Summoning the Powers Beyond: Traditional Religions in Micronesia

Notes

notes Chapter 1: Introductory Issues 1. The contemporary political entities are the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, the Territory of Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Nauru, and the Republic of Kiribati. Mapia, an island just off the shore of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya in western New Guinea), has Micronesian speakers, but the island itself is now part of Indonesia. 2. That there was and still is a chain of Chuukic- (formerly Trukic-) speaking people from Tobi in the west to the Mortlockese in the east is not in question. What is difficult to agree on are meaningful terms to describe this link between islands across Micronesia. Although I originally used “the Chuukic-speaking Continuum” to refer to this group, here I will use the terms “Chuukic-speaking islands” or “Chuukic people.” 3. The archaeological evidence is too complicated to be summarized here. The best readings are Kirch (2000) and Bellwood (1979). 4. A strong case for cultural similarity in the region has recently been made in Glenn Petersen’s Traditional Micronesian Societies (2009). 5. These are Lothar Käser’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Der Begriff Seele bei den Insulanern von Truk” (1977), and Ward Goodenough’s Under Heaven’s Brow (2002). A third book, Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, vol. 3: The Belief among the Micronesians (1924), is drawn entirely from existing ethnographic sources. 6. This absence of religion as a CIMA topic of investigation is confirmed in the fiftieth anniversary publication documenting the CIMA work, while the publication itself (Kiste and Marshall 1999), the definitive report on fifty years of American anthropology in Micronesia, has no chapter on religion. 7. During 1899–1914, Germany controlled all of the islands that would later be occupied by the Japanese and then by the Americans as trust territories. Kiribati (the Gilbert Islands), Banaba (Ocean Island), and eventually Nauru were British protectorates or colonies. 8. The expedition spent its first year in the German colonies of Melanesia, but almost all the published expedition reports are about Micronesia. Because of World War I, much of the work was not published until long after the war. The expedition was funded by the Hamburg Museum and approved 224 Notes to Pages 4–6 by the German government, so it is known variously as the Hamburg or the German South Sea Expedition, and sometimes it is referred to as the Thilenius South Sea Expedition (Thilenius was the general editor). The multivolume publication is known as the Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910; in this work, I use the abbreviation ESE. 9. See, for example, Hanlon (1988) on Pohnpei and Burrows and Spiro (1953) on Ifalik. 10. Swain and Trompf’s Religions of Oceania (1995) has precious little on Micronesia; the same can be said for Hans Nevermann’s Die Religionen der Südsee und Australiens (1968), which devotes a skimpy 9 pages out of 312 to Micronesia. 11. Quoted in W. Goodenough 1988, 118. 12. The classic substantive definition is from Melford Spiro (whose first fieldwork was on the Carolinian atoll of Ifalik): Religion is “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings” (1966, 96). This substantive definition has a long ancestry. Tylor, in the late nineteenth century, defined religion as “a belief in spiritual beings” (1889, 424). This is a definition that anthropologist Anthony Wallace views as “still a respectable minimum definition of religion” (1966, 5). Wallace expands on the “respectable minimum” in this way: “Religion is a set of rituals, rationalized by myth, which mobilizes supernatural powers for the purpose of achieving or preventing transformations of state in man and nature” (italics his, 127). By and large, anthropologists have avoided Durkheim’s dichotomy between the sacred and the profane as the defining trait of religion. Nor have they embraced Ninian Smart’s suggestion to avoid a single criterion for the definition of religion and see that all religion will have some of the features of the following “bundle” of characteristics: the doctrinal, narrative, ethical, ritual, experiential, and social/institutional (2000, 8–10). Most anthropologists, American and British at least, tend to favor a substantive definition like Spiro’s or the more expansive functional one of Geertz. 13. Geertz’ full definition of religion is “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a...