Voyages of Ethnographic Knowledge: Circulation, Intertextuality, and Genre in <italic>The Book of Luelen</italic>
Open AccessDrawing on anthropologies of language and circulation that recognize the generative power of texts' movements through culturally salient trajectories, this paper follows the social life of an ethnographic text from the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, The Book of Luelen.The manuscript was written in Pohnpeian by an elderly, high titled man named Luelen Bernart in the 1930s, just eighty years after American missionaries developed the first Pohnpeian orthography. From the 1950s to the 1970s, three American anthropologists translated, annotated, and finally, published the manuscript as The Book of Luelen in 1977. The book, the Pohnpeian oral tradition inscribed within it, and language about it continue to circulate dialectically on Pohnpei and through the wider world today. My analysis traces the book's changing forms and meanings via textual analysis of The Book of Luelen itself; manuscripts, letters, and notes found in anthropologist John L. Fischer's papers at National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, as well as from anthropologist Saul H. Riesenberg's papers in the Pacific Collection, University of Hawaii; qualitative interviews with Pohnpeians and anthropologists; and fieldnotes from my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer on Pohnpei. Based on anthropological and linguistic theories of circulation and materiality, I developed the following schema for parsing the dialogic social life of a text: 1) Trace its circulation via its forms and functions, i.e. its materiality and generic formal structures, the matrices in which those forms have meaning, and the people for which they mean.2) Study the intertextual gaps of its writings and readings, i.e. how, when, and why does it change via entextualization, as well as its connections via indexicality.My paper seeks to trace the meanings generated by the circulation of Pohnpeian texts like The Book of Luelen in interaction with the wider creation and circulation of ethnographic texts in anthropology.
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