Ifaluk
Valentine’s Day and Peace
Tomorrow, February 14, people in the United States and many other countries will celebrate Valentine’s Day, not as an official holiday but as a folk celebration of romantic love. If you can ignore the commercial aspects of the occasion, this unofficial holiday celebrates the love among couples that can foster nonviolence. For an advocate of […]
Electricity Reaches a Birhor Village
On India’s Republic Day, January 26, the Birhor living in a small village in the state of Bihar were connected to the electric grid with the rest of modern India. Two days later, the Hindustan Times published a description of the village and the ceremonies involved with turning on the electricity. Light bulbs flickered on […]
Wolfat Enjoys His Tattoos
Last week the Mexican news website lanetanoticias.com published a cultural piece explaining why the art of tattooing became popular among the Ifaluk. The story of the adoption of tattooing on the island, tied in with a belief in the god Wolfat (also spelled Wolphat), is explained effectively by the journalist but it is better related, […]
Ifaluk Fishermen
Two sailors on a cross-Pacific voyage kept running into very difficult sailing conditions so they decide to head for Ifaluk Atoll in search of better winds. Claude Appaldo and Tom Zydler sail into the Ifaluk lagoon in the western Pacific after a voyage across the ocean from Panama that took many months to complete. The […]
A Fondness for Grandchildren
Paul Turke, an anthropologist who did field work on Ifaluk Island in the early 1980s, has just shared a few recollections of the islanders in a Psychology Today blog post. He links the pleasures grandparents can derive from helping raise their grandchildren—as the Ifaluk do—to successful human evolution. He recalls his trip to Micronesia with […]
Ifaluk Atoll Has an Uncertain Future
A prominent educator from Massachusetts spent some time on Ifaluk Island 40 years ago so now he has decided to return there to live out the rest of his life. John Chittick was born and raised in the small city of Fitchburg, completed an Ed.D. from Harvard, and went on to have a career as […]
The Happy Isle of Ifaluk
A world traveler raved about the wonderful people of Ifaluk Island in a blog entry published last week. Even though Marina, a young woman from St. Petersburg, visited the island in September 2013, her observations are worth studying today since there are so few current reports about this isolated society. Marina wrote in her blog […]
Comparing Kauai and Ifaluk
Kauai, the fourth largest of the Hawaiian Islands, has over 100 times as many people as Ifaluk Island in Micronesia, it is 1000 times larger, and it is vastly more diverse and modern. Yet the two islands were carefully compared by an article last week in The Garden Island, a daily newspaper from Kauai.
An Erection Points toward Peace on Ifaluk
A Peace Corps volunteer, who only identifies herself as “Dr. Rosemary,” has just visited Ifaluk Island, an experience that she briefly describes in a blog entry posted on June 2, 2015. She includes many pictures with her blog posts about her year in the Yap State of Micronesia, which began in August 2014. Her visit […]
A Visitor on Ifaluk
The best news about the really isolated peaceful societies is that they are still remote, still quiet, and still able to persist in their ways, despite intrusions of the modern world. So a blog report by a visitor to Ifaluk Island is welcome due to the way it confirms that the people there thrive, their […]
