"Nest in the Wind is a readable, enjoyable, and insightful work presenting the personal and professional experiences
of a young American woman conducting medical anthropological research in Pohnpei in the early 1970s."
--Robert W. Franco, American Anthropologist
"Here Ward gives us a first-person account of her adventures as she learned to get along and accomplish her work
in an unfamiliar and often uncomfortable tropical island environment, among people of an unfamiliar culture. Along
with telling her personal story she manages to convey a great deal about Pohnpeian life, society, and culture."
--R. Berleant-Schiller, Choice
"Ward does a masterful job bringing this exotic research setting and the dynamics of fieldwork alive for the reader."
--Suzanne Falgout, Pacific Studies
From the Waveland Press, Inc. Web site, December, 2004
Summary
During her first visit to the beautiful island of Pohnpei in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, anthropologist
Martha Ward discovered people who grew quarter-ton yams in secret and ritually shared a powerful drink called kava.
She managed a medical research project, ate dog, became pregnant, and responded to spells placed on her. Thirty
years later she returned to Pohnpei to learn what had happened there since her first visit. Were islanders still
relaxed and casual about sex? Were they still obsessed with titles and social rank? Was the island still lush and
beautiful? Had the inhabitants remained healthy? This second edition of Ward's best-selling account is a rare,
longitudinal study that tracks people, processes, and a place through decades of change. It is also an intimate
record of doing fieldwork that immerses readers in the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and the sensory richness
of Pohnpei. Ward addresses the ageless ethnographic questions about family life, politics, religion, traditional
medicine, magic, and death together with contemporary concerns about postcolonial survival, the discontinuities
of culture, and adaptation to the demands of a global age. Her insightful discoveries illuminate the evolution
of a culture possibly distant from yet important to people living in other parts of the world.
