Cultural Anthropological Research on Historic Media in the Caroline Islands.

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This research team consists of three social and cultural anthropologist and an archaeologisit.What we means by historic media covers various phenomena, including written material, oral history, the performing arts and etc., which carries informtion about the past. Written records are recent development in Micronesia, and, therefore, history in a conventional sense ishardly hnown. It is important to study the historic media identified above in inorder to write Micronesian histories.We organized our project around this task to reconstruct the history of people in the Caroline Islands though the analyses of the various historic media. The Collection of basic data was our first priority. Because traditional culture is now under strong pressure from the process of modernization, the collection of basic data is itself an urgent issue. We are happy to report that each member of the project was able to achieve better results than expected.However, given the richness of Micronesian culture and … More history, the project is still in its initial stages. The second target,i.e., the reconstruction of the historical record, is still in progress.the following provides summaries of each team member's work. Komatsu, Kazuhiko conducted his fieldwork on Pulap atoll focusing myth and folktales, the inter-island exchange system, and social relationships. Karakita, Yasuyuki did his fieldwork on Woleai atoll. He studied oral tradition, cross-sibling relationships, and descent group structure. Intoh, Michiko and Rubinstein, D. H. conducted their fieldwork on Fais island. Rubinstein recorded the islanders' experience of World War II though songs comosed at the time, and collected genealogies in order to reconstruct a demographic history of Fais. Intoh did archaeological excavation, and found a rich cultural satratification. Preliminary results indicate that Fais hasbeen ingabited past 1900 years.We plans to publish a formal report in cooporation with the Kagosima University Research Center For the South Pacific Less