Despairing Moods: Worldly Attunements and Permeable Personhood in Yap

Abstract Building upon ongoing efforts to further a phenomenological anthropological engagement with affective and mooded dimensions of moral experience, the article examines the ways in which everyday moods may disclose forms of attunement to worldly conditions. The article focuses specifically upon the mood‐inflected concerns of a Yapese woman suffering from type II diabetes named “Thiil” who despairs of the possibility that her children will eventually become afflicted with the disease as well. A central goal of the article is to explore the ways in which Thiil's mood‐inflected responses to her illness disclose an attunement to the “communicable” pathways of an otherwise “noncommunicable” disease.