Profile
Robert Kiste's Gamble
Retiring Pacific Islands Studies Director Looks Back On 24 years Of The Best Job In The World
In 1978, anthropologist Robert Kiste was a fully tenured professor at the top-10 University of Minnesota when a part-time, non-tenure track job opened at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma¯noa. Accepting the directorship of the Pacific Islands Studies program was a gamble, but one that he has not regretted. This month Kiste retires after a 24-year track record of building up the regional studies program from an obscure operation that had barely any commitment from the university to what is now a world-class academic operation.
 |
|
|
- ADVERTISEMENT -
“It was a risk coming here and leaving a tenured position, but if I hadn’t, I’d have been haunted all my life with what I might have missed.”
What he might have missed was getting to know a whole generation of Pacific Island political and cultural leaders. What he might have missed was traveling throughout the region—and the whole world, in fact, making connections for the center. And the region would have missed a great deal too if Kiste had stayed in Minnesota. He is most proud of the annual conference put on by the center, an event that has become a must-attend for scholars from around the world. The Pacific Monograph Series of publications, done together with the University of Hawai‘i Press, is also one of his fondest accomplishments.
“This turned out to be the best job in the world,” Kiste adds.
UH has named Pacific history professor David Hanlon as his replacement and Kiste moves this month just across campus to the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center. “This gives me an institutional base to do some research and some writing,” he says. Writing about the region is nothing new for him. Since his first book on the Bikini community in 1968, he’s written or edited many titles, including his most recent collaboration with Mac Marshall called American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment.
Kiste says that the program is needed now more than ever. “Every health and social service agency in the Pacific needs people trained in Pacific Studies. There are more Islanders living in metro countries than ever before.”
Meanwhile, he has appreciative Pacific Islands Studies alumni around the world, including five graduates serving in the U.S. State Department and others who are governmental leaders in Pacific nations or teachers and librarians around the region. All of us are indebted to Kiste for taking a risk 24 years ago and, in the years since, for creating what has become a center of excellence at the University of Hawai‘i.
