Lamotrek Atoll and Inter-Island Socioeconomic Ties

Despite their comparative isolation from one another over many miles of ocean, the inhabitants of the many small atolls and islands of the western Pacific rarely constitute wholly independent economic, social, and political societies. The existence, methods, and reasons for this long distance interaction are disclosed in this study of the people of Lamotrek atoll in the western Caroline islands of Micronesia. It also reveals that the inter-island modes of interaction are of the same social structure as that which organizes activities of a single island within an interacting group. The author particularly delineates the complex of socioeconomic ties that unite the populations of Lamotrek, Elato, and Satawal atolls into a single social system--a system dependent upon a framework of economic and symbolic exchange between a hierarchy of ranked lineages, sub-clans, clans, and islands.