Honor and Stratification in Pohnpei, Micronesia

This article is an investigation of honor in a Micronesian society, particularly as it is constructed in language. I argue that honor is a set of practices through which people organize positive embodied attitudes about social hierarchy, according particularly high value to acts of self‐depletion. A different notion of the self in the Pacific has implications for ideas about the universality of a personal notion of honor and suggests that the common element in Pohnpeian honor and that described for other societies is the link between honor and inequality or stratification, [honor, honorifics, Pohnpei, Pacific Islands, social stratification, language and culture]