The Meanings of Work in Contemporary Palau: Policy Implications of Globalization in the Pacific
Economic and political changes in Palau in the last two decades have led to a rapid increase in the numbers of foreign workers. At current levels of growth, Palauans could become a minority in their own country. We examine the global processes that have produced this phenomenon and discuss their social and cultural impacts on Palau. In doing so we examine ways the meanings of work in Palau are understood, and how these are changing. We conclude that a new distinctly Palauan system of occupations is emerging that is neither traditional nor purely western and that is widely shared between Palauans and non-Palauans.
Schizophrenia in Palau
The Republic of Palau in the western Pacific has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnoses in the world today. The expression of schizophrenia in Palau and greater Micronesia is also extraordinarily gendered, with rates of affliction approximately two times higher among males. This study uses contemporary clinical diagnostic and research tools to consider and reject the hypotheses that schizophrenia in Palau has a unique diagnostic profile, that it has a unique bio‐behavioral expression, and that it is a consequence of “development” manifest in the introduction and use of psychoactive drugs. These results are used to critique an assumption that has emerged from previous cross‐cultural research—that the expression of schizophrenia is necessarily more benign in “developing” settings—and to suggest that aspects of historical and contemporary social practices may contribute to a gender imbalance in the expression of symptoms of schizophrenia in this Pacific Island nation.
Quantitative Analysis of Sharing and Variability in a Cognitive Model
In their comprehensive review of various formulations of the concept of culture, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (I952: Iogff) deal at some length with the problem of "the relationship of the abstraction, culture, to concrete individuals." The issue of homogeneity, commonality, or sharedness is of considerable importance in culture theory, since analyses of a culture necessarily proceed by abstraction from observations of the behavior of individuals, including their verbal behavior, and seek to arrive at generalizations. Early formulations of culture tend to make the tacit, or even explicit assumption of cultural homogeneity. To take only a few examples from the Kroeber-Kluckhohn compendium, Linton (I945, cited on p. so), talks of "the collection of ideas and habits which [members of a society] learn, share, and transmit"; Young (I942, cited on p. 56) of "common and more or less standardized ideas, attitudes, and habits"; and Gorer (I949, cited on p. 56) of "shared patterns of learned behaviour." In recent years, however, a number of anthropologists, including Aberle (I960: I5) and Wallace (Ig6Ia) have argued that culture is not homogeneous, but should be conceptualized rather as a complex structure or system which does not require cognitive sharing on the part of all individual members of a particular society. Wallace (Ig6Ib: 37) takes perhaps the mo!st extreme position on cultural hetero-