Social Analysis, Fall 2002 v46 i3 p129(27)
The sorcerer as an absented third person: formations of
fear and anger in
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Berghahn Books, Inc.
Introduction
This essay revolves around a recent intensification of homicidal sorcery on
I will explore the historical specificity of these developments and
simultaneously try to situate sorcery on Ambrym in a larger comparative
framework of human sociality. Like earlier writers in the tradition of British
social anthropology (see Kapferer 1997), I see sorcery as fundamentally an
expression of people's acknowledgement of the immanent powers of sociality
itself. In the Melanesian context, sorcery must be seen to be part of the
larger social networks and agency that not only cause production and
reproduction, but also destruction and death. I will show how sorcery on Ambrym
is fundamentally part of the interpersonal realm of reciprocity, and that it
actually represents a constant `regulation' on the changing patterns of
reciprocity that take shape in the post-colonial situation.
Sorcery on Ambrym works as a cultural recognition of some principles of
reciprocity, wherein the triad becomes central. I see these principles as
exemplified in the abstract by Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of reciprocity
outlined in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (see Sartre 1991). In his
elementary example of how reciprocity is essentially bound up inside triadic
relationships, he describes himself standing in a window, observing two workers
outside. The two workers cannot see each other, and their mutual relationship
as workers is constituted only through him as a third party. As a result of his
totalisation, they come to stand for a unification of their mutual reciprocity
as `workers' of the same class. But this reciprocity exists only as his
totalisation and in so far as they have not yet been engaged with one another.
Once they meet face to face; their mutual reciprocity as in the eyes of the
third is closed off, and they engage in a seemingly dyadic relation. But
Sartre's point is that even though they themselves close it off through their
interaction, the triadic constitution of their relationship continues to hold,
and the absented mediation of the third is in fact the only way in which they
can come to interact in exchange (Sartre 1991: 100-9; see also Sahlins 1972).
(1)
With regard to the modern character of sorcery on Ambrym, a lot of power
seems here to be invested into this dialectic, and its relational composition
is set up along a similarly triadic structure as in Sartre's example. Sorcery
here not only concerns the victim and the accused, but also the sorcerer
himself, who is a third party to that relationship. The sorcerer is hence like
Sartre's man in the window--an outsider who through his `absented presence'
constitutes other people's relationships.
By approaching sorcery in this framework of reciprocity and totalisation, I
wish to avoid seeing sorcery as masked expressions of people's problems with
`reality'. Indeed, I do not address how sorcery attacks represent down-to-earth
social conflicts in another, often fantastic guise (see Patterson 1974-5), or
how they are an expressive `metaphor' for the political arena (see Lattas
1993). Rather, I explore how it is the totalising perspective of the attacks
that actually reveals the problematic social situations in the first place. In
other words, I see sorcery itself as constitutive in the process of social
relations and as a key element of their dynamic.
Kastom and `the Great Terror'
My initial impression of
In a historical survey of deserted villages that I conducted in the area,
this situation of peace and tranquillity was in people's discourse strongly
opposed to the historical period that I am tempted to call `the Great Terror'.
Along with many other Melanesian islands, Ambrym was heavily depopulated
between 1910 and 1940. In the area concerned in my survey, a population of
about 3,000 people, spread out over 30 villages, was seriously decimated by
these developments, and in 1940 only five villages remained, with a population
of only 300 to 400 people. From one perspective, we can account for this
radical disruption by referring to the new diseases, rifles and alcohol that
were introduced to the island by missionaries, traders and colonial personnel
(see Rivers 1922). But according to
In many respects, the concept of kastom, the Bislama term and pan-Melanesian
idiom for a pre-colonial realm of `customary' practices (see Lindstrom and
White 1993), can today be used synonymously with sorcery. Even though kaztom
refers to ceremonies of food exchange, men's cults and `the indigenous way' in
general, it now also carries with it a conception of evil, of malevolent and
uncontrollable forces dwelling inside these powerful practices. This concept of
evil has arisen out of an indigenous churchly (3) discourse that has been
preoccupied mainly with opposing these destructive forces at the core of
kastom. In
In the period that followed the Great Terror, the church was set up as a
sanctuary from these lethal forces that were hiding inside the darkness and
secrecy of the ceremonial ground, and by 1950 most people in
I will describe how this prospect is constantly being threatened by the
ever-returning theme of sorcery. When I returned to
For weeks after this meeting, people in Ranon were going around in
amazement. What had, since the Great Terror, been a sanctuary and a refugee
camp for people who had escaped from other places torn apart by sorcery and
warfare had now itself turned into the centre of these malevolent forces.
Ranon--the first mission station and the only colonial plantation centre in
I here choose to see these developments as a local commentary on historical
circumstances, instead of seeing them merely as irrational or `creative'
responses to diseases or other `natural causes: I now follow the local
viewpoint on the processes involved, extending on Taussig's insistence that
such apparently irrational beliefs can be `intricate manifestations that are
permeated with historical meaning and that register in the symbols of that
history' (Taussig 1980: 17). I think that these recent events of sorcery on
Ambrym also manifest a certain loss of control that is due to the Western
presence (impregnated with the cosmologies of Christianity, colonialism and
capitalism), akin to that experienced by Taussig's South American workers in
relation to capitalist alienation of their labour. It is, however, not first
and foremost a question of an invading `mode of production', as in South
America, and wage labour and cash-cropping are, again, rather peripheral to the
Ambrym subsistence economy 20 years after independence. Instead, I will suggest
that these incidents on Ambrym represent a reaction to other historical
circumstances tied to the post-colonial situation. They take place in an era
when much of the colonial history has to be reframed with regard to local
idioms such as rights, ownership and belonging, and it is within this nostalgic
climate that the abio reappears. It is now manifested as a destructive force
that in a sense reinforces the communal moral of giving and sharing as against
the modern tendency to claim rights and keep to oneself, which comes with money
and the commodity market.
Differentiation and Conflicts in the Colonial Era
The issues of sorcery and witchcraft have, of course, a significant history
in the region of
In a more recent article on Sorcery among the Mekeo of coastal
I think this point about sorcery's ability to open up relationships to
external agency is crucial to recognise, especially with regard to the
post-colonial situation. In my view, it is not necessary to refer these
tendencies to strictly `Melanesian' contexts, since the same tendencies can be found
in other areas of the world (see Kapferer 1997, Boddy 1989), and since sorcery
can thus be seen to manifest the human capacity for articulating the world in
social terms. Therefore, Ambrym sorcery, which manifests one specific instance
of this capacity, might just as well communicate with Sartre's theories as with
Strathern's.
What we do have to pay attention to is how the history of the region has
brought about certain ideologies, discourses and parameters that people engage
in their daily interaction. On Ambrym, the colonial presence represented an
external judgement on local relationships through the court system, taxation
and the church's moral order. But while the colonial agents believed themselves
capable of resolving local conflicts through Western standards of court cases
and imprisonment, they could not mediate in the real arena of conflict on
Ambrym, the field of sorcery and witchcraft. The sorcerer's work was
unintelligible to the colonial agents, since the cause and effect involved in
the local view of sorcery agency could not be made to converge with Western
views on individual agency and the principle of the unity and coherence of the
`act of crime; In local explanations of how people died, the agent of the
murder was not at all clear, but the colonial officials had to make hasty and
random arrests in order to uproot the `evil' forces at work. In the Ambryrn
understanding of these actions, the colonial police were thus seen as using
their mediating role to act like sorcerers themselves by abducting people and
taking them away to imprisonment. Interpreting events in a simplified
`sociology of conflict', the colonialists believed sorcery was simply a tool
that could be the weapon of one man against another; they failed to realise the
complexity of the agency involved. Anthropologists have, of course, been guilty
of making the same mistake, interpreting sorcery as disguised expressions of
conflicts arising from structural circumstances, such as marriage and
settlement organisation (e.g. see Patterson 1974-5).
In
On top of these sociologically given conflicts of the colonial village,
another overt theme of conflicts has been the presence of money. Ever since the
plantation was set up in the village of Ranon around 1860, money has been a
motivating factor in village life. Gold sovereigns and silver sterling figured
in the prestige economy of the male hierarchy at an early stage and, for a
period, almost replaced the valuable tusked pigs in the ceremonial economy, as
pigs were forbidden by the churches. People, however, learnt that money--in
North Ambrym called buwir (literally, `lumpy stones')--was very different from
pigs. Money represented a more solid, material presence that was problematic to
peopie on Ambrym because it, in a sense, resisted transformation. I would
suggest that money is by its very material stability and durability
antithetical to the paradigm of the local ceremonial economy of flow and
transformative gifts (see also Rio 2002). Money is seen to produce jealousy
(brire) and anger (lolfrifri), since it has a potential for being kept to
oneself and apart from social engagement. It does not deteriorate, cannot be
eaten or replanted, and thus represents an enduring and coagulated presence in
social life. People always tend to imagine that their relatives are holding
back money from them, and when there is a question of money changing hands, the
demand for sharing and `borrowing' always comes up. We can then understand why
the generation of men who worked for the `Master' at the Ranon plantation put
the gold and silver coins they earned in jars and buried them in the ground
when they were full. Even though this `planting' of the money could not produce
increments, like the food they planted, at least it was invested into the soil
of the place.
The specific history of Ranon hence leads people of other villages to think
that money is indeed captured in this village, both under and above ground.
Ranon village has, even after the plantation era, continued to attract money.
Following independence, certain entrepreneurs have benefited from a veritable
industry of wood carvings that are being sold to the commercial markets in the
capital, as well as in New Caledonia, Australia and the United States (see Rio
1997, Patterson 1996). In addition, the village attracts tourists, who come to
see both the active volcano of the island and the performance of kastom dances
and magic.
The imagery of accumulated and coagulated money was again evoked when the
issue of the destructive curse of the werefil, which had allegedly been planted
in Ranon village, came up in 1999. The werefil was said to have been planted in
the village by outsiders who were jealous of the Ranon riches and who wanted to
take part in the wealth. Even if the money was out of sight and hidden away, it
still posed a threat to relationships, since everyone knew that it was there as
a historical fact. As we shall see, it is as if the containment of money
itself--and the jealousy and anger that comes with it--attracts abio to
relationships.
Lattas (1993) comments that in Melanesia there is a greater tendency for
sorcery to pop up in places where there is an accumulation of money (see also
Chowning 1987, Lederman 1981, Zelenietz 1981). Among the Kaliai of West New
Britain, Lattas also observes how sorcery accusations are directed towards the
new elites created by the colonial situation: priests, government officials and
businessmen. These new forms of sorcery are in Kaliai called `the sorcery of
whites' (Lattas 1993: 59), not because the white people perform it, but because
the whites control the spaces where it is bought and sold and seen to grow out
of--the markets, the plantations, the church. Lattas (ibid.: 53) comments:
`Sorcery here is not a continuation of tradition, an archaic superstition or
falsehood which stubbornly clings on and which is destined to disappear with
the growth of knowledge and development. Rather development itself spawns new
forms of sorcery, new narratives of evil. Instead of treating development as
antithetical to sorcery, as being the bearer of that modernity which eradicates
superstition, it is possible to see development as consolidating the powers of
sorcery.'
Hence, I believe that the abio dwelling around colonial spaces such as Ranon
village is also very much related to the processes of modernity that have been
in motion. By taking on disguises of past historical connections, the recent
and strong sorcery tendencies may be seen as a `backlash' at the disruptions
caused by the colonial and post-colonial situation. But unlike earlier writers
of the conflict framework, I would insist that these more recent attacks of
abio concern much more than tense relationships. Even though the relationships
themselves, the rivalries and disagreements implicit in the colonial village
history, figure as the settings for the sorcery attacks, we must also pay
attention to the changing character of the socio-cultural stage that the
sorcery attacks create (see also Knauft 1985). Like Lattas, I also maintain
that there is a radical break here between sorcery before (as in the rivalries
of the Great Terror) and sorcery now, even though they appear to be the same.
North Ambrym Abio
The first effort to describe Ambrym sorcery is an account from the Catholic
mission in Olal village, North Ambrym. It is part of the memoirs of P6re Suas,
who established the mission there in 1893, and Pere Jamond, who accompanied
him: `The individual who is hableou has the power to do whatever he wants--to
change himself into a chicken, a dog, a bird, a snake, etc.--to go, without
physically going, wherever he wants--to make people die, by removing their
heart or intestines or other organs--to play tricks on people, such as forcing
someone to climb a coconut palm and leaving him up there so that he cannot
move' (my translation, Jamond 1949).
This is a description of the Ambrym sorcerer or witch. (6) To avoid the many
dangers inherent in translating such a concept into `sorcery', laden as it is
with Western exoticism and orientalism (see Kapferer 1997), I will carefully
try to follow the manifestations of the indigenous term. I understand abio as
sorcery since it is about interfering in other people's lives through what is
indigenously recognised as a special kind of agency. Abio is used to stand for
all kinds of agency involved in meddling with other people's hal (road), the
course of their acts and conditions, mostly to hurt or kill them, but also to
make them act in certain ways. Abio can make people give away their possessions.
It can involve so-called `parcel magic', which hurts people by treating some of
their intimate belongings in certain ways, and it can result in the
straightforward abduction and murder of people. To avoid confusion I must also
point out that the term abio covers acts and remedies of sorcery, as well as
the sorcerer himself. I will here be mostly interested in this last concept of
abio as a person who takes up a specific place in social interaction.
Writing about the decades before 1900, Jamond describes this personage, the
hableou, as part of a `secret society' in which men had to sacrifice pigs to
other sorcerers in order to become sorcerers themselves. After the payment in
pigs, the apprentice would be let into a `sacred ground' at the cemetery, where
the initiator said spells over him and rubbed him with magical leaves in the
presence of the ancestors. The apprentice would then be ready for the
transformation that made him into a hableou. According to the story Jamond had
been told, the initiator would now cut off the candidate's head and limbs with
a knife. He would say spells over the body parts before he refitted the body of
the candidate, who would now come back into life as a man transformed into a
sorcerer. When re-created, the man was called by his new title, Hableou (Jamond
1949). Many similarly fantastic stories about Ambrym sorcery continue to
circulate today on Vanuatu, as Ambrym is
characterised as the `Mother of Darkness' and the centre of sorcery practices
in the archipelago. These beliefs are, however, the view of sorcery as seen
from the outside, as the practice of the Other. But also on Ambrym such
horrific ideas figure as theories about what hides inside the darkness of other
villages. The prototypical act of the murderer abio is to ambush someone who is
out in the forest by himself. The victim is blinded by spells and magical
remedies and made unconscious. The abio then cuts open his belly, removes his
intestines, replaces them with magical herbs, patches up the open wound and
then brings him back to consciousness. The victim will then continue on his
path, not knowing that anything has happened to him. When he returns to his
house, he will later die a sudden death. Thus, when someone dies unexpectedly,
people are immediately suspicious about the cause of death: a sudden demise
without warning is a sure sign of abio.
Diviners of abio affliction are in North Ambrym called vanten ne hal (man of
the mad). One says that vanten ngea vanten hanglam tolhe (lit., this man is a taboo
man who can see). Such people, who are called `clever' in Bislama, can `see'
the cause of problems and provide cures (see also Tonkinson 1979). If people
suspect that someone is after them, they can visit a panten ne hal and pay him
to `see the road', that is, the past and future course of actions and
relationships. This role of diviner is something that people might choose to
take on if they feel that they are capable of seeing things. It takes a lot of
courage (helhel), since looking into these things constantly must necessarily
be both frightening and dangerous. Such men must therefore go though fasting
and other strong taboos that affect their lifestyle before they can engage in
this type of work. They must be afraid (lummormor) all of the time, since they
especially are open to attacks.
The Colonial Overturning of the Sorcerer
This story about sorcery initiation opens up the question as to how sorcery
was, and is, institutionalised on Ambrym. From many places in Melanesia we hear
that the role of sorcerer is itself an acknowledged position, a kind of
`office' As in Mekeo on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea, we have learnt
that the `war sorcerer' and `peace sorcerer' are concrete positions held
alongside the `war chief' and `peace chief' (see Mosko 1994). Likewise, among
the Garia of the central Papuan Coast, the sorcerer was an acknowledged ritual
expert (see Lawrence 1987). In this more `egalitarian' society, all boys, even
as children, entered into a `series of initiatory ceremonies' in which they
were initiated into the secrets of the Garia cosmos and were fed secret
remedies to make them mature as men. The most dedicated in this learning would
become acknowledged sorcerers.
As I have pointed out above, sorcery on Ambrym was also closely related to
the `secret societies' We here recognise both Stephen's and Lawrence's material
as also relevant to North Ambrym sorcery, as something that was taught to
people through their career of secret initiations that involved transfers of
secret knowledge. In the mage hierarchy of sacred fires, the life of the
highest man, the mal, was led in isolation because of the strong power that he
embodied. Through many grade initiations and pig sacrifices and his ascetic
lifestyle, he had embodied so much secret knowledge and manly power that he in
many instances now represented the very principle of abio, having power and
influence over all people and creations within his district. These men, who
embodied extraordinary capacities through their initiations and their lifestyle
of taboos and avoidance of contact with female substances, were considered so
dangerous to other people that they spent their days in permanent seclusion, in
fact, sleeping and cooking inside their own graveyard, a circular stone fence.
As the motors of all ceremonial exchange, they were acquainted with other
people, but their social interaction was always imbued with a certain danger.
The high men who turned into sorcerers were referred to as vanten hanglam (a
term for a man who is taboo but implicitly also an abio). They were known for
their magical capabilities and their ability to make things happen to both
people and things. Villagers I talked to commented that these sorcerers `were
almost like spirits' (temaer), referring to their ability to travel through the
air and to do incomprehensible things. A man from West Ambrym is today known to
have been such a man. He had gone through all of the grades in the male
hierarchy, even starting over again when he had reached the highest step and
made multiple `rounds' of the twelve steps of the mage hierarchy, and had in
addition undergone a whole series of other spectacular ceremonies to achieve
this spirit-like power. When his father had died, he had for 100 days washed
only in the water of the decaying corpse that he had kept under the ceiling of
his imkon taboo-house. After this and other similarly symbolic rituals of
regeneration, he had at the peak of his career the power to do anything he
liked. He travelled to places without actually leaving, and he killed hundreds
of people by sorcery without even going near them. The power of these high men
was based on an acknowledged and legitimate use of sorcery and magic. In a
sense, they incorporated principles of state-like formations in their person, creating
an imagery of a personified totalisation that was in fact present behind every
social scene and inside all relationships.
An important idiom for male power is meje fofo, which means literally to
`open eyes turning around', implying one's capacity to see things from all
sides, to see and understand everything. Like the Big Brother of George
Orwell's 1984, this character both embraced the totality of the community, by
standing on top of the male hierarchy and overseeing all ceremonial activity,
and represented the instrument of further totalisation and control as the abio.
The vanten hanglam of West Ambrym referred to above in 1913 allegedly brought
about a volcanic eruption in order to wipe out most of his rival villages in
West Ambrym, even succeeding in devastating the biggest mission hospital in the
New Hebrides at the time. Like generals in totalitarian states, these men were
imagined capable of controlling all social interaction. Speaking about the
early colonial period in South East Ambrym, Tonkinson (1981: 79) writes: `A
vital element in the power of chiefs was their monopoly over sorcery, which was
allegedly used to maintain the loyalty of their followers (by threatening
persistent offenders) and to combat the power of outside enemies, real or imagined.
Sorcery was considered a legitimate institution, which kept people in line in
an otherwise somewhat anarchic society.' Tonkinson, however, goes on to point
out that after a period of pacification and the fall of the institution of the
male hierarchy, sorcery radically changed its character on Ambrym. In what he
calls `a democratisation of sorcery', the practice became available to all
people through inter-island exchange. In the highly mobile era of colonialism,
people brought back sorcery from plantations on other islands and from the
urban cultural conglomerate. Sorcery became the tool of everyone and everybody.
Those who had purchased sorcery could now pose a threat to others without being
legitimately known as vanten hanglam (high men).
Another factor in this change was, of course, the church discourse, which
through its moral of equality, love for the next man and individual freedom had
managed to break down the legitimacy of the former vanten hanglam. In fact,
both the church and the colonial government set forth to strike down every
incident of alleged sorcery on the part of the high men. In 1964, the British
District Agent of the Ambrym district wrote in his quarterly report:
North Ambrym: A number of visits were paid to north Ambrym to investigate
allegations of murders in that region. Preliminary investigations revealed
an extraordinary series of murders as far back as 1930 that had not been
reported, and that witchcraft was still being extensively practised. One
murder was reported to the Resident Presbyterian Missionary at that time,
who agreed to overlook it provided the offender agreed to join his Mission!
Two other murders were reported to the French District Agent who took no
action on the report. The Commandant of police Mr. Walford and the
Officer-in-charge of Police, Santo, Mr. Dumper visited the region on
several occasions. It was decided not to prosecute in those cases which
occurred many years ago; in the more recent cases it has not yet been
possible to obtain sufficient evidence to common proceedings. One of the
most feared of the pagan chiefs, Tofort, the son of the highest grade chief
in the region, Tainmal, was sentenced to one year's imprisonment for
witchcraft and generally with Tofort's absence from the island the position
seem to be much improved. (British District Agent 1964)
Within these developments, the powerful men of the male hierarchy lost much
of their power.
Tonkinson remarks that in the 1970s people's characteristics of sorcerers
were completely altered. People now conceived of them as degraded and immoral,
instead of powerful, recognisable by their `sickly looks, poor hygiene,
absenteeism from church, night prowling, a propensity for making veiled threats
when angered' (1981: 81). As sorcery was now freed from the male hierarchy and
let loose among men of less regard, it became a question of moral authority
instead of power:
A major reason [for the change] is that it has become identified with
secrecy, death and evil powers and in the view of the Ambrymese must be
condemned because it breeds fear, tension and hostility. Villages are no
longer at war, and sorcery no longer has an acceptable place in the
inter-village quarrels when they occur. The trouble with sorcery is that
too many innocent people of all ages are thought to be its victims. There
are too many motiveless deaths; accidental, experimental mistaken
identity-killings. This suggests to people an essential lack of control, a
disorderliness which convinces beyond a doubt that reckless and
inexperienced men are not in full command of the dangerous powers they are
manipulating. (Tonkinson 1981: 84)
The situation was hence out of control because people could no longer
appreciate the agency of the sorcery act as an expression of power, since it
was no longer seen as the tool of the socially constitutive high men of the
hierarchy. These men had now been struck down by this new moral authority, and,
in the Bislama terminology, ancestor spirits (temoer) and the powerful men who
were `almost like spirits' came to be called `devil'. This went hand in hand
with the Christian overturning or uprising against the influence of the vanten
hanglam and against kastom, setting up this practice as one of darkness, evil
and destruction. (7)
Sorcery without Sorcerers
If we now return to Ambrym around the turn of the millennium, the effects of
these historical shifts are still clear. There has been a complete
figure-ground reversal of the relation between sorcery and kastom. Previously,
sorcery was taught to apprentices in initiation ceremonies and inside the
secrecy of men's lodges, and hence represented forms of knowledge transferred
as part of the initiation package. If a man was a good apprentice in sorcery,
he also became a man of kastom. Today, a man who merely expresses an interest
in kastom practices is liable to raise suspicions of also trying to bring back
sorcery. People who have engaged themselves in the recent reappraisal and
reappearance of kastom are likely to be automatically blamed for `pulling in'
sorcery, even though the men's lodges are practically extinct. This process
involves a certain degree of `fantasising' about people of other villages and
how they are hiding schemes of sorcery attacks inside imagined new secret
lodges. It is therefore a common statement in Ranon that there is no sorcery in
Ranon, only in the uphill kastom villages that Ranon people rarely frequent.
This reflects that sorcery is mostly feared from the outside; when I talked to
men in the uphill villages about this, they on their side actually feared the
Ranon people for their sorcery more than anything else. According to them, abio
has all the time been in the possession of the Ranon people, even though they
have officially abandoned kastom (as grade-taking). Sorcery is hence viewed
always the practice of Others, outsiders who then try to plant their `seeds' in
one's own village.
The ethnographic reality of sorcery today in North Ambrym is not seen as
sorcery practice, but is instead found in the realm of sorcery effects, of the
everyday aching bodies, of things that go wrong in the garden, and of sudden
and unexplainable deaths. It is as if the sorcerer has been absented from the
scene of sorcery, hiding somewhere in the background of the relationships in
which people take part. The acts of sorcery have in a sense been obviated, made
unnecessary by the self-evident signs of sorcery that come up all the time in relationships.
In this situation, we must then approach sorcery as a field of relationships
stretching between the victim, the `diviner', who can talk about the reasons
for the attack, and the man who is the alleged cause of the attack. Behind this
triadic field of concrete relations lurks the abio himself.
The Mediating Appearance of Abio
One of the victims of the terror that swept over Ranon in 1999 was an old
man who had originally come from a neighbouring village to work at the
plantation in Ranon. He had married a woman and stayed on even after the
plantation was overtaken by the independence movement in 1980. One day as he
came back from the garden, carrying some firewood that he had collected on his
way down, he fell to the ground outside his house. He was already dead when his
wife found him. People suspected that this was an act of abio, and on closer
inspection of the corpse they found that the neck was twisted off angle and
therefore assumed that someone had broken his neck. Looking for further evidence
of this, they found that the dead man's toilet had an opening on the back wall,
an opening that they had not seen there before. The dead man's son consulted a
diviner who could `see' that the man had actually been killed in the morning by
an abio, who had grabbed him through this hole in the toilet wall and broken
his neck. Then the attackers had restored him to life again with herbs and
spells so that he could go to the garden as usual. He only died when he came
back, the guilty men having disappeared from the scene of the crime in the
meantime.
In the proceedings that followed, the dead man's `brother', his close
neighbour and friend, was charged with the murder. He allegedly had an
accomplice, a man from the same village, the dead man's son's wife's brother
(his classificatory `mother's brother') and an elder of the Presbyterian
Church. During the court that was held against these two men, it came out that
they had been observed one morning as they were walking together close to the
dead man's house. They had allegedly put something there that attracted the
abio. Another important issue that came up was that the cousin-brother had had
an argument with the deceased over a recent `project' that they had going. They
had been initiated together into a special kind of rom ceremonial (8) that they
had imported from West Ambrym. The dead man had later initiated other men into
this ceremonial without letting his `brother' take part in the profit, and
several men during the court witnessed that he had reason to be discontent with
his `brother' over this. The court ended with a decision that the accused
should pay a penalty to the dead man's son. The two men did not object to the
verdict, and people commented that they were `completely silenced' by the
sentence. They hence accepted it, not because they admitted to having done the
deed, but because it stood as the community opinion, a `social fact' that they
had to agree with after hearing the arguments brought forward.
The fine was merely symbolic, but the worst thing about the sentence was
that they now had to fear the revenge of the dead man's son and other
relatives. Under this threat of becoming victim to another sorcery attack, the
elder immediately took off for the regional town centre and worked on a kava
plantation for six months. Shortly after the incident, the `brother' became
seriously ill--from tuberculosis, according to the doctors--and spent several
months in a town hospital. When he came back, he had quit smoking and kava
drinking, the main activities for socialising among the men in Ranon. People
saw his physical weakness and his retreat from the social scene as clear
evidence that he was admittedly corrupted by the sorcery presence and now
feared that revenge and abio would strike him if he associated frequently with
the men of the village.
When I later discussed the court decision with another Ranon man and
expressed my surprise and disbelief in the verdict, he tried to explain to me
the logic of the outcome. The point was not that the `brother' and mother's
brother had necessarily actually killed the victim themselves; we all knew that
they could not have done it. But it could be that they had expressed themselves
in a manner which indicated that they wanted him dead. If you sit in your
kitchen and talk to your wife about someone in an angry manner and say in anger
that `this man might as well be dead', an abio might actually hear you and
commit the murder on your behalf. Hence, by expressing the will to do other
people harm, you are liable to attract abio who want to harm them. Bad feelings
and anger directed towards others make those people vulnerable to acts of
sorcery and witchcraft. The abio is in a way equivalent to the `diviner' in his
position as a mediator between the two parties in the relationship, but his is
a force that mediates only the negative side of the relationship. It is a
totalising force that can `see' the true character of relationships when there
is disruption and destroy them, just as the `diviner' can see the same disruption
and try to mend it.
So the sorcerer is still around on Ambrym. He has changed from being a
concrete, legitimate, known person to becoming an absented principle that is
attracted to tense personal conflicts. This is then no longer a matter of
anyone and anybody performing sorcery, as Tonkinson earlier maintained was the
case with the `democratisation' of sorcery. At this point, nobody performs
sorcery, but it is as if the image of the vanten hanglam has returned.
Solitary Anger and Communal Fear
In Vanuatu there is, as among the Gebusi
(see Knauft 1985) and in many other places in Melanesia, a clear ideology of
`good company'. On Ambrym, friendship (bulbulan, a word also used for the white
`glue' of the breadfruit) is the overall frame of social interaction, and all
face-to-face interaction goes on with an open smile. Even when facing their
sworn enemies, people act in a mild and open manner. Anger and aggression do
sometimes occur as loud swearing and outright fighting in rare cases when the
steam of anger (lolfeangfeang, lit., inside is burning) gets too high. But it
is when people do not openly display their anger that the abio sets in. The
incident of the two `brothers' who co-operated over the rom project was hence
typical. The man who had been accused had kept the anger to himself, and my
friend who commented on his sentence said that he had expressed his anger only
inside his house in front of his fire. This solitary emotion of anger and
grudges is seen to attract abio. It is often from the interpretation of
`qualisigns' (see Munn 1986: 16-18) that villagers on Ambrym realise that
people among them conceal grudges and that something is wrong. It shows on
their faces, in their general bodily disposition and in their absence from
social interaction. When I discussed the concept of anger with a friend of mine
in Ranon, I asked him how he would know that a man was angry. He explained it
in an example: if he was in a meeting with another man and he told him off
about something or if he strongly disagreed with him, and at the next meeting
the other man did not show up, it meant that he was now angry. His inside was
so hot that he could not show himself, and he now only wanted to fight. He
would then keep to himself until the thing passed over, so that people could
not see his face deformed by this anger. This form of concealed anger is
considered dangerous because it threatens to bring abio into the relationship.
The evidence of this is brought only after the fact, since the anger is always
concealed. This was also probably why the `brother' of the dead man was
accused--because he had kept to himself after his `brother' had sold the rom
rights, and had not said anything about it.
Abio is linked to this emotion of solitary anger, anger that is concealed
and enclosed in the individual. This is illustrated by another incident that
took place during this traumatic time in Ranon. A man who had spent almost his
entire life away from Ranon, living in the capital, suddenly came back to
Ambrym and set up his house in Ranon. It then became known that he had for a
long time planned on claiming the entire ground of Ranon village as his own
land. Through his genealogical tracings before the Island Council of Ambrym he
had even managed to get the court's support for his claims. He now began to
demand money from people. He claimed that all the people in Ranon who had made
money in the tourist traffic and wood carving sales owed him a percentage of
their income and that the villagers owed him more than 10 million vatu (the equivalent
of US$100,000) altogether. These were absurd amounts of money to the villagers,
who did not have any money at all, at least not for open display. The intruder
was seen to walk around the village with an angry grin on his face, never
engaging in friendly interaction with anybody. He instead hastily walked around
to other villages, visiting the feared uphill villages to seek support for his
land claims, promising them money and land if they helped him.
As I was observing the completely improper behaviour of this man, I became
worried that he would be killed or at least beaten up. But the villagers, on
the contrary, treated him in a friendly manner, and supplied him and his family
with food, seemingly taking no notice of his aggressive desire for money. People
shrugged their shoulders, saying, `We'll see what happens' or `Let him carry
on'. When people are in conflict, they are expected to stay quiet, to let the
village court or Island Council settle the matter and to see if `something'
happens. One should not walk around too much when embroiled in a conflict,
since this is a sure sign that one is looking for sorcery. Accordingly, there
is also an unspoken rule that one should not stay overnight in another village
if a member of one's own village is sick. If one happens to be away while
another man gets sick, one should stay put until he recovers. This clearly has
to do with the agency of sorcery and malevolent powers, which are seen to come
from outside of villages while being mediated by inside people to afflict their
co-residents. This intruder in Ranon, who was constantly observed walking
around to other places, became more and more associated with sorcery.
One day, a diviner from a neighbouring village came down to Ranon and
claimed that this man had approached him to buy sorcery that he would use to
kill the three most prominent men in Ranon. A village court was organised for
the next day. The accused man sat down in the middle of a circle, surrounded by
the district population. People then threw out accusations towards him. (9)
claiming that he had tried to purchase sorcery. There was, however, no hard
evidence, and the court decided that he should get away with a slight fine.
After all, he could not be charged with any murders, and no one believed him
really capable of causing sorcery either. The man he had approached about
buying sorcery was, for that matter, now a member of the church, and despite
what the urban dweller had believed, he was not involved in sorcery either. The
accused had to pay a small amount of money to the three men whose names had
figured on a list that he had made, showing the order of the men he was going
to kill. These men, however, also had to give him some money in return, to
release the tension of the accusations brought forward during the court. After
this, people were satisfied, since the accused, now considered to be
`finished', had been spotted as a man looking for sorcery remedies. With the
urban dweller's dispositions having been revealed, and thus no longer hidden,
the people would no longer fear his anger. The to and fro of the payments
appeared to settle the tension. This, then, was regarded as a happy ending,
since the man had been brought forward, taken out from the secrecy of the
kastom people he was allegedly seeing, before anyone had been killed.
Even though the claims of the man, his greed, his clearly displayed anger
and his lust for money were not mentioned during the court, this behaviour had
clearly triggered the accusations levelled at him. By giving him food and
trying to accommodate him in the village, people had sought to deal with his
desires. In the court he was now compensated with return payments so that he
should let his demands on his rivals drop. The accused claimed he was
completely ignorant about these things, and that he knew nothing about sorcery.
He had merely come up from the capital to claim what he saw as his rights, and
was surprised and frightened by these massive charges against him. The
following night he boarded a ship headed for the capital, and he did not return
to Ambrym, dying the year after (allegedly a victim of Ambrym sorcery).
In most of the cases of sorcery that I have encountered, the setting of the
relationship between the accused and the victim is rather straightforward. The accused
had motives for being angry or jealous, due to disagreements over land, money,
rights or women. These motives are enough for people to suspect that the
accused has worked as a channel for sorcerers, either explicitly through
seeking remedies from sorcerers or unknowingly by merely holding grudges. If
people have reason to be angry or jealous of someone, this is enough reason for
the sorcerer to mediate their anger and kill the person. Hence, there is a
clear moral issue at work here. People believe that if they have done anyone an
injustice, by holding back something from him, this can make them victims of
sorcery.
Interestingly, another emotion that comes up in this regard is fear. When
discussing the concept of fear with my informants, it was often in relation to
sorcery. When a person feels that he is being afflicted with some sort of
sorcery, he goes to see a diviner and pays him to express his opinion. The
diviner tries to `see the road' of the victim--the state of his relationships
and whether someone is after him. Often, he will see that someone is actually
trying to hurt the victim, and the prophylactic is that `he must be afraid:
This concept of fear (oulmormor) literally means `the breakdown of the skin'.
The concept of the skin, as a covering or a wrapping that is both
symbolically and pragmatically related to the constitution of communality, is
well known in the Pacific (see Gell 1993). On Ambrym, lu- (the suffix-taking
form of general oul) refers to human skin, to tree bark, to clothes and to leaf
coverings. But this word also comes up in economical usages. The word lumlum
(skinskin) is used for compensation for work or favours, such as midwifery and
personal care that have to be appreciated through return gifts of food. A word
for bride price is wulum vehen (lit., return on the skin of the woman), a term
that refers to the payment and overtaking of the plaited `cover' that the bride
has over her head when she enters her new household.
These usages are tied up with the idea that the skin or the `cover' of a
person is a matter of communal input. The fear--when `the skin breaks'--is an
expression of a need for further interpersonal care. When the diviner tells a
man to be fearful, it is not only a warning that he should watch out, but
implicitly also an expression of his need for communal engagement, both by
opening himself up and giving and by seeking help from others in nursing his
relationships. The emotion itself creates a need to engage socially, and in practice
this means to initiate some way of giving to specific relatives. Significantly,
fear is thus an emotion of the surface, while anger is an emotion of the inside
(lol, inside). Fear opens a person up, while anger is enclosed within him. The
prophylactic against abio is hence fundamentally to engage in mending one's
surface. As a case in point, a businessman in Ranon tried to deal with the
threat of sorcery caused by people's jealousy towards him. He was known to have
a lot of money, and he felt the grudges against him very strongly. At one point
he staged a ceremony wherein he paid his wife's relatives, as well as some
known kastom performers, with gifts of expensive pigs. Through several
similarly costly ceremonies, he in fact gave away everything he had, causing
his entire business to collapse. Giving and fear are hence two aspects of the
same pratico-symbolic principle of avoiding the emotion of anger and thus the
involvement of abio. In a rather simplified manner, we could display the social
dynamics and logic of the Ambrym sorcery arena as in figure 1.
By being fearful and mindful of their communal engagement, victims of
sorcery will then also ideally take away the reason for the attack, admitting
that he or she is withholding something from the social flow. Another version
of this principle often takes place during ceremonies when people are not
satisfied with what they are given to eat. In one case, I attended a small
ceremony for the birth of a child at his father's hamlet. The agnates of the baby's
mother came to receive the tokens of their important relationship to the child.
During this small ceremony, the baby's mother's brother openly expressed his
dissatisfaction with the food presented to him and stated that he wanted to eat
`food that tastes', implying that he wanted pig meat. The father of the child
had to bring forward a pig, which he immediately killed and gave to his wife's
brother. This desire for meat, for an opening up of the man's store of food,
could easily have transformed into anger and then to sorcery, as an alternative
way of `eating' the man's substance.
As we see in figure 1, the assumed negative relationship brought into
question by the sorcery attack does not exist before the misdeed of sorcery is
a fact. The anger of the accused is concealed inside him and is not made
manifest on the level of everyday relationships, and the fear of the victim is
experienced not in a relationship to anyone in particular. It is a matter of
following the moral obligation of the community and of trying to maintain all
relationships in general. The relationship to the accused only comes up in the
meeting with a third party, the diviner, and then the character of the
relationship turns out to be determined by another third party, the abio. It is
hence the abio who first brings the accused and the victim together in concrete
reciprocity, a relationship marked by `negative reciprocity', so to say, and it
is the `clever' who again `sees' this reciprocity and tries to turn it into a
`positive reciprocity' through gifts and communal engagement.
Sorcery and Agency
Like Sartre's man in the window, the abio is here constituted at the very
same time that the relationship between the victim and the accused is
constituted. Like Sartre says, it is not for the third party that the two
people have a relationship, it is through him. Their reciprocity is in fact
constituted though their `mutual ignorance' of each other, but this ignorance
presupposes a knowing third party. Sartre's two workers each know of the possibility
of other workers, but this is only possible if they construct a subjectivity
outside of this ignorance, a knowing subject. Sartre (1991: 103) speaks of
himself standing in the window: `Even my subjectivity is objectively designated
by them as Other (another class, another profession, etc.) and in interiorising
this designation, I become the objective milieu in which these two people
realise their mutual dependence outside me.'
It is exactly in this way that I think the dialectics of sorcery works on
Ambrym. The abio's subjectivity is `objectively designated' by the situation
when the victim and accused become aware of each other. But at the same time it
becomes clear that it is he who has made the linkage between them, in this
socially `objective milieu', and forced them to engage with each other. If they
are lucky, if the act of sorcery is discovered before someone is killed, they
can engage in exchange and make the abio disappear, just as Sartre's man in the
window would disappear out of focus if the two workers saw each other and
started to interact.
There is, of course, a difference here between the two cases, between French
workers and Ambrym villagers, the difference being that people on Ambryrn
realise that this constitution of reciprocity is immensely powerful. Granting
that the third party can constitute relationships, it is understood that he can
also destroy them, and people therefore do not look lightly on the issue of
reciprocity. Hence, as a slightly different version from what Stephen calls
`individuation', we see here that the emotion of anger is logically bound up
with sorcery as part of an `economics of communal substance.' Sorcery is
working as a moral sanction against differentiation, and is therefore also seen
almost as a necessary outcome of immoral behaviour that people themselves have
no control over. If people keep their riches to themselves, they are liable to
become victims of sorcery, and they therefore become afraid and have to engage
in giving and reciprocity. On one level, this is a concern of the relationship
that is afflicted by sorcery--between the victim and the man accused of having
caused it--but the agency of the sorcery act places this relationship in the
grasp of an outsider.
In recent cases on Ambrym, one form of sorcery has been especially
prevalent. The man accused of sorcery is believed to dig up the grave of a
mother who has died in childbirth in order to take a bone from the corpse of
the baby who is buffed with her. He touches the head of the victim with this
bone, and the victim then loses his mind, walking around in a haze. The purpose
of this is to make him drop his defences against the abio, the personified
sorcerer or witch. When abio arrives, the victim will `only wish him welcome',
and the abio is free to do what he pleases with the victim, in the end killing
him and stealing his inner organs. We here realise how the structure of sorcery
on Ambryrn is fundamentally grounded in the relationship between the man
assumed to be using sorcery and his victim, with the murder itself being
committed by a third party. As we have seen, people can commit murders through
these outside agencies both knowingly and unknowingly, but the triadic
relationship works on the premise that the character of the relationship is
dealt with from the outside. The third party hence represents both a principle
of justice and social regulation and an absolute dispossession of control. In
these cases it is hard to believe that anyone would have actually dug up the
graves of dead women; at least in the cases that I have taken part in, I know
that the accused would not have done it. That they are being accused comes as a
shock to them, and they are forced into an awareness of their relationship with
the victim. They are thus being compelled to look at themselves through the
eyes of the totaliser, the third party, who can see that things have gone wrong
between them. The judgement of this triad is then also simultaneously the
totalising view of the community, and it is of course this fact that forces the
accused to take the charges seriously and to leave the community.
There are thus two opposite totalising forces at play here. One is the third
person, the abio, who in the first place opens up the relationship between two
persons by using one of them to gain an entry into killing the other, because
he has been keeping things to himself and caused jealousy and desire. The other
is the judgement of the community on the accused in the court, which `sees' how
the accused has been guilty of keeping his anger and desire to himself. Both of
these acts of totalisation represent moralities, and we could say that while
the abio is a negative force with a positive morality, the communal judgement
is a positive force that removes solitary anger and desire from community, but
which at this point in history has been deprived of its absolute moral force,
which was earlier represented by the high men of the hierarchy.
What we see here is a change in the concrete pattern of agency in the
sociality of the sorcery field. Without people figuring as concrete and
proclaimed abio, the sorcery has instead been internalised into the quality of
relationships themselves. The abio has become a diffuse being, a monster-like
creature that can appear anytime and anywhere, popping up with its superhuman
qualities. Just like the malaria mosquito, this bloodthirsty creature lurks
near human habitations, seeking a way to kill people. But also like the malaria
parasite, it needs the mediation of other people to be able to dwell there.
This is hence a special version of Stephen's `invasion of other selves' that
must be seen to come out of specific historical circumstances.
Sorcery and a Celebration of History
At this time, around the turn of the millennium, when the many sorcery attacks
occurred, Ranon and the surrounding villages were in a phase of a growing
collective consciousness of the history of the place. In 1997 there had been a
big national celebration in Vanuatu, and
also in Ranon, of what was called the `Golden Jubilee'. This was a celebration
of the anniversary of the Presbyterian Church, and there were great festivities
and feasts all over Vanuatu. In Ranon, the
day was celebrated by a performance of theatre, enacting the landing of
Reverend Murray, the first missionary on Ambrym, on the beach of Ranon. A Ranon
man dressed as Murray came ashore on the beach and was immediately attacked by
other actors dressed as `cannibals' However, he managed to talk them into a
peaceful arrangement and was led over to the ground where Murray's house had
been set up in 1886. When the drama ended, Murray was celebrated as a hero, and
a cement monument was erected with his name on it.
In another similarly historically laden event, a cruise ship visited Ranon
in 1998. As the tourists walked ashore on the Ranon beach, a similar drama was
acted out before them. This time the hero of the story was Captain Cook, who,
according to people on Ambrym, landed on the Ranon beach and gave Ambrym its
name. After an attack on the tourists by Ranon men dressed as savages, the
ship's captain was implicitly made to act as Captain Cook, exchanging presents
with the village landowner.
Together with these events, there had been a massive mobilisation of history
in Ranon over the last years to celebrate its moments of success. The history
of the plantation, the recent yachting business and the success in producing
wood carvings for the larger markets only complemented this imagery. During the
very formation of this image of Ranon, during this very process of claiming
origins, Ranon village was also suddenly torn apart by conflict. In the
`essentialisation' of belonging that occurred, the place was riven with
disagreements over who owned the land and who should profit from all of the
money coming into the village. In the process, people had to account for their
origins, their belonging, and this brought into focus names of ancestors, the
history of places, narratives of past ceremonies and rituals, and possessions
of rights in customary emblems.
The past then stood to represent what was right, and the men who knew the
stories of the past would also claim a right to ownership. In this way, the
past had been drawn into the present as an ideal, and it was through the
importation of this ideal into the present that they wanted to construct the
future. It then seemed as if this focus on the past simultaneously brought back
an unwanted remnant of the past, notably abio. This was of course not intended
by anyone, but in the act of `pulling back' secret kastom ceremonies, such as
the rom, and by evoking past conflicts and rights, the larger imagery of the
past was also reignited.
It was in the middle of this period of historical consciousness that the
abio started to turn up. In most cases it killed people and stole their
intestines, but sometimes it also turned up without killing them. In one case,
a married man had for some time been having an affair with a girl from the
neighbouring village. He had managed to hide this from people in his village
for some time, but in the end his wife had suspected him and people had seen
him walking with the girl. One night he woke up in his house in Ranon, his bed
surrounded by men dressed in kastom outfit, penis-wrappers and face paint. He
could not recognise them, but he knew they were abio. They did not speak, but
he understood that they had come to kill him. He however managed to get out of
his house and fled to another village. He stopped seeing his mistress and paid
pigs in compensation to his mistress's agnatic kin. In another similar case, a
man knew that people in his village had for a long time held grudges against
him because he had negotiated several big sales of wood carvings without
sharing the money with his brothers. One night abio men walked up to his house
and knocked on the door. They were dressed in penis-wrappers and face paint,
and clearly intended to abduct him. He had a cunning wife, however, and she
went in between them, holding out her Bible in front of her. This made the abio
retire, and her husband managed to escape. He had to move to another village
after the attack.
This view that abio now appeared before people in the disguise of the kastom
outfit of penis-wrapper and face paint became an accepted idea among villagers.
When picturing the abio to themselves, they now imagined a fierce man dressed
up in a disguise from the past. Of course, most old men do still have complete
kastom equipment, concealed from rats and decay above the fire in their houses.
There the bark belt; the dyed, plaited wrapper; the bow and arrow and clubs
hang under the ceiling, sometimes taken out for dances or to show off for
tourists. But for most of these men it is unthinkable that they should put on
the outfit and walk around to other villages to kill people. No one believes
that they do this either.
It was clear that during these sorcery attacks, the abio was believed to be
a spirit-like creature. Significantly, the abio did not figure as anyone in
particular, and their faces were not known to the victim, since they were in
disguise. It sometimes seemed to me that they were seen as revelations of
ancestral creatures, but in other cases they were described to me as if the
sorcerers were actually village people, only transformed into a double self who
committed the murder in the disguise of kastom without knowing it. In the
disguise, they in a sense personified kastom; they became manifestations of the
kastom `machine', which stands for communal justice, for social control and for
the bitterness of the past over the colonial influence.
Harrison (1993) in this regard makes an interesting point about the effects
of masks and disguises in Papua New Guinea warfare. In Mount Hagen feuds, men
must mask themselves in collective identities, disguising themselves with paint
that takes away their personal appearance and that indicates `the presence of
ancestral ghosts on the men's faces' (Harrison 1993: 114). I believe that this
same effect is suggested by the kastom disguise of the abio, the difference
being that this is not a disguise, but a revelation of the past vanten hanglam
in the present. We must remember that these men had something of a `universal
presence' and a power to mingle with the dreams and actions of anyone. Even
though the people holding this power are now gone, the power itself remains in
society. Their presence is hence a matter of a collective memory, projecting
these powers into the matters that have become pressing in the post-colonial
scene.
Conclusion: History Corning Back
We thus realise that abio today actually represents an absolute loss of
agency. The principle of mediation, the very fundament of reciprocity, kinship
and production on Ambrym, was now transformed into a monster-like figure who
turned up and killed people. With the abio as an abstracted but present third
party, we realise that sorcery represents a key factor in the maintenance and
persistence of the principle of totalisation, despite colonialism's effort to
wipe out totalising agency on the part of the high men. The abio forces people
to act in a Sartrean dialectical intentionality, moving the focus between
singular acts and relations and the totalising potential of their acts.
Abio hence places conflicts into a perspective of history and future
Socialisation, working as a commentary on the larger framework of people's
lives, as a view from the past. The abio, in his disguise from the past, takes
in all perspectives in his overtaking of people's relationships and passes
total judgements on them. It is as if the community's historical `in-itself'
suddenly is exteriorised and set to pass judgement from the outside. What then
becomes clear is that this ideal morality of the past has actually never gone
away. Even though the colonialists did their best to destroy the totalitarian
and hierarchical agency of the vanten hanglam, their morality, surveillance and
control is still functioning underneath the new Christian morality that denies
their presence. Therefore, people immediately also recognised abio when it
struck in Ranon, understanding perfectly well that this was a reaction on the
part of a morality that had come into the background of people's dealings with
money and property. With the history of Ranon in mind, we must then also
acknowledge how the sorcery trial is an institution that passes through the moral
discourses of Christianity and colonialism on its way to its collective
judgement in accusations and courts. The whole situation hence represents a
moral with a twist, expressing itself against the growing tendency amongst
people of `keeping instead of giving', yet simultaneously taking up the tenet
from the Bible that one should not desire other men's possessions or women. I
think that this battle between the communal judgement on desire and the abio's
judgement on selfishness today represents a highly potent tension in the Ambrym
community, a constant re-evaluation of what has been gained and what has been
lost during its specific history.
In practice, however, actual events of sorcery do much more damage than what
these moral tenets would suggest to us, and it is really the community's
admonition against desire that causes people worry. If the victim is dead, the
accused is confronted with an unbearable social pressure, and people go out of
their way not to reveal their desire for other people's things. The force of
abio accusations is very strong, and in most cases the accused also feel that
they are guilty, admitting that they did hold grudges against the dead and that
they did turn away from the relationship in question--they did conspire with
the `devils', so to say. Most people cannot bear these charges, and instead of
trying to mend the damage, they leave. In many instances they have never come
back, instead spending the rest of their lives away from their closest
relatives, outside the Ambrym universe of sharing and jealousy.
NOTES
(1.) The same point has been raised by Sahlins (1972). In his re-evaluation
of Mauss's Maori material, he finds that a concept of the third party is
crucial to the concept of the Maori hau.
(2.) This discussion in this chapter specifically concerns the area of North
Ambrym, a linguistically distinct region with about 30 larger villages, and
around 5,000 inhabitants.
(3.) Missionisation gained a foothold on Ambrym Island around 1870, but
because of the harsh environment, Western missionaries did not stay on the
island for long. Early on, Christianity took a strongly indigenous character,
being mediated by indigenous `teachers' who had been baptised either during
their Australian plantation work or in the central mission stations in Vanuatu.
(4.) This tendency of secrecy involved in Vanuatu
customs has historically given rise to the conception that customs always and
everywhere wrap up malevolent agencies inside the seemingly harmless visible display
of dance, music and magic. Therefore, it is a commonly held idea in Vanuatu that the big arts festival that was held
in the capital in 1980 to celebrate independence after almost 80 years of a
colonial regime caused many deaths because of the release of the power of
kastom from different islands. The presence of Ambrym kastom during the
festival especially caused a lot of anxiety, and the casualties were numerous.
(5.) The mage hierarchy consisted of 10 to 12 different fires in the men's
house, where men belonging to the different ranks would cook their food. The
fires of higher grades were considered dangerous to the lower initiates, and
the food of the higher grades could itself be poisonous to men of lower ranks.
(6.) In many parts of Melanesia, it is difficult to distinguish between
sorcery and witchcraft, and the abio has something of both these Eurocentric
concepts (see also Knauft 1985, Stephen 1987). The missionary Paton translates
able in West Ambrym as `witchcraft', `poison', this being the general term
covering many items `also used of the person' (Paton 1971: 1). When one talks
about abio in Bislama, the pidgin-based national language of Vanuatu, it is framed as posen, indicating that it
refers to using poisonous substances or practices to inflict disease and death
upon others.
(7.) A very similar situation is reported by Williams (1976).
(8.) Rom is a general term for a secret ceremonial cycle that revolves
around the making of a dance costume and the transferring of the costume's
secret knowledge. The initiation culminates in a public display of the costumes
and a dance in which the individual dancers are believed to be overtaken by the
spirits of the rom costumes. The dance itself has a violent appearance, as the
dancers strike the audience with their sticks when they come running into the
dance field. The masks are either hidden or burnt after the ceremonial and must
never be seen by uninitiated people, except during performances. Sometimes the
dancers reappear in other villages to haunt the inhabitants and beat them with
their sticks. During the period of revival of kastom, starting in the 1990s,
the rom has become popular among young men because it gives them the right to
carve the design of the rom mask in wood. Such design carving is popular with
the tourists. The young boys have to pay men who have been previously initiated
for their own initiation.
(9.) Someone had seen him carrying octopus tentacles, a well-known mystical
substance used for poisoning fruit trees, into the village. Six months before
this court, a man had died, supposedly from this form of poison, and another
man claimed that the accused had been responsible for this death. He had even
overheard him saying that the dead man's son should also `die by eating fruit from
the same tree as his father'. Other people also testified to having seen him in
distant villages, asking around for sorcery remedies.
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Knut Rio is a Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology,