To now, this book has been concerned with the nature of persons in Lihir and their relational and emotional connections to one another. In Part 3, ‘Loss and its Transformation’, I ask how persons in Lihir un-become. What is the meaning of death in Lihir? In what ways are relationships transformed or continued between the living and the dead, and how are relationships at stake in particular contexts such as feasting?

During my fieldwork I was perplexed by the nature of grief in Lihir, which to me seemed unaccented. There was little crying at death, people did not give eulogies, and there were no mourning taboos or obvious markers of mourning (for example, black or torn clothes, dirty appearance). People did not speak of grief as a lengthy process. They did not speak about managing their own grief or about grief as pathological. Was this apparent lack of grief a matter of lack of expression or of experience?

The nature of grief implicates understandings not only of emotions but of personhood and the attachments between persons. If personhood in Melanesia is relational, with persons the objectification of relations, then when someone dies grief should be severe and should affect the very nature of others who were in relationship with the deceased. The death of a member of the community should not only leave a space in relations but should affect the definition of all persons who were in relationship with that person. This does not seem to be the case in Lihir, as I discuss below, and this has implications for the nature of personhood.