All people want to sing: Mortlockese migrants controlling knowledge, historical disaster, and Protestant identity on Pohnpei, FSM.

摘要

In the aftermath of a violent typhoon that struck their homeland in 1907, the German colonial administration relocated hundreds of Ta Islanders over three hundred and fifty miles across the Eastern Caroline Archipelago to Pohnpei, in what is now the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Ta Islanders have remained on Pohnpei as a permanent migrant group over the course of the past century, where they have land rights in a small village community known as Deh (or Roie). The long-term, intellectual and spiritual response of Ta Islanders to the physical and cultural devastation of natural disaster provides insight into the dynamics of religious revitalization, conversion, and syncretism in a displaced community.;The 1907 typhoon struck Ta just 35 years after Christianity in the form of American Congregationalism was introduced in 1873 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In the years that led up to the 1907 typhoon, Ta Island women and youth began to demand access to Christian songs and texts on a level equal to that of their elder and chiefly male counterparts, and the system of religious rank that privileged elder, chiefly males began to disintegrate.;This dissertation is primarily a historical and ethnographic analysis of the transformation of Ta Islanders from love magic dancers (women and youth) and political-priest-sorcerers (elder, chiefly males) into Christian singers, whose visibility and power within the cultural milieu of the FSM comes as "those who sing church songs." As such, this work contributes to a growing ethnographic literature on song performance and on religious conversion in the Micronesian Pacific. It also provides comparative ethnographic insight on the ways in which religious knowledge systems are challenged, suppressed, and transmitted in a matrilineal society by persons of differing age, rank, and gender statuses.