BOOK REVIEWS 237
Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll andTheir Challenge to Western Theory, byCatherine A. Lutz. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1988. ISBN 0-226
49721-6, xii + 273 pp, maps;photographs, notes, bibliography, index.US$35.00 cloth; US$I3.95 paper.
Unnatural Emotions is a valuablework, contributing insights into Micronesian life and American culture. Itsets new standards for ethnopsychology, the effort by anthropologists,especially students of Pacific societies,to appreciate the meaningful world ofpeoples in part through those peoples'understandings of psychology.
The title is ironic: Haluk emotionsare unnatural only from the Westernview that emotions are somehow natural and universal. Lutz sets out to
rapid cultural change, these studies aretimely, and they should serve as areminder that the Micronesian way oflife is an integral part of the Micronesian built environment. Changes andalterations to one will inevitably affectthe other. In addition to their intellectually stimulating content, these studies could potentially provide practicalguidelines to Micronesian governmentleaders on such matters as urban development and housing construction.Finally, archaeologists, ethnographers,and historians who are studying Micronesian culture and history from theIslanders' perspectives would benefitfrom reading these studies.
RUFINO MAURICIO
University ofOregon
tations of the data generated. WhileMorgan's interpretations are functional and tend to be environmentallydeterministic, Hockings' are structuraland historical. Hockings' theoreticalapproach is the Levi-Straussian brandof structuralism that addressed elements ofsocial relations as expressedin spatial (built environment) termsand articulated by binary oppositions.
The following examples illustratethe types of interpretations one mightexpect from these studies whose subject matter is basically the same andwhose theoretical approach is different. Morgan suggests that the loweringof the bai roof like a sail is an ingeniousmethod of protecting the house fromtyphoons (ISO). Hockings points outthat should the oka (rafters) protrudeabove their longitudinal roof plate,there would be continual fighting andargument within the maneaba.Morgan suggests that relatively highpopulation densities in the past influenced the Micronesian architecturalevolution (ISO). Hockings points outthat symbolic means of continuing definition of the rights and responsibilitiesof the various clans toward each otherwere reflected in the allocation ofkainga (clan estate) sites and the particular orientation of inaki (roof panels)within the maneaba geometry (245).
Although it is a matter of opinionwhich interpretation is correct, mostMicronesians adhere to both types ofinterpretation.
The last two decades have witnesseddrastic alteration and transformationof the Micronesian built environment,and it appears that this trend will accelerate at an even faster pace during thenext two decades. Given this pattern of
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THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC. SPRING 1991
deconstruct both academic and folkmodels that lead Americans to treatemotions as irrational and precultural.The ethnography of Haluk emotionallife is presented not just for its ownsake, but with a critical aim. (Such anaim may always underlie ethnography.Lutz is clear about her intentions anddiligent in researching American culture along with Haluk.)
Lutz begins by introducing her project and Haluk together. She summarizes past and present ties between Haluk and the outside world well. Shegoes on to show how Haluk ideasshaped her role as a female ethnographer and hence shaped her research.
Next, broad cultural "views of emotion and self" are identified. The majorchapter on Western ideas-dealingabove all with the dominant culture inthe United States-is a lucid account ofviews of emotions in relation to nature,rationality, control, physical being,subjectivity, gender, and value.
In the next chapter, Lutz defines andexemplifies Haluk notions of personhood and emotion/thought/ desire.She shows that Haluk notions divide upthe realm of psychological processes ina way quite distinct from Americannotions. Haluk concepts allot a role tohuman will in all psychological processes. They provide clearer indications of the social orientation of psychological states and processes thancomparable American notions do.
At the heart of the book are deftanalyses of the ideas, actions, and relationships in which fago 'compassion',song 'justifiable anger', and metagu'fear' arise. Elucidating the Halukunderstanding of song as a moralcapacity, Lutz contrasts this view with
American notions of anger, frustration,and control. (Pacific Islanders may findthis chapter helpful as an account ofAmericans' ambivalence and overreactions concerning anger.)
Haluk is known to anthropologistslargely for Melford Spiro's psychodynamic account of fear of ghosts. Spiroargued that inevitable anxieties thatHaluk minimize and hostile feelingsthey seek to banish find an outlet inexpectations of aggression by ghostsagainst humans. In this account, anxiety and anger are outside human reach.
Lutz in contrast seeks to learn whatsort of dangers Haluk recognize, thevarious ways fear arises in Haluk lives,the communicative functions of fear,and the moral discourse fear supports.She accepts a functional analysis-fearof spirits and outsiders and drunksdramatizes the dangers of violence in asmall community and wards againstsuch violence. However, the emphasisis on the moral sense that fear makes,not on latent functions.
Lutz's account is complex. Onestrand of the analysis is the relationbetween fear and justifiable anger.Superiors are appropriately angrywhen relatives of lower rank overstepnormal bounds of decorum. Inferiorsare appropriately fearful both whensuch anger is expressed and when it islikely to arise: "To the Haluk way ofthinking, fear is what keeps peoplegood." Fear is a product of learning, anindex of relationship, and a sign that aperson accepts norms, not just a repressed by-product of earlier experience.
Spiro's fear and Lutz's fear differeven more than the two scholars' explanations do. Lutz takes care not to
BOOK REVIEWS 239
Islands, Islanders and the World: TheColonial and Post-Colonial Experiencea/Eastern Fiji, by T. P. Bayliss-Smith,Richard Bedford, Harold Brookfield,Marc Latham, and Muriel Brookfield.Cambridge: Cambridge University
treat either American or Haluk concepts as underlying entities. Basically,she argues that her explanation isricher, not that Spiro's is necessarilywrong.
Lutz goes on to distinguish amongseveral varieties of emotion theories.These concluding remarks make explicit what the preceding anecdotes andanalysis made vivid: theories of emotions as things separate from humanmoral activity presuppose alienation ofthe individual or the body from experience and relatedness. Lutz argues thatemotional activity and talk illuminatesocial life in both Haluk and Americanworlds, so academic emotion theorymust be considered a product of Western ideas, rather than a reflection ofexperience.
Lutz has largely succeeded in presenting Ifaluk lives and discourse ashaving meaning apart from Westernpreconceptions of them. She has identified ways in which Americans are aptto reduce others' communications tonatural behaviors or drives and procedures to resist such reduction. She provides a model of self-conscious andother-respecting ethnography that, Idevoutly hope, will be followed andamended by anthropologists in thenext few years.
JOHN KIRKPATRICK
University ofHawaii at Manoa
::. *
Press, I988. ISBN 952I-26877-X, xvii+ 323 pp, illustrations, tables, notes,appendix, references, index. US$49.50.
Few works of scholarship, especiallythose resulting, as this does, from themultiple endeavors of a large team ofresearchers over many years, haveabout them so refreshing a sense ofhumility as this useful volume. It is thepublicly available fruit of a project thatbegan in I974 under the auspices of theMan and the Biosphere (MAB) programinitiated by UNESCO in I97I. It drawstogether the most important aspects ofresearch on the islands of Lomaivitiand Lau in eastern Fiji that were previously published in a difficult-to-obtainseries of project working papers, islandreports, and general reports (obtainable from the Australian National University).
The distillation benefits, however,from a return visit to eastern Fiji inI983 by the chief investigators and theirdecision to write a book "about whathas happened in Eastern Fiji, and whatthis might add to the sum of knowledgeabout the colonial and post-colonialexperience of the developing world"(xv). It also benefits from their conclusion, as a result of the military coups ofI987, that their analysis had been moreculturally conditioned than they hadrealized. "Even when a real effort ismade to 'understand' the minds of apeople being studied," the editorwrites, "social scientists inevitably findthemselves asking questions whichderive from their own disciplinary systems of theory, and moreover reasoning from the norms of their own society" (IO). The team was fascinated byyoung people who had experienced the