The Puzzle of Chuukese Mobility Patterns—Contradictory, Dualistic, or Pluralistic?

Education, employment, and health care are the three main reasons given by Micronesians for the ongoing flow of migrants to the USA. In many families, remittances constitute the only source of steady cash income. Therefore, migration is seen as part of the islanders’ subsistence strategy. Emotional implications for the individual are subsumed under the collective good. This paper will review migration motifs as experienced bychóón(people of) Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia. With regard to kin relations, the value of family and notions of the self, focus is put on those who leave and/or come back as well as on those who make the decisions. Western spectators are often puzzled by the apparent contradictions between the adherence to traditional culture and the practices of modern life, between love for land and kin and the perceived necessity to nevertheless leave both behind. This paper thus aims to explore whether these dynamics are really in contradiction or rather parallel and interlocking dimensions of cultural concepts of locality and mobility that are connected to ideas of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]