Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824897611.
In this ethnography, Phillip McArthur wrestles with the many layers of meaning that emerge from folklore performances, particularly in the dialogue between storyteller, audience, and anthropologist. He calls this approach “dialogic ethnography” (16), which goes beyond recording myths, as earlier researchers did, to a more nuanced exegesis of the conversation between storyteller and anthropologist. Jack Tobin moved in this direction (Stories from the Marshall Islands: Bwebwenato Jān Aelōn Kein, 2002, University of Hawaii Press), and now McArthur provides a full-fledged analysis of the dialogue itself. Decades of dialogue with the folklorist Kometo, as well as other Marshallese storytellers, resulted in this collaborative effort that reveals the interplay between story, relationships, and colonial realities.
Stories, like metaphors, are open-ended. An abundance of meaning is slowly revealed, particularly if the storyteller is playing games. These conversations about narratives deflate old categories, blur boundaries, and open windows revealing ethnographer bias and Indigenous agency that can work to decentre imperialism. Revealing such layers of meaning requires an ethnographer who is willing to be part of the joke.
Anthropologists have moved past the assumption that there is one “real” or “authentic” story. Kometo presents various iterations of the Letao stories as he discerns whether his conversation partner follows the joke or not: “The riddle-like dialogues capitalize on this ‘open-endedness’ to grow the myth and playfully mediate our ethnographic relationship” (82). McArthur structures his chapters by the growth of the myth.
Letao is a trickster who causes trouble by concealing and revealing meaning—thus his ability to deceive. As a marginal figure, Letao tends to trick those in power, upend the social order, and create standards (by providing a bad example) and alternatives (by offering new angles for understanding). Under Kometo’s tutelage, McArthur comes to realize that these stories offer resources for interpreting current affairs.
The fact that Kometo uses Letao stories as a decolonizing strategy casts doubt on the claim that folklore belongs to the past since it is “separated from a living and vibrant culture of the preindustrial societies of Micronesia” (Jay Dobbin, Summoning the Powers Beyond: Traditional Religions in Micronesia, University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 7). Kometo brings Letao into the present by having him sail him off to America where he practices his craft, much as novelist Robert Barclay imagines Jemāluut riding a rocket roaring up from Kwajalein (Melal: A Novel of the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
There is a tension in the dialogic relationship. Kometo controls the performance but McArthur does the writing. That kind of critical reflexivity runs as a theme throughout the book and puts the work in conversation with the current movement in anthropology away from “informants” and toward “collaborators.”
Early in the book, McArthur explores several ways in which Kometo as “a playful storyteller employs a range of poetic devices (including laughter) and flexible generic framing to situate a riM,ajeᶅ myth in an interrogative dialogue, how he entertains the story’s sense of truthiness, and how the episodic plot reflects islander sensibilities and comes to serve as an analogy for the ambivalent history of American presence in the islands” (76).
The present is entangled in the past as Marshallese tropes provide a framework for interpretation. “Reading the Americans through the lens of chiefly power” (71) is one step, but the storyteller can be a trickster too. Kometo blurs the boundaries by closing his performance with the disclaimer: “Well, thus is the story” (74).
Kometo works to link Marshallese cosmologies with the power of the chiefs, and then, by the logic of riddling, with American power. Thus, the Marshalls, instead of being on the periphery, are located at the centre of power.
Letao was the youngest son of the youngest of three sisters: the lowest of the low in Marshallese kinship dynamics. Is there an analogy here? Letao is to chiefly power as the Marshallese are to American imperialism?
The storyteller is able to manipulate “who is doing the concealing and who is doing the revealing” (115). Relationships change as the story emerges. Thus, we are never sure when the story is finished. The character who is concealing has the power, for a while. Then, the character who reveals what is hidden gains greater power. What is the relative status of the Marshallese and the Americans in this game?
It is difficult enough to translate metaphors, yet all the more so when the trickster is working to reimagine them. McArthur argues that magic, instead of being a “false science,” reveals “a keen appreciation for the complex and illusory relationship of representation to reality” (152). Certainly, we are familiar with these magic tricks in political discourse and international relations.
Instead of dismissing the magic of concealing and revealing, one comes to realize through McArthur’s analysis that the truth of the story is not found in the reality of the events but in the deeper transaction between meanings. For example, performances of the Letao genre tend to push the boundaries of Christianity since sexual innuendo is never far from the story.
McArthur reminds us that doing ethnographic research requires a tolerance of ambiguity and incompleteness as well as a sense of humour. I spent 18 months doing research on Arno Atoll and learned something new every day until the last.
Kometo left one last gift before he died: “Laughter is life-affirming.” He concealed some meanings for McArthur to discover at a later date. The book is a gift from Kometo and McArthur to the reader, and contributes to our understanding of the dialogue between storyteller and ethnographer, between Marshallese culture and the outside world, and between the colonized and the colonizer. Given the way that the story unfolds, it appears that Kometo learned well the ways of Letao, and McArthur learned well the ways of Kometo.
Michael A. Rynkiewich
Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky