The Australian Journal of Anthropology, August
2002 v13 i2 p200(19)
Moving histories: an analysis of the dynamics of place in
Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT 2002 TAJA (The Australian Journal of
Anthropology)
Recent writing on the ethnogeography of
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 TAJA (The Australian Journal of
Anthropology)
If an obsession with temporality, memory and history appear characteristic
of 1980s anthropology, the 1990s has seen a geographic turn; the love affair
with time has been usurped by place and space or, as in more complex
formulations, place and space/time are granted their mutually reinforcing
presence, though 'place is the master of their shared matrix' (Casey 1996:43;
see also Fox 1997:2-3). Toponymies and ethnoscapes provide the neologisms for
an ethnogeography, characterised in the recent literature on Vanuatu by the two master tropes of rootedness in
place and mobility, metaphorised as the tree and the canoe, and more recently
as manples/womanples and their transient alter, the European (see Bonnemaison
1985, 1994; Jolly 1992, 1999).
In his early work, geographer Joel Bonnemaison (1985:32) stressed place and
permanence over mobility, but later, it is the image of reticulated space, or
networks that feature prominently. Here, places are linked by alliances and
there is no dominant centre, only foundation or primordial places that 'launch
outwards' the 'forces that well up within' (Bonnemaison 1996:36-38). This later
view suggests that he had been reading Deleuze and Guattari (1987). In A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, their attempt at shattering
all foundationalism, of which tree metaphors are, they claim, an examplar,
there is this passage:
The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The
tree imposes the verb 'to be', but the fabric of the rhizome is the
conjunction, 'and and ... and ...' This conjunction carries enough force to
shake and uproot the verb 'to be'. Where are you going? Where are you coming
from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a
clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning
or a foundation--all imply a false conception of voyage and movement....
(1987:25)
Deleuze and Guattari are not the only ones to deplore the hegemonic imagery
of trees in Western thought (see Bouquet 1996:62). But what also needs to be
noted perhaps, is the extremely widespread imagery of the tree, which, like
that other equally ubiquitous image of groups connected by kinship--namely 'the
house', occurs far beyond the borders of a homogeneously imagined Occident and,
as I note below, is not necessarily or solely the quintessential icon of
foundation and stasis that is implied in Deleuze and Guattari's attack. (1)
Even in their critique of the verb 'to be' that forms the 'useless questions'
they list and lies behind the image of the tree as 'foundation', there is, at
the heart of their interrogative list, not fixed 'being' but fluid 'becoming'.
These are not universally useless questions nor do they interfere with the
efficacy of their 'grassroots' metaphor. In north Ambrym, Vanuatu, the place that is the subject of this
paper, these are precisely the words used by the extremely mobile Ambr ymese,
as their standard interrogative greeting. Omrowabe? 'Where are you going?'
Omebwe? 'Where have you come from?' The form of such greetings tells us
something about an orientation to the world. Nor do tree images themselves
necessarily stand in opposition to networks and webs as Fernandez has noted in
relation to the banyan tree, the most prominent arboreal symbol of place in Vanuatu. 'The banyan tree suggests a circularity,
if not a tensile netlike interconnectedness of parts, in human affairs', that
offers 'a different imaginative vision of the human condition, a different
order of 'necessary connections' between human variety...' (1998:99). In Vanuatu mythic space/time, no less than in some
contemporary contexts, stones and trees have motile capacity, roaming about or
sending their roots forth to link up places and people. As Weiner and De Broeck
have recently noted for Papua New Guinea and the Congo respectively, trees in
some cultural contexts are analogues of movement as much as they might represen
t other aspects of 'grounded' being (Weiner 1998:136; De Broeck 1998:26).
Particular botanical images, like the specific characteristics of place, may
not be universally salient. Images of rhizomes do not usefully replace trees,
when trees can locally emerge as both mobile and reticulating while maintaining
their iconic status in other contexts as foundation and primordial symbols, and
like many of the botanical idioms of the Austronesian world conflating
'temporal and spatial modes of comprehension' (Fox 1997:8). While Clifford
(1992) claimed that anthropologists privilege dwelling over travel, some recent
work on place seems to echo Deleuze and Guattari's privileging of movement over
stasis. (2) However, human history, including that of north Ambrym and the
archipelago of which it is part, speaks as much of primordialism as it does of
movement and diaspora. But primordialism and the discourse on origins,
particularly in the Austronesian world, as Fox points out, are never
uncontested (1996:5).
My aim in this paper is to show how the demonstrably ancient counterpoint of
mobility and promordialism in north Ambrym was disrupted at a particular
juncture of local history. The dynamism of the relation between the
intruder/voyager and the priimordial/originator, while consistently played out
in myth, legend and social life in north Ambrym, was reconstituted by the
colonial experience, pressure on land and the seductive discourse of a politics
of exclusivity emanating from several sources outside the island, that led in
the late 1970s to a bitter battle between sections of the community, the
ramifications of which extend into the present.
Ideologies of place
I have examined the semantics of place and 'placing' in more detail
elsewhere (Patterson 2001b), but there are salient aspects of the qualities of
place that require some exposition here. In noting the particular
spatio-temporal aspects of the way in which places 'gather' events and people,
Casey (1996:42) stresses that such place making can only occur where there are
'permeable margins of transition'; porous boundaries that are essential
elements of the way in which places come into being. In north Ambrym such
permeability is locally reinforced by the gendering of ethnoscapes, in which
the transformation of elements is imagined through the interposition of human
agents and their products. In ideal terms, only the male agnatic core of the
cognatic category called a bulufatao or 'doorway' remains on the ancestral
lands in which its founders emerged, were placed, laid claim, or were granted
land rights, while women as metehal or 'paths' leave at marriage, their male
children remaining in the place of their husb ands to provide daughters who may
later be reclaimed as wives by the original group of agnates.
These descriptively named domains and their residential segments contain the
sedimented 'layers of men', lang lang ne wanten, as Ambrymese call them, in an
apt representation of the identification of alternate generations of agnates.
One sibling set, (containing own siblings, father's father and his siblings and
son's children) being related to the other (father and his siblings, own
children and all generations of agnates alternate to them) as 'father' to
'son'. In typical botanical idiom, the relationship between these two sets is
called tali viung; like two bunches of coconuts that hang from a single stalk
it is described as a divided unity. Compressing what is commonly noted as a
linear concept of descent, into an arborescent and fruitful spatio-temporal
entity, history is collapsed into the relation between filiation and
siblingship that is the 'base' or 'origin' (barite) of place. Located as 'home'
(besau), the origin group refers to itself simply as 'us' (gemasul).
Women of a domain are said to spiral forth as potential mothers who will
'return', their blood and its life force restored, vectored via their daughters
who may legitimately be claimed by one sibling set of a domain as wives for
their sons. These 'mothers' as they are categorised, provide each sibling set
with the means to reproduce the other, recapitulating the mythic origin of the
yam, outlined below, when the sons' parricide and consumption of their
transformed father provides ultimate and eternal nurture. The dual theme of
mobility/connection and rootedness in place are reiterated in this gendered
ordering of place and placement. While men are placed, women are mobile links
to place when they become 'paths', and yet, at the same time in a reversal of
this apparently obvious social maxim, men, in their once exclusive capacity to
travel beyond the shores of their island, link places, while women are
temporally reified as embodiments of place in their propensity to be known only
by their domain of origin. ( 3)
The focal point of the recreation of people in the lived world and the
reticulation of the substances that sustain them, is the named origin site or
domain. The origin of these landscapes replete with signification lies in a
creation myth found widely, but variously distributed in the Austronesian
world. In north Ambrym the culture hero Batgolgol was identified with the
Christian deity by the first Catholic missionaries and is credited with having
'produced all things'. However, on his creative path around the north of the
island he discovered several autochthonous beings already in residence. He is
said in one origin myth to have begun on the rugged east coast at Lonol, where
he discovered a man who had emerged from a coconut tree, and his journey is
irregularly memorialised as he moves from east to west. At Fona on the west
coast, Batgolgol found the demiurge Bungyam, who plays a more significant role
as we shall presently see and at Hawor he encountered a being called Temat the
name given to spirits of the dead.
In a more material sense a domain contains its 'layers of men' deposited as
bones in and around the sacred sites of old ceremonial grounds where powerful
rituals were performed in the past. These ancient sites, or hanglam or 'tabu'
grounds that every domain has, are a communal fund of ancestral power both
potent and dangerous, particularly to women, children and non-agnates. (4) In
the gendered and ranked arrangement of living space, persisting into the 1970s
only in the traditionalist enclaves of taot or 'bush' dwellers, men and women
inhabited defined areas of a settlement. Named hamlets contained the houses of
men's wives and children while they slept and ate communally in men's houses on
the edge of ceremonial grounds from which ordinarily, women were forbidden
entry. As men and their wives advanced in the cosmo-political hierarchy of
ranks called mage their status and sanctity was marked by separate residential
arrangements. Both high-ranked men and their wives could aspire to an imkon or
sacred house an d to the restrictions on commensality that high rank required.
At the highest levels both men and women were isolated from their kin by the
requirement that they only eat food cooked on the fangkon or sacred fire
kindled by someone of the same rank. Separate paths, ablution sites and
excretory places for men and women allowed the latter to avoid some of the
onerous proscriptions and prescriptions to which they were subject in the
presence of some of their male kin.
The agnatic segments of the localised bulufatao are commonly ranked in
relation to their proximity to the apical ancestor and it is the members of the
senior segment who keep the knowledge of the links to the founder, and
correspondingly it is possession of this knowledge and the ability to
successfully utilise it that ratifies members' claims to seniority and
therefore provides the basis of contestation over land and intellectual
property. If every part of the north Ambrymese landscape is replete with
signification it cannot be 'read' equally well by all of its residents, some of
whom may have been deprived by circumstance of the vital key to their local
map. The flora and fauna of a domain may be at once sacred and utilitarian,
distinguished and identified in a hierarchy of inherited intellectual property
rights that constrain access to them, particularly those that are used in
secret magic or have figured in ritual contexts. All valuable resources,
including botanical pharmacopoeia, fruit and nut trees, gr oves of bamboo, sago
palm and pandanus as well as gardens and sites where marine resources are
collected, could be sequestered by men and some women of rank who mark them
with their insignia. Access to these resources and sites is mutable but also
heritable. But sequestered or free, the earth itself, that is the 'tan' and its
products, is constitutive of the descendants of those who originated from it,
absorbing the power of the ancestors who dwell in and around it and providing a
particular kind of embodied 'being in the world' that links the people of a
place with each other and with their total environment. Although the custodians
of the ancestral lands of the 'doorway' should grant rights of access to their
land and its botanical and marine resources to both male and female agnatic
descendants of the founder, with the provisos of rank mentioned above, only
males can pass those rights on to their children. However, if at the death of a
male agnatic member, his agnates do not 'plant' him, that is sacrifice and
transfer live tusked boars to the members of his mother's origin place in a
rite called tontonan (lit. 'planting'), the latter may acquire rights in
perpetuity to some of his land.
Spirits of the dead, in the past as now, interact regularly with the living,
some of whom in every domain have inherited or acquired a privileged access to
them. When ancestral spirits afflict the living, most commonly women, children
and male non-descendants, typically for some infringement of a tabu or wrong
committed against an agnatic descendant, or in the case of children simply because
the ancestors desire to hold them, it is the duty of the senior male of the
domain to perform a ritual exorcism. (5)
While warfare was said to be endemic in the pre-contact past and there is
plenty of evidence for it in the colonial period, a certain unity was provided
to the region by intermarriage and by the ritual yam cycle linking domains in a
sequence of planting and harvesting, orchestrated by the yam master, the senior
male of the coastal domain of Fona founded by the autochthonous being Bungyam.
Although bung means darkness and the Catholic priest nominated this being as
'the devil', much to the disgust of his Fona descendants, in his mythic
encounters with Batgolgol, Bungyam is merely bad or stupid. This not uncommon
opposition in the Austronesian world typically depicts the creator being
associated with land as an ambivalent dark force representing the creative
aspect of the earth itself. In a myth known in both South Pentecost, the island
immediately north of Ambrym and north Ambrym itself, yams are created from the
body of a great old chief who instructs his sons to make a garden then kill,
dismember and plant him in it. All refuse except the youngest who carries out
his father's instructions. Each part of their father's body provides a variety
of yam, 'The very small yams are our father's fingers; the white yams are his
bones; red yams are his blood; soft yams are his flesh (or fat); lumpy yams are
his head., (Paton 1971:6) and a plentiful supply of food. This myth reinforces
the centrality of yams in north Ambrym thought and social life. Yam cultivation
marks out time and space and, particularly in the production of the huge
ceremonial yams, was the focus of both secret and sacred knowledge. Though
women aid in the preparation and weeding of yam gardens, yams are primarily
seen as a male crop and the planting of yams are largely carried out by men who
know the techno-magical secrets of ensuring the success of their own plantings
and the means to sabotage those of their rivals. Wound around the supporting
stakes from the central point of growth of the old seed yam, the yam vines form
the iconic spirals replicated in the tusks of the sacrificial and sacramental
boars whose immolation ensures the passage of the spirit into the afterlife.
Like the spirals called namroing fang or 'I seek fire' painted on the shaven
heads of mothers when their sons are ritually in limbo (bangvi) during the
incision rites, they are a potent symbolic statement of the regenerative power
of the life force instantiated by human actions of exchange and nurture.
Planted around them, still to be seen in inland gardens of great men of the
1970s, were crotons and dracaena, the insignia of rank and symbols of status,
the whole framed by a delicately woven cane fence, forming, like the area
surrounding a great man's sacred house, a spectacular aesthetic enunciation of
a horticultural landscape of power. Yams were, and remain a significant focus
of all prestations between kin at birth, male puberty rites, marriage and
death, despite the proliferation of other crops and the incursions of
cash-cropping and the money economy which frequently necessitates their
purchase locally or from neighbouring islands.
One generation of the Fona yam masters carries the name of the ritual called
Koran, passed on in alternate generations of the senior line, that inaugurates
the harvest of new yams now incorporated by the churches into a harvest
festival. The yam master also holds the sacred ritual object used in the rite
and performs the ritual first planting of yams, calculating the appropriate
time by the phases of the moon and other environmental markers. (6) The
performance of these rituals ensures the success of the crop for the whole
district. The sequence of planting and harvesting of yams accompanied by
various proscriptions, begins at Fona and takes in regions around each of the
origin sites of autochthonous beings proceeding from west to east, in the
opposite direction to the creative journey of Batgolgol who in Ambrym myth
returns to the sky from whence he came. In Fona the ancestral spirits are said
by Koran the yam master to be particularly powerful, capable of smiting his
enemies and readily afflicting anyone w ho disturbs their habitat or injures
their descendants.
These mythic and idealised narratives of place are however only one aspect
of the figure/ground gestalt of 'placement' in north Ambrym, particularly as it
has appeared in the last forty years. I want to turn now to an account of the
more recent history of two apparently disparate places on the west coast of
north Ambrym--the domains of Fona and Ranon--to show that while some ancient
themes of movement and relocation provided useful precedents for a reordering
of the lived environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were
readily occluded when passed through the lens of a different discourse
emanating from outside the island.
In 1968 as a novice fleidworker, I arrived in the coastal village of Fona,
recommended by the British colonial authorities for its centrality, modernity,
cooperative store and Christian inhabitants who had consented to be my hosts
for the duration of my research. At Ranon, about an hour's walk due south from
Fona, there was the only plantation of any size in the north. Its owner was the
Ambrym-born child of a deceased Australian planter named Mitchell and his Ambae
wife. He spoke the northern language fluently and was considered 'man Ambrym'.
North Ambrym appeared remarkably free of European incursion, a 'backwater of
Empire' never having had a resident representative of the colonial government
and with them then only a Catholic priest, two aged nuns and an even older
French trader who had been promised that his eviction would not precede his
immanent death, as the only 'foreign' residents. Given the seductive power of
linear narratives, it was easy to imagine that it had always been thus. 'Why
haven't white men finished our land as they have in Malakula, Santo and Efate?'
was the rhetorical question I was challenged with not long after my arrival.
'Because we got rid of them, we Fona people', was the answer. As I eventually
discovered, there had been an impressive catalogue of 'them', these planters
and traders dotted along the coast at every safe anchorage and even inland. But
who, exactly, in 1968 were 'we Fona people?' This was a complex question. On
the one hand, 'real' Fona people are exemplars of primordialism, descendants of
the autochthonous being Bungyam, already in possession of his land when the
culture hero Batgolgol arrived from the east. His agnatic descendants safeguard
the most valued crop in the north, the food that 'is our father'. An rem bewi
(how many yam seasons have you)? was a question the anthropologist soon learned
to ask, the answer serving to reckon age in a society accustomed to European
obsessions with measurement.
In 1968 the only Fona residents who were also 'Fona people' in the senses of
the origin narratives, comprised male and junior or elderly, divorced female
members of two out of eleven households. The majority of Fona residents were
actually 'other' people who, while strongly maintaining their domain
affiliation, had been drawn to Fona by preachers, stores and the persuasive
powers of the senior man of the village, the yam master Koran, over which
eponymous ritual he presided annually. The major advantage of relocating,
emphasised by most of the villagers, was the safety that aggregation in a
larger settlement afforded them in the face of the sorcery of their neighbours
in the bush. Most male residents of non-Fona origin were from nearby domains,
some being the only remaining agnatic descendants of the founder and members of
all but two households made their gardens on and utilised the resources of
their own domains. The exceptions were the son of a man granted land by Koran's
father as a 'brother' from a dist ant coastal domain for particular reasons
noted below, and Koran's daughter's husband, son of a refugee from west Ambrym
who utilised his wife's land granted her by her father.
Perhaps it is more than co-incidental that in Ambrym mythic history, Captain
Cook landed at Fona rather than elsewhere, and when offered a yam with the
words am rem, 'your yam', assumed he was being given a name for an island that
was, from the outside and for a European bestower of names, a necessary unity.
Ethnoscapes and the genealogies that map them however, are always perspectival;
lolihor, 'down there' lonwowan, 'on the mountain' and ion fonhal, 'at the end
of the road' serve perfectly well as deictic reference for those 'at home' in
the landscape and Ambrymese had no other name for their island as a single
entity. For northerners the north is simply orrin, 'down here'. That Captain
Cook was more likely to have been a Melanesian Mission Bishop, adds no greater
or lesser cachet to the provenance of the oranges used to stone the ground in
the annual yam harvest ritual of Koran. Presented by the Bishop, imagined now
as the famous explorer, in exchange for the eponymous yarn, the oranges were
discarded to seed, flower and fruit in Fona village, further botanical evidence
of its primary status as an origin place.
This particular village site was established in the domain bearing the same
name, on coastal land purchased by the Presbyterian mission, after Benjamin,
descended from the man who is said to have presented the yam to the explorer,
adopted a new faith in a foreign land. Together with Harry, later granted land
in the village, named, no doubt with a typically 19th century literalness,
after the domain of his birth--Harimal--Benjamin returned from Fairymead
plantation in Bundaberg, full of the zeal of conversion, to a Presbyterianism
that was as militantly anti-papist and anti-French, as it was opposed to
heathenism. The Presbyterian medical missionary Dr Bowie, ensconced in the mission
station at Craig Cove in west Ambrym, with a reputation among French colonists
as a ferocious francophobe, provided the money to purchase the village land and
the incentive to rid the north of the then numerous French traders and copra
makers. In 1913, Harry and Benjamin began collecting money from the villagers
to pay the fees o f Edward Jacomb, a private lawyer known to help 'native'
clients in their land claims. The traders, meanwhile contacted the French
Condominium agent in Malakula who, seeking to protect the interests of French
nationals, took the names of all those who had contributed money and left the
impression that Harry and Benjamin were committing a fraud. Alarm grew and
rumours that the money had been stolen spread rapidly. Not long after, Harry
was arrested by the Commander of the man-of-war Kersaint and taken to Vila.
Detained without trial for several months, his sentence for obtaining money
under false pretences was eventually reduced to three months. Despite his
lengthy incarceration he received no remittance for time already spent in jail
(Jacomb 1914:126). Pragmatic about his fate, Harry later became store keeper at
the Ranon plantation.
While Jacomb recounts this episode as an example of the common injustice of
the period and the machinations of the French, for the descendants of Harry and
Benjamin, their ancestors' deeds achieve heroic and mythic dimensions. Traders
were still quite numerous until World War II, but for many north Ambrymese
their late colonial absence was owed less to past metropolitan conflicts that
called them back in defence of their homelands, than to the efficacy of two
stalwart Christians whose prescience saved the north Ambrymese from the fate of
their neighbours. Their efforts, refigured in the 1970s through the lens of
land alienation and anti-colonial discourse, were not universally appreciated
at the time however. Perhaps because it was the only island in the north
central region in which kava was not drunk, Ambrymese rapidly developed a
predilection for alcohol. Although sale of liquor to 'natives' was illegal,
most traders were happy to oblige their island hosts. In 1912, the Catholic
priest reported in his dia ry that when he visited the village of Likon to
preach, he found most of the men in the men's house drinking absinthe; at
Nouiha they were drunk on gin. Encouraged by the missionaries now in residence
at Dip Point, in west Ambrym, north Ambrym converts like Benjamin and Harry
would lie in wait outside the stores for their heathen neighbours and relieve them
of their grog, either smashing the bottles or delivering them to the
missionary. Traders deplored the interference of the Christians in their
lucrative trade in alcohol, taking every opportunity, like the Presbyterian
missionaries, to report each others' activities to the colonial government.
These early incidents established an animosity in kastom/skul
(traditionalist/Christian) relations that was only exacerbated later by
conflict over land use and cash-cropping.
A mobile world
Active volcanoes foster an outward orientation to the world and the presence
of Ambrymese communities in other islands attests to the recurrent need for
refuge that their unruly presence requires. Ethnoscapes are not exclusively
physical however, and sorcery for Ambrymese can be as real and terrifying a
part of the terrain as the volcano Marum. It was as much fear of sorcery then,
as now, that also motivated Ambrymese mobility. There is a greater proportion
of the population of Ambrym living elsewhere than of any other island, with the
exception of Paama and the Shepherd Islands, both of which have particular
local demographic problems.
From the earliest years of contact with labour traders, Ambrymese were
enthusiastic recruits, first in the plantations of the archipelago itself, in
New Caledonia and Fiji, and later in Queensland. In the first ten years for
which records for Queensland exist (18631872), Ambrym provided more recruits
than any other island except Efate, the one on which the capital, Port Vila is
situated; they are indeed, the only northern islanders listed at all in this
period (Price with Baker 1976:114). For the entire period (1863-1898) covered
by the figures, only Tannese and Epi islanders were recruited more frequently
than Ambrymese, a bias recorded in the appellation 'Captain Ambrym' that was
given to 'any labour trader operating in Melanesia' (Evans, Saunders and Cronin
1988:232). (7) When William Murray, the first missionary to take up residence
in the north arrived at Ranon in 1883, a good proportion of the region's adult
male population had experienced both the ways of those who were to become their
colonial master s and lands further afield than any they had previously
encountered. Murray commented that he would have no difficulty with the local
language because there were several returned labourers who spoke English.
Marum: 'it falls'
Accustomed to a mutable landscape, more so than any other in recent history
in the archipelago, Ambrymese are not particularly perturbed by living in the
lee of a volatile and destructive force (see also Tonkinson 1982;1985). The
cataclysmic eruption that formed the vast caldera of the Ambrym volcanoes in
the second century AD was 'among the ten largest such events in the world in
the last 10,000 years' (Spriggs 1997:178). Marum, as the largest volcano is
metonymically known to north Ambrymese, is for them, as for neighbouring
islanders, a final resting place for spirits of the dead.
Inscribed in myths and legends of origin, precedence and agency and, not
infrequently, conflict, Ambrym's ethnogeography is replete with themes of
transformations of place and people that map the landscape of connections both
inside and across the island's beaches. Ambrym and Pentecost for example, were
once joined by a great vine that stretched under the sea from Ranwirigere, the
place of flying foxes near Nebul in north Ambryin to Batnaone (Bwatnapne) on
the north-west coast of Pentecost. This botanical umbilicus was cut by the men
of Tawor when, after trading pigs and mats as usual, their Pentecost visitors
'stole' a girl. Chased to the shore, the men escaped with their prize never to
return when the severed vine turned to stone, its hollow end still visible,
protruding from the floor of the sea. In 1970 the Tawor men decided that they
should demand a bride from Batnaone to re-establish this ancient alliance and
redress the imbalance caused by the theft of their 'daughter'.
Such connections, that permeate local and inter-island boundaries are
ubiquitous and explain even geological processes. When long ago some men from
Ambrym went by canoe to Ambae to trade for pigs, they returned with a small
fruit called watroro (the shining fruit). They took it to Likon domain where it
began to make a noise; when it grew louder they removed it to Hawor where it
continued, and then to Ranon and finally, still noisily rumbling it was placed
in the fork of a ligelat--a stinging nettle tree, where it burst into flame and
became a great hole which is where the crater Marum Ligelat is today. Marked on
the map as extinct, Marum Ligelat's small crater lies within the caldera
closest to its northern escarpment. (8)
That the lived world of ethnoscapes encompasses both human agency and
geophysical processes is illustrated not just by the origin of the volcano but
by all its subsequent activity. Eruptions are never simply 'natural' events.
The people of Hawor, whose domain also hosts the most powerful or hanglam (tabu
place) in the north have a special connection with the volcano ever since the
creator Batgolgol found the ancestor spirit Temat already there, naming the
place 'the hole of the spirits of the dead' in consequence. During a period of
fairly intense volcanic activity in the late sixties, the Hawor people were
asked to perform a ritual aimed at returning it to a dormant state. After
several unsuccessful attempts, an ancestral skull was taken and shot at with a
bow and arrow. With a last massive explosion the volcano subsided. After the
ritual shooting of the skull in 1968 a three-year moratorium was placed on tourist
expeditions to the caldera, their intrusion in the Hawor domain and disturbance
to its stones w ere the assigned cause of the eruptions of that period. In west
Ambrym there are still other traditions of connection to the volcanoes and
their activities; descendants of those who claimed responsibility for the 1913
eruption or to whom it was attributed, still note the effects of this ancestral
inheritance, as we shall see.
The histories of neighbouring islands contain the residues of past movements
between their shores in legends of place naming and origin. In 1970, I met
Waresus, a Pentecost man on a trading journey, selling yams to north Ambrymese,
an activity that in normal circumstances would be of the 'coals to Newcastle'
variety, but in that year fall-out from the volcano was still spoiling the
crops. He was 'at home' as it were, since, as I discovered later, his ancestors
who had established the Pentecost village of Bunlap, came from the north
Ambryrn domain of Likon. The permeable and contextual boundaries of island
homes that confound the insider/outsider distinction have left many traces in
Ambrym social life. When Ambrymese say 'sipa ten', the equivalent of 'thank you
very much', they invoke the memory of the men of Sipa, who, landing just north
of Dip Point in west Ambrym were only saved from being killed by the presence
of the hermaphrodite pigs they brought with them. Taken to Sulol in the west,
they and their pi gs flourished, some later moving on to settle in the north at
Halhal, others going to the western domain of Wakon and still others to Aulua
in Malakula. Rivers (nd), recording this story before WWI, wrote in the margins
of this account 'Sipa - Malo'. (9) Trading for pigs between Ambrymese and their
northern neighbours continues into the present. In the 1970s men of rank
travelled regularly as far as Santo to obtain tusked boars for their rituals
although since Independence in 1980, there has been a resurgence of home-bred
tusked boars.
While the region around Dip Point in the west was transformed utterly by the
massive eruption of 1913, ash fallout and seismic activity regularly alter the
coastline and the immediate hinterland, where landslides are common; only last
year a large slice of coastal cliff slid into the sea just north of Dip Point
and people still speak of a time when the now rugged coast between the domains
of Fona and Ranon was a succession of beaches.
Beaches
Ranon which means beach, was a 'beach' in Greg Dening's sense (Dening 1980),
a sandy cross-roads where intellectual and material commerce was conducted and
where later, men-of-war anchored to 'pacify the natives' or persecute the
French traders for selling grog--whichever of these two activities
predominated, depending rather on the nationality of their commanders. As a
consequence perhaps of their mobility, Ambrymese were vigorous traders in
material and intellectual property. The politico-cosmic institution of the mage
or graded society, as it existed at the time of European contact and by which
north Ambrymese, by a process of ritual attrition came to be best known in the
archipelago, was imported over a period, from the neighbouring island of
Malakula. Ranon was the entrepot for imported rituals in this vigorous trade.
For Europeans, it was the first safe anchorage on the route from west Ambrym.
Equally attractive and for similar reasons, to labour recruiters, traders,
planters and missionaries, Ranon was a place to be 'beached' and a place whose
bustling and almost 'cosmopolitan' early twentieth century character, has only
just begun to be retrieved. The Presbyterian Murray brothers, took up residence
there, serially, in 1883, next door to the Corsican brothers Rossi, the latter
busily establishing a thriving copra plantation and recruiting enterprise. When
the elder Murray died after only a few months residence at Ranon, his younger
brother hastily married and volunteered to replace him. Struggling with the
local luminaries who opposed the mission and threatened converts with sorcery,
and with the depredations of almost constant malaria, Murray junior finally
sank into despair after the death in childbirth of his beloved wife and left
the island. Welcomed by the French government as a necessary foil to the
British presence, represented by the Presbyterians who had established their
fine hospital over the line of fissure linking the volcanoes that were later to
swallow them up, the Rossis, unlike the mission aries, prospered. No-one was
much surprised, given his reputation, by the elder Rossi brother's murder in
Santo in 1895. Rossi junior remained at Ranon, and by 1902 the property was
substantial. It was said that the Rossis had acquired 'little by little, by
purchase from the chiefs of the island, vast tracts of land, great forests' for
which they allegedly paid 50,000 francs. Governor Picanon described the
substantial family approvingly as consisting of twelve persons, three of whom
were women, and five children. They employed fifty two ni-Vanuatu, by no means all local and in 1902 made
200 tons of copra (O'Reilly 1957:203-4). Success in Ambrym enabled a move to
Efate and the Ranon property was transferred to the French company Ballande and
Hagen when Australian John Mitchell, Hagen's nephew, took over its management.
If places require porous boundaries as Casey (1996) suggests, then beaches
are the ideal site. But porosity also enables a leaching out of place, and
Ranon, by the 1960s was no longer the thriving European centre it clearly was
at the end of the nineteenth century. Reading accounts of the inter-island communication
of this period, when Ambrymese and Europeans moved regularly between districts
and islands, when the only substantial hospital in the north of the archipelago
was situated just a few hours away from Ranon by canoe, and when several
traders and missionaries lived in the vicinity, my hosts claims to have rid
themselves of an alien and dominating presence seemed all the more dramatic.
The erasure of traces of colonial presence in narratives that collapsed a
series of voluntary leavings and natural disasters into a single expulsion of
intruders, underscores the constructive and destructive capacity of place.
Ranon's resuscitated beach status continues transformed again into the
present. While Rossi senior's tombstone serves only as a convenient sharpening
stone for bush knives, and the traces of the Murray's mission have long since
disappeared, the Mitchell plantation buildings have been joined since
Independence, by the first secondary school in the north, the first water
supply and the first, if modest, tourist resort--and even more recently by
anthropologists from Norway. At Independence the Mitchell plantation reverted
to the customary owners, who continue to dispute their identity. The Rossi's
land accumulation in the 1 19th century was facilitated by the massive
depopulation in the areas most frequented by Europeans and their accompanying
diseases. In the vicinity of Ranon alone there were some 19 domains, of which
eight had by 1968 no agnatic descendants of the founder, and therefore primary
landholders left. Of the remainder, three had only one adult male, another
three only two and the rest between five and seven. In most of these extinct
domains not acquired by the planters, non-agnatic descendants of the founder
occasionally gardened, and some parcels of land had been sold locally, but
after Independence with a rising population, pressure to plant cash crops, and
the desire to reclaim ancestral sites, land disputes escalated. Ranon and its
hinterland is known as Lolihor and features in the 1990s along with the rest of
north Ambrym, as a government designated 'backward' area, riven with disputes
over land.
Grassroots disputes
The record of valued connections with other places that facilitated trade
and mobility, and validated the ancestry of groups re-establishing themselves
in other regions and islands, took on a different cast over the last century
and a half. In mythic accounts, the relationship between the autochthonous and
the stranger is always a matter of context. As Ambrymese told it in the
political context of late colonial land alienation, the creator deity Batgolgol
was addressed belligerently by the beings he encountered on his creative path:
'We are already here! This is our place. Go away and do your work elsewhere!'
they proclaimed. Although domains ideally contained only the agnatic
descendants of their founder, either an autochthonous being or one placed there
by Batgolgol, a survey of known domains in the early 1970s revealed that more than
half contained agnatic descendants of an immigrant of either another domain,
another part of Ambrym, or even another island and that these movements had a
long but well-record ed history. The French Catholic missionary Tattevin
(1929-1931), who documented at length the culture of south Pentecost, records
several cases of relocations between the two islands, one the establishment of
the domain of Melwar, contiguous to Fona. According to the Pentecost myth,
after a dispute in the men's house of the Delah domain, one of the disputants
took a section of ridge pole made of liawar (the awar tree) and journeying to
north Ambrym settled at the domain he named Melwar after the men's house he
constructed there using the awar wood. (10) The inhabitants of Melwar it seems,
are entirely of external origin. The oldest man in the domain in the 1960s was
the descendant of a man who had escaped the depredations of a man-eating lizard
that emerged from a fruit in his domain of origin, Ralitor, inland to the south
of Melwar. The refugee was given a wife and the tubu tree that he brought with
him and planted can still be seen. (11)
From the late nineteenth century on, demographic change was accelerated by
depopulation and conversion to Christianity. New composite villages with their
novel modes of dwelling, were established on land purchased by the Catholic and
Presbyterian churches from domain custodians. Often sited around a church or a
store, houses were no longer communal for men, containing nuclear families in
which husbands and wives slept and ate together in a manner that
traditionalists regarded as not just improper but a threat to their health and
that of their children. A number of refugees from the 1913 eruption, were
resettled in the north and most intermarried with north Ambrymese; many
purchased parcels of land. Depopulation throughout the region left about one
quarter of all domains with no primary landholders. Many more had so few that,
fearing the sorcery seen as responsible for the death of their kin, they aggregated
in new Christian villages like Fona where they had prior links but could still
utilise their own domain land, or where they were granted land by their hosts.
Christians, of two major denominations and one minor, left the taot, the bush
dwellers in their hilly redout where they continued to oppose encroachment on
their land and lifestyle, engaging meanwhile in plantation labour and trade in
artefacts as it suited them.
By the 1970s, the population had begun to increase to such an extent that
coastal villagers who had planted coconuts on much of their land began to worry
about the availability of land for subsistence agriculture. The national
rhetoric about European land alienation emanating from both Nagriamel, the
Santo-based secessionist movement that was to have a major role in the Santo
Rebellion at Independence and to which many north Ambrymese belonged, and the
incipient political parties, began to have a local effect. People who had paid
sums of money for land rights in domains other than their own found that their
right to plant cash crops was questioned or even that their rights of domicile
could no longer be taken for granted despite their having 'bought' their
parcels of land. Fona village was transformed. Not even the yam master's
son-in-law, also of west Ambrymese origin, was immune to the primordial
rhetoric of the time. He, together with his wife and family, moved to west
Ambrym where the reactivation of thei r land rights caused its own problems in
an area severely affected by the lava flows of the 1913 eruption. Members of
all the other Fona households but two, returned to their domains of origin,
only Harry's son retaining his access to the Fona land given to his father.
(12) The ideology of manples, whether at the micro or macro level, is
inherently contextual and contestable because it relies on the interpretation
of precedence and the differential value accorded to a range of socioeconomic
factors. In the past, whether strangers were regarded as a 'meal' or a
'meal-ticket' depended on what they had to offer. In mytho-historical accounts,
many initial journeys were the result of discord and they were brought to an
end and a new beginning by the inauguration of ties of kinship. Adoption or
marriage to a local girl set up a new kind of rootedness in contrast to that of
autochthony.
For the first Europeans on the shores of Ambrym, what they offered was
differentially valued and depended on what they wanted in return. For some male
Ambrymese, renunciation of the mage, the politico-cosmological system that was
central to their social identity, which some of these interlopers demanded, was
too great a price to pay, for others it seemed like something 'worth a try', a
'road' that might lead to better things. For many women the benefits appeared more
obvious. Although they banned them from ocean-going canoes, men could not
always control women's access to traders' and recruiters' vessels and the
opportunity to trade their produce for valued goods at mission stations and
traders' huts. Increased mobility provided an escape route from unwanted
marriages or a path to safety after elopement with a lover. But while
conversion and residence at the mission might offer a girl a new kind of life,
such moves could also cut her off from the vigorous ritual life in which
women's status was firmly embedd ed as independent transactors and valued
persons (Patterson 1981, 2001a).
The opportunity to travel, to access new places and useful and newly valued
goods was only worth the presence of strangers with rude habits, so long as the
terms of the exchange were controlled by north Ambrymese. Frequently in the
colonial period they were not, and the increasing cost of colonial intrusion
accumulated, to be repaid with interest, after more than a century, when the
time came.
For many north Ambrymese, the Ambrym-born planter George Mitchell,
consistently described up till the early 1970s as 'man Ambrym' was
nevertheless, not 'manples' enough to guarantee his continued presence at the
now rundown Ranon plantation. Although Mitchell had already come to an
agreement with the indigenous owners that allowed him to sublet parts of the
plantation that were in dispute, with the rest to remain in his hands including
the store that he would operate, by the late 1970s the arrangement had fallen
apart. It was made clear to him that he should not expect to return to Ambrym
when he left to visit Australia. For some others born in north Ambrym, even
their indigenous provenance was not enough in the turbulent times before
Independence to guarantee incontestable residence rights. It may not have
seemed coincidental to Ambrymese, given their views of volcanic activity and
causality that the period in recent memory of Marum' s greatest activity,
coincided with the incursion of strangers in their la nd. The eruptions of 1913
and 1952 wrought unforeseen demographic changes; the massive destruction of the
are a around the mission at Dip Point in west Ambrym in the earlier cataclysm
rendered a return for the evacuated members of the district, with much of its
productive land obliterated by lava flows and its hospital engulfed, a
long-term prospect at best. Most remained in Malakula or resettled in Magam
village and its vicinity in the north, on land acquired by the Presbyterian
mission, again part of domains depopulated in the nineteenth century. Some went
to Ranon. In the decade before Independence, this second largest parcel of
alienated land on which school and mission were sited became a new source of
dispute. The well-built mission house, occupied by the Reverend Paton and his
family from the 1930s until 1952 at Magarn had been well cared for but remained
empty when he returned to Australia until the 1970s. Paton's use of the
Lonwolwol language, spoken by most of the refugees, ma de him popular with them
but the choice was resented by the northerners among whom he lived and
preached.
Still, many of the west Ambrymese already had relatives in the north, many
married northern women and their children were born locally. Many had also
purchased garden land from members of domains in the vicinity. The local
primary school was on their doorstep, they were modernists all, and committed
Presbyterians. Their young village chief, Willy Bongmatur had been made the
Presbyterian Assessor in the late 1960s. He was energetic, and called on
frequently to adjudicate at Native Courts. Though without much formal
education, he was even then a man with a singular vision for the future nation
state. A spokesman for local government, seen as a necessary precursor by the British
to the more widespread dissemination of the institutions of democracy, he saw
Christianity, education and obedience to the authority of customary chiefs as
the basis of Independence. In the I 970s, he joined the National Party, known
locally and particularly by its opponents as. the 'Presbyterian Party',
entrenching opposition to him by his main rival and notorious sorcerer, the
kastom Assessor, Tofor of Fanla.
Tofor dealt in the rhetoric of 'freedom'; councils and government were its
enemy, since they ushered in a lifestyle where everything had to be paid for.
Noumea, which many north Ambrymese had either visited as labourers or knew by
repute, was the exemplar of this awful prospect. Courted by the French, Tofor
had offered his allegiance to the Francophone 'Union des Communates des
Nouvelles-Hebrides' (UCNH) party at least for the time being. In 1975, when
Willy, rather than Tofor, was elected by the chiefs of the administrative
district CD2 to be the representative of kastom on the new Representative
Assembly set up by the colonial governments, many north Ambrymese wanted a
clarification of what it meant to be manples in the north. (13) But given the
contested rhetoric of the time this was no simple matter, as the following
example demonstrates. In the predominantly kastom domain of Noiuha, the second
highest ranking man in the almost defunct mage, the once dominant
politico-religious institution, was, in the 19 70s, a man who traced his
descent through seven generations from Toltegar. This ancestor he claimed, was
the domain founder. The Noiuha man was involved in a dispute over a parcel of
land that he had acquired from a neighbouring domain. In the opinion of a man
from another section of his own domain however, he would never win this dispute
because, despite his claim to be its senior member, he was in fact 'not even a
genuine Nouiha man'. Toltegar the second man said, had come from the
neighbouring island of Pentecost. It was he, a Christian with no mage rank, who
was the true 'origin' of Nouiha domain, tracing his descent from Beungkon Lino
who had emerged from a no tree which gave the domain its name--Noiuha, who was
one of the autochthonous beings found to be already in residence by Batgolgol.
It was absolutely clear to many that manpies did not mean 'man west Ambrym' and
despite Willy's birth in the north and northern mother he was not universally
considered to be at that time, a bonafide northerner.
In November of 1975. an armed mob of Francophone supporters marched on Magam
demanding that all the Magam west Ambrymese should leave, taking their mission
and their local council with them. If they refused to go, the village would be
burned down. After a meeting of all parties a few days later, organised by the
British District Agent (hereafter the BDA) and attended by his French
counterpart, a list of twelve itemised grievances against Willy was drawn up.
One of these was the cryptic message: 'Willy says that he is uprooting a tree,
but he means custom'. Here was a reappearance of tree imagery at a significant
moment. Willy was understandably troubled by the situation if not the
accusations. The BDA reported at the end of that year that Willy had confided
in the Presbyterian Pastor then resident at Magam, that his grandfather was
responsible for the unspecified breach of custom that led to the cataclysmic
volcanic eruption of 1913. He wondered whether his present trouble might not be
the result of the lack of expiation of this ancient infringement. (14)
The intervention of the colonial officials prevented the demonstrators'
threats of murder and arson from being implemented. However, pressure to
relocate in other parts of Vanuatu caused a
prevailing sense of insecurity. The Magam people began to re-establish houses
and gardens in their ancestral domains in the west, places most only visited
but almost none had resided in. Some long-standing claims to the land on which
the Magam mission was sited by the original domain landholders, now Catholic
and Francophone, were successful and the fine old mission house was demolished.
Willy, to the dismay of the kastom bush dwellers, became the President of the
Malvatumauri, the National Council of Custom Chiefs, spending most of his time
removed from the scene of conflict (Lindstrom 1997; Patterson 2002). Now retired
and returned to Ambrym, he has constructed his own monument in the shape of a
private church adjacent to his house, but his presence in the north is
continually contested outside the village in which he li ves and he frequently
resides in Port Vila where his reputation as an elder statesman is secure.
In the past, male fame and renown were acquired through being established in
an ancestral place, even though many became known to their descendants
precisely because they had come from somewhere else and had connections to
other places. The ability to trace one's primordial origins was not enough, one
also benefited by demonstrating powerful connections to the wider world,
through trade in material and intellectual property as well as prowess in giving
tusked boars, frequently brought from elsewhere, to one's kin. Manoeuvring
oneself and one's direct descendants closer to an apical ancestor was also a
reason for keeping the knowledge of primordial connections and making claims to
privileged access. In the postcolonial period these claims became more
important in relation to access to land and rights of domicile. When the yam
master of Fona village, a supporter of the secessionist movement Nagriamel was
removed from his position, after its defeat just before Independence, a member
of a junior line in the vill age, who was a Vanua'aku supporter, was appointed
in his stead. In the late 1980s this man built himself a large new concrete
'well' (actually a water tank) into the side of which he engraved the words
'Bungyam's well'. As village chief he was now asserting a claim to precedence
in the domain that was made possible by a totally novel situation, the
obliteration of a person's once inalienable right to connection with their
ancestors. This right had been recognised in the colonial period by the common
designation of direct descendants of domain founders as village chiefs. The
usurper's attempts to perform exorcism of those afflicted by Fona spirits were
notably unsuccessful, according to the yam master's son, because he was not the
senior member of Bungyam's patri-placed kindred despite his attempts to claim
otherwise.
Once the Vanua'aku Pati lost power after an uninterrupted first decade
however, the new Francophone government elected in 1990 was keen to see the
rehabilitation of those who had been punished nationally and locally after the
events of the Santo Rebellion. In 1998, the yam master received a distinguished
service medal from the government and in the following year held an
inauguration feast in which his eldest grandson was nominated as chief of Fona
village, in an attempt to restore the position of his descendants to
preeminence in the domain.
The stress on manples ideology at the national level in the run up to
Independence distorted the longstanding dynamic tension between primordial and
immigrant origins in north Ambrym. Reticular and mobile connections were as
characteristic of Ambrymese 'place' and 'placement' as autochthony and ancient
primordial attachment. As Fox (1996,1997) has pointed out, these are prominent
and enduring features of Austronesian communities in the Pacific as well as in
Eastern Indonesia. The trigger of conflict that seemed frequently to
precipitate mobility in cosmo-mythic time was reconstituted in the history of
contact, in which lived space was reconfigured by bitterly divisive colonial
and mission policies, catastrophic depopulation and its attendant demographic
shifts, and the accidental geography of active volcanoes. Contested access to
valued resources, including kastom, and the advent of political parties with
their roots in colonial divisions, has produced, with repopulation, a region
riven with 'grassroots' dis putes whose matrix is a far less fluid reading of
place and placement then was ever evident in north Ambrym history. Ambrymese
are a resourceful people however, and the very particular mode of connection
where all kinds of origin might be celebrated depending on context, may yet
defend them against other kinds of outside intrusion that nation states are inclined
to impose on those they consider to be 'backward'.
Let me conclude with a north Ambrym children's play song evocative of
connection and place that I was taught by my neighbour's offspring in 1969.
Am ol ha li? What is your coconut here?
Ol besung The coconut of my navel (15)
Murube? Where does it belong?
Muru lon Liliyekon It belongs at Liliyekon
Omkuku libwite mumhanghanga? How do you remove its roots?
Mamkumkunga I take them and throw them
Kone ba lon womel e mesunyesul Throw them on your mother's
brothers' fruit
Am opwer ha li? What is your taro here?
Ol bwesor The taro 'tall coconut'
Murube? Where does it belong?
Muru lon basil It belongs in the garden
Omkuku libwite mumhanghanga? How do you remove its roots?
Mamkumkunga I take them and throw them
Lingiburu bale Leave them there
Yinga wowere We will pile them up
Acknowledgements
This paper had its origin in a version presented to the conference 'Walking
about: travel, trade, migration, and movement in Vanuatu',
a cross-disciplinary discussion held at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research,
Australian National University, Canberra in October 2000. I thank Lissant
Bolton for inviting my participation. For comments on this revised version I
thank the anonymous readers and the editor of TAJA. The research on which it is
based was funded by the Carlyle Greenwell Bequest, University of Sydney
(1968-69;1970-71), the Australian Research Council (1993) and the Faculty of
Arts, University of Melbourne (1992,1997,1999). I would also like to thank
Cathy Creely for her assistance in accessing the J.W. Layard papers at the
University of San Diego, Dorothy Shineberg for providing details of Ambrymese
involvement in the New Caledonian labour trade, and the Government of Vanuatu for providing access to the National
Archives. To my friends in north Ambrym, particularly my surrogate family in
Fona vill age, my greatest thanks. Sipa ten.
Notes
(1.) See, for example the collected papers in The Social Life of Trees
(1998) edited by L. Rival. In her introduction Rival cites Deleuze and
Guattari's view of tree imagery in Western thought as 'reductionist'(1998:25).
See also Rumsey (2001) for a more nuanced account.
(2.) Gupta and Ferguson for example, urge a reassessment in which greater
attention is paid to borderlands, marginality, deterritorialisation and the
avoidance of 'succumbing to a nostalgia for origins' in anthropological
exploration of the local (1997:7). For a recent more comprehensive account of
this position see 'movement' in N. Rapport and J. Overing (2000:261-69).
(3.) It was still common practice in the 1970s for married women to be
addressed by their place name--e.g. Akum ta Wou would be called Tawou; the name
Tilly was not, I discovered, a version of a European name but a contraction of
Ta Wilit (of Wilit). In genealogical narratives, the personal names or titles
of agnatic male ancestors are recorded but only the origin places to which
their sisters went or from which their wives came, rather than the names of the
women themselves.
(4.) Five of these are known to be so powerful that simply placing something
that was in close association with someone in one of them, will cause the
person to die.
(5.) The west Ambrymese husband of the Fona yam master's daughter, and their
children were continually afflicted by the Fona temat because they lived in the
Fona domain rather than in the husband's.
(6.) See Patterson (2001b) for a more detailed account of the yam rituals.
(7.) Out of an estimated population in the vicinity of 6,000, almost 3,500
recruitments were recorded. Even granted that many of these were repeats, the
number is extraordinarily high. During much the same period, some 337
recruitments were recorded for plantations in Fiji (Seigel 1985:51) and some
360 to New Caledonia (Shineberg 2002, database: pers. comm.).
(8.) Not only the Ambrymese grant external origins for their volcanoes. The
Catholic priest Godefroy recounts that in 1903 some of the old men of the small
islands of Wala and Rano off the coast of north-east Malakula, decided to
repatriate the volcanic fire of Ambrym that the Ambrymese had stolen from them
(Layard 1942:233). Loading their sea-going canoes with pigs to buy back the
fire, they sailed off but were thwarted by a storm whipped up by the ghosts
that resided on the promontory of Pinalum only a few kilometres away. Their
forced return left the volcano safely (for them at least) on Ambrym.
(9.) Malo is a small island just off the south coast of Santo to the
north-west of Ambrym. The intersex pig is highly valued in Vanuatu but unevenly distributed. Always tusked
like a male pig the terer, as it is known in Ambrym, has the external genitalia
of a female. In most islands where they occur they are graded according to
these external genital features but their symbolic capital clearly lies not
just in their relative rarity but in their overstatement of the male and female
elements combined in the body of the tasked boar, the principle sacrificial
animal in Vanuatu (see Baker 1929).
(10.) Mel is the north Ambrym word for men's house--hence mel-awar,
contracted to Melwar.
(11.) Tattevin (1929-1931) recorded many stories of connection between south
Pentecost and north Ambrym in which the origin of groups in one island is
traced to inhabitants of the other.
(12.) Since the other resident had always gardened on his own domain land
and had no sons to press claims to Fona land, he and his wife were not forced
to leave by the classificatory brothers of the yam master who were instrumental
in the expulsion of his son-in-law.
(13.) For an account of the election and its aftermath see Lindstrom (1997).
(14.) The BDA concluded his report with the somewhat whimsical comment--'At
this point, the rumours seemed to have finished, and it was somehow appropriate
that the volcano was active for that and the subsequent evening' (Vanuatu Archives 1975).
(15.) An infant's umbilical cord is buried at the foot of a fine coconut
tree which is then referred to as ol besung 'the coconut of my navel' on the domain
land of its father.
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