The Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Glenn Petersen has been teaching at Baruch College since 1977, and also at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center since 1987. He teaches anthropology and geography at Baruch; at the Graduate Center he teaches in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and in the Master’s Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), where he specializes in international affairs. He did his undergraduate studies at California State College, Hayward, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Prof. Petersen is an ethnographer, and has been engaged in on-going field research in the islands of Micronesia since 1974, especially on the island of Pohnpei. He writes on nearly every aspect of social and cultural life in the islands, but has focused particularly on aspects of traditional chieftainship and social organization there, on the Micronesians’ pursuit of independence, and on the Micronesians’ contemporary political status as a small island nation-state located in a strategically vulnerable position.

Prof. Petersen served for a time as a member of the Federated States of Micronesia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. He taught international affairs at the University of Puerto Rico in 1992-93, where he has also conducted comparative research on Puerto Rico’s political status. He has also been a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among other sources.

Among the international conferences he has recently participated in are the “Island State Security Conference” at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu; the “Power and Hierarchy in the History of Civilizations,” at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia; “Global Perspectives on Island Archaeology,” University of Auckland, New Zealand; and the “Political Culture, Representation and Electoral Systems in the Pacific,” University of the South Pacific, Port Vila, Vanuatu.

His books include One Man Cannot Rule a Thousand: Fission in a Ponapean Chiefdom; Ethnicity and Interests at the 1990 the Federated States of Micronesia Constitutional Convention; and Lost in the Weeds: Theme and Variation in Pohnpei Political Mythology. He has recently completed work on Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization in the Central Pacific.

Among his recently published articles are:

“Important to Whom? On Ethnographic Usefulness, Competence and Relevance.” Anthropological Forum, 2005.

“Lessons Learned: The Micronesian Quest for Independence in the Context of American Imperial History.” Micronesian Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 3:45-63, 2004.

“Routine Provocation and Denial: From the Tonkin Gulf and Hainan to Kyoto and the Pacific Islands.” In E. Shibuya and Jim Rolfe, eds. Security in Oceania in the Twenty-first Century. Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, pp.193-230, 2003.

“Strategic Location, Sovereignty, and Cash in the Federated States of Micronesia.” In J. Fitzpatrick, ed., Endangered Peoples: Oceania. Westport: Greenwood, 2001.

“Indigenous Island Empires: Yap and Tonga Considered.” Journal of Pacific History 35:5-27, 2000.

“Sociopolitical Rank and Clanship in the Caroline Islands.” Journal of the Polynesian Society, 108 (4): 367-410, 1999.

“Strategic Location and Sovereignty: Modern Micronesia in the Historical Context of American Expansionism.” Space & Polity 2:179-205, 1999.

“Politics in Post-War Micronesia.” In R. Kiste and M. Marshall, eds., Anthropology in American Micronesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, pp.145-197.

• Home
• Faculty
• Major Requirements/Courses
• Minor Requirements