Thanks for the advice! It certainly sounds more efficient than leaving the door open and poking under the couch with a broom handle for hours on end.

A clear plastic bag, filled with raffia. Leave the bag on top of a piece of furniture, and stay in another room while keeping your ears open. Eventually — and we tried and tested this, it works — a mouse will go into the bag to get nesting material and make some noise. Before he finishes his work, rush to the bag, seal it with your hands, take it outside and release the mouse (who shoots out of the bag with extreme fear). No killing involved.

Man, what we do on this blog, the new heights we explore, it’s just dizzying :-D

I’m sure it’s a very American thing to think, “I don’t want to use mouse traps. That’s mean,” and then get a cat that goes around stalking the poor thing for days. I recently saw an ad for a perfectly white mouse trap box that kills the mouse inside. You throw the whole thing away without ever having to see what you’ve killed.

Anyway, it turns out that he actually IS a scared of everything and has only killed one mouse so far, when I’m sure hundreds have been passing in and out, grabbing snacks here and there.

Off topic (maybe): I must be blind(er) — I just noticed what an incredibly chilling avatar image you have.

[I feel sorry for that cat: clearly he's about to be eaten by that zombie mouse.]

I’m sorry I don’t ever fully explain my questions/concerns, because it’s pretty much impossible to do, but when Ryan pointed out home v. other parts of the world it reminded me of the person in Guatemala on landslide relief who told me Americans should be fixing problems in their own country/home. It made me wonder if we really do have more responsibility to a specific locale/country, which makes the least sense when you consider that my “home” is made of lots of other peoples’ homes, even down to electricity which, here in WV, comes from mountaintop removal mining. So, there are lots and lots of concerns at stake, probably TOO many for a person’s sanity.

Marshallese is the language spoken. It’s not spoken broadly outside the islands, of course, but is still spoken there. I’d imagine the main island of Majuro and then Kwajalein where the US base is are the places where English is spoken the most. According to Wikipedia, the government uses Marshallese. English is also an official language, and some speak Japanese. I found the website of the cultural museum in Majuro that works to “promote and preserve Marshallese culture.” Most are probably anthropologists and archaeologists who, as we see here, are definitely not free of bias but do still have perspectives. Sometimes even people with vested interest can give answers counter to their better interests, or have multiple conflicting interests at play. No harm asking, but the answer could never be definitive.

I think all of this tangled web partially comes back to what you said here: “(1) we do not study imperialism, so that “critiquing” it becomes more difficult, and unusual; (2) we cannot study imperialism, because we have the wrong methods.”

I know nothing at all about the Marshall Islands. What language are they speaking when it’s not English? How is that language faring? I am not defining the teaching of English as “cultural imperialism” (which, incidentally, is a concept that is among the crummiest ever developed, in my view). What I am asking about is how teaching it is “doing good.” In other words, rather than snobbishness, I am not ready to take the goodness for granted without question.

I think “family” is also too narrow/confusing, but maybe that’s what you’re saying. I have family all over the US, & some in other countries, but that doesn’t make those places my home. Although, it’s definitely tied to questions of colonialism, for example making a home in sb. else’s home. “Doing good” is probably also a bad phrase b/c it’s too much like pure altruism, but people do have to choose jobs, so lets cut to the proper words: is it doing too much to further US imperialism in the Marshalls?

I don’t know if you’ve defined colonialism in a specific way, but if it’s “control by one power over a dependent area or people,” then the US does exert a certain degree of control over the Marshalls. We have a military base there, carried out nuclear testing w/terrible results, and right now “U.S. funding accounts for two-thirds of the Marshall Islands national budget of US$137 million, and more than 80 percent of the funding for the Ministries of Education and Health” (source). It sounds like there’s also a lot of talk about local sustainability, possibly increasing tourism, and asserting local fishing rights. The fact that their Ministry of Education has made English learning one of its priorities implies to me that many think it’s a valuable skill for their kids to learn, maybe even for the aims of increasing tourism and better asserting fishing rights, so why not teach it? From that perspective, it even sounds a bit snobbish/imperialistic to say, “no, I won’t teach you my language because in doing so I would be exerting power over you in the form of cultural imperialism.” However, the fact that MANY think it’s a valuable skill does not necessarily mean ALL, and “how many” is an important question, as is to what extent the individual islands are involved in deciding for or against English education. Sounds like a good question to ask the program coordinators!

There are so many conceptualizations of “home” that I am beginning to think the notion is meant to be obscure and confusing. Otherwise, I might consider a test: home is not just where you feel at home, but requires a family to be home. If the people where you feel at home do not consider you family, then you are probably not at home, but rather just comfortable being in someone else’s house. (By “you” I don’t necessarily mean you in particular, Stacie).

Anthropology is about the study of others out of fear of facing ourselves? That would be rather depressing, a kind of inverted narcissism.

I was amazed because it is almost a logical inversion of another statement from an anthropologist (reported and interpreted by another anthropologist) :

“Is the translation of difference into different texts, all of the same substance but in different shapes, a way of escaping from a certain painful truth that cannot be grasped by simply reading? As Geertz has said, in his true cosmopolitan fear-of-the-other, the purpose of anthropology today may be to help us avoid one another in a world in which we have all been forced in the same rapidly shrinking space (Geertz 1986) . For the reality of cosmopolitan existence may not be a wonderful bazaar of mixed-up differences for the great majority of people. It may be closer to the story of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner , a world that is divided into ‘ethnically’ differentiated classes (however mixed) (…)”

Source : Friedman Jonathan, 2005, “From roots to routes, tropes for trippers”, in Anthropological Theory, Vol. 2(1), 21-36.
Geertz’ reference is : Geertz Clifford, 1986, “The Uses of Diversity”, in S.M. McMurrin (ed.) The Tanner Lectures, on Human Values 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I mean almost a logical inversion, because here, anthropology would be underlain by a fear-of-the-other (instead of a fear of facing oneself).