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United Nations, Indigenous, Millennium development goals, Well-being,

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In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.

"Despite the fact that indigenous Australians are known to be frequently mobile over the short term, statistical information regarding this population movement is grossly deficient.... This paper examines various means by which short-term population movement can be quantified to yield aggregate indicators of demographic impact. First, census data are used to establish the rate and pattern of inter-regional, short-term displacement. This reveals regional urban centres as net recipients of temporary residents while most rural areas experience temporary absenteeism. Secondly, results from household surveys are reported stressing the importance of including visitors to households in the estimation of service populations. Thirdly, administrative data on occupancy in urban hostels are used to derive indicators of the duration of movement."

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An ethnographic account of sorcery accusation, violence, and subsequent community discussion provides a basis to explore the 'moral economy of agency' that shapes expressions and interpretations of personhood in Vanuatu. Mediated historically by transforming social, political, and economic circumstances, agency is demonstrated to be patterned according to culturally specific ontological and moral schemes. Key local categories of embodied personhood -including man ples (man place), man wan (man one), and jelus (jealousy) -are examined to elucidate two relationally entwined analytic categories, referred to as 'distributive' and 'possessive' agency. Such categories, it is argued, fundamentally shape expressions and interpretations of moral being and doing, including by providing a basis for identifying morally abject expressions of personhood. Taking seriously the important role of spiritual agency within such moral economies, this paper provides new ethnographically grounded insights into the ways in which communities and individuals negotiate moral being within transforming contexts of economic and sacred power.