I was hoping page 99 of my dissertation would include data documenting face-to-face interactions among children in Manu’a, American Samoa, from my 2015-2017 fieldwork. No luck. It only briefly completes the description of the framework I developed for analyzing these interactions and, with it, Chapter 2 of the dissertation. (Page 98 will thus have to come to my rescue.) As these pages explain, this framework was to enable me to account for the particular shape and feel of Manu’an children’s interactional universe, and specifically for how central bodily movement, and thus space, seemed to it. My observations here echoed Oceanic discourses about “space [a]s agentively involved in […] the enabling of sociality, and the organization of subjectivities and […] [about] places as caring.”  

As I see now more clearly than while writing Chapter 2, a clue towards the framework had come from experiencing the cultural centrality of dance in this context. It dawned on me that the basic fact of dance—as patterned embodied movement that transforms space in meaningful ways—could be seen at work in daily interaction also beyond dance. That is, in daily face-to-face interactions, too, like in dance, participants’ actions were informed by overarching movement (or “choreographic”) logics that influenced how and how often and with what effects they used specific embodied resources—from gestures to speech (a kind of oral gesture) to whole-body motions. Different interactional resources—e.g., telling vs. gesturing each other off during games—afforded different transformations of collective space and the individual bodies in it, facilitating or foreclosing possible next moves and, thereby, possible interaction outcomes.

Across daily activities, I identified three preferred movement logics, which I dubbed staying, flowing, and resounding. As they stayed, flowed, and resounded, Manu’an children experienced interaction outcomes as resulting from their ways of taking up and moving in collective space. I argued that they thus also experienced self, agency, relationality, and power as issuing from embodied practices and as mediated by space. Tracing this space-centered ontogeny of psychosocial experience helped me understand what Manu’ans mean when they say that their island space—epitomized by their lands—is “who they are,” constitutive of both their physical bodies and their identities.

My analysis framed daily face-to-face interaction as a “movement system” embedding specific understandings of social life, to put it with dance anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler (e.g., 1996), whom I wish I had cited on page 99. In doing so, it highlighted little-explored dimensions of interactional and semiotic practice and of childhood development. As page 99 concludes, foregrounding a key rationale of my dissertation, it matters that this approach was specifically built around indigenous understandings and practices: “this centering matters practically, given that it can yield understandings of child development aligned with Manu’ans’ experiences, and thus useful to support interventions targeting children’s welfare in American Samoa. It also matters in a broader political sense, considering the decolonizing import of understandings of human processes and of research paradigms grounded in indigenous ontologies and epistemologies (e.g., Smith 1999; cf. Watts 2013).”

Kaeppler, Adrienne. 1996. “Dance.” In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Volume 1, ed. by David Levinson and Melvin Ember, pp. 309-312. New York: Henry Holt.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed Books.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1):20-34.