ABSTRACT
Clifford Geertz’s observation that our world more and more resembles an enormous collage-a pastiche of tastes, patterns, ethnicities, languages, religions, and the like-captures the plight and the promise in which chon Namoluk find themselves as they venture forth from their small atoll to ever-more cosmopolitan places. A collage is a mixture of elements in incongruous relationship, originally
developed as a kind of surrealist art, a movement characterized by its irrational, noncontextual arrangement of material. For Namoluk people away from home, especially for those outside of the FSM, the world they encounter is a surreal place, filled with incongruity, irrationality, and diversity. They are just one more small piece in the collage.
