I have three goals in this paper. The first is to represent formally the knowledge about emotions held by the Ifaluk people of Micronesia. That knowledge can be seen to be structured in two fundamental ways: The first is in terms of salient events in everyday life, and the second is in terms of the culturally constructed goals held by the Ifaluk. The second aim is to address the question of the actual status of ethnotheory in social interaction; I stress the idea that the emotional understanding this ethnotheory allows is, in actual practice, an understanding that is negotiated between individuals. Third, I reject the view that ethnotheoretic models of emotion are aptly characterized as involving “cognition about emotion” or “thinking about feeling.”

Introduction

I would like to tell two stories here. To understand each story, it is necessary to present the underlying cultural and cognitive model that structures the understanding of the characters in them. The first story is a simple one because it merely involves narration, an assertion made by one character and left unanswered by others. The complexity of the second story arises because it tells a more fully social tale; the characters not only theorize, they also attempt to convince others that their theory is at least plausible, if not the only possible route to proper understanding of the events at hand.