Popular religion: A cultural and historical study of catholicism and spirit possession in Chuuk, Micronesia

This dissertation is a study of religion, history and morality in Chuuk, Micronesia. It examines cultural and historical processes and practices of popular religion---the dynamic religious pluralism and politics of religious synthesis of spiritism and Catholicism---as lived by a Mortlockese people in Chuuk. A cultural constructionist approach, defined by structuralist history, practice and feminist theories, and recent scholarship on the anthropology of Christianity and spirit possession, is taken to examine the cultural ethos of Mortlockese religion and morality, from the period of early Christian missionization to the present. At the center of the indigenous religious-moral medical-magical complex, referred to as "spiritism," is the practice of spirit possession, along with a range of phenomena including spirit encounters, dream trance, divination, magic, sorcery and the healing arts. This dissertation challenges prevailing assumptions of spiritism's demise since the adoption of Christianity by Mortlockese, and demonstrates that spirit-centered beliefs and practices are part of a dynamic system that continues to be lived in the Christian present. At the center of this study is a broader concern to understand cultural changes having to do with transformations of religious systems, moral frameworks, and gender and kinship relations generated by colonial and Christianization processes. How and why spiritism and Catholicism have become interwoven, while remaining meaningfully distinct cultural systems for men and women in Chuuk, and how local and global events and political economic processes over the past century have intervened and shaped Christianization and Mortlockese lifeways, are central questions addressed in this dissertation. Spirit possession and related ecstatic phenomena are examined as moral and emotional discourses about cultural change, especially those changes having to do with gender and kinship relations, and ideas about "tradition" and "modernity." At the same time, this dissertation argues that spirit possession is more than a discourse of cultural change; it is a cultural anode of changing.