Geoffrey M. White is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i. He is the coeditor of
This chapter introduces the national memorial to Pearl Harbor as a social space by focusing on the visitor center and the activities that continually reproduce Pearl Harbor history there through storytelling, lectures, film presentations, and casual interactions of all kinds. The account focuses especially on the role of Pearl Harbor survivors who, in volunteering time at the visitor center, acted as both objects and agents of history. Drawing from fieldwork in the 1990s and 2000s, when a significant cadre of veterans spent time at the memorial to speak to visitors, the chapter discusses the kinds of history that emerge from personal and moral narrative. Then, with an eye toward the disappearance of the Second World War generation, the chapter explores the ways survivor voices are recoded and deployed in electronic media, losing much of the irony, uncertainty, and ambivalence characteristic of in-person witnessing.
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