ROBERT KISTE

It gives me pleasure to nominate Robert C. Kiste for the position of ASAO Honorary Fellow.  Bob is well-known to nearly everyone in ASAO—either personally or by reputation—so I will simply sketch a few reasons below why I think he deserves this honor.

Bob's scholarly contributions to Pacific anthropology are legion.  The Bikinians (1974) was his first book, and it remains perhaps his best known volume, largely because of the continued interest in U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and its impact on the islanders.  The book remains an outstanding example of the social changes that follow upon a significant change in the physical environment that people inhabit--in this case relocation from a large atoll with a huge lagoon to a relatively small makatea island with no lagoon at all.  The former heavily maritime orientation of the Bikinians no longer proved feasible, and Kiste spells out the consequences in clear and forceful prose.  Bob’s other single-authored book is less well-known but no less important: He Served: A Biography of Macu Salato (1998), published by the Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific.  In this volume he masterfully presents the life story of a major Fijian and Pacific Island leader.

Along with the above two books, Bob co-edited four other volumes pertaining to Oceania: Size, Security and Pacific Geopolitics (with W. Sutherland, 1986), South Pacific: Political, Economic, and Military Trends (with 4 others, 1990), Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (with Kerry Howe and Brij Lal, 1994), and American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment (with Mac Marshall, 1999).  In addition, he has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and miscellaneous other items.

Bob was very active in ASAO governance in the early years of the organization, having served as Executive Committee member, Secretary, Newsletter Editor, and Program Coordinator.  While at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970s, he and his colleague, Eugene Ogan, established the Kiste-Ogan Series in Social Change, in which a number of excellent volumes appeared.  Then, as the long-time (only  recently retired) Director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa, Bob built that program into what is arguably the premier center of its kind on the planet.  In the process, he helped establish a Master’s degree in Pacific Islands Studies, a prestigious Monograph Series published by the University of Hawai'i Press, and a major regional journal: The Contemporary Pacific.  He edited the Pacific Islands Monograph Series until his retirement.