ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the author's resistance and struggle, as an entry point, to examine his own perspectives on how recounting conversations about one particular family's history can contribute to understanding power relations within Belau, within international militarism, and within ethnography itself. The author's own focus on deconstructing the dichotomized categories of "women" and "men" in political discourse and practice led him to challenge the dichotomy between clan and electoral politics that has been so often reinforced in anthropological texts and in US administrative strategies. The chapter highlights two broader points. The first involves conceptualizing and representing the relationship of local relations of power to globally defined processes of colonialism and militarism while emphasizing how local expressions of power relations have actively contributed to shaping international relations and transnational military policies. The second concerns notions or identity politics and resistance.
