Girdiiq nu Waqab ("People of Yap")

Avoiding my gaze, Paer looked out over her garden. She had planted this garden close to the house, she said, to reduce the distance she had to walk to get food when her grandson was visiting. Her leg was hurting a lot these days and it was just not possible for her to get to her favorite taro patches and gardens without some help. Her present pain seemed to be evocative of past suffering, however; at that moment our conversation shifted rather abruptly, I thought, to her memories of gardening for Japanese soldiers during the war. "During that war there was great suffering, suffering that was put upon us," she said. "Very great suffering that the Japanese gave to us. We all stayed and we all worked. And there was work and that is how it went."

The story of pain in Yap cannot be told without first understanding the place of suffering in the island's rich and at times difficult history. Perhaps most famously recognized in anthropological circles as the inspiration for David Schneider's (1984) critique of the concept of kinship, the island of Yap is located in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. Unlike the coral atolls that constitute some of its closest neighbors, Yap is a volcanic high island that is the exposed area of a large submarine ridge. Yap proper actually consists of four main islands—Yap (Marabaaq), Gagil-Tomil, Maap, and Rumung—that are each separated by narrow water passages that have been, with the exception of Rumung, linked together by manmade land bridges, roads, and paths. While it is much larger than the neighboring coral atolls, Yap proper is still a relatively small area with a land mass of approximately 38.6 square miles and an estimated population of 7,391 inhabitants (Yap State Statistical Bulletin 2000). Having endured four waves of colonial governance (Spanish, German, Japanese, and American), today Yap proper is the administrative capital of Yap State, one of the four states (Yap, Pohnpei, Kosrae, and Chuuk) that comprise the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), an independent nation that holds a compact of free association with the United States.

Economically, most Yapese individuals participate in some combination of wage labor and subsistence farming based primarily upon the cultivation of taro, yams, bananas, breadfruit, and chestnut (Lingenfelter 1991, 392; Egan 1998). In many villages fishing still contributes importantly to daily subsistence. Most salaried workers are employed by the government, the small private sector, and the service industries that have arisen in response to the growing influx of American, European, and Japanese tourists. For many individuals, cultivating and selling betel nut at local stores and to individuals who export to Guam and other islands in Micronesia is an important source of household income.

Languages spoken include Yapese, English, and a number of Outer Island idioms, including Ulithian, Woleaian, and Chuukese (Yap State Census 1994). Yapese, a reported first language for over 95 percent of the island's inhabitants, is a nominative-accusative Austronesian language in which the canonical word order is verb-subject-object (see Ballantyne 2004). Yapese is distinct from the languages of Palau and the other Caroline Islands (Lingenfelter 1991, 391) and has long defied historical linguistic attempts to classify it either as Western Malayo-Polynesian or Oceanic (Kirch 2000, 191; Ross 1996). During the time that I was conducting my fieldwork, many individuals under the age of fifty-five spoke English as a second language, while many individuals under the age of thirty spoke English fluently.

Precolonial History

While there are numerous competing archeological and historical linguistic accounts of the various waves of migration that contributed to the settlement of Micronesia (see Kirch 2000), there is a growing consensus that Yap was inhabited well before Gifford and Gifford's (1959; see also Takayama 1982) original estimation of 1800 B.P. (cf. Dodson and Intoh 1999). As is true of all cultures, precontact Yap was not only the product of local refinements on the cultural forms that arrived with its first inhabitants. It was also importantly shaped by a long history of interaction and trade with other peoples and traditions spread throughout the Western Pacific and beyond (Egan 1998, 35; Kirch 2000, 191). In fact, Yap proper long held a position at the center of an expansive trade network whose size and complexity led a number of scholars to term it an "empire" (Hage and Harary 1991, 1996; Kirch 2000; Lessa 1950).

Beginning sometime between 300 and 800 A.D., Yap participated in an elaborately interlinked system of mutual-exchange relationships stretching from Palau, located 280 miles to the southwest (the site of aragonite limestone quarries that were essential for the production of Yap's stone money called raay), through a total of fourteen islands and atolls extending from Yap's closest eastern neighbors (Ulithi and Fais) to Puluwat and Namonuito, two atolls located over eight hundred miles to the east. While there are a few researchers who have explored the trade relations between Palau and Yap (see Gillilland 1975), it is the link between Yap and the eastern atolls that has garnered the most attention by scholars working in the region (see Alkire 1965, 1980; Descantes 1998; Hage and Harary 1991, 1996; Hunter-Anderson and Zan 1996; Kirch 2000; Lessa 1950; Labby 1975; Lingenfelter 1975).

The system of formal relationships (sawëy) between Yap proper and the Outer Islands was arranged as a chain of hierarchically cast linkages between islands. In this system, the links progressed from the lower-ranking atolls in the east to the higher-ranking atolls and islands to the west. The highest-ranking positions were attributed to a number of estates in the villages of Gatchpar and Wanyaan in what is presently the municipality of Gagil on Yap proper (Alkire 1965; Lessa 1950; Egan 1998). A basic form essential for understanding a great many different varieties of social relations in Yap, the transactions between each individual island participating in the sawëy were understood in terms of a series of dyadic relations between a higher-status island and a lower-status trading partner. In each case, the relationship between islands was predicated upon an exchange of gifts and tribute. Gifts, such as bamboo, turmeric, and foodstuffs fl owed east from a higher-status island to a lower-status island. Tribute, in the form of shell belts, beagiy (woven textiles made from banana fiber), and coconut fiber rope, flowed in the opposite direction (see Egan...