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Chapter 6 The Religion of the Marshall Islands Every region in Micronesia has notable evidential problems regarding its old religion. For Kosrae, the problem arises from the limitations of a single source, Ernst Sarfert, interviewing a few informants about a religion long dead and only dimly remembered. For Pohnpei, the problems flow from the nature of the traditions and oral histories used as historical or ethnographic data. For the Chuukic-speaking islands, the major problem is sifting through an enormous quantity of evidence to find the patterns of belief and practice that stretch across the breadth of Micronesia, from the Mortlocks and the Chuuk Lagoon to Tobi, just north of New Guinea. For the Marshalls, three evidential problems merge to create a unique challenge in describing the old religion. The first problem is the scant source material on Marshallese traditional religion. There is only one major early work on the religion, which came from longtime resident and Catholic missionary in the Marshalls, August Erdland (1914).1 German colonial official C. Knappe published an article on the religious views of the Marshallese (1888); this is the only other publication devoted entirely to the old religion there. The earliest eyewitness records about Marshallese religion come from Adalbert Chamisso’s report of the Russian expedition’s stay in 1819, but later reports have not always corroborated Chamisso’s information, which came through the eyes of a Woleai native who had lived in the Marshalls for some years (Chamisso 1986). Krämer’s report from his fieldwork under the Hamburg South Seas Expedition was finished by Hans Nevermann and published in 1938, almost a quarter of a century after Krämer’s fieldwork; moreover, much of Krämer and Nevermann was merely a reworking of earlier printed reports. Mythology, on the other hand, was well researched by Davenport (1952, 1953) and later by Chambers (1972), McArthur (1995), and Tobin (2002). The second problem is that, upon examination of other accounts— including both shorter, earlier reports and later reports done after World War II—one can quickly see that these reports, including Erdland’s major 122 Chapter 6 work, do not agree on the meaning of key vocabulary items about the gods and the spirit world. This confusion about terminology is not just material for a scholarly footnote. It means that a clear picture of the Marshallese spirit world is close to impossible. From the ethnographic data, some patterns do emerge about the spirit world, about human destiny within the mythic cosmos, and about the rituals, but the patterns are quite general. The contemporary religious vocabulary is of little help because it has an overlay of Christian belief that is difficult to separate.2 In short, terminology is the stumbling block to a coherent, unified summary of Marshallese religion. The evidence concerning religious vocabulary is contradictory and fragmented. The result is something like a partially complete mosaic or jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces do not quite fit together for a connected picture. Perhaps the fragmentary and confusing evidence simply reflects the equally fragmented social and political structure of the old Marshalls. In the final analysis, the reasons for the inconsistent and patchy evidence are simply not known. The third major problem is that this terminological confusion creates difficulty in understanding the mythology in which much of the old religious vocabulary is embedded. Marshallese myth, while rich in quantity and in detail, is conflicting. This valuable corpus of data is quite unlike the mythology of Pohnpei and more difficult to organize. Pohnpeian mythology is already organized and systematized into linear sequences of events by Pohnpeian oral historians; Marshallese mythology is not. Regardless of the difficulties, however, Marshallese mythology remains the place to delve for an explanation of the old beliefs about spirits, the cosmos, and human destiny. In this chapter, I propose what appears to me as the one overarching concept that can link together Marshallese religious terms, the key myths, and the spirit world with human affairs: power. Focusing on the idea of power does not reconcile all the confusing data, but it does give some order to the old religion.3 After presenting this concept, I will flesh out the idea with additional detail about the spirit world, about the Marshallese picture of the cosmos, and about the ritual links between spirit and human.4 Power in Marshallese Religion The Marshallese spirits, wrote Erdland, are associated with “almost anything that has to do with power.” (1914). Although Erdland’s assertion is almost a...

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