Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophesies, and a Battle Over Sorcery 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

Section: A Killingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Royal Anthropological Inst

2021

Self Cite

“…Most community activities are organized in the church, whether they are committeesfor which there is one for just about every area of Ahamb life, fundraisers, or the weekly public meetings held after Sunday service. Since Christianity was introduced in the early 1900s, the church has also been the main framework through which Ahamb people have dealt with perils, from disputes and violence to sorcery and dangerous spirits (Bratrud 2017). However, over the past two years, church leaders too have become involved in the island's political disputes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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.

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

2019

Ethnos

Self Cite

During a Christian revival movement on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu in 2014, gender-and agebased hierarchies were inverted as women and children were given divine authority and men were positioned as threats to sociopolitical renewal. In analysing these events, I develop Kapferer's insights on the inherent openness and unpredictability of ritual dynamics.However, I argue that such openness and unpredictability can also be tied to external factors including participants' multiple and sometimes incompatible values and interests. Attempts to resolve ambiguities in ritual may eventually feed back into ritual ideology and practice in ways that make participants' experiences disturbing and problematic rather than orderly and supportive.