Pacific Island Cultures Research Articles

Asian and Pacific Islander cultural values: considerations for health care decision making.

As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, health care practitioners must learn about the perspectives and values of a variety of cultural groups. Of interest is how these cultural values intersect with those of the dominant culture, especially in the health care arena. This article explores the values that influence decision making among Asian and Pacific Islander cultures, with specific illustrations from six of these cultures. The literature, along with our observations as health professionals and researchers working in Hawaii, suggest potential areas of conflict between the more collectivist values of Asian and Pacific Islander cultures and the more individualist orientation of the U.S. health care system. Implications for practice and research are presented.

Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism

L O H A MAI. Aloha kakou. In Pacific Island cultures, genealogy is paramount. Therefore, I greet you with my family origins. I am descended of the Pi'ilani line of Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua'i. I am Native Hawaiian, indigenous to Hawai'i.1 My people were born of Papahanaumoku-Earth Mother-and Wakea-Sky Father-who created our bountiful Hawaiian islands. From these islands came the taro, and from the taro, our chiefs and common people. The lesson of our origins is simple. The land is our mother, and we are her children. If we care for our mother, she will care for us in return. The relationship is more than reciprocal; it is familial. Like most Native peoples, Hawaiians lived in our mother's keeping for millennia until the fateful coming of the haole-Western foreigners-in 1778. Then our world collapsed from the violence of contact: disease, mass death, and land dispossession; evangelical Christianity; plantation capitalism; cultural destruction including language banning; and, finally, American military invasion in 1893 and forced annexation in 1898. Dur

Heterotopic Dissonance in the Museum Representation of Pacific Island Cultures

Two exhibits, the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History (1971) and Traveling the Pacific at the Field Museum of Natural History (1989), are compared. Foucault's concept of heterotopia is used to examine why, in spite of major recent changes in museum philosophy and technology, the subtexts of the two exhibits remain remarkably similar. Both confuse spatial distance with temporal flow, creating an incoherent framework of disjunctive orders.

The right to a family environment in Pacific Island cultures

The right to a family environment in Pacific Island cultures

Germany and the Pacific Islands: A Cross‐cultural Marketing Study

Since the nature of marketing is meeting the needs and wants of one′s customers and those needs and wants are culturally based, it is of especial importance for the marketeer to understand another culture and the differences inherent before he attempts to market goods or services to a foreign county. Culture preconditions a people to perceive, think, feel and act in the norms of their own culture. Norms and values between two cultures frequently clash. Yet it is the understanding, respect and acceptance of another culture and the ability to put aside one′s own cultural mores which separate the successful international marketeer from all others. Utilizes the experience of the authors and discusses examples of cultural differences between the German and the South Pacific Island cultures, their implications in the marketing and business decision‐making function, and provides recommendations for the conduct of a successful business arrangement between Germans and Pacific Islanders.

Cross-cultural counseling: A systematic approach to understanding the issues

Counseling theory and practice tend to be dominated by a European-American orientation. Cross-cultural counseling is advanced as an approach that transcends European dominance while focusing on the specific needs of African American, Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American cultures. This paper reviews the major conceptual models, described by social scientists, and advances a more culturally sensitive, cross-cultural approach to conceptualizing counseling theory and practice when counseling members of large minority groups living in the United States.

Telling, Showing, Showing off

Outlines how New York City sets an image, using nature as a sign. Its very layout demonstrates the importance of a balanced intercourse between background and figure, between plan and details, between chaos and organization. Central Park, the domesticated preserve of nature-within-culture; Exhibits; Floor plans; Demonstrations; Conclusions.

THE PLACE OF HUMANS IN THE STATE FACTOR THEORY OF ECOSYSTEMS AND THEIR SOILS

Landscapes and their soils often are studied and described by the clorpt equation of the state factor theory. It links properties of animals, plants, and soils to the factors climate (cl), organism (o), topography (r), parent material (p) and time (t) or age of an ecosystem. Humans are implicitly contained in the organism factor o, and this study attempts to conceptualize explicitly the role of humans as a state factor in ecosystem study. After a brief exposition of state factors and their sequences, humans are symbolized by their inheritable attributes, their genotypes, oh, and their external phenotype expressions h. Humans possess culture, c, defined as “products of human work or thought.” When humans enter an emerging ecosystem they bring along a cultural inheritance, ci. Both oh and ci are treated as independent state factors, whereas h and culture elements c are considered being dependent on oh, ci, cl, o, r, p, t, … The concepts are probed for Pacific island cultures, for cultures of Indian hunting tribes of the Great Plains, for midwestern rural trends, and for soil cultivation and plant growth experiments. Golden Gate Park in San Francisco comprises three consecutive chronosequences differing in the human state factor.

Perceived Structure: Welfare Organizations in Three Societal Cultures

This paper replicates Glisson and Martin's (1980) study of social welfare organizations (SWOs) in St. Louis, Missouri (U.S.A.), with data from two samples of Pacific Island cultures, Guam and Oahu, Hawaii. We test the culture-free vs. culture-specific arguments about the effects of societal culture on internal structure. Our structural dimensions are formalization and centralization. They are measured as perceptions (regime) of social service workers rather than form that is officially prescribed. As expected, Guam and Oahu SWOs are smaller and younger than those in St. Louis. Guam SWOs are the most formalized and centralized; Oahu SWOs do not differ structurally from those in St. Louis. Multivariate regression results show that culture/locale significantly predicts formalization (Guam SWOs are the most formal ized) and both culture/locale and size predict centralization. Significant interaction effects were discovered, prompting rejection of the culture-free argument: larger size leads to more formalization in Oahu and St. Louis but to less in Guam; higher average worker tenure leads to more centralization in St. Louis but to less in Oahu. Alternative interpretations and implications of the results are considered.

Field Dependence-Independence and Language Testing: Evidence from Six Pacific Island Cultures

This study analyzes the relationship between field sensitivity and cloze test performance for 286 subjects between the ages of 15 and 19 in six Pacific island cultures. Hawaiian students were found to be significantly more field independent than Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Indian-Fijian, and Tahitian students. In the South Pacific samples, males were significantly more field independent than females, whereas in Hawaii there was no statistically significant relationship between sex and cognitive style. When the sample was taken as a whole, a significant relationship was found between field dependence/independence and cloze scores. Sizable group differences for subgroups within the sample, however, indicate that the relationship may not be significant for all cultures. Within cultures, the subgroups having lower scholastic achievement showed a significant relationship between cognitive style and cloze test score, while the high achievers did not.