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This chapter asks what processes might contribute to the historical durability of cultural beliefs and practices over time. This is not a new problem in anthropology. It reflects an enduring, if often neglected concern among psychological anthropologists with processes of cultural reproduction (e.g., D’Andrade 1992; Sapir 1924; Spiro 1987, 1997; Strauss and Quinn 1997). However, I find that studies of cultural reproduction have been largely displaced in recent decades in favor of a renewed interest in cultural diffusion, understood in terms of the accelerated globalization of cultural forms, and the proliferation of cultural hybrids of various kinds (Appadurai 1996). This renewed emphasis on the historically particular flows and entanglements of culture through time and space does not illuminate much in terms of how culture as a conceptual system connects to the beliefs and motivations of social actors who participate together in social practice (Spiro 1997; Strauss and Quinn 1997; Searle 1995, 2010). Also, it tells us little about why some publicly trafficked symbolic representations never really “make sense” or “catch on” among people as they go about their daily lives while others rapidly become the basis of strong convictions about what members of a community believes to be true, intend to do, or desire will (or will not) become true in the future (Spiro 1997). The emphasis on cultural flows and hybridity also leaves unsettled questions of how and why new generations continue to adopt the strong convictions regarding certain cultural representations as their parents, even as accelerated cultural flows present a host of potentially attractive alternatives.

I became interested in cultural reproduction partly because of an encounter with funerary rituals in the Micronesian islands of Chuuk Lagoon where I have been conducting fieldwork off and on since 1995. In 2012, I spent one month doing fieldwork with the initial idea of trying to understand how new communication technologies might matter for the ongoing production of kinship in the newly emerging diaspora of Chón Chuuk (“people of Chuuk ” in the language of Chuuk Lagoon) that had grown rapidly since the mid-1990s. Upon arriving that June, I was thrust into a series of encounters that led me to quickly put aside my original plan, for I had arrived at a time of intense participation in funerals.

Immediately upon my arrival at the airport, members of my adoptive kin group picked me up and—realizing I was quite tired from my two-day journey—dropped me off at the local boat pool where their fiberglass skiff was moored and which would take us back later that day to the nearby island where they lived. They sped off in their pickup truck to “pay their respects” at the ritual that preceded the burial (peeyas 1 ) of one of their “mothers” (iin) in their father’s adoptive matrilineage. This was the second major funeral in which members of this kin group had participated in recent weeks. Over the course of the next three weeks, we would attend four more funerals. Another took place just a few weeks after my departure—a total of seven in just over two months. Funerary observances last anywhere between 6 and 10 days, so my entire field visit was overtaken by preparations for and attendance at various funerary events. Since funerals are the realization of principles of kinship in ritual form (see below), and provide a major vehicle for enacting kin ties distributed broadly in the emerging Chón Chuuk diaspora, I shifted my original research plans to gather ethnographic data about contemporary funerary rituals in the increasingly transnational space of Chón Chuuk kinship .

Once I was back in the United States, I began working through my fieldnotes from this trip and from earlier rounds of fieldwork to document the contemporary practices and shared understandings associated with funerals. I was also interested in understanding how the patterns I documented compared to those recorded by earlier ethnographers. There is a rich ethnographic literature for the islands of Chuuk Lagoon (formerly “Truk”) dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the present (e.g., Bollig 1927; Caughey 1977, 1980; Dernbach 2005; Gladwin and Sarason 1953; R. Goodenough 1970; W. Goodenough 1978; Kubary 1895; Lowe 2002, 2003; Lowe and Johnson 2007; Marshall 1977, 1978; Rubinstein 1995). After reading these ethnographic records carefully, I was surprised to find that a remarkably durable pattern of cultural practices remains.

My discovery led me to ask in this chapter “how and why such historical durability in funerary beliefs and practices is possible?” After all, the Chón Chuuk had endured successive waves of economic globalization, Westernization, and colonization since the late nineteenth century (Gladwin and Sarason 1953; Hezel 1983, 1995; Marshall 1978; Petersen 2009). As such, “culture” in Chuuk Lagoon might be expected to consist of a tangle of hybrid forms—ever shifting cultural “-scapes” (Appadurai 1996). And yet, certain central domains of belief and practice, such as those associated with funerary rituals, continue to be reproduced with only modest embellishments and amendments that incorporate elements of the global into locally meaningful and enduring forms.

To address the question of cultural reproduction, I draw on two theoretical frames: Searle’s (1995, 2010) theory of the creation and maintenance of social institutional reality and Spiro’s (1987, 1997) theory of cultural reproduction. Searle (2010) argues that three conditions are needed for the construction and maintenance of social institutions . The first is a language, rich enough to enable a class of speech acts Searle describes as “Status Function Declarations ” (to be defined a bit further on), which can both assign status functions to persons or objects and relate these to “deontic powers ” or the moral propositions that define the rights, duties, obligations, etc. associated with the status function so assigned. The second is the ritual enactment of status functions and associated deontic powers granted to the institution in question through Status Function Declarations. Third, there must exist in the members of a community psychological states of “collective intentionality ” that allow for the collective recognition or acceptance that institutional realities created through Status Function Declarations are legitimate, even if this is only done so begrudgingly.

In his most mature work on cultural reproduction, Spiro (1997) takes up many of the same themes as Searle. But, Searle focuses primarily on developing a theory of how language and speech acts create and maintain social institutional realities, offering only a sketch of a theory of mind that makes collective intentionality possible. Spiro (1997) theorizes processes of cultural internalization, the outcome of which corresponds well with Searle’s notion of collective intentionality . Spiro offers a more sophisticated account of internalization and collective intentionality (note: Spiro does not use this latter term), in which one can see levels of collective intentionality ranging from mere recognition of cultural propositions or acceptance as cliché with little emotional attachment to emotionally powerful convictions that certain cultural propositions are true and morally correct, along with strong motivations to engage in actions to uphold them. 2

Given these points, I argue in this chapter that the historical durability of culture requires three things. First, it requires the ongoing availability of cultural propositions in a community that provide for the meaningful assignment of status functions associated with social institutions , with their deontic powers . Since funerals in Chuuk are public enactments of cultural understandings and sentiments associated with kinship in Chuuk , I outline in the first section below the cultural propositions associated with kinship in Chuuk . I specifically elaborate those cultural propositions associated with Searle’s notions of status functions and their associated deontic powers .

Second, the historical durability of cultural forms requires repeated Status Function Declarations (capitalization is used in the style of Searle 2010) that assign status functions of kinship to actual people and objects. Declarations are an important feature of ritual practice, which I will describe in relation to the historical durability of the ritual process associated with funerals in Chuuk . Funerals both allow Chón Chuuk to create an institutional reality that conforms to ideas and expressions of sentiment associated with kinship and to simultaneously represent this reality to others. In so doing, funerals become a key site for the social transmission of these cultural propositions . They are simultaneously important sites for the psychological acquisition and deeper internalization of these propositions.

Third, in an era where waves of (post)colonialism and globalization provide ready alternatives to locally traditional cultural propositions , people must not only continue to collectively accept or recognize the legitimacy of local cultural propositions , but these must also be related to powerful motivations. In other words, there must exist historically robust local processes for their deep internalization, such that active participation in the ritual practice allows for the fulfillment of needs or the expression of powerful sentiments (Spiro 1997). So, in the final section of this chapter, I will describe those historically enduring processes of internalization that make participation in funerals so emotionally compelling for many Chón Chuuk .

Culture Described: The Enduring Language for the Institution of Kinship in Chuuk

In this section, I describe some important aspects of the linguistically elaborated cultural domain of kinship that are reproduced through funerary practices in Chuuk . These cultural understandings of kinship relate kinds of people (living and non-living), objects, land and reef, labor, objects, commodities, and substances together into a system of mutual relations that have long been the subject of anthropological studies of kinship (e.g., Goodenough 1978; Carsten 2004; Sahlins 2013).

As noted earlier, I find Searle’s (1995, 2010) theory of human social ontologies useful (see also D’Andrade 1992, 2006, this volume; Durkheim 2001; Tomasello 2009, 2014; Turner 1969). Searle (1995, 2010) begins with the widely accepted claim that humans depend on each other for the satisfaction of their material needs. In order to meet the needs of a society’s members, labor, distribution and exchange, and consumption are organized into social institutions (Durkheim 2001). One of the things culture does as a conceptual system is to elaborate ideas that define the various institutional statuses that people and objects can possess or occupy in this cultural system for meeting various needs, and their associated functions. Searle (2010: 94) calls these “status functions,” which he defines as

a function that is performed by an object(s), person(s), or other sort of entity(ies) and which can only be performed in virtue of the fact that the community in which the function is performed assigns a certain status to the object, person, or entity in question, and the function is performed in virtue of the collective acceptance or recognition of the object, person, or entity as having that status. (Searle 2010: 94)

Searle is describing the processes whereby humans create institutional realities from cultural propositions (D’Andrade 2006, this volume; Spiro 1997), by imposing “functions on objects or people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure” (Searle 2010: 7). Status functions are created through cultural propositions that establish constitutive rules, often of the form X counts as Y, in the context of C. For example, there is nothing about the physical properties of the man who carries the title of samon or “local lineage chief” in Chuuk specifying that he should function as the leader of a kin-based local matrilineal group known as the eterekes. Indeed, the same could be said for the eterekes itself.

One way that the persons, objects, or other entities who are assigned social statuses gain their functions is through the further cultural elaboration of the “deontic powers ” associated with those statuses (Searle 2010: 8). As already stated, by deontic powers , Searle (2010: 9) means moral propositions that define how a social status functions relative to the “rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements, and so on” that they carry. As moral propositions, deontic powers provide reasons for “acting that are independent of our inclinations and desires” (ibid.: 9). Psychological anthropologists have discussed the deontic powers of culture in terms of its “directive force” (D’Andrade 1992; Goodenough 1978; Strauss 1992). Deontic powers are not sufficient for governing people’s actions in society; we are as yet missing individual volition.

Goodenough (1978: 92–119) described the social organization of kinship in Chuuk similarly. He first presented kinship as a terminological system or a “set of relationship categories, designated by appropriate [categorical] terms, and rules [or propositions] by which membership in each category is determined.” In other words, as a system of social statuses that categorizes the possibilities of relatedness among kin along a number of dimensions. These categories distinguish types of kin and create the locally recognized possibilities for bringing people and things into conventionally recognized forms of kinship , or what Sahlins (2013: 2) describes as “mutuality of being.”

The contours of these understandings of kinship can be outlined as follows. First, people in Chuuk recognize two fundamental forms of kinship relation, one is either mwirimwir (a matrilineal relation) to another kinsperson or éfékúr (related as a child of the male members of a matrilineal group, the matrilineage’s “heirs” should the lineage’s members die out) to that person. Matrilineal kin are further organized into a nested set of matrilineal kin groups. The most basic and intimate group is the owunnun or fameni (a term borrowed from the German familie and introduced by the German administration between 1903 and 1917). The owunnun includes a woman, her unmarried biological or adopted children , and her husband and is the group that is primarily responsible for everyday household production. The next larger group is the sibling-set (Goodenough called it a “sub-lineage”) or inepwiinéw—i.e., mother (iin), adult same-sex siblings (pwii), and their children (naaw). Members of the sibling-set are often the most solidary and supportive group beyond the owunnun. Sibling-sets are organized further into local exogamous landholding matrilineal groups known as the eterekes, which Goodenough labeled the lineage. Members of an eterekes are the matrilineal descendants of a known ancestress or local lineage founder (pwunefás). The parcels of land belonging to the lineage are owned by all members equally as a corporate group. The eterekes provides one of the main traditional political officers in Chuuk , the lineage “chief” or samon, typically the oldest son of the oldest living woman in the eterekes. At the most expansive level, Chón Chuuk share membership in named, exogamous matriclans known as eyinang, with their members widely dispersed among the islands and atolls of the greater region. People are also considered éfékúr to their father’s eyinang, although in this case, there is nothing that they might inherit. People rarely interact with all members of their eyinang, particularly when these kin might live quite a distance away. However, as we shall see, funerals are a significant exception.

In addition to the organization of kin into kin groups, institutional relations of kinship are established through terms of reference that are used to distinguish one’s consanguineal and affinal relatives. These terms are differentiated with reference to generation, sex of the relative referred to, and sex of the speaker (Goodenough 1978: 94). Kin terms include iin- for any woman of a higher generation that the speaker and sam- for any male of a higher generation. Pwii- is applied to anyone of one’s own generation that is the same sex as the person, feefin- to any female who is of a male’s own generation, and mwongey- or mwááni- to any male who is of a female’s own generation. Naaw- is used for anyone of a lower generation. Affinal kin are termed similarly except for members of one’s own generation. So, relatives of one’s spouse who are of a higher generation are termed iin- for women and sam- for men and the lower generation one’s nowu-. But, among one’s own generation, cross-sex affines are termed pwúnúwa- (“spouse”) and same-sex affines are termed éss-.

Goodenough (1978: 111–119) described the deontic powers associated with different kin terms and kin relationships with regard to respect behavior and sexual distance, depending on the context of how they are related to the speaker. For example, respect behaviors that indicate status differences include pro- and prescriptions for whether or not one could use “fight talk” (fóósun fiyuuw) or hard words (fóós péchékkun), was permitted to refuse a request, was expected to generally avoid the other in public settings, or was expected to lower oneself by physically stooping or crawling in the presence of the other in public, or to say fááyiro or tiiro when crossing the other’s path. The more of these behaviors that one is obligated to display in the presence of another (e.g., one’s older brother, any brother of a woman or sister of a man, or a chief), the greater the status difference in the relationship. The most respectful relationships in Chuuk , those where most of these behaviors are expected even today, are between a brother and a sister and between chiefs and their non-chiefly kin.

Other deontic powers are associated with one’s status vis-a-vis the matrilineal kinship groupings. For example, members of an eterekes have exclusive rights to the land and reef holdings of the eterekes, including to their agricultural and fishery products (Goodenough 1978). Non-members may only access these lands via special permission from the samon of the eterekes, typically after being given assent from all adult members of the lineage. Violating these rights and obligations is a significant source of inter-group conflict in Chuuk to the present. Lineage members are also prohibited from any sexual relations with one another.

There are also deontic powers associated with clanship or sharing membership in the same eyinang. Clan or eyinang members may not marry one another, for example. In addition, during times of extreme hardship such as that caused by typhoons or periods of drought that are endemic to the region—or after defeat in times of war in earlier eras—Chón Chuuk generally expect that they could rely on their connections to eyinang members on other islands with whom to take refuge until they could return to their own land, and these distant kin are morally obligated to take them under their care and protection (Goodenough 1978, 2002; Petersen 2009).

Again, what is important in each of these cases is that the cultural propositions that define the ranges of deontic powers associated with the different statuses in the system of kinship provide reasons for action (i.e., moral reasons) that are independent of people’s inclinations or desires. The obligation to help a kinsman in need, or to avoid violating the taboos associated with the persons or resources of non-kin, are expected to be followed even if someone does not particularly feel like observing these obligations or taking advantage of their rights.

The sketch I present above reflects an available collection of cultural propositions that most adults articulate regularly in everyday conversation, and in more focused interviews. As I noted, the enduring availability of these propositions over time is an important part of the historical durability of kinship in Chuuk , and as I will describe below, an important part of how kinship is enacted through funerary rituals. In the next section, I will address the second major claim in my argument: By providing a venue for Status Function Declarations associated with kinship , funeral rituals allow Chón Chuuk to simultaneously create a reality that conforms to key ideas and expressions of sentiment associated with kinship , and represent this reality to others. In so doing, funerals become a key site for the social transmission of these cultural propositions and for their psychological internalization both at a cognitive level and in terms of the development of an embodied habitus .

Culture Declared and Transmitted: Funerals as Venues for Enactment and Acquisition of Kinship

In this section, I describe kinship for the Chón Chuuk as it is publicly instituted through funerary practices. More specifically, funerary rituals include the (re)enactment of a complex network of a class of speech acts Searle defines as “Declarations”: a class of speech acts that changes reality to represent the propositional content of the statement while simultaneously representing reality as being so instituted (Searle 2010). It should be noted that these are Declarations specific to social institutions , a type Searle describes as “Status Function Declarations ,” and through which, he (Searle 2010: 13) argues, “all human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence”. So, when a large group of people who understand themselves to be related to one another through various principles of kinship cooperatively participate in funerary rituals as described below, they create a reality that fits the proposition “We are one kingroup (Kich, sia eew chó),” while simultaneously representing, to each other and to a broader public, their shared reality as being so changed. Finally, it is important to recognize that the propositional structure of Status Function Declarations is not always given in explicitly verbal form, but can be performed through non-verbal embodied means, through the way people interact with artifacts, and as a combination of these, as we will see in the case of funerals.

Status Function Declarations as expressed through ritual practice can institute (i.e., create as social reality) cultural propositions only if the participating members of a community or larger society share collective intentionality that enables them to recognize and accept, however, willingly or unwillingly, their propositional content (Searle 2010). What is collective intentionality ? In general, intentionality can be defined as “that capacity of mind by which it is directed at, or about, objects and states of affairs in the world, typically independent of itself” (Searle 2010: 25). As such, intentional (or volitional) states have two components, a general psychological state such as believing, desiring, hoping, fearing, etc. and some propositional content such as “it is raining”. So, an intentional state would take the form of something like, “I (believe, hope that, fear that) it is or will be raining” (Searle 2010; see also Spiro 1997: 74–89 for a similar account of volitional action).

Intentionality is often understood in terms of individual beliefs , desires, and intentions, often rendered as “I” intentionality, as the previous example suggests. But the actual production of social institutions in social life requires a different sort of intentionality: collective or “we” intentionality (Searle 1995; Tomasello 2009, 2014). These are intentional states associated with planned or ongoing social actions that require, as do all human institutions from marriage to money, a collective “we” to realize. Again, institutions require collective intentionality because their social realization depends on collective acceptance of the way actual persons or objects possess or acquire the status functions associated with these institutions (Searle 1995, 2010). So, in order for the publicly expressed belief statement, “that man there is samon of our eterekes” to reflect a socially accepted institutional fact, there must also exist among those participating in this statement a broadly shared state of mind that provides both a complex, logically elaborated set of propositions about how a person becomes “samon” of an “eterekes” as well as belief states about the fit between the contents of mind and the actual conditions of the world among those who receive this statement. Absent such a state of collective recognition and acceptance, such a statement will not be meaningful to a receiving audience and thus will not allow for the co-creation of the associated institutional fact.

Searle does not develop an account of how collective intentionality comes about as a psychological capacity shared among individuals cooperating in the social production of institutional reality. However, Spiro (1987, 1997) has developed just such an account in his theory of cultural reproduction. Spiro recognizes that cultural reproduction involves two distinct mechanisms, cultural transmission (a “social transaction between actors”, Spiro 1997: 3) and cultural internalization (“a psychological operation within actors”, Spiro 1997: 3). Social processes of cultural transmission aid cultural reproduction because they establish the conditions through which novices can acquire the cultural propositions that are necessary to produce collective intentionality . Psychological processes of internalization aid cultural reproduction because they determine the strength of individual conviction and motivation associated with different cultural propositions once they have been acquired, and therefore, the likelihood of their accepting Status Function Declarations as true, morally correct, and desirable as well as their motivation to institute such Declarations through forms of practice in the future.

Spiro (1997: 8–9) identified a four-step scale for the levels of conviction associated with cultural acquisition. The first is when individuals are acquainted with a cultural proposition, but not yet assenting to it, remaining indifferent to it or rejecting it altogether. At the second level, a cultural proposition is accepted as cliché, accepted but honored more in its breach than in its observance. The third level of conviction is when a cultural proposition is cognitively and emotionally salient. Spiro (1997) claims that at this level, the proposition is “internalized.” It is at this level that the proposition affects one’s sense of self and how one acts in the world (Hallowell 1955). At the fourth level, the proposition is not only internalized, but the individual has a powerful emotional attachment to it and is highly motivated to arrange her or his life around its content, either in the pursuit of the fulfillment of needs or the expression of sentiments attached to the cultural proposition or in the avoidance of the arousal of these (Spiro 1987). It is at this level that we might say culture has become deeply embodied, a significant part of a person’s habitus (Bourdieu 1977).

Searle’s discussions of collective intentionality overlap with this scale of internalization. On the one hand, Searle (2010: 57, emphasis in the original) notes that “institutional structures require collective recognition by the participants in the institution in order to function, but particular transactions within the institution require cooperation ” in which the members engage in different tasks in the service of achieving a jointly-shared goal. This distinction is important for my argument here because, as Searle (2010: 57) claims, “full blown cooperative collective intentionality … is often necessary for the creation of the institution”. In other words, the internalization of a cultural proposition would need to include how it relates to one’s sense of self from the standpoint of one’s cooperative (or non-cooperative) engagements with other persons, objects, and entities as they are elaborated through a cultural system of status functions and associated deontic powers (e.g., Hallowell 1955). The acquisition of cultural content occurs upon a bedrock of preexisting psychological processes, some innate and phylogenetically derived, and others developed through the individual’s social experiences, as these are socially organized and culturally shaped beginning in infancy and early childhood (Spiro 1997). A significant proportion of these experiences are highly cooperative in nature (Tomasello 2009, 2014).

In Chuuk , discussions of the way culture is internalized are part of everyday conversation and the ethnopsychological concepts that inform it (Caughey 1980). For example, people can be forgiven for not participating in important cultural events if they do not know (sineey) what those events are, why they are important, or how to comport oneself when participating. This is particularly the case with very young children and foreign visitors. But those who are expected to know these things about events, but do not attend or participate in them, are understood to lack the intentionality, will, or desire (tiip) to do so. Of interest for our discussion is the importance given to having a single, collective will which is described as having “one will” (tiipeew). It is interesting in the context of the above discussion of collective intentionality that the Chon Chuuk think of will or desire (tiip) in collective terms, that a collectivity can have one will, a shared set of goals and purposes, and a shared desire to pursue them, often expressed in public discourse as “we must have one will or shared purpose together” (sipwe tiipeew fengen) and in that collective state show generosity (kissássew) and compassionate caring love (ttong) for each other, particularly those who are materially needy or physically or emotionally suffering (e.g., Lutz 1988). But a single intentionality requires an additional motivational standpoint on the part of a person: They should be “low” (tekisón) and humbly respect the desires of others (sufenuti) as opposed to having a “high attitude or comportment” (namanam tekia), which is to say they should not be self-centered and arrogant (Caughey 1980). As I have argued elsewhere (Lowe 2002), enactments of humble, nurturing care of others is a central feature of self-fashioning for the Chon Chuuk as a “good person” (aramasééch).

I will now describe the funerary rituals for the Chón Chuuk as a complex of socially instituted Status Function Declarations of kinship , drawing on my own data collected in Chuuk between 1996 and 2012 and published reports based on ethnographic fieldwork reports that date from the first decade of the twentieth century (Bollig 1927; Dernbach 2005; Gladwin and Sarason 1953; Goodenough 2002; Lowe 2002). I organize my description according to the four main stages of these funerary rites and observances that have remained remarkably constant throughout the recent historical period. These are preparing for death (for which there is no single linguistic label), the néénap (funeral), peeyas (burial), and the period of prescribed mourning and final release of both the departing good spirit of the deceased and of her or his mourning kin—the roro and érék rituals. Across these phases of this ritual process, we can see how different categories of kin cooperate in the performance of distinct statuses relative to each other and the deceased, making Status Function Declarations of kinship relations as well as producing intentional states of different affective intensity and character. As such, funerals are sites, not only for the social institution of kinship , but also for its psychological acquisition and, through cooperative participation and an intensely emotional series of ritual events, for its deeply embodied internalization.

Preparing for Death

The connection between death and kinship is well established in the ethnographic literature for Chuuk . When one is dying, establishing connections of care and comfort to one’s closest kin and the land to which they are collectively associated is particularly important. Goodenough (2002: 134), citing Bollig (1927), reports that “People did not like the prospect of dying away from home and family. They wished to die, if possible, in the arms of their closest female relatives. … people’s children and sub-lineage mates had the responsibility for caring for them in their last illness.” This was still very much the case in my own observations (see also Quinn 2013 for a similar observation on Ifaluk ). Often when they had moved to other villages or islands in Chuuk , people who were gravely ill might return to their local lineage (eterekes) or to their sibling-set, sublineage (iinepwiinowu) homesteads if death seemed imminent. If their illness made travel impossible, close female members of their lineage (e.g., lineal “mothers” (iinenap) or “sisters” (feefin/pwii) or “children ” (nowu) would travel instead to care for their sick relative where the sick person was staying, and hold vigil there if the person seemed close to death. In the contemporary milieu, this travel to care for the gravely ill can include staying on the main, urban island of Wééné in the only state hospital for Chuuk State (see also Bautista 2010: 92). Or, in an even sharper reflection of the Chón Chuuk diaspora, a close female relative may fly to Guam or Hawaii, or even to the mainland U.S., to care for their sick relative, especially when death seems imminent.

Upon death, the women who are attending to the person, typically very close matrilineal kin of the deceased, begin immediately to keen and wail in a characteristic outpouring of grief and loss. In my own fieldnotes and in the historical record, these expressions of grief are particularly acute among one’s closest kin associated with the faameni (owunnun) or sibling-set (inepwiinéw) who know the deceased more intimately. However, the way grief is expressed is different for men when compared to women and children . Gladwin and Sarason (1953: 157) described women’s expressions of grief well: “the mourning wail of a Trukese woman is dramatic and often chilling, rising from a moan to almost a scream and falling again while she sways back and forth clutching her head or pounding the ground.” Women’s keens are highly stereotypical, and often have a content today that is like that recorded by Bollig (1927: 15, cited in Goodenough 2002: 135) a century ago, “Oh, truly you are dead, and I am utterly bereft, surviving you. There is no one any more to care for me, surviving you, now that you have died and left me.” Children and younger adolescents of both sexes will also cry openly, often in the company of their lineal mothers, and no attempt is made to quiet them or send them elsewhere. Men typically react stoically, they may tear up and look on silently in apparent sadness, but they do not cry, keen, or wail.

These close kin are also responsible for preparing the body for the funeral ritual. Shortly after death, if the person has died in the lineage or sublineage meeting house (wuut), those close relatives in attendance at the time of death will prepare the body. The body will be tenderly stripped, cleaned, and dressed in new clothes. Traditionally, it would be laid out on a new pandanus sleeping mat (kieki). Since the early twentieth century, however, the body is placed in a coffin, often one that has been made locally or purchased in the urban center on the island of Wééné. Once in the coffin, the body is placed on the floor of the meeting house and women who are closely related to the deceased will stay next to the body to fan it as they continue to keen and wail. 3 After the body is prepared and placed in the wuut for the ensuing funeral rituals, more kin begin to arrive. These will invariably be members of the deceased’s eterekes, close kin of their spouse, or members who are éfékúr to the deceased’s eterekes. Among these, kinswomen will typically also come to care for the mourners, sing hymns, and lead prayers. The next day, the funeral (néénap) will take place.

Néénap

A person’s death in Chuuk is understood to be a calling for kin and others who had some relationship to the deceased during her or his life (e.g., coworkers, close friends, fictive kin) to assemble. This calling is reflected in the term used to refer to the body of the deceased during the funerary period, kkóniiro (literally the “assembly ” (ro) of kkón or pounded breadfruit, long a symbolically important food staple in Chuuk ). The first gathering of kin is in a funeral ritual called the néénap. The general features of the néénap are as follows: As the body of the deceased lays in state in the center of the lineage meeting house, more distantly related real or fictive kin, as recognized through the principles outlined above, arrive to pay their respects. Those visiting the deceased are obliged to bring a small gift (oowun meyimá) for the dead person and none attend without such a gift. Visitors enter the funeral site and leave their gift next to the body of the deceased. In my own observations, a plastic tub or other durable container is set at the foot of the deceased’s coffin in which to place these gifts. 4 As visitors exit the wuut after presenting their gift, they are given a small package of food and drink. Aside from the occasional wailing and keening of women attending the body, this phase of the funeral is emotionally muted. As Gladwin noted, “none of the visitors, nor anyone in the household, offered any expressions of sympathy or the like” (Gladwin and Sarason 1953: 163). Which is true also today. 5

After several hours, and once enough of the kin who will stay to attend the burial have arrived, a formal program is called by a representative man of the lineage (eterekes) that is hosting the funeral program. The program is often led by the lineage chief or samon or by another senior man (sam-) of the lineage designated to “emcee” this portion of the néénap. The speakers, all older men, include senior representatives of the hosting lineage (sam-), political office holders, and often a very senior man who is considered to have some expertise in local traditional lore and ritual knowledge (itang). These speeches rarely mention the deceased, but instead typically call on the assembled kin to renew their commitments to each other as a single, related people or chó.

The speeches are followed by a final return of attention to the deceased before the burial and the emotional crescendo of the funeral. It is at this inflection point in the néénap, during the transition toward the burial or peeyas, that a condition of liminality emerges (Turner 1969). Here, liminality can be understood in terms of a ritually instituted site of cultural practice characterized by the nearly complete flattening of the status distinctions that are typically given in social institutions and many of their associated normative expectations in more secular contexts. Each member of the relatively numerous assembled kin group will approach the body of the deceased to say their final goodbyes to the deceased by touching or kissing him or her one final time. The emotional outpouring by the assembled group is quite intense and it is here that one readily observes Turner’s communitas : an emotionally intense and deeply involving “unstructured or rudimentarily structured and undifferentiated communion or community of equal individuals devoid of judgementality” (Olaveson 2001: 104). In this case, liminality and communitas involve the whole assembly of broadly related kin of various sorts in attendance. The following entry from my fieldnotes for a funeral of a 17-year-old youth, who died suddenly from a brain aneurism, gives a sense of this:

Saying goodbye to the young man at the end was particularly emotional. Nearly 200 people crowded into the wuut with many people crying over the body. It was sweet the way person after person would come to the casket, bend over the body and kiss the dead boy and say their final farewells. Several women keening and wailing grievously and the final farewell ceremony (kapwong) proceeded. As this portion of the event went on, more and more people came to tears, including several young men and teen aged boys, with more than a few men allowing tears to come to their eyes. The scene itself was quite moving, with most the assembled singing hymns as the procession of persons coming to say farewell carried on. Their voices adding a stoic unity as a counterpoint to the grief-stricken crying and wailing. During it all, the boy’s father stood beside his wife and the other women minding the casket, looking on stoically as each member of the procession came to say goodbye. As the last one to say goodbye, he went over and looked down on his son’s face for a good two or three minutes. Finally, he took a kukui nut necklace that the boy’s cousin (his father’s sister’s son) had brought and bent down to place it on his neck. Then he took the sunglasses that the man had on his head and bent down to place them on the boy’s face. After this, the officiant announced that the burial ritual (peeyas) would begin.

Frankly, reading this description again and recalling the event as it happened gives me the chills to this day, a testament to its emotional intensity and enduring effects on at least one participant.

Peeyas

The burial (peeyas) takes place on the same day as the funeral (néénap). The speeches by senior men mark the end of the néénap ritual, and the burial or peeyas ritual follows. In 2012, the shift from the néénap to the peeyas rituals included the officiation of catholic clergy (the local deacon and a catechist in the case of the Roman Catholic villages where I worked). Quite often, in my observations, the catechist is either a member of the lineage of the deceased or married to one of the women in the lineage. After the very brief prayers and a short sermon by the religious officiants, the coffin is lifted by a group of men related to the deceased, and carried as part of the procession to the grave site, located on lineage land or land owned independently by the sublineage or individual who had died. After a few words, prayers, and hymns at the grave site, the body is lowered into the grave, a few burial items such as articles of clothing of the deceased and some burial gifts that kin had brought are thrown in with the coffin, and then these are covered in dirt.

The burial ritual marks a final transition of the deceased from the domain of living people to that of beneficent or good spirits/souls and malevolent or bad demons/souls. This distinction is still maintained despite the nearly universal adoption of Christianity early in the twentieth century. Goodenough (2002, citing Bollig 1927) reports that the grave was covered with light-colored sand, a post driven into the center to allow the “good spirit” of the deceased to come and go, and a small altar or shelf was erected where kin could place fragrant flowers, or other small offerings at the grave site in the days following the burial. Gladwin (Gladwin and Sarason 1953), observed similar practices, with the additional placement of a wooden cross at the head of the grave. In my observations, graves are covered nowadays with rectangular concrete caps and concrete crosses. These are then tended regularly by close relatives, who would leave woven garlands of fresh flowers and other fragrant plants. Several people in Chuuk reported to me that their care of the burial site is also intended to signal to the good soul of the deceased that they remain an important and beloved member of the lineage (eterekes) or sublineage (inepwiinéw).

Roro and Érék

Once the burial is concluded, the ritual observances associated with the deceased as the kkóniiro shift to the roro ritual or the continuing assembly of those mourning kin who were closest to the deceased, typically members of her or his faameni (owunnun), sibling-set (inepwiinéw), and some members of the lineage (eterekes). The more distant kin and funeral attendees return home after the peeyas. These close kin will stay together in the wuut where the funeral took place in observance of a prescribed mourning period of between three and nine days. 6 The roro is another liminal phase, but this time only for kin closely related to the deceased. Those who attend are expected to stay in the wuut, visit together, and visit the grave site. They do not to do any work, including food preparation. In my observations, kin who were more distantly related (often affines and éfékúr) would prepare food (notably kkón) for the mourners and deliver it to them through a formal procession to the mourning site, as part of a ritual of sympathy known as áámwáám. These processions also include speeches from a senior representative of each group, offering expressions of nurturing love (ttong) and reassurances of kin group unity and collective intentionality (tiipeew fengen).

Unless there is a novena, the roro concludes on the fourth day, according to custom, with a final ritual, the érék. This ritual event quite explicitly emphasizes the local value placed on the cultivation of collective intentionality and communitas as a critical feature of kinship for the Chón Chuuk . This ceremony involved the final gathering of the lineage (eterekes) members and their spouses. The assembled group traditionally ceremonially burned some of the personal effects of the deceased in a ritual known as fiirowurowu, after which it was thought that the deceased’s good spirit would follow the rising smoke and ascend to the place where all good spirits reside, known as náán or nááng (Goodenough 2002), which is now equated with the Christian heaven. The érék also provides members of the lineage an opportunity to openly express hurt feelings or grievances with various members of the kin group, regardless of their normal status relations to each other. People can apologize (omwusomwus) for these, and then recommit their shared feelings of unity and common purpose (tiipeew fengen). The érék concludes with a large meal or feast in which all share. After the érék, mourners can return to their normal lives, visiting the gravesite of the deceased more occasionally.

To summarize this section, one of its main aims has been to describe the historically enduring features of the ritual process for funerals in Chuuk . We saw in this description many ways that kinship is socially instituted through a networked series of verbal and non-verbal Status Function Declarations specifying that the people, objects, and other entities so assembled cooperatively enact the funerary observances as one kin group (eew chó). The deceased thereby transitions from the world of the living to the realm of the spirits, and simultaneously represents this reality to others as a collectively realized symbolic act. Instituting kinship in this way provides for the social transmission of many of the cultural propositions associated with it in Chuuk and the means of their acquisition by novice members, particularly at the level of embodied practice. A key point here is not only that certain explicit propositions regarding important values of kinship are publicly expressed and attended to, but also that these propositions are also performatively enacted in the distribution of responsibilities for different members of the kin group. This includes distinctions made between near and distant kin, lineage (eterekes) and non-lineage members, older women (iin-) and men (sam-) as opposed to more junior members, and so forth. Each plays a different, fully embodied role in service of the larger goal of assisting the transition of a relative from the realm of the living to that of the spirits. In this manner, explicit cultural propositions are not only transmitted and acquired, but also become an associated habitus through embodied participation from the standpoint of different relations of kinship (e.g., Toren 2015). One may estimate there to be well over one hundred such funerals in the first few decades of life.

In the next section, I argue that the historical durability of funerary practices is also a reflection of the way the cultural propositions associated with funerary practices continue to be deeply internalized. They are not only highly cognitively and emotionally salient; Chón Chuuk attaches strong psychological motivations to these propositions and the place of funerals as the venue of their enactment.

Culture Motivated: Alienation and Communitas

The preceding section documents that many if even most Chón Chuuk adults (and many who are younger) find participation in funerals to be highly cognitively salient and emotionally involving. This level of collective and emotional salience was recognized by Gladwin and Sarason (1953: 156), based on Gladwin’s observations in 1947. They wrote

Death is a catastrophe to the Trukese, as it is to most people. In the face of the irretrievable loss of one of its members the lineage responds in a body to a degree not found in any other normal context. Not only must the actual members of the lineage participate in expressing their bereavement, but also their spouses and the children of the male members of the lineage.

My own observations over the decades of the 1990s and 2000s are consistent with this claim. But, what motivates such active and emotionally intense participation?

Answering this question requires describing briefly the theory of psychological motivation and volitional action used in this section of this chapter. Spiro (1997: 74) defines volitional action as “motivated by the [conscious or unconscious] desire to fill a need or else to express, or avoid the arousal of , a sentiment.” A “need,” he goes on to say, refers to “any event, condition, or state of affairs that an actor feels is necessary for physical or psychological well-being” (Spiro 1997: 74). A “sentiment” is an object-directed emotion , such as grief over the loss of a loved one, or compassion for someone who is grieving. To explicate his theory of volitional action further, Spiro (1997) adds the concepts of “wishes” and “aims” to needs and sentiments. A wish refers to the particular event, condition, state of affairs that an actor desires to achieve. An aim refers to a desire to perform some act. So, volitional action can be understood as the mental or behavioral implementation of an aim that fulfills a wish that, once fulfilled, will satisfy a need and/or allow the expression of a sentiment.

In human societies, the satisfaction of needs and/or the means to express or avoid the expression of sentiment are culturally and socially mediated (Spiro 1997). The fulfillment of a need or expression of a sentiment is mediated by our transactions with other people and objects. Therefore, as people become enculturated within social milieus, the persons or objects with which one might transact and the specific actions that characterize these transactions becomes constrained to those that are collectively accepted or recognized.

Rituals become particularly important venues for the possibility of the fulfillment of needs and either the expression of sentiments or the avoidance of their arousal—particularly needs or sentiments that cannot find fulfillment, expression, or avoidance in more mundane circumstances (Kracke 2003; Turner 1969). It follows that the level of emotional investment members of a community or larger society place on forms of ritual practice reflect, in part, the way that such practice allows for a collectively recognized and accepted means of action that thereby permits either the fulfillment of a wish that might satisfy some conscious or unconscious need, and/or the expression of some sentiment, and/or avoidance of its arousal. 7

Ritual processes such as the one described above are complex. So, it is likely that people’s shared motivations to participate in them reflect equally complex configurations of need and sentiment, which we can label “motivational configurations ” (see Sirota’s chapter in this volume for a related idea). Such motivational complexity might further reinforce the historical durability of culture and its associated forms of ritual practice (Spiro 1997). One could identify multiple motivational configurations in the ethnographic descriptions given in the preceding section. For example, one might explore those motives associated with the loss of attachment objects and associated processes of grieving (Bowlby 1988; Fraley and Shaver 2016; Quinn 2013). However, a full analysis of all motivational configurations is beyond the scope of this chapter. I will instead focus on motivational configurations associated with Victor Turner ’s (1969) notion of the structure-antistructure dialectic. Turner described this as a dialectic present in social life that alternates between the alienating qualities of everyday secular life as organized by mundane social structures and the collectively reinvigorating qualities of communitas generated through active, engaged participation in sacred or religious ritual (see also Durkheim 2001; Olaveson 2001).

To explain this dialectic further, many human psychological needs and associated emotions are innate and evolutionarily derived (e.g., hunger, security, aggression, sex, attachment ); however, many others are socially derived. The needs and sentiments associated with Turner’s (1969) structure-antistructure dialectic are socially derived and are generated because of the alienation a person experiences while fulfilling her or his status functions within a society’s institutional structures. These experiences are alienating in two ways. First, by enacting one’s status functions in everyday life one contributes one’s part to the collective needs of the larger group or society. In doing so, one meets some of one’s own personal needs, but at the cost of not fulfilling or frustrating other personal needs (see also Freud 1930). Second, enacting one’s status functions as a part of a symbolically elaborated system of separate statuses that together perform the everyday work of society alienates those members of society from one another, often leading to social segmentation, division, inequality, and exploitation.

Turner (1974: 274) claimed that the alienation experienced in everyday pursuits situated within the deontic, jural-political order of social structure generates a motivational configuration he labeled communitas : “the desire for [an emotionally intense] total, unmediated, relationship between person and person, a relationship which nevertheless does not submerge one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness in the very act of realizing their commonness” (see also Ingold 2015). This need for communitas motivates a wish for the realization of a condition under which such a need is fulfilled, and aims to implement actions that would allow such a condition to happen. Typically, implementation involves leaving the everyday secular domain of social structure and entering a sacred, ritual process, which affords a phase of liminality: a phase in which people withdraw from the everyday world to a ritually delimited one, and categorically elaborated social relationships are greatly simplified while myth and ritual practice are highly elaborated (Turner 1969). It is inside of such liminal spaces that experiences of communitas are possible. Following Durkheim (2001), Turner argued that rituals, liminal phases, and experiences of communitas are necessary to revitalize people’s commitments to their everyday individual pursuits within the moral order of society. They do so, in my view, by allowing the simultaneous public Declaration of collectively recognized ideals while also allowing the fulfillment of wishes, the expression of sentiments or the avoidance of their arousal as these are associated with the cultural ideals so Declared. The combination of these two symbolic poles make genuine participation in rituals emotionally intense and meaningful (Turner 1969). Without such ritually realized renewal, the constant tension between personal and collectively desired ends would exhaust a person’s emotional investment in the artificially constructed moral norms and values of society.

One can use a psychoanalytic lens to develop Turner’s model further (Kracke 2003). 8 As Spiro (1997: 114) notes, when internalized moral prescriptions conflict with a wish, people may experience a range of painful sentiments (e.g., guilt, anxiety, anger). People may deploy primary psychological defense mechanisms and repress the wish and avoid the arousal of these painful sentiments. But repression can lead to frustration, as the wish continues to unconsciously press for fulfillment, continually threatening to reenter consciousness and arouse painful sentiments. The constant frustration of the wish can promote depression and despair (i.e., exhausted emotional investments in social life). Spiro (1997: 114) continues, “to cope with these painful affects, the unconscious wish … may be subjected to a second type of defense mechanism, which admits them into consciousness in symbolic disguise” and, when attached to aims and their implementation, provides some measure of wish fulfillment and emotional release. Rituals provide a collective venue for the enactment of cultural defense mechanisms promoting shared experiences of wish fulfillment, even if these are symbolically disguised, and emotional release.

An example of this conflict and how participation in funerals are understood to be a means of the fulfillment of a wish for communitas that is otherwise frustrated in one’s everyday pursuits is given in the following exchange I had with a man in Chuuk in 2012. In that encounter, this man explained the meaning of the deceased’s calling kin (kkóniiro) to participate in the funeral (néénap), the burial (peeyas), and the liminal mourning period (roro). During our conversation, the man reflected on the meaning of kkóniirow. He started with a description of the single family or household portion (mwatún) of pounded breadfruit (kkón) that is used in Chuuk to send to relatives after the breadfruit has been prepared at a shared cookhouse. Preparing kkón to be shared with close relatives in this way is a typical bi-weekly feature of young men’s everyday routines. When presented as a mwatún, the kkón is smooth and well mixed. But, he continued, kkón comes from the breadfruit tree. Kkóniiro has a metaphoric meaning, provided by the growth pattern of this tree. The breadfruit starts from a single trunk, representing the extended kin group and all of their relationships . As the branches separate out from the trunk, so do the single lines of relationship that connect people to each other. He then discussed how the different branches represent the households of the kinship group that had gathered together to observe kkóniiro. As people go about their daily business, they become separated/differentiated (ra sakufesen) in their ideas and in what they think the family should do. This can lead to bad or disjointed intentions (tiipengngaw) among the kin group’s members. But, he stated, when there is a death, then there is a kkóniirow. This is when the fruit of the breadfruit tree is harvested from the many different branches, and then cooked and pounded into kkón. As the cooked breadfruit pieces (tipen) are mashed together into a single smooth mwatún or portion of kkón, the people become as one again. For kkóniiro gives kin the opportunity to throw out any bad feelings and to become united again in a single, collective state of mind (tiipeew fengen).

The metaphor, of the kin group being a breadfruit tree with its many fruit bearing branches reflecting the individual households of the kin group, is telling. On the one hand, the tree itself reflects an abstract whole, a reality made possible only through the status functions given in the institutionalized, collectively held ideas, norms , and values that allow kinship groupings to come into existence. But belonging to such a collectivity is abstract and, while a significant source of a person’s sense of “me-as-we,” difficult to realize in everyday life. Yet desire for enactment of this more general “we” is no less a part of that everyday experience, possibly leading to a general condition of yearning for reunification. This is a condition created by the disjunction between the internalization of the cultural propositions that conventionally describe the ideas, norms, and values for kinship for these adult Chón Chuuk , and the more personal or small-scale pursuits of everyday life, which undermines these cultural ideals. Funerary rites are compelling for these adults, then, because they allow the creation of a venue for the fulfillment of a wish for unity to come into being as communitas , both at the point at which the kin group assembles as a unified unit to bid a final farewell to the deceased and during the final éruk ritual.

People in Chuuk described other conventional symbolic resources that I believe help them to cope with the structure-antistructure conflict. One is reflected in the cultural value placed on the cultivation of skill as a mature social actor who can effectively strike a balance between meeting collective demands and satisfying more personal desires. For example, an admirable, mature (miriit) person is one who more expertly and ethically knows when and when not to adhere to collectively recognized rights and obligations. This is quite often the case when the agenda of a larger group, say the village, the lineage, or the church congregation, interferes with the more immediate needs of one’s multigenerational nuclear family. It is also often the case when the agenda of one’s employer interferes with the agenda of the lineage group.

Such ethical situations often came up in discussions concerning funerals. For example, in cases where there have been many funerals in a short period and lineage members’ household budgets are strained, people will decide to make a smaller, cheaper offering of food (such as a single baked roll) as opposed to a plate of rice, meat, and other prepared foods for kin who come to “pay respects.” Such decisions can easily be fit into the larger cultural logic of being a “good person” in the ways described above. While showing generosity to kin attending the funeral can be a demonstration of the unified will of the kin group in their ability to muster the resources to host a more extravagant funeral, a humbler offering can evoke in attendees’ feelings of love/compassion (ttong) regarding the apparent material hardship (osupwang). As it was explained to me by several older men and women in Chuuk , a person who is miriit, would understand when and why it would be best to deploy these different strategies of representation in different contexts for the greatest effect.

Finally, vigorous participation in funerals may be a means of collectively avoiding the arousal of guilt and anxiety associated with the possibility that one had failed to observe their duties as kin, particularly when caring for their now deceased kinsperson during her or his illness. One way these anxieties manifest is through concerns regarding threatening community gossip . Many Chón Chuuk worry that members of the community or the wider kin group will spread gossip that they had been negligent of their duties. Such accusations can evoke intense sentiments of shame and resentment. Therefore, during the funeral itself, people aim to engage in actions that would counter or displace these threats and avoid the arousal of the associated sentiments. Goodenough (2002: 135) writes ,

These kin, therefore, had reason to make a significant display of how much the deceased meant to them, how much they were going to feel the loss, and how much they cared for him or her. They also had reason to make public show of their intention to honor the deceased’s wishes regarding place of burial and the disposition of property.

In so doing, people might forestall any community gossip and the arousal of painful sentiments such gossip might generate.

People also expressed concerns about failing to be good kin as a collective kin group and the threatening role spirits play in these circumstances. For example, Goodenough (2002: 135) reported,

Surviving close kin did not want to have the good soul of the deceased angry with them for their neglect. Its anger could lead it to inflict illness and possible death on one or more of them. The mourning and bringing of gifts that characterized the proceeding immediately following death were also intended to make the deceased’s good soul well-disposed to surviving kin.

People in Chuuk described to me several episodes in which a close member of their kin group had been possessed by the good spirit of the deceased during the funeral as a means of articulating the spirit’s anger at his or her surviving kin for not being united and caring of one another (see also Lowe 2002). In these ways, active participation in funerals may reflect the implementation of an aim that can satisfy the desire to avoid the arousal of angry or critical sentiments in others and guilty or shameful sentiments in oneself.

In this section, therefore, I argue that funerary rituals in Chuuk provide collectively recognized venues for the expression of volitional states associated with several motivational complexes. The reproduction of funerary observances continues to be compelling to Chón Chuuk partly because they provide collectively recognized means of satisfying a desire to counter alienation with experiences of communitas . But this reproduction is also compelling because it provides a means to avoid or displace the arousal of painful sentiments associated either with their failure to live up to the collectively held expectations of being a good kinsperson or to accusations from others that they were negligent in their care of the deceased.

Conclusion

This chapter takes up the question of cultural reproduction that has been an important site of inquiry among psychological anthropologists for nearly a century (e.g., Sapir 1924). The problem of cultural reproduction has received little attention among culture theorists in recent decades, as interest in theorizing globalizing cultural flows and tangled webs of cultural hybridity has become dominant. While this shift in emphasis has reflected some important criticisms of the culture concept prevalent inside and outside of anthropology in the middle of the last century (Abu-Lughod 1991 ; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986), it has also fed into the impression that processes of cultural reproduction somehow are irrelevant to the development of culture theory or to the way we encounter and understand our interlocutors in the conduct of ethnography.

This was certainly my expectation when I began to conduct research in Chuuk in the 1990s. Returning there every few years over the course of nearly two decades, though, I had documented in my notes both ways not only that certain features of everyday life in Chuuk were changing as new technologies, media, ideas, and forms of practice circulated in, among, and out of the islands of Chuuk Lagoon, but also important cultural propositions , features of both everyday life and ritual observances, that remained remarkably durable. Returning to the body of ethnographic literature for Chuuk that spans over a century reinforced my sense that important domains of culture have endured. Among these, funerary rituals in Chuuk have been among the most historically durable.

Thus, my aim in this chapter was to take up the question of cultural reproduction anew and draw on a range of theoretical sources, from among psychological anthropologists and other scholars, to craft an explanation for the patterns of durability in funerary rituals I had documented in Chuuk . As I have argued above, such durability requires three conditions to persist over time. First, cultural reproduction requires that the relevant cultural propositions continue to circulate in the community. Although a great number of alternative ideas, norms , and values have entered and circulated through Chuuk via processes of colonialism, Western imperialism, and economic globalization, the Chón Chuuk have been able to hold onto key domains of traditional cultural knowledge, of which the cultural understandings for kinship have been particularly robust.

Second, it is not sufficient that cultural propositions continue to circulate through forms of social discourse, but there must also be venues for their psychological acquisition and internalization be members of the community. Many aspects of the system of kinship are acquired and internalized by Chón Chuuk through their everyday participation in the existing secular social institutions into which they are born as novice members (Lowe 2002). But, as I have argued here, funerary rituals are also sites for the transmission and embodied enactment of many central beliefs , values, and norms of kinship as a cooperative endeavor, with different members enacting their roles in the larger cultural understandings of kinship to achieve a collective end. Given that one might attend a dozen or more of these events in any year, perhaps hundreds in the course of just a few decades, it is reasonable to claim that these cultural propositions derived from them inform a well-developed adult habitus. This habitus is characterized by a preoccupation with one’s self-fashioning as a moral member of the networks of kin in which one is enmeshed (see also Keane 2016). Through regular participation in funerals and other more mundane aspects of kinship , Chón Chuuk develop a general, diffuse embodied sense of their moral standing as a ‘good’ member of the kin group (Lowe 2002).

Finally, the reproduction of cultural practices is more likely in those cases where participation in them satisfies other important psychological needs, allows the expression of sentiments, or enables those who participate to avoid the arousal of sentiments. In other words, participation in ritual practices such as those I have described is likely to endure if people are highly motivated, as opposed to merely obligated, to do so. I have argued that two related motivational complexes are particularly relevant to such high levels of participation in funerary rituals among the Chón Chuuk . These motives reflect the likely universal need for communitas to counter the otherwise alienating experiences of everyday life as organized by social institutions . At the same time, people are motivated to participate because of their desire to avoid the arousal of sentiments associated with those episodes when they may have failed to live up to the deontic expectations as defined within those same social institutions .

Notes

  1. 1.

    In this chapter, I follow the orthography given in Goodenough and Sugita (1980: xiv–xvii). The interested reader can find explanations for how to pronounce the Chuukese words given in this chapter by consulting this source.

  2. 2.

    In this chapter, I agree with Spiro (1997: 6) who, following Parsons, defines culture as referring to a “subset of ideas, norms , and values which are found in social groups as a consequence of social transmission and hence socially shared in various ways.” Moreover, culture is often transmitted in public discourse in the form of propositions (e.g., “The earth is the center of the universe”; “Catholics do not eat meat on Fridays”, “the unexamined life is not worth living”). But even in the case of embodied cultural knowledge learned through observation and participation in cultural practices, culture still has a propositional form and is represented propositionally in the mind (Spiro 1997: 7; Searle 2010: 61–89). Cultural propositions should not be equated with beliefs , as the latter term reflects an intentional state that is added in the mind to propositions that have been acquired and internalized by individuals (Searle 2010: 25; Spiro 1997).

  3. 3.

    In the contemporary context of the rapidly growing Chón Chuuk diaspora, if the person died in the hospital or off island in Guam, Hawaii, or the mainland US, they are attended to by whatever local mortuary services are offered in those locales. The body will then be transported to the village where the funeral rites will take place. When funeral and burial takes place after death has always been somewhat of a variable. Goodenough (2002, again citing Bollig 1927), reports that in the early twentieth century the funeral and burial might take place within a few hours after death, after a few days, or even up to a year or more after death. In my own observations, the funeral took place anytime from within a few hours to several days after death, depending on how soon funeral arrangements could be made and when relatives, including many living in Guam, Hawaii, or the mainland US could travel to Chuuk to attend the funeral.

  4. 4.

    While the obligation to bring a small gift has remained a constant over the last century, the nature of the gifts themselves, unsurprisingly, has changed. In the early twentieth century, gifts were locally crafted personal items and “consisted entirely of things [like] turmeric sticks and perfumed coconut oil; loom-woven skirts, poncho-like shirts, and loincloths; shell-bead belts, necklaces, and other items of personal adornment” (Goodenough 2002: 136). By 1947, Gladwin reported gifts that included imported mass-produced items like “towels, pieces of new cotton cloth, perfume, and the like” (Gladwin and Sarason 1953: 163). In the 20 years that I observed funerals in Chuuk , the oowun meyimà was almost invariably a single US dollar bill (although visitors were free to leave larger bills). In my own observations, people might bring other gifts for the deceased. For example, relatives brought a necklace of kukui nut lei from Hawaii to be given to a deceased young man at his funeral. Before the shift to the use of dollar bills as funerary gifts, many of these gifts would be buried with the dead’s person’s body. However, some might be distributed to close kin as well after the burial (Gladwin and Sarason 1953).

  5. 5.

    In the contemporary milieu, the néénap proceeds for hours with little activity other than the coming and going of visiting kin who are paying their respects, the rising and falling intensity of the keening and wailing of women who sit next to the body to fan it, and occasionally the hymns or prayers led by other women who sit inside the wuut. For much of the time, the atmosphere is rather casual, if somber. People dress in rather casual clothes, not their Sunday finest. Those who are not attending to the body directly or leading hymns and prayers, sit along the periphery just outside of the wuut, drinking sweetened coffee, bottled water, or soft drinks that might be tendered, and chatting about various things. Just after midday, a package of prepared food will be offered (including cooked rice, cooked chicken or turkey tails, some pounded breadfruit pudding (kkón), tapioca, and some local fish).

  6. 6.

    Goodenough (2002) and Gladwin and Sarason (1953), and my own interlocutors reported that traditionally these kin would stay together for a period of three nights. However, Catholics might stay together for nine nights to conduct a novena and recite the rosary each night. Bollig (1927: 22) reported that the kkóniirowu might last anywhere from two to seven nights in the early twentieth century. But all sources report that three nights was the preferred length.

  7. 7.

    In stating this, I should note a couple of things. First, while this framework shares some similarities with Malinowski’s (1922) psychological functionalism, the claim here is not that the ritual practice exists because it satisfies some innate or socially derived psychological need. Rather, the argument here is that when presented with a historically emergent range of options for volitional action, individuals operating within a social milieu over time will tend to become emotionally invested in those options for action that are both collectively recognized and accepted. This allows for the cooperative implementation of aims, the collective fulfillment of wishes, and the expression or avoidance of sentiments (Spiro 1997). Second, Chón Chuuk individuals who participate in funerals bring with them to this experience a whole range of individually held beliefs , desires, and intentions that may or may not reflect or agree with those that are held collectively. But, these diverse, conflicting and varied states of individual or “I” intentionality are not likely to be a reason for the historical durability of funerary practices, which is the central problem of this chapter.

  8. 8.

    The reader should note, however, that the psychoanalytic frameworks used in anthropology are varied and complex (see Hollan 2016; Gammeltoft and Segal 2016). Here, I present only a working framework for the purposes of furthering my argument.