ABSTRACT
This chapter details modalities of being and forms of social belonging that are rooted in local sensory attunements and moral sentiments in Yap, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Significantly, the phenomenological and moral underpinnings of Yapese orientations to social belonging are shown to include the negotiation of relationships as mediated through an interplay of viscerally palpable experiences of suffering, endurance, workinduced exhaustion, and compassion. As we will see, sensory aspects of social belonging in contemporary Yapese communities are centrally rooted in the concept of magaer—the sensation of work-induced exhaustion, tiredness, or fatigue. Magaer, I argue, is an example of a morally configured sensory attunement, what Thomas Csordas (1993) would call a somatic mode of attention. Of central concern here is how magaer relates to a pivotal cluster of moral sentiments that include suffering, endurance, compassion, and shared pain. Together, these moral sentiments pattern everyday practices that generatively contribute to the perpetuation and contestation of norms, values, and ideals informing everyday social life. As such, these moral sensory attunements play a significant role in configuring how it is that Yapese individuals struggle with contemporary understandings of citizenship and social belonging in the FSM. As we will see, the struggles and ambivalences that arise from such contemporary emplacements are manifest in moods of “sensory nostalgia” that can be understood as modes of moral critique.
