Adult Attachment Cross-culturally: A Reanalysis of the Ifaluk Emotion Fago

Abstract

In the language of the Micronesians who inhabit the island of Ifaluk, fago is an emotion that the ethnographer Catherine Lutz, in her 1988 book, Unnatural Emotions, translates as love/compassion/sadness. Here I reanalyze the meaning of fago, an endeavor made possible by the depth and detail of Lutz’s ethnography, based on fieldwork conducted in 1977 and 1978. As Lutz footnotes in her book (1988:238, fn. 20), “The meaning of the concept of fago shows important similarities with related emotion words in other Pacific languages.” She names and cites published References for descriptions of Samoan alofa, Marquesan ka’oha, Maori aroha, and Tahitian arofa. I was first attracted to this set of related emotion terms common to the Pacific islands because of how different these cases seemed to the American material I had collected. My realization that there might be deeper commonalities between the Pacific Island and American cases came later. I have chosen to focus on Lutz’s Ifaluk case simply because I deem it to be the most ethnographically rich, for my particular purposes, among the set. It is likely, however, that much of what Lutz describes about Ifaluk fago is distributed more widely across the Pacific Islands.