This article contributes to the development of a medical anthropology of sensation through providing a thick ethnographic description of pain's significance in the context of a particular community's — Yap (Federated States of Micronesia) — understandings of subjectivity, social action, and morality. After first proposing an attentional—synthetic model of the patterning of sensory experience, the article goes on to describe in some detail the linguistic, moral, and cultural frameworks that serve as the semiotic, existential, and practical resources providing the background against which individual sufferers tend to interpret their dysphoric sensory experiences. Central to the article is an exploration of a local illness category maath'keenil' that is implicated in two, at times competing, models of ethical subjectivity. It is argued that through configuring their subjective experiences in light of these virtues individual sufferers are at times able to transform their experiences of pain from excruciating dysphoric sensations to meaningful, morally valenced, lived experiences.
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