Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu

An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym

Annelin Eriksen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317130024
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on cultural change and the socio-political movements in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, this book uses both anthropological and historical analysis to examine the way the relationship between gender and Christianity has shaped processes of social change. Based on extensive research conducted over several decades, it is one of the few books available to focus on Vanuatu and on the impact of Christianity in Melanesia more generally - as well as on the significance of gender relations in understanding these developments. Providing a model for understanding and comparing processes of change in small-scale societies, this fascinating book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the ethnography of Melanesia and in issues related to contemporary cultural change and gender more generally.

Chapter 1

Gender, Christianity and Change

Introduction

Sorcery and Christianity

People in the village of Ranon in the northern part of Ambrym were, by the end of 1999, disturbed by a great increase in sorcery (see also Rio 2002b). There had been an increase in the number of deaths, more sickness, and in particular skin infections were not healing as they should. The fruit trees were not producing as much as they usually did, and, the most important indication of sorcery, people were generally much more antagonistic toward each other. It has been reported that the approach of the millennium for many people, in the Pacific and elsewhere, was tied to a fear of what was perceived as a liminal period of transition (see for instance P.J. Stewart and A. Strathern 2000a). In Ranon however, there was little, if any, talk about year 2000 as an important bellwether of change. Rather, the focus here was on the past: what should they do with this sudden increase in a kind of sorcery they considered belonging to the past? People in Ranon have been Christian for almost a century and sorcery is, for them, part of a world they characterize as dangerous and belonging to pre-Christian ancestors.

In order to deal with the sudden and dramatic turn of events in Ranon in 1999 a village court was organized. The whole village and people from neighbouring villages gathered in Ranon’s communal square early one morning. The most important and recognized chiefs from the area were all present, sitting together at the end of an oval circle of men, women and children; everyone was there. There had been many rumours, and people were frightened, some even expressed their wish to leave the village completely, as they believed it might be cursed. Now they gathered to learn the facts.

The eldest, most prominent chief in the area gave an opening speech summing up people’s anxieties and pointing out that the local development was going in the wrong direction. Several other people spoke as well, and not only the chiefs. They were mostly men who voiced their opinions as to who the sorcerers were. At midday however, when the angry discussion had turned to naming the sorcerers, a brother of one of the accused sorcerers and a member of a relatively new Church known as the ‘Holiness’, asked everyone present to swear on the Bible that they would only tell the truth. ‘We are Christians’ he said ‘we should follow the rules of the Bible’. This statement implied a sudden shift from discussing ‘who was responsible’ to discussing ‘how to deal with it’. The man from the ‘Holiness’ church wanted to establish the Church as the framework for the event. However, this was not an easy matter. A man with a reputation for knowledge of kastom1 rose and replied aggressively: ‘We are not women. We can make no use of the Bible here’.

This event is indicative of how people on Ambrym see Christianity as embodying a contrasting and alternative logic in relation to a pre-Christian cosmology wherein control of sorcery was more important than nowadays. Moreover, alternative logics such as this are also gendered. The court case was an effort to establish a ground wherein sorcery, as something outside and contrasting the church, could be discussed, but this, as was overtly expressed by the kastom-man, was not perceived to be a matter for women. As will become apparent throughout the chapters of this book, Christianity has seriously challenged what we might call the male hegemony on Ambrym, implying the rise of alternative values.

Understanding Cultural Change and New Social Formations

The literature on social and cultural change in Melanesia, especially in relation to Christianity, is growing. Papua New Guinea ethnographers in particular have become more focused and interested in understanding the cultural and social implications of Christianity (see Barker 1992, 1996; Douglas 2002, 2003; Jebens 2005; Robbins 2004; Stewart and Strathern 1997, 2000a,b,c, Robbins, Stewart and Strathern 2001) as well as of changing ideas of personhood, gender and agency (Robbins and Wardlow 2005; Wardlow 2006). This book contributes to this growing and important literature in two distinct ways. Firstly, the book concerns Vanuatu, which provides an interesting comparison to Papua New Guinea, since Vanuatu has a completely different colonial history. Whereas colonialism came very late to certain areas of Papua New Guinea, and the Highlands in particular, Vanuatu has over a hundred years of colonial history and knowledge of Christianity. People in island Melanesia became entangled very early on in relationships and encounters that took them across the sea to new places or created inroads for new ideas and practices (Hviding 1996, 2003). However, in Vanuatu’s case, with the English-French Condominium government, the country was colonised by not only one European power, but two, creating a somewhat less efficient colonial power than existed in the ‘one-nation’ colonies where the hegemony of one power could develop with less interference from other nations. An understanding of changing systems of meaning and forms of social organization must take into consideration this particular colonial history.

Robbins (2004) has recently described the incredible transformations of cultural ideas taking place among the Urapmin of the western highlands of Papua New Guinea. Having had only two decades of exposure to colonial Christianity at the time of their Independence in 1975, the Urapmin converted to a charismatic form of Pentecostal Christianity and became obsessed by ideas of a morally good life according to Christian ideals, controlling their sinfulness. According to Robbins, their encounter with colonialism and Christianity was so dramatic and to some extent shocking – removing them for instance from their pre-colonial position of importance in the regional ritual system – that they completely changed their perceptions of the world. Through a process Robbins terms ‘humiliation’ (see also Robbins and Wardlow 2005) the Urapmin changed their worldview radically. My analysis of Christianity in Vanuatu also deals with cultural and social change, but not of the radical kind Robbins’s account reveals. Robbins, drawing on Dumont (1980), shows that the dominant cultural values among the Urapmin, that of the ‘the relation’, became encompassed, and was thus replaced as a core cultural value by a completely new and utterly contrasting value. It was the value of the individual as an autonomous being (especially in the face of God on the last day) that became formative for a new conception of self among the Urapmin.

My analysis draws attention to how an already existing but not dominant cultural value gained in prominence as a result of the mission and the church. I show how Ambrym men and women, not in the face of rapid, humiliating and shocking change, but rather in the course of several decades, reformulated their cultural system. Here I arrive at the second distinct characteristic of my analysis. In understanding the role Christianity plays in Ambrym cultural values and social organization, I have emphasized a perspective on gender. The chapters of this book will outline the double character of many principles of social organization as well as cultural values and ideas. I show how kinship, migration, ceremonies and rituals all reveal two contrasting but complementary forms. One of those forms I have termed male, the other I have termed female. A value hierarchy is therefore always according to a gendered form. Toward the end of this book I show how the traditionally encompassed social form has become primary, and how the male form is losing ground. The new value that gains in prominence is therefore not a completely new introduction, but a social form that has been foregrounded in the encounter with Christianity.

In this book I will outline these two contrasting forms and show how they play out in different parts of Ambrym social life. Before doing so however, I will begin at the beginning with how I encountered Ambrym sociality.

Ranon

My first encounter with Ambrym was late one night in October 1995. My husband, Knut Rio, and I had travelled from the capital Port Vila to the airport in West Ambrym on one of the smallest planes operated by Vanair. It was hot and humid, and the plane was crowded, not only with people, but also with chickens and small piglets. It was heading towards Santo in the northern part of Vanuatu as its final destination, and had already landed on several of the islands between Efate and Ambrym. We were dizzy but relieved when we landed safely on the small clearing between the coconut groves and villages on West Ambrym. My husband had already visited the island the year before when he first travelled to Vanuatu and met with Director Ralph Regenvanu at the Cultural Centre in the capital Port Vila. Before carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu, a research agreement with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre [VCC] has to be worked out. This agreement secures the cooperation between the VCC and the researchers and makes sure that what the researchers learn is reported in the form of a written document in Bislama and returned to the place where the researcher stayed. The VCC might also ask the researcher to do some work for the VCC while in the field. For its part, the VCC facilitates the researcher’s work as far as possible, by for instance suggesting fieldwork sites particularly relevant to the ethnographer’s interest. Regenvanu had recommended Ambrym to us. I was interested in how small-scale societies with intricate structures of social organization have sustained and changed through colonial and postcolonial times. Ambrym seemed the perfect location. Ever since Rivers’s (1915) and Deacon’s (1927) account of Ambrym kinship, this particular social system has been the subject of anthropological interest (Seligman 1927; Radcliffe Brown 1927; Lane and Lane 1956, 1958; Löffler 1960; Scheffler 1970; Patterson 1976).

Map 1.1 Vanuatu

As we arrived on Ambrym that afternoon in 1995, it was a comfort to know that one of us had been on the island before and could look for some familiar faces. Knut recognized a smiling man at the outskirts of the airport. He was the north Ambrym chief responsible for managing the community-owned speedboat that connects people in the north to the west. It was already late afternoon and, travelling with an infant, we decided to hurry aboard the boat in order to reach the north before nightfall. By the time we approached the beach in Ranon, however, it was completely dark. We could only hear the excited voices on shore, children laughing and shouting, men talking and dogs barking. We were led through a crowd of yelling children and entered, at the very outskirts of the village, a low-roofed kitchen house. Men and women with children were sitting on mats in front of the fire. We were fed and before long installed in our own thatch-roofed sleeping house.

Photo 1.1 Ranon village, seen from the sea

We stayed in the household of Billy Bong and his wife Nelly. Billy was a fieldworker2 for the Cultural Centre, and it was this connection that enabled us to rely on their hospitality during this visit and the years to come. During the first field period we slept in Billy and Nelly’s elder son’s house. He was married to a woman from the island of Pentecost and was living in Port Vila, and only occasionally needed the house for himself. Later however, we built our own house in the village close to Billy and Nelly’s house. During the first period in Ranon from October 1995 to April 1996 I stayed close to the house and always in the village. Caring for an infant while doing fieldwork made me quite familiar with the paths from my house to Nelly’s kitchen house, and also to my next door neighbour Serah, who cared for a child of exactly the same age as mine, and to the house of Mamu, who was an experienced grandmother and always knew what to do for fever and children’s lack of appetite. Serah, also a fieldworker for the VCC, was helpful whenever I wanted to visit a place or when I heard of a marriage or another ceremony I wanted to observe.

The company of women and my involvement in their daily lives, the gossip and their concerns, made me adopt a female perspective on life in the village. The analysis of this book is very much influenced by the perspective these women presented as we talked about daily concerns.

Movement, Marriage and Women

My initial general interest in studying how small-scale communities have sustained and changed their social organization as the colonial state, the independent nation state, and the global economy pushed them in new directions, was soon influenced by a particular focus on movement, marriage and women. This was so because women were always keen on discussing marriage arrangements. They discussed this among themselves all the time and were always eager to answer my ignorant questions on how and why certain marriages were arranged. I came to realize that an understanding of my initial interest depended on a deeper understanding of how social organization connected to women’s agency in movement and marriage. My impression of the vital role women’s mobility played was enhanced as I conducted an historical field survey on demography and movement of people in the last generations. As will become apparent in Chapter two and three, women play a crucial role in creating ‘roads’ for different kinds of movement, and not only roads for people, but roads for social institutions as well. When asking for instance about the first churches and how different villages became Christian, I not only realized the tight connection between demographic movement over the last century and mission history, but also the role women played in these processes. Women, who moved when marrying and brought the church along, revealed a pattern in my historical investigations. It was as if my first interest in women’s role in marriage arrangements unravelled, for me, a new dimension of how social life works on Ambrym. I ‘found’ a female social structure. In this book I try to analyse how this female social structure worked as counter logic to a more immediate, and perhaps more outspoken social structure, a ‘male’ social structure. In relation to kinship for instance, the focus on place and on patri-lineages, is what I call a male social structure. The female alternative, as I will show in the next chapter, breaks down the monopoly of the patri-lineages in setting the premise for new relationships. Unravelling female agency in relation to movement then also revealed an alternative social logic.

Anthropological analyses of the region have often taken marriage as the point of departure when addressing the relations between the genders (for instance, M. Strathern 1972; Josephides 1985; Gewertz and Errington 1987; Kelly 1993). Women’s roles as ‘in-between’ or ‘outside’ in relation to male land holding groups have been emphasized. In this book I will show that connection-making and movement are assets that have social recognition and importance within a value hierarchy where landholding is not the primary asset. M. Strathern (1988) has suggested, in referring to the relations between men and women among the Sa speakers on Pentecost, the island north of Ambrym, that ‘One could argue that the differentiated spheres of male and female activity afford a framework for the conceptualization of a dual process in social life’ (1988, 82). The creation of alternative universes wherein the value hierarchy of the one is reversed in the other, points to such a dual process.

It is important however to point out that when I talk about female and male social structures, I refer to ideal types. In this book I will single out certain values and certain practices that I argue become key elements in this model of a gendered social structure: I show how the value of connectedness, of emphasising the relation more than the personification of the relation, of emphasising the road more than the place, is female gendered. However, I would have no trouble finding women who would be ideal personifications and women who have become icons of their place. My intention in singling out female values is not to argue that no woman can do otherwise and act according to other values. Rather, I argue that these are the values that are defining the ‘female’. Women can, however, act according to other ideals. Women can act according to male ideals and thus seek personifications and become more place bound than mobile. It is a fundamental premise for my argument that gender is not only a characteristic of the individual. By this I do not only mean that gender is more than biological sex. It is well known and accepted in feminist theory that gender is different from ‘sex’ and that gender is ‘performed’ more than ‘born’, although the degree is disputed (Butler 1990; Grosz 1990). Paradoxically, even the most constructionist positions in feminist theory seem to focus primarily on gender as an aspect of the body and of the individual. My claim is that we need to recognise the relevance of gender for more than an understanding of individual gender play. More importantly, when gender is seen as fundamentally related to individual properties (whether biological or constructed/performed) this might be characteristic of a cultural construction where the individual plays the role as the dominant value. Within these cultural frames, gender becomes individualised. In cultures that are not organized around the notion of the individual as a fundamental value, gender is not basically an attribute of the individual. In line with a dominant trend in Melanesian anthropology (M. Strathern 1988) I will outline in the following chapters how relations as well as persons are gendered. More than this, gender on Ambrym is the one difference that organizes other differences.

When I discuss male and female social structures, forms and values, I am thus not talking about what all women and all men d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface Fixity, Movement, and Change: An Ambrym Kaleidoscope
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Language
• 1 Gender, Christianity and Change
• 2 Kinship, Place and Movement
• 3 Origin Routes: Historical and Contemporary Relocations on Ambrym
• 4 Women on the Move
• 5 The Loud and the Silent Stories: Female Agency and Mission History
• 6 Women, Churches and Communities
• 7 From Churches to Councils and Cults
• 8 On Council, Development and Leadership
• 9 The Social Dynamics of Ambrym in a Comparative Perspective
• References
• Index