Kiribati Spirit Roads and the Land of the Dead

Record summary

Kiribati traditions concerning the dead, ancestral presence and routes across the island landscape provide a lead for comparing boundary-crossing stories in low-lying Oceania. Accounts often relate spirits to village places, sea horizons, trees, reefs or burial locations rather than to a single enclosed underworld. Their significance includes social memory, proper mourning and the moral risks of contact. Because documentation is dispersed and terminology varies among atolls, the researcher should verify the exact island, language form and publication before assigning a common cosmological model.