The Place of Faith: A Lamotrekese Case of Landscaping

Abstract

The invention of ritual structures, the collective perception of cultural rituals and their maintenance are everyday phenomena on Lamotrek. William Alkire (1989a) writes about the tabu zones (rong), Eric Metzgar attends thoroughly to the tradition of knowledge through rituals in his dissertation (1991, see also 2004). In his book The Rites of Passage (1960) Arnold van Gennep distinguishes several phases of a ritual and describes their structure. In the real life situation we find smooth transitions from one phase to the next, but the main elements of separation, liminality and reaggregation, build the structure of each and every ritual. The religious training on a place called “Sunrise” on Lamotrek is an example of a ritual in van Genneps terms in that the different phases are clearly specifiable.