Janus and the siren's call: kava and the articulation of gender and modernity in Vanuatu

Abstract

In the South Pacific Islands of Vanuatu, it is often said that ‘Women can't drink kava because kava is a woman, and a woman can't take back a woman’. Such proscriptive reasoning relates to deeply rooted cosmological understandings of fertility, sacred power, and the nature of sexed bodies. They also evoke the fraught situation regarding gender relations and kava‐drinking practice that has emerged through Vanuatu's transition from colonial outpost to independent nation‐state. This article takes an ethno‐historical approach to address critically the complex sense of rupture that infuses everyday kava‐related talk and activity in Vanuatu. In so doing it reveals important insights into the dynamic relationship between ‘kastom and its others’ in both ni‐Vanuatu and academic discourse, across gendered identities, and in embodied practice. Résumé Dans les îles du Vanuatu, dans le Pacifique Sud, on dit souvent que « les femmes ne peuvent pas boire du kava parce que le kava est une femme, et une femme ne peut pas reprendre une femme ». Ces raisonnements prescripteurs sont liés à des notions cosmologiques profondément enracinées de fertilité, de pouvoir sacré et de la nature des corps sexués. Elles évoquent également la situation de tension entourant les relations de genre et la pratique de consommation du kava qui s’est constituée lors du passage du Vanuatu du statut de poste colonial avancéà celui d’État‐nation indépendant. Le présent article décrit sous un angle ethno‐historique critique le sens complexe de la rupture qui imprègne le discours et les activités quotidiens concernant le kava au Vanuatu. Il jette ainsi un important éclairage sur la relation entre « la kastom et ses Autres » dans le discours des ni‐Vanuatu aussi bien que des chercheurs, entre les identités sexuées et dans la pratique incarnée.

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