New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. US$35.00, paper; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9781978832602.
In this work, Sarah Smith presents readers with a thoroughgoing analysis of Chuukese women’s sexual and reproductive health experiences in Guam, and with a well-grounded consideration of women’s comparative encounters in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia. Her work highlights the ways in which Chuukese women’s everyday experiences embed components of complex colonial histories that began with Spain and Germany, and subsequently intensified with Japan and the United States. Each of these colonial regimens devalued local people, constructing them as primitive subordinates. Hand-in-hand with Euro-American missionary practices that were integral parts of those waves of imperialist imposition, each colonial regime systematically worked to invert local matrifocally grounded conceptions of women’s reproductive potency and social centrality, reframing local cosmologies in disjointed patri-biased configurations that decentred Chuukese women’s power. While I would argue that much of this cosmological and social mischaracterization of local Micronesian practices occurred well before the United States began administering the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) following World War II, and while US imperialism during the TTPI era differed substantially from that of Japan or Germany, Smith nicely demonstrates how US empire building and maintenance perpetuated inequalities both during the TTPI era and in the years that followed. During these years, Chuuk residents began migrating en masse to Guam and elsewhere in the United States as a result of Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreements with the United States. As Smith demonstrates, distinctions between the levels of marginalization in Guam’s territorial status and Chuuk’s status as a COFA-associated “free-yet-dependent” nation each, differentially, perpetuate components of US empire-building with the discordant components of these marginalized political statuses. This often creates untoward relationships between the residents of Guam—including local Chamoru people, military residents, and several other groups on the island—and the substantial group of Chuukese residents, each with their own distinct atoll and island identities.
Smith uses the concept of benign neglect to typify the relationship between the United States and the states that were constructed out of the former US TTPI, both in the past and in the contemporary era. While this strategy certainly promotes dependency and results in the “slow and limited attention to political, economic, education, and health infrastructures in the region” (15), the concept, while generically useful, obscures perpetual and purposive strategies of marginalization used by US senators, congressional representatives, and others in their ongoing relationships with COFA peoples and, likely, with indigenous residents of Guam. Smith clearly delineates the health outcomes of these imperial relationships as manifest in the stories of the Chuukese women with whom she has worked: these women differentiate the highly desirable care available in mainland US healthcare facilities, the (often imagined) attractions of maternal health care accessible on Guam, the rotting and rat-infested hospital with its marginal care in Wééné, the government centre of Chuuk, and the local home-birthing assisted by village women care specialists on Chuuk’s outer islands. The structural violence presented by these systemically distinct care settings, manifest in institutions and infrastructures, as well as in the visceral components of women’s bodies, are laid bare in Forgotten Bodies. The imagined advantages of birthing on Guam, often accompanied by comparable perceived advantages in the domains of education and the availability of employment, cause Chuukese women to make the short flight to Guam, by far the nearest US destination available to Chuukese where some of their imagined COFA immigration benefits might be realized.
For Chuukese mothers, Guam’s attractions, reinforced by the vast array of relatives already living in Guam’s vibrant, if stereotypically marginalized, Chuukese community, often prove chimeric. As Smith documents, systematic manifestations of stratified reproduction are invariably imposed on Chuukese women who seek health care on Guam. From constraints encountered in transportation and work conflicts when scheduling (frequently cancelled) appointments, from language barriers for Chuukese women who are not fluent in English, to burdensome applications for public health assistance insurance programs, from overt discrimination against COFA immigrants to their massive stereotypification, the type of maternal health care available to Chuukese women on Guam is marginal at best. Nevertheless, in comparison to the even-more-marginal care available on Wééné, many women continue to fly to Guam as their pregnancies near term.
In her final chapter, Smith shifts to a consideration of the Chuuk Women’s Council that operated for years under the leadership of Shinobu Poll, then much expanded with her energetic daughter, Christina “Kiki” Poll Stinnett. Kiki’s vitality and energy combined with the communal matrifocal force of Chuukese women’s collective energies provide readers with a sense of the underlying power alignments that make embodied human life possible in the Chuukese view of the world. Smith presents these women’s activities as a form of resistance to imperialism and its concomitant constructions of patriarchy, yet having worked for decades among Marshall Islands people who share a similar matricentric cosmology, I am not sure that this is how most Chuukese women view their activities. Rather, as Smith states, they know that men are relatively unimportant, while women are the “brave keepers of the culture, clan, and community” (150). However much men may garner attention in their public performances, it is women who control the sacred reproductive force, mediated through land, that gives Chuukese everyday cultural life its vitality. While emphasizing that message may be a central mode of “decolonizing Micronesia” (166), it is, more importantly, a way of centering a core component of Chuukese culture. As was first made apparent by David Schneider in his reanalysis of kinship on Yap, Chuuk’s closest neighbour, the empathic understanding of local people’s ideas and daily practices must be the central driving force of any viable anthropological account. At certain junctures, Sarah Smith’s ethnography seems a bit too “top-down,” yet her book’s great strength lies in making visible the evocative power of Chuukese women’s voices, experiences, and everyday encounters to allow each of us to comprehend their perspectives as we seek to reorder our lives in pursuit of a more just world.
Laurence Marshall Carucci
Montana State University, Bozeman