Ambiguity in a Charismatic Revival: Inverting Gender, Age and Power Relations in Vanuatu

2021

Oceania

Self Cite

This paper examines how the new material value of land in postcolonial Vanuatu intensifies people's shaping and re‐shaping of claims to autonomy and dependence. Ahamb, like many other villages in Melanesia, originated as a mission community with people moving in from various original homelands. The mix of people from different places facilitated new kinship bonds and senses of community. However, it has also sparked disputes over land rights and leadership, fuelled by the postcolonial government's incentives for converting customary land into registered titles and leases for wealthy investors. The possibility of leasing out land, and preventing others from leasing out land, creates a dynamic where groups increasingly define themselves in terms of landowner clans that exclude outsiders rather than the wider kin networks that include them. Redefinitions of social boundaries generate secondary disputes over dependence and autonomy where care of kin, Christian commitment and future aspirations sometimes prove to be incompatible and in need of negotiation.

Section: Everyday Relations Of Interdependencementioning

confidence: 99%

Asserting Land, Estranging Kin: On Competing Relations of Dependence in Vanuatu

2021

Oceania

Self Cite

“…As a result, visionaries reported that sorcerers from the whole district were flying in to Ahamb in invisible form (suu) to try to kill anyone they could get hold of. 8 These revelations of the intense threat from sorcery came every day for about three months, generating a strong moral and existential panic on the island (see Bratrud 2017;2020). Eventually, however, the strong prayers on the island allegedly led the Holy Spirit to produce a shield of near-complete protection against all 'evil forces' (ol ivil paoa).…”

Section: A Killingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Foregrounding the children also demonstrated the Christian emphasis on humility illustrated in Bible texts where Jesus proclaims that the lowly children are the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:1‐5; Luke 18:15‐17; Mark 10:14‐16). This was interpreted by revival supporters as criticism of the men who engaged themselves in political disputes at the expense of others’ wellbeing (see Bratrud 2019).…”

Section: Revival and The Hope Of Transgressing Divisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is love? The complex relation between values and practice in Vanuatu

Royal Anthropological Inst

2021

Self Cite

The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of 'love', referring to everyday practices of concern and care for others, is a core value for living on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu. However, adherence to the same core value does not necessarily create an ordered social world. Analysing three ethnographic cases, one of them a dispute with fatal consequences, I propose a model for studying values that accommodates ambiguity by uniting the notion of shared social values with individual experience and strategy. A methodological argument is that it is crucial for anthropological studies of values to assess the context for people's shifting interpretations and articulations of value in practice.'It is a surprising thing, because Ahamb is a place of love, right?' George 1 suddenly exclaimed. It was December 2014 and three weeks since the tragic killing of two men feared to be sorcerers on the small island of Ahamb adjacent to the larger island Malekula in the South Pacific republic of Vanuatu. George, Bruce, and I were sitting on a canoe by the island's community church reflecting on the last months' events that proceeded the fatal act. The killing had taken place eight months into a Christian charismatic revival movement that swept over Malekula in 2014. The revival had gained a massive following in its capacity to morally and spiritually renew Malekula's villages through the supposed presence of the Holy Spirit. On Ahamb, the revival arrived during a time of enduring conflicts and division in the community and was frequently talked about as 'cleaning the island' . The movement gave rise to hope about a new future in which the island was reinstated as a place of concern, care, and unity. On Ahamb, these qualities are summed up as 'love' (napalogin in the vernarcular, lav in the national language Bislama), a core value for islanders' living, solidly rooted in both kinship and Christianity. While the importance of love as an ideal is undisputed on Ahamb, what love entails in practice, however, is anything but fixed, and subject to the continuously shifting vantage point of the person assessing a situation. One example of this ambiguity

“…Their role was also connected to the Biblical theorem that one must become humble like a little child to enter the Kingdom of God (see Mark 10:14-16; Luke 18:15-17; Matthew 18:3). For revival supporters, the latter worked as a criticism of the adult men who cultivated their own desires in land claims and political strife, without thinking of others (Bratrud 2019a). As a contrast, the children exemplified the values of humility, obedience and love.…”

Section: The Revival: Recovering Ahamb's Moral Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradoxes of (In)security and Moral Regeneration in Vanuatu and Beyond

2020

JEA

Self Cite

This article examines some paradoxical intersections of fear, security, and morality on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. I take as my ethnographic vantage point a child-led Christian revival movement that developed in the wake of enduring political conflicts on Ahamb during my fieldwork in 2014. The revival began as a process of moral renewal and turned into a security measure protecting the island against sorcerers found to be responsible for many of the island society’s problems. In the article, I make comparisons between the situation on Ahamb and the recent political and cultural crisis in the UK and USA where an increasing number of people perceive their moral order to be under threat. In both contexts, new charismatic actors of governance emerge and gain a following by identifying an ‘other’ as responsible for the crisis while convincingly presenting themselves as the solution. An important reason for these actors’ appeal, I argue, is that they appear to take people’s concerns seriously in a way that established authorities do not. However, in both Vanuatu, the UK, and the USA there is a paradox in how the actors present themselves as holding the solution to people’s insecurities while at the same time shaping the context for their emergence.