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Tuvalu has recently come to the attention to global strategic planners.This report puts these executives on the fast track.Ten chapters provide: an overview of how to strategically access this important market, a discussion on economic fundamentals, marketing & distribution options, export and direct investment options, and full risk assessments (political, cultural, legal, human resources).Ample statistical benchmarks and comparative graphs are given. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Countries and Their Cultures, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1599 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Covers the broad range of popular religious culture of the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Beliefs, practices, symbols, traditions, movements, organizations, and leaders from the many traditions in the pluralistic American community are represented. Also includes cults and phenomena that drew followers, such as Heaven's Gale and UFOs. ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Languages of Tuvalu, Libraries in Tuvalu, National Symbols of Tuvalu, Religion in Tuvalu, Tuvaluan Music, Flag of Tuvalu, Tuvaluan Language, Gilbertese Language, Music of Tuvalu, Tuvalu Mo Te Atua, Tuvalu National Library and Archives, Church of Tuvalu, Coat of Arms of Tuvalu, Protestantism in Tuvalu. Excerpt: Tuvaluan is a Polynesian language of the Ellicean group spoken in Tuvalu. It is more or less distantly related to all other Polynesian languages, such as Hawaiian, Maori, Tahitian, Samoan, and Tongan, and most closely related to the languages spoken on the Polynesian Outliers in Micronesia and Northern and Central Melanesia. Tuvaluan has borrowed considerably from Samoan, the language of Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are about 13,000 Tuvaluan speakers worldwide. Like all other Polynesian languages, Tuvaluan descends from an ancestral language, which historical linguists refer to as "Proto-Polynesian," which was spoken around 3000 years ago. Tuvaluan has had significant contact with Gilbertese, a Micronesian language; Samoan; and, increasingly, English. Gilbertese is spoken natively on Nui, and was important to Tuvaluans when its colonial administration was located in the Gilbert Islands. Samoan was introduced by missionaries, and has had the most impact on the language. Englishs influence has been limited, but is growing. The sound system of Tuvaluan consists of five vowels (i, e, a, o, u) and 10 or 11 consonants (p, t, k, m, n, g, f, v, s, h, l), depending on the dialect. All sounds, including consonants, come in short and long forms, which are contrastive. /h/ is only used in limited circumstances in the Nukulaelae dialect. The grapheme g usually represents a velar nasal. Like most Polynesian... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=104014 ... Read more

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A compelling portrait of a Polynesian island communitycaught up in a world of change Thousands of years ago, Polynesianvoyagers discovered and settled Nanumea atoll, a tiny cluster of coralislets in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The community prospered,first evolving into a traditional culture finely tuned to the atoll'slimited environment and then weathering new changes imposed bymissionaries, colonial officials, and Westernization itself. Now oneof eight separate island communities comprising the modern Pacificnation of Tuvalu, Nanumea faces new challenges: rising sea levels,globalization, and massive social and economic changes. Using personalstories that evoke the difficulties and excitement of fieldwork, Keithand Anne Chambers draw on more than twenty-five years of ethnographicresearch in Nanumea to craft an engaging account of Nanumean cultureand social organization. Readers will come to appreciate how thecommunity's intense sharing obligations, service-orientedchieftainship, and a flexible system of extensive kinship reckoningdefine a lifestyle that differs fundamentally from modern Westernsociety. Caught up in the Internet revolution and the many forces forchange sweeping the Pacific, Nanumeans look ahead to the twenty-firstcentury with mixed feelings. Will the community's cultural treasure,its "unity of heart," be able to sustain them in the twenty-firstcentury? ... Read more

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In this study Niko Besnier analyzes the transformation of the Polynesian community of Nukulaelae from a nonliterate into a literate society, using a contemporary perspective that emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual. ... Read more

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Winner of the BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) Book Prize, 2010

Although gossip is disapproved of across the world's societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of politics: through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. Based on the author's intimate ethnographic knowledge of Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, this work uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions - the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice - that are rarely wedded successfully.

Drawing on a broad range of theoretical resources, Niko Besnier approaches gossip from several angles. A detailed analysis of how Nukulaelae's people structure their gossip interactions demonstrates that this structure reflects and contributes to the atoll's political ideology, which wavers between a staunch egalitarianism and a need for hierarchy. His discussion then turns to narratives of specific events in which gossip played an important role in either enacting egalitarianism or reinforcing inequality. Embedding gossip in a broad range of communicative practices enables Besnier to develop a nuanced analysis of how gossip operates, demonstrating how it allows some to gain power while others suffer because of it. Throughout, he is particularly attentive to the ways in which anthropologists themselves are the subject and object of gossip, making his work a notable contribution to reflexive social science. ... Read more