Spirit Possession in Chuuk

Francis X. Hezel, S.J.

One cannot live for any length of time in Chuuk, the most populous state of the Federated States of Micronesia, without hearing tales of spirit possession. An incident involving Fermina, the 15-year old daughter of devout Christian parents, is rather typical. One evening a few years ago she went to bed complaining of a pain in her stomach. By the next morning her body was twitching uncontrollably and she was seized with convulsions. As the family gathered around her mat to comfort her, they heard her suddenly reprimand a much older male relative, angrily telling him "Leave the house, because I don't like what you are doing." The words came from Fermina's mouth, but the voice was that of her mother who had died a year or two earlier. Fermina recovered within two or three days of the incident, but she has had similar experiences a few times since this one.

In 1989, Cathy Hung, then a Peace Corps volunteer in Chuuk, generously offered to assist in the collection of case reports on spirit possession. Within two months, she had collected from her interviews of Chuukese women accounts of 57 spirit encounters, more than 40 of which could be called spirit possession. Had it not been for limitations of time and access to informants, she could have easily collected twice this number of stories. It was apparent that, despite her dedicated efforts, we had done no more than skim the surface of a deep pool of such cases in Chuuk. All but a few of the possession cases involved female. A deliberate effort on our part to elicit cases of male possession may have yielded a few more instances of episodes among men, but the strong gender imbalance almost certainly would have remained.

Drawing on this fund of case material, we shall examine spirit possession in Chuuk as a psycho-social phenomenon, a phenomenon that is rooted in an institution of traditional Chuukese society but which has been modified over time to serve new purposes. If the spirit world of Chuuk has changed in the past century, so has the way in which the people of Chuuk interact with it. Against this background, we shall attempt to describe how spirit possession itself has been transformed into a mechanism that serves essential functions in Chuuk's modern-day society.

Continued Spirit Possession in Chuuk Pg2