Hierarchy From Below Analysis

3. Investigating Hierarchy from Below
During my dissertation fieldwork, staying in two villages of different ranks broadened my experience with hierarchy and knowledge. As Traube (1989) argued, the form of cosmogonic knowledge is encompassing, rooted, comprehensive at the “trunk,” or the source of hierarchy, but remains fragmented, partial and shallow at the tips. In Yap, the sociology of knowledge takes a slightly different form. Indeed, those who grew up in higher-ranking tabinaw are savvier with the political and marriage alliances among the high tabinaw, while those who are from the low-ranking tabinaw are dependent on the commands or information issuing from their patrons. They rarely possess the full picture of upper-level political associations.
In this ethnography on Ifaluk—an atoll traditionally associating with Yap Island, Lutz details how the paired emotions, such as song (“justifiable anger”)/ metagu(“fear”), fago (“compassion, love, sadness, caring”)/pak (“homesickness”) or gafago (“needy, poor”) correlate with the asymmetric social positions, such as brother/sister, chief/commoner, parents/children. Since 2005, Throop has been known for the studies on sentiments, experience, personhood, intersubjectivity, morality and cultural phenomenology (Throop 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015). In the development controversy in Yap, the sentiments expressed by the elderly women have been shifted from respect to anger, discontent, and accusations. The very presence of those elderly women indeed embodied a strong persuasive power, which was based on the long-term drudgery and nurturance work on the land. Nevertheless, the sentiments they expressed to the government officials were not conforming to the normative idiom of sentiments—which prioritized respect and suffering-for-others. Their presence signals a paradoxical position: they themselves embodied the physical suffering based on their life-long work on the land; therefore their opinions need to be respected by the community. However, their discourses were humiliated by the pro-development
The controversy undoubtedly reflects the erosion of the land basis for sociality: whereas previously land was the main source of sustenance and the primary referent of personal and political identities, Yapese today are increasingly involved in the cash economy, leading to intense anxiety and doubt over the long-term viability of the island’s fragile economy. While facing investor’s large-scale land acquisition endeavor, the Yapese elderly women take the role of ethical guardians of the land itself at this critical moment. Their unprecedented demonstration does not only signify “a sea-change in public decision-making in Yap” (Rubinstein and Mulalap 2014: 9), but also imply a radical political potential of the Yapese “styles of worlding” (Descola 2014). For Yapese, land does not only signify their own “worldview.” Being the embodiment of continuous labor investment (magaer) over generations, the land has the ontological significance in defining, positioning, and orienting Yapese persons, incommensurable with the individualized, alienable, possessive land-ownership. The real stake of the controversy in the Chinese tourism investment revolves on the ontological differences of land-acquisition between the foreign investor and Yapese. Such differences, as Viveiros de Castro (et. al) suggest,