Summary :
Forty years ago when I began to research the history of alcoholic beverages in Micronesia, I kept running across numerous references to tobacco consumption in ways that predated the rise of modern cigarettes. Although tobacco was not my primary focus back then I routinely recorded this information for possible future use. I mentioned bits of this historical material on tobacco in two articles that chronicled the history of beverage alcohol in Micronesia (Marshall and Marshall 1975, 1976), and more appeared in a preliminary discussion of tobacco use in Micronesia a few years later (Marshall 1981). But it was while I supervised a two-year study of alcoholic beverages in Papua New Guinea during 1979–1981 that my interest in the medical anthropology of tobacco use in Oceania was truly kindled, and it was then that I began to examine the rapid growth of marketing and advertising of cigarettes in the islands. Eventually, this concern with cigarettes led me to conduct a general population survey in Chuuk that gathered data on tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana consumption (Marshall 1990, 1991a), and to then take a region-wide look at the relationship between cigarette smoking and the epidemiological transition in Oceania (Marshall 1991b). Subsequently, I devoted several months of field research specifically to the topic of tobacco and health in the Federated States of Micronesia (Marshall 1996, 1997, 2005). Now this long-standing research interest has led me to examine the ways that cigarette smoking and other ways of using tobacco (e.g., chewing it along with betel nut) relate to a history of colonialism and loss, contemporary economic impoverishment, and an intertwined syndemic of both communicable and chronic diseases.

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