Artifak: Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu 9781789200430

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Artifak

Artifak Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu

 Hugo DeBlock

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Hugo DeBlock

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without wri en permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-042-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-043-0 ebook

 Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction. Art and Commodity in Vanuatu

1

Chapter 1. Art, Anthropology, and Tourism

27

Chapter 2. Arts of Vanuatu

53

Chapter 3. Making Authenticity

86

Chapter 4. Selling Authenticity

134

Chapter 5. Commodities and Authenticity

164

Chapter 6. Museums

195

Conclusion. Artifak: The Value of Art in Vanuatu

213

References

222

Index

261

 Illustrations 0.1. Bwerang in the Ethnographic Collections of the University of Ghent, Belgium. 180–46.5 cm, tree fern and clay, Inv. GE 69, donated 1936 (published in Demoor-Van den Bossche 1983: 167, figure 1; Dewolf 1992: 20; Bruyninx and van Damme 1997: 58–59; © Ghent University Museum).

2

0.2. Atingting and bwerang awaiting shipment to France on Fona beach, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

3

0.3. Atingting and bwerang (detail) as in figures 0.1 and 0.2, Fona beach, North Ambrym, Vanuatu, 2009 (photograph by the author).

3

0.4. Group of rambaramp effigies in the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, dramatically approaching the viewer from the dark (photograph by the author).

9

0.5. Map of Vanuatu. Province names are abbreviated island names: for example MALAMPA for Malakula, Ambrym, and Paama (source: www.nationmaster.com).

22

0.6. The house used by the anthropologist in Fona, North Ambrym. It was built a couple of years ago with the financial assistance of Mary Pa erson (photograph by the author).

23

1.1. Group of South Malakulan masks at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Slit-drums standing across the exhibition hall are reflected in the glass (photograph by the author).

35

1.2. Group of Nalawan figurines and puppets at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Slit-drums, the public, and Paris reflected in the glass (photograph by the author).

36

Illustrations •

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2.1. Tofor of Fanla painting an atingting in North Ambrym in the late 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

69

2.2. Mage ne sagaran tree fern figure owned by Chief Sekor of Saint-Louis, Halhal Fantor har, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

77

2.3. Copy kwetie tamat just like the one in the Louvre Museum in the garden of Father Luke Dini, Paradise Bungalows, Ra Island, Banks Islands, 2009 (photograph by the author).

79

3.1. Moise Wobung shipping his sculptures-on-pedestals to his cousin in Port Vila, Fona beach, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

92

3.2. Miniature wooden carvings of slit-drums and bwerang at one of several handicra markets in town, all in Ambrym style, Port Vila, 2006 (photograph by the author).

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3.3. Souvenir stall in Port Vila harbor during a P&O cruise ship stop, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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3.4. Handicra stall on Wala Island during P&O cruise ship stop and transaction of a miniature carved stone, Wala Island, 2006 (photograph by the author).

94

3.5. Banks Island food knives, carved by Eli Field, Turmalau, Vanua Lava, 2009 (photograph by the author).

97

3.6. Statue carved by Franklin Woleg, on Mota Lava, remade a er visual repatriation (photograph by the author).

100

3.7. Norbert and his fellow grade-taker claiming their mage ne sagaran grade on the platform, Halhal Fantor, North Ambrym, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author). 106 3.8. The payment for the mage ne sagaran grade, a tusked boar, being paid to the ritual sponsors, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author).

107

3.9. Chief Sekor leading the rom dancers onto the har at Halhal Fantor, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author).

110

3.10. Young boy in self-made coconut shell mask chasing his friends, Ranmuhu, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

111

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3.11. The Unmet performance group from Northwest Malakula, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

116

3.12. Herna Abong and his men during a performance by Lamap at the Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

117

3.13. Masked gulong dance by the Lamap performance group, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

117

3.14. The stick dance by the Avok performance group, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

119

3.15. Silent passage of copy items for sale at the Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

122

3.16. Vao dancer at the National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

125

3.17. Southwest Bay dancers among the crowds on the performance grounds of Parliament House, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

126

3.18. BTMR group rom and four female dancers entering the performance grounds of Parliament House, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

127

3.19. Sekor and Eli Tiworwor leading the rom dancers, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

128

3.20. Copy items for sale a er being walked by Herna Abong, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

131

4.1. Detail of the head of a painted tree fern figure in a pile of slit-drums and tree fern figures awaiting shipment to France, Fona beach, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

144

4.2. Painted tree fern figure for the “double” mage ne sagaran grade-taking of Norbert Nabong at the National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

145

Illustrations •

ix

4.3. Unpainted tree fern figure along the streets in town, on the corner of Lini Highway and Avenue Winston Churchill, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

146

4.4. Two small atingting carved by Gemgem, one of which is an atingting rom, not shipped to France and le behind on Fona beach, 2009 (photograph by the author).

146

4.5. Banks Islands sculptures in wood and tree fern, price tagged on the side of the festival grounds, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

148

4.6. Rom placed on sticks in Fanla in the late 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

153

4.7. Decoration of a rom mask in Fanla in the late 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

154

4.8. Rom masks on sticks, for sale outside of Chief Sekor’s rom nakamal, Halhal Fantor har, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

155

4.9. The collector David Baker seated between the Tomman slitdrums that allegedly killed him, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

160

5.1. North Ambrym incised bamboo flutes showing new designs, made by Lafu of Nehatling, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

167

5.2. “Un Jour de Sabbat à Malicollo,” in A. Reuze, “Un Jour de Sabbat à Malicollo” (Journal des voyages, July 1913; reproduced in Boulay 2001: 78).

169

5.3. Tain Mal and Tofor looking at a photograph of Tofor taken by Kal Muller, Fanla, 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

170

5.4. Worwor of Fanla, North Ambrym, photograph posted on Flickr in 2007 (copyright by Eric Lafforgue, reproduced with kind permission).

171

5.5. The lengnangulong sacred stone, exhibited at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre, Paris (photograph by the author).

181

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5.6. Room view of the Pavillon des Sessions, Musée du Louvre: on the left are three Banks Islands tree fern figures, on the right, “the blue man” or trrou körrou. In the back, right, is the lengnangulong sacred stone from Magam (photograph by the author).

184

5.7. Malakulan spearheads for sale at Gallery Jean-Yves Coué. The one on the left was described as a masterpiece and was for sale at ten thousand euros. Parcours des Mondes, Paris, 2011 (photograph by the author).

189

5.8. South Malakulan rambaramp effigy (former Fowler collection) for sale at forty-five thousand euros at Gallerie Ivana de Gavardie, Parcours des Mondes, Paris, 2011 (photograph by the author, taken with kind permission of Kevin Conru).

190

5.9. Handles of two knives carved by Eli Field in the nertum, or Janus-faced, style, exact replicas of Speiser’s knife in this style that he collected on Gaua and wrongly labeled “the Gaua knife,” Turmalau, Vanua Lava, 2009 (photograph by the author).

192

6.1. Group of slit-drums and tree fern figures from Malakula and Ambrym at the Musée du Quai Branly (photograph by the author).

202

6.2. North Ambrym slit-drum: detail of the back of the head of the drum, bearing a design that is now claimed by Justin Ramel (photograph by the author).

203

 Acknowledgments The research for this book was undertaken in Vanuatu, for longer and shorter periods of time between 2008 and 2013, while I was affiliated with The University of Melbourne. I wish to thank the University of Melbourne for various sources of funding. At Melbourne, also, I wish to thank Mary Pa erson, for sharing her knowledge and for introducing me into the family that she worked with and has known for many years in North Ambrym, and Martha MacIntyre, for being instrumental in the last stages of writing up the research. I also wish to thank my Melbourne-Vanuatu peer Benedicta Rousseau as well as Julienne Corboz, Gillian Tan, Bob Swinburn, Nadiya Chushak, Mari Fitzpatrick, Megan Lafferty, and Anaïs Gerard. At UC Berkeley, thank you to my former teachers Laura Nader and Nelson Graburn, for your continuing support and trust, and to my Berkeley Anthropology of Tourism group of peers and friends. In Belgium, home, thank you to my first teacher Elze Bruyninx, former chair of Ethnic Arts at the University of Ghent, who unfortunately died too soon to see this work come to an end, and to Wilfried Van Damme, who was the first one to introduce me to the anthropology of art. In Vanuatu, I owe a special thank you to former Vanuatu Cultural Centre directors Ralph Regenvanu and Marcellin Abong; to current director Richard Japuneyo; to Cultural Centre staff members Sam Jacob Kapere, Ambong Thompson, and Evelyne Bulegih; and at the library, to Anne Naupa and June Bela Norman. At the Malakula Cultural Centre, thank you to Fred Numa Longga. Of my Vanuatu peers across the world, a bigfella thank you to Michael Franjieh and Daniela Kraemer. Thank you also to Sarah Lightner in those first instrumental years in Vanuatu, to Tessa Fowler, and to former National Geographic photographer Kal Muller for the correspondence and for providing me access to his Ambrym and Pentecost photographs of the 1960s–1970s.

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My utmost gratitude goes to the people in Vanuatu who participated in the research and who showed hospitality and generosity throughout my fieldwork. I am deeply thankful to my host family in North Ambrym for taking me in and providing me with shelter, support, and advice. Thank you Chief Johnson Lengkon Koran in Fona, Jenny, Jeffrey, Masi, Sandy, Tarsisia, Philippe, George, Ronald, Lisa, Ine e, and li le stronghed Tewar, always by my side. A bigfella thank you to Gemgem in Bwehaltalam for sharing his wisdom and knowledge with me, and to Moise, Petronilla, and young Johnson. Thank you to Saksak Batokon in Fansar, Chief Justin Ramel and David Jacky Tubuvi in Magam, Chief Sekor in Saint-Louis, Norbert Nabong in Olal, Benedicta Lising Tiningkon and Job in Halhal Tawor, Lafu and Jacky Sawan and Annie Willy in Nehatling, Chiefs Magekon and Bongmeleun, James Bae Roromal and Freddie Bule in Fanla, and Solomon Laan Douglas in Ranon. Thank you also to the Back to My Roots group of performers Eli Tiworwor, Alexis Massing, André Sawan, Gratiano Tamtam, Pierre Saksak, Michel Saksak, Frederick Bongnaim, Touissant Bongnaim, Armand Kitor, Ignace Tibal, Pascal Linban, Roland Lakon, Pascal Melip, Daniël Lewa, Louis-Marie Bule, Atel Thomas, Clement Kilfan, Noël Lolo, Elysee Malmeleun, Lucy Malihar Tiningkon, Marie Vianey, Julia Maku, and Eliane Yewkon, and to Moses Toa, Stuart Nato, and Timothy Taitai from Ambae and Roy Apia from Epi Island. On Malakula, I owe a special thank you to Jacky and Herna Abong and their families in Lamap, for warmly welcoming me during my time there. In Lamap, also, thank you to Daniël and Fabrice Leymang. On Avok, thank you to Chief Andrew Nakel and my friend Frank Whitley. In North Malakula, I wish to thank big nambas Chief Virembat of Unmet. In the Banks Islands, I thank Eli Field in Turmalau and Chief Godfrey Manar in Vureas Bay and Reginald Tarilaka in Sola, Vanua Lava. On Ra, I thank Father Luke Dini, Rona, Pa eson, Charles Wotlalan, Roger Ryan, Basil Noah, Chief Johnson Wotleling, Chief Joseph Golden, Frank Wetford, Joshua Alfred, and my brother Silas. In Port Vila, I thank Wilfred and Helen Koran for their hospitality, George Bumseng, Kathy Nifia, and artists Emmanuel Wa , Sero Kauatonga, Julie e Pita, and Moses Jobo. In Sion, Switzerland, I owe gratitude to César Tofor, son of the renowned Tofor of Fanla for the correspondence. Of the tourists I met during fieldwork, I wish to thank Sylvie Egro i and Michel Kirch and Jim and Katie Coolbaugh. Everyone, thank you, merci beaucoup, tangkiu tumas, Lo Not Ambrym, sipa gatlam, Your son, Luan

 Introduction Art and Commodity in Vanuatu On arrival in a small boat at the village of Fona, in North Ambrym, for the first time in August 2009, I was immediately confronted with a black sand beach piled up with the typical North Ambrymese slit-drums and bwerang, or tree fern figures, to be shipped off, in that case to Paris, France. Such a scene sums up quite accurately what I came to study in Vanuatu. So, was it really going to be this easy, or was I just very lucky to have come at this particular moment? As it turned out, it was going to be both easy and difficult at the same time. North Ambrym is indeed very much still piled up with slit-drums (the easy part), but, as I later learned, most of them do not get sold so easily as was the case that one evening when I arrived for the first time (the not so easy part). In turn, this provided opportunities to investigate why local people in North Ambrym today still produce slit-drums and what really happens to them if they are not shipped off to the West a er some time. I say “a er some time” because, ideally, drums stand in North Ambrym villages or on beaches of yacht anchorages such as that of Nobul, just north of Fona, or sometimes in their rightful place, on a har or ritual ground away from the villages, because they need to age, or at least look old, before they are sold and shipped off to Australia, Europe, or the United States. Buyers who come in do not really have to stress this anymore. Local people know as well as anyone that their drums, in North Ambrym language called atingting, need to look old if they want to get a good price for their frozen-in-time “masterpieces of tribal art.” Years before my arrival on the island of Ambrym, as a student in art history, my interest in the arts of Vanuatu was sparked by the collections of Vanuatu materials in European museums and by one tree fern figure specifically, which was a ributed to Southeast Ambrym and kept in the ethnographic collections of my home university, the University of Ghent,

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Belgium.1 The Ghent bwerang is a significant piece for the collection. According to the inventory, it was donated to the university by a certain Mr. Hayois in 1936. Whether it is from Southeast Ambrym is questionable, considering that this part of the island was Christianized from early on (Tonkinson 1968, 1981). Also, in terms of formal components, the position of arms and hands, worked out figuratively, would be considered atypical for Ambrymese sculpture. According to Marcellin Abong, former director of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, who visited the collections in Ghent in 2008, it more probably originates from North Ambrym, although he also admi ed not having seen this type of figure before. When I showed a photograph of the figure in North Ambrym during fieldwork, people agreed that it is “probably a very old one” and that it is of a kind “not seen before.” Traditional art history refers to it as a piece in the glabella style (e.g., Demoor-Van den Bossche 1978, 1983; Bruyninx and Van Damme 1997), a er the pointed pronunciation of the eyebrows in the glabella, giving the “face” of the statue a moon-shaped appearance with pursed lips. In the le eye cavity, some of the clay remains on which the paint was a ached with which such figures were originally decorated.

Figure 0.1. Bwerang in the Ethnographic Collections of the University of Ghent, Belgium. 180–46.5 cm, tree fern and clay, Inv. GE 69, donated 1936 (published in DemoorVan den Bossche 1983: 167, figure 1; Dewolf 1992: 20; Bruyninx and van Damme 1997: 58–59; © Ghent University Museum).

Introduction •

3

Figure 0.2. Atingting and bwerang awaiting shipment to France on Fona beach, North Ambrym, Vanuatu, 2009 (photograph by the author).

Figure 0.3. Atingting and bwerang (detail) as in figures 0.1 and 0.2, Fona beach, North Ambrym, Vanuatu, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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This book is concerned with the meaning and value of material culture in Vanuatu, Southwest Pacific. In this book, I add to discussions on intellectual cultural property rights and the reproduction of knowledge and, more specifically, its material component, the reproduction, use, and sale of what we call art and what local people in Vanuatu today refer to as artifak (artifact). I do this in a context o en described as cultural revival or revitalization and relevant to the area as well as larger parts of the Pacific and elsewhere. Adrienne Kaeppler proposed the term “recycling” instead of “revival” for such movements (2004, 2005), arguing that the la er implies that cultures and kastoms (customs) were “dead” before they were relived. This specific recycling of kastom is rooted in the period prior to independence, in 1980, when the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides became the Republic of Vanuatu, and the years following, when kastom discourse accelerated and became a vehicle for unification of the nation-state. While it is still something being played out in the national arena, most if not all authors writing on the politics of kastom as a nationalist discourse have seen it as a fluid concept, with an emergence in most areas of creole practices rather than a unitary kastom.2 In Vanuatu, probably more unifying than the troubled concept of kastom itself is people’s commitment to it. The research for this book is based on research that I undertook between 2008 and 2013 as a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Melbourne and in 2015 as postdoctoral fellow at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. For my research, I revisited those “islands of art history” that formerly produced the objects now globally recognized as art and held in collections of museums of what was usually called “primitive,” “tribal,” or “ethnic arts” in France, since the opening of the Pavillon des Sessions at the Musée du Louvre in 2000—arts premiers (first arts), which is yet another problematic term. Famous locations in that history, as seen from the West via major collections made by, among others, A. B. Lewis, Felix Speiser, and Jean Guiart, are Ambrym, Malakula, South Pentecost, and the Banks and Torres Islands (cf. Bühler 1969: 222; Stöhr 1972: 187). Ambrym, Malakula, and South Pentecost share many origin stories and mythological ancestors, such as those of the Ambrym rom and the South Pentecost nagol, which are interconnected. Well-known objects from the region include the slit-drums and tree fern figures that I mention above but also many different mask forms and puppets made from fragile materials and used in “secret societies.” On Ambrym and in South Pentecost, heavy wooden masks occurred, but Malakulan masks predominate in collections (Huffman 1996c: 24–25). For example, Felix Speiser collected a huge variety of things in the islands of the archipelago between 1910

Introduction •

5

and 1912, some of which were ritual artifacts (Speiser 1923: 36). He collected four slit-drums, eight tree fern figures, two rambaramp, or funerary effigies, of Southeast Malakula, and 21 Malakulan masks out of a total of 2,480 objects (personal communication, Flavia Abele, Museum der Kulturen Basel, 12 July 2011). The historical frame of collecting and collectors is a reference point for the contemporary se ing of revival, reproduction, and commoditization that I discuss throughout the book. There are two periods that stand out in this se ing. The first is that of the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, when a so-called curio trade was flourishing in the wider Melanesia region, with ethnologists such as A. B. Lewis and Felix Speiser collecting thousands of objects (or specimens, as they were called at the time). The second, more recent, is that of the late colonial period of the 1960s–1970s, just prior to independence. This is a period that was marked by an increase in supply as well as demand and an increase in travel and tourism, known as the global tourism boom of that era, which created a whole new market segment. From the local perspective, this was a period that was marked by heightened tensions regarding copyright and ownership. The 1960s–1970s are known as the time when the last of the Big Men who had achieved their position in the traditional sphere were still active in the islands, primarily in the north-central region of the archipelago. It was a time, local people now agree, that saw “the last of the real.” Today, within ongoing revivalist movements in which ritual is reenacted and its objects reproduced, what constitutes “the real” is still very present in Vanuatu; it is discussed and negotiated by all involved, locals as well as outsiders. Perceptions of “the real,” “the authentic,” are central to this book and framed by questions of how authenticity is negotiable in different contexts. In anthropological literature, the study of authenticity is inextricably linked to culture, to what is o en designated as authentic culture (e.g., Lindholm 2008). Authenticity and the authentication of things, however, are complex and multilayered processes that do not always progress in a linear fashion. As Nelson Graburn has noted, the cultural construction of authenticity became clear only when it was shown “that authenticity is always a variable” and that it was not necessarily ever “really there,” “like an elusive Holy Grail” (1999: 351). Moreover, authenticity is enacted on different levels. Local people in Vanuatu who revive their former art forms do this by using genealogical links to important ancestors, o en utilizing anthropological literature and photographs in the process in order to legitimize their claims to authenticity. There is also the authenticity of the outsider, the consumer or the tourist, visiting on her or his own or as one of the happy few, in remote places

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that are hard to reach. At the intersection between the two is the encounter and the transaction, where notions of authenticity are once more negotiated. The purchase of an object preferably happens in an authenticated se ing by an authentic “native” and by visitors who like to see themselves as authentic on their own terms. In this se ing, the native is o en reduced to a frozen-in-time native, one who offers his artifacts for sale in contexts of what in the literature is o en referred to as staged authenticity (MacCannell 1976). Last, forces of authenticity also work on the global level, once the object is in the West, in the auction room or gallery or, a er it was sold, in the museum or private living room. During my long-term fieldwork in Vanuatu, I recorded one story that particularly illustrates some of the complex issues in relation to the manifestation of different levels of authenticity and to one specific category of objects, that of the rambaramp funerary effigies from Southwest Malakula that I briefly touched upon above and that had become prized commodities by the 1960s–1970s. It is a story of supply and demand of art objects that somewhat resembles that of my arrival scene on Ambrym in 2009 forty or fi y years earlier. It is also a story that brings these kinds of objects into the museums in “the West” that keep them. This is another aspect of the book, as it illustrates the trajectories of objects and their differing states of value and meaning while traveling. It is an issue I will return to later, when I treat museology. My interest in rambaramp was sparked by an image in a book during my time as an exchange student in anthropology at UC Berkeley. That image shows a “recently bought funerary effigy,” or rambaramp, from South Malakula. It is in Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World (MacClancy 1997b). Not long before, in Belgium, I had been writing up my dissertation in art history, which had a specialization in so-called ethnic art, on Austronesian architecture with a focus on Sulawesi, Indonesia. It is there that I was first confronted with questions of the ethics of collecting (see Crystal 1989): empty Toraja cliffs with tautau (effigies of the dead) ending up on the tribal art market and Tana Toraja or the Toraja homelands being increasingly flooded with tourists. These kinds of questions, however, did not fit in an art history thesis that, as a rule, asks questions about how an object is made or about its beauty and aesthetics. What remained unanswered, then, was what these things might mean in their places of origin or in the world: in transit, in transition, on the market. It is what is o en lacking on museum labels accompanying such objects, where only information on their histories in Western museum collections and their pedigrees is provided, with perhaps the addition of a cultural group and, in the best case scenario, the name of a village in a colony and a date of collection.

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What the image of the rambaramp in Contesting Art, edited by Jeremy MacClancy, shows is its departure from its local place, being loaded onto a motorboat in Southwest Bay Malakula and sent to the global art market. It is in the introduction to the volume, titled “Anthropology, Art and Contest” (p. 20). The same author has another such image in another edited volume, Exotic No More (MacClancy 2002b: pl. 1). The caption to this image reads, “Entering the global market: a recently bought artifact is laid on a canoe before being paddled to the main island and, ultimately, sold in either Europe or America (Vao islet, Malakula Island, Vanuatu, February 1980).” What both these images lack, however, is explanatory text. Nowhere does the author explain the circumstances of collection. My questions remained, particularly in the case of the rambaramp effigy that, as I had learned in my art history courses, traditionally contains the skull of a deceased ancestor. Were these things really for sale? Or was this a clandestine transaction, the people concerned ignorant of it? A er all, I had also learned that rambaramp were traditionally from the Lamap area of Southeast Malakula and not from Southwest Bay, across mountainous, rugged South Malakula. It was later, during my Ph.D. research, that I contacted Jeremy MacClancy and asked him about his powerful image in Contesting Art. He replied that it was Tessa Fowler, at the time traveling with him, who was the collector of the rambaramp in that specific photograph. During a trip to Vanuatu in 2010–2011, I met Tessa, who still lives in Vanuatu, in the capital town Port Vila on Efate Island. Tessa and I met for the first time for an interview in a seaside bar in Port Vila in December 2010. By then, I knew from different sources that she had been one of the main figures of the flourishing art trade of the 1960s–1970s. As she told me, she originally came to the then New Hebrides in 1958 to work as an economist for the British government. Traveling around in the archipelago, she soon became an agent for men in the islands, selling their objects to museums worldwide. She primarily worked with men on Malakula and Ambrym, “islands of art” in the history of collecting for Vanuatu. She developed contacts with museums in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and particularly with the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland (the keeper of Felix Speiser’s historical collections of Vanuatu materials). Tessa and I talked about the last Big Men with links to the “graded societies” of that time, such as Tain Mal and Tofor of Fanla for North Ambrym (see also Guiart 1951; Pa erson 1976, 1981, 1996, 2002a, 2002b), Bong of Bunlap for South Pentecost (Jolly 1979, 1982, 1991b), and Kali and Virembat of Amok for North Malakula, the “last of the big nambas” and the “last man-eaters” (Harrisson 1937; Guiart 1952). Tessa primarily bought from people of the villages of Yapgetas and Lendombwey in Middle-Bush

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Malakula. Her main intermediary was a certain Wallit, a man lame from polio and as she put it, not a Big Man at all. When she was on Malakula, she stayed in Lawa, in Southwest Bay, where the inland people had a shed on the beach in which they stored rambaramp for sale. Tessa and I also discussed her shi of career, as she herself called it, “from artifacts to real estate,” in the late 1970s: the run toward independence, which is when major areas of land were bought up by foreign investors (a situation that continues today). By then, the previously flourishing art trade had collapsed. Nearing the end of the interview, an interesting fact surfaced, rather by accident. While wrapping up our conversation, I mentioned the ongoing request by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre for the repatriation of human remains, such as the ancestor skulls modeled into rambaramp effigies held in museum collections all over the world. To this, Tessa replied that rambaramp should not be repatriated to Vanuatu, “but to Vietnam instead.” As I could guess what she meant but was not sure, I asked for explanation. And indeed, as she told me, the demand by museums for more and more rambaramp effigies in those years was so high that, at a certain point, there was a shortage of skulls. Because using the skull of a local Christian was taboo and “the heathens,” as they were called in those days, “were not dying fast enough,” they asked her to find more skulls. “Vietnamese skulls,” she said, “were the easiest to get in those days” (not very surprisingly: it was the 1960s–1970s). However, this initial trade never became an industry. These specific skulls came to Vanuatu through an American friend of Tessa. They had belonged to a Vietnam veteran who had picked them up on the ba lefield but who no longer wanted his macabre souvenirs. They were posted to Tessa by her friend, and she took them to Malakula in her bag, together with her food and her camping equipment. She did not have to pay duty on the skulls because they were declared for customs as “used skulls,” and anything “used” was exempt from duty. Before she had access to these skulls, she added, her small nambas connections went fossicking on burial grounds on Malakula for skulls to use in art. The actual request for repatriation of human remains by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre has, as far as I know, resulted in only two responses worldwide. By November 2010, one overmodeled skull was prepared for repatriation by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as were two rambaramp effigies in the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, et Amérindiens in Marseille, France. By July 2011, the overmodeled skull previously held at the Smithsonian, collected during World War II, was back in Vanuatu. It is now safely stored in the tabu room (storeroom) of the National Museum and Cultural Centre in Port Vila. In Paris, the permanent exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly has eight rambaramp effigies exhibited together in a dark “glass box” (cf. Ames

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Figure 0.4. Group of rambaramp effigies in the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, dramatically approaching the viewer from the dark (photograph by the author).

1992), dramatically approaching the viewer, with reflections in the glass purposefully adding to the evocation of a mysterious, spirit-like atmosphere. As their labels say, some were collected in the early twentieth century, and some in the middle of the century. During a trip to Paris in 2011 in order to trace the Ambrymese slit-drums and tree fern figures I started this book with, I saw one more rambaramp; it was for sale at the Parcours des Mondes. The Parcours is a tribal art fair taking place annually in Paris (from 7 to 11 September in 2011). That specific rambaramp effigy, formerly part of the known Fowler Collection (not connected to Tessa) and known to have been in the United States since the 1950s–1960s, was for sale at Galerie Ivana de Gavardie, rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, through Brussels-based tribal art dealer Kevin Conru. Its price in Paris in 2011 was set at 45,000 euros (personal communication, Kevin Conru, 7 September 2011).

Commodities, Value, and Authenticity The frame for this book is one of commodities and the valuation of things, entwined with notions of authenticity negotiated on different levels of interaction and set in contexts of cultural revival and tourism. As the story

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of the production and sale of rambaramp effigies in the 1960s–1970s highlights, the concept of authenticity entails many different aspects. There is not just the authenticity of the native and, at the other end of the range, the authenticity of engaging with that native, in local contexts and in museums in the West. There is also something like the guise of authenticity, as the example of the Vietnamese and Malakulan skulls illustrates, and even something like the authenticity of repatriation. As the rambaramp story also highlights, authenticity and the authentication of things strongly relate to commoditization and valuation. Of these three themes, commoditization is the most concrete one: things have monetary value. They move around within an increasingly global market economy, gaining value while they circulate and are circulated by people. Other sets of value engage with cash value, o en implicit, invisible. These have to do with aesthetic value, or emotional value, with previous ownership, and with the history of things. Entwined with commodity exchange, there also exists a wide range of values around things usually exchanged as gi s in gi economies (Mauss 1965 [1923–1924]; Strathern 1988; Munn 1986; Weiner 1992). Commoditization is the transformation of all sorts of things that have use value (things that were initially not intended for the market) into commodities (things that have market value). In Marxist theory, the term “commodification” is used to refer to such processes. In the case of Vanuatu, relevant examples are the slit-drums, tree fern figures, and the variety of masks, puppets, and rambaramp effigies that were collected over time. An important aspect in the commodification of such things is their circulation: they change hands; their ownership changes. Mauss (1965 [1923–1924]) saw this kind of alienation as something that happens when all rights in what is considered to be someone’s property are detached from one owner and vested in another (in Graeber 2001: 162). The circulation of things was most notably examined by Arjun Appadurai in his work The Social Life of Things (1986b). Appadurai investigated things-in-motion, allowing questions to be asked about collecting, tourism, and trade or, in his own words, about “the role of objects of the ‘other’ in creating the souvenir, the collection, the exhibition and the trophy in the modern West” (1986b: 48). He built his argument on Simmel’s earlier work The Philosophy of Money (1978 [1907]) in which value “is never an inherent property of objects, but . . . a judgement made about them by subjects” (in Appadurai 1986b: 3), saying that “we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them” (ibid.). We have to “follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations

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that enliven things” and “it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (ibid.: 5). It is in these spheres of interaction that objects gain monetary value, changing hands and accumulating a further history. Drawing on Nelson Graburn (1976), who uses Maquet’s original terminology, Appadurai repeated that, for aesthetic productions, there are four types of commodities: those by destination (intended for exchange), those by metamorphosis (intended for other uses but placed into the commodity state), those by diversion (objects placed into a commodity state although originally specifically protected from it) and, lastly, ex-commodities (things retrieved, either temporarily or permanently, from the commodity state and placed in some other state; 1986b: 16). In the same volume, Igor Kopytoff focused on the cultural biographies of things, asking questions “similar to those one asks about people,” about the biographical possibilities in the thing’s status and in the period and culture, about its career, about the recognized ages or periods in its life, and about the cultural markers within which it is embedded in differing contexts (Kopytoff 1986: 66). This view was revolutionized by Alfred Gell (1998), who focused on objects as indexes. Kopytoff distinguished two kinds of object values: the value of an object as commodity (of which he said it can be compared to other objects) and the value of unique objects (those that cannot be compared). This is done by a process he calls “singularization,” or the singling out of things, in order to make them special, more valuable (1986: 83). “Most of the time, when the commodity is effectively out of the commodity sphere, its status is inevitably ambiguous and open to the push and pull of events and desires, and it is shuffled about in the flux of social life” (ibid.). It is in singularization that the thing takes on meaning. Singularizations of various kinds are an accompaniment of commoditization; they make things meaningful and valuable on different levels. The research for this book was influenced by how objects in some parts of Vanuatu have come to be produced and transacted and by the various ways in which such processes of commoditization have been analyzed. As a consequence, it is about transactions and about people, galleries, and museums: local people, art collectors, tourists, and dealers and connoisseurs. In later chapters, the book is informed by the literature on museum anthropology and the roles of objects (e.g., Steiner 1994; Phillips and Steiner 1999a) and not so much by Gell and the ontological school that grew out of the agency of art (e.g., Pinney and Thomas 2001; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2006; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). In this book, I a ribute agency to people who actively participate in the market economy. What I take from Appadurai is his objects-in-motion

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frame, and from Kopytoff his singularization scheme. When it is circulated and singularized, the object accumulates a history in the form of a pedigree of former sellers, buyers, and owners, which enhances its monetary value. In the Vanuatu case, this can be in the form of a statue traveling from Ambrym Island to Paris, to the so-called tribal art gallery scene: the statue was separated, singularized. Most valuable are things that appear as unique. They can be (almost) impossible to buy. Singularization can take place on the local level by usage and authentication, and on the global level by exposure in galleries and museums or private living rooms. When such objects change hands, they become even more valuable: they accumulate further pedigree, history. Dealers and connoisseurs will refer to such things as masterpieces: rare things, or unique, worth incalculable sums of money. To single out objects makes them into highly desired commodities, even though they might have been originally specifically protected from this state (cf. Appadurai 1986: 16). People in Vanuatu have been aware of the commoditization of their culture and material culture items for a long time. Some actively participated in it. Others did not. For Melanesia, we know of trade-on-the-beach contexts from the early nineteenth century onward. Later, traders and planters visited and se led more systematically in the region and exchanges of art for industrially produced goods such as metal tools and weapons became common. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what was called a “curio trade” flourished in the region. Drawing on Appadurai, Nicolas Thomas used the term “recontextualization” instead of “circulation” to refer to such processes and focused on the active involvement of colonial relations rather than excluding them as external to the question of precolonial gi economies and their transformations (Thomas 1991; see also Myers 2001 for transformative economies; see particularly Sahlins 2000 [1988]). In current se ings, commodities, or things placed in the commodity state, range from tourist arts and customary arts made and used in contexts of cultural revival and tourism (Skinner and Bolton 2012: 467) to what in the West is o en designated a fake or a forgery, remade “a er the old” but not used in local contexts, made “just for sale.” Older things can also be sold, o en by people who are not the customary owners. While, on the local level, things have been exchanged for a very long time, in a context of globalized commercialization, problems include a decrease in monetary value when buyers become aware that something was made “just for sale,” or, on the local level, disagreement and dispute when much valued things are sold. This once more relates to the authentication of things, which is achieved by local people for themselves to give meaning and value to their objects in the context of cultural revitalization, but au-

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thentication is also done on other levels, for art collectors and tourists, in order to sell the objects. Focusing on production and producers rather than on the products themselves, Pierre Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996), outlined the concepts of economic and symbolic or cultural capital and power relations between producers and consumers. Thinking in terms of dominants (those who adhere to the economic pole) and dominated (the cultural pole), he focused on the relationships between people and things. His field of power is formed by an economic and a cultural pole, with economic capital being the root of all forms of capital: cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital as a form of power as well as his notion of field is useful in developing an understanding of the circulation and valuation of objects in Vanuatu. He defines a field as a network, or configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by the present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.). (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97)

In contemporary Vanuatu, the market principle is being increasingly appropriated by local people, with the artifact trade increasingly becoming a field of power, where actors compete for control over resources. As David Swartz has noted, Bourdieu’s fields “denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize these different kinds of capital” (1997: 117). Fields are sites of struggle and resistance for control over valued sources (ibid.: 121–22), where relationships between people and between people and things are being constantly renegotiated. David Graeber (2001) has argued that economic value is determined by money, by price mechanisms, and by the market economy. Values, in the plural, he added, are determined by sets of o en invisible valuation mechanisms, such as aesthetic or emotional value or, in this case, the authenticity of the people and the things involved. “Where there is no single system of values,” he writes, “one is le with a whole series of heterogeneous, disparate ones” (ibid.: 56). He sees the market as the basic organizing principle of social life in the industrial West, the ultimate determinant, the mediator of value (ibid.: 158). In the market, the rules of transfer are

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implicitly always there, but they can vary according to the specific conditions and to specific sets of meaning and value. Like authenticity, value is a difficult to grasp and multilayered concept. While commoditization is primarily about markets and prices and pricing, valuation plays on all kinds of different levels, in people’s minds. Value is related to production, exchange, and consumption of goods. Marx’s influential thinking centered on production, arguing that the value of commodities was derived from the workforce, from the human labor that went into producing them and saying that this fact is all too o en forgo en when a thing is bought and sold on the market; so it seems that its value arises somewhat naturally from the qualities of the thing itself (Marx 1964 [1859] in Graeber 2001: 26; see also Appadurai 1986: 13). The study of commodity exchange was more concerned with establishing a quantitative equivalence of value between objects (e.g., Gregory 1982) and with giving and reciprocity (Sahlins 1965) or keeping (Weiner 1992, 1994). Graeber used Clyde Kluckhohn’s work of 1951 in which value was described as conceptions of the desirable (in Graeber 2001: 78). Money, Graeber wrote, is only one token of value, the most concrete one (ibid.: 67). “It might be be er, then, to think of the word ‘value’ as meaning something more like ‘importance’” (ibid.: 55). “The desirable,” a key term, “refers not simply to what people actually want—in practice, people want all sorts of things. Values are ideas about what they ought to want” (ibid.: 3, emphasis in original). This then translates into a certain notion of pleasure once something is owned (ibid.: 9). Pricing and prices measure value, by comparison, by distinction. In Bourdieu’s work Distinction (1984), value revolves around the game of dominance, around the a empt by one party to accumulate symbolic capital (or symbolic tokens) and gain advantage over the other party. According to Bourdieu, the one who has symbolic capital is the victor, not the economic capitalist. But symbolic capital can also add to the monetary value of a thing when it is sold. There is a paradox in this, in the sense that certain things that can and should be sold, because it is their purpose, decrease in monetary value when this aspect comes to light, while something that has intrinsic value to the people who created it increases in monetary value once this aspect of it surfaces. It is not because an object is made for sale, or not made for sale but sold anyway, that it cannot have other sets of values a ached to it, outside of the realm of the commercial, such as a family history, pride in one’s culture and artifacts, artistry and cra smanship, acknowledgment of indigenous ownership, or as token of the right to make and sell a certain kind of item. Importantly, in Graeber’s thinking as well as Bourdieu’s, it is the actions of creative individuals that make things into valued items. Graeber’s

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theory is a theory of action. This is an idea that I relate to, particularly in my discussion of what I will later refer to as “making authenticity.” As I will argue, it is not objects that produce authenticity, but people. It is local people as well as art connoisseurs who manipulate objects to turn them into authentic tokens of culture. It is people who are related to things who determine the value sets. Authenticity and the authentication of people and things is a type of valuation. According to Charles Lindholm’s account of Trilling’s view (1972), the concept of authenticity grew out of the more modest virtue of sincerity in sixteenth-century postfeudal European society, when stratified and sanctified social order became fragmented and individualistic (Lindholm 2008: 3). Authenticity is particularly a ributed by people to people and things. In Vanuatu, within increasingly sensitive se ings of appropriation and ownership of valued things and combined with an increasingly global economy and cultural differences in regimes of value between gi s and commodities (Appadurai 1986; see also Myers 2001), authenticity and authentication is becoming increasingly important in the form of conceptions of “the real.” Moving from villages to galleries and auction rooms, the authenticity of objects is regulated by the tastes and desires of producers and consumers. Concerns about authenticity, Fred Myers has noted (2001: 56), are usually centered on ideas of static culture. Notions of authenticity and authentication, however, can also be agents for change and inventiveness in revitalizing a past that is seen as unchanging and real. Myers talks of “culture making” (ibid.: 56, 60), what I will return to in this book as “making authenticity,” which is primarily done by local people who authenticate and evaluate what they do, for themselves and for audiences, for sale. Unlike Bourdieu, who rejects the idea of what he calls “the direct effect of demand on supply or of supply on demand” (1984: 241), I define the buyers as those who create the market. Like Simmel, I argue that the value of an object lies in the degree to which a buyer wants it (Graeber 2001: 31). Authenticity in the making of things, in the style, in the materials used, are things that, to a certain degree, can be controlled by the maker. Purity, beauty, and reality form in people’s minds and, ideally, are subject to change. As Graeber noted, perfect value lies in the fact that “Most of us are accustomed to describe things as ‘realities’ precisely because we can’t completely understand them, can’t completely control them, don’t know exactly how they are going to affect us, but nonetheless can’t just wish them away” (2001: 51–52). “It’s what we don’t know about them that brings home the fact that they are real” (ibid.: 52). The authentic native is one imagined by visitors and locals alike. He, and particularly he, is one dressed up in local costume, wearing parapher-

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nalia such as pig tusks and leaf and flower decorations and showing his traditional “nakedness.” There is a nuance in the authenticity a ributed by local people to themselves, however, which is accomplished by linking oneself to ancestors who were important in culture history and to indigenous claims for ownership of rituals and objects. In revived ritual sequences, men dress up to perform aspects of their ancient culture, but for them this is only one layer of the meaning and value they a ribute to their revived culture and objects. The local and the global meet, however, at least in what is put on for the audiences. Underlying sensibilities, such as who has the right to perform what kind of dance, song, or ritual sequence, do not always surface in performances and are interpreted only by local audiences. Authentication of people and things in the context of performances and cultural festivals generates value and, again, authenticity, real or perceived. Local people ask higher prices for authenticated items, whether or not they are considered truly authentic (danced, performed) or made just for sale. Buyers are not always aware of this nuance. There is a paradox here as well: making things authentic can be seen as forging them, making them into something that in reality they are not to make them saleable and to achieve a be er price. On the other hand, each tangible thing is a real thing (it is physically there), but producers and consumers o en refuse to see it this way. While “the real” is preferably not sold, “the fake” is made authentic for sale. When local people sell that which their family members and neighbors consider to be the real, problems and disagreements and disputes begin. Yet, what buyers really want is the real, even though they can also be disappointed that they are in fact able to buy the thing, for buying the real equals diminishing its authenticity. Tourists, for example, are not easily tricked anymore into buying a recognizable item of tourist art. Authentication through performance, through dance and usage, convinces potential buyers who witness the presentation of the thing they will buy a erward, and they will buy precisely for this reason. This is an innovative strategy developed by local people in order to counteract the process of (supposed) loss of authenticity. Performance, usage in dance, enhances authenticity. Engagement with authenticity does not end with the authentic native in local contexts. In globalized se ings of galleries and museums, it is the acknowledgment of being exhibited in a white gallery space in Paris or New York or a museum or a private living room that generates value and authenticity for objects. In all these spaces, visitors consume in order to establish their own authenticity. They do this self-referentially, by establishing themselves as a person of taste, along the lines of “I am a person

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of knowledge” or “I can distinguish beauty.” In relation to art collectors and tourists in specific places, this can be added to “I know this place.” In Distinction, Bourdieu focused on taste, or distinction, and class, saying, “There is a fairly close homology between the fields of production in which products are developed and the fields (the field of the social classes or the field of the dominant class) in which tastes are determined” (1984: 241). In contexts of galleries and museums, they meet in a kind of harmony. In Bourdieu’s intranational frame, it is because of someone’s upper middle-class academic background that it is his or her taste to consume avant-garde experimental literature and it is somebody else’s, who shares the same social condition, to produce that literature. He calls it a “quasimiraculous correspondence prevailing at every moment between the products offered by a field of production and the field of socially produced tastes” (1984: 231). Producers in Vanuatu are not structurally homologous with consumers in Paris, of course, but they have developed a sophisticated understanding of the tastes of the Westerner. In globalized se ings, aesthetic objects take part in systems of taste, or distinction, through people, centered around markets and connoisseurship in different hierarchies of value (Myers 2001: 55). In Vanuatu society, in which property and exchange have for a long time played important roles in the construction of social identity, ownership and indigenous copyright are central problems in the commoditization, valuation, and authentication of objects. Rights to reproduction, use, and ownership of certain artifacts and designs are stretched and now include rights to produce items for sale. Revival, cultural performances, festivals, and customary arts are in many cases entwined with tourism and the market and infused by competition in tastes and desires. In places where people revive past rituals and dances and reproduce the ritual artifacts that go with these performances, art collectors and tourists follow, as paying audiences and buyers. In some of these places they are welcome visitors; in others they are carefully kept out of interaction. Buyers do not just create the market but also shape it, in the sense that an Ambrymese or any other sculptor in Vanuatu today creates according to the tastes and desires of the Paris or New York auction room goer, a taste the sculptor has come to know and to accommodate. The local is one step ahead, however, supplying what the buyer desires: “the real,” “the authentic,” or o en the “made real” or the “made authentic.” These are meaningful distinctions: they produce value (cf. Sahlins 1976: 213–14). Some consumers form their taste in isolation, in their homes, determining on their own what to them is a beautiful, well-cra ed artifact. At each end of the long chain of distribution, actions of connoisseurship are generated

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by individuals who, by doing so, increase the object’s monetary value as well as its other, inherent values. In this process, the disguise of money can work well on some levels and less on others.

Methodology I carried out the ethnographic fieldwork for this book in Vanuatu in November–December 2006, November 2008, July–December 2009, and November 2010 to February 2011. The 2006 trip was a prospective one and by invitation by Ralph Regenvanu, then director of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, whom I had met shortly before at a Pacific Arts Association Meeting in Cambridge, United Kingdom. During that first Vanuatu trip, I attended the conference A er 26 Years: Collaborative Research in Vanuatu since Independence, held at the Cultural Centre in Port Vila (6–8 November 2006). During the trip, I traveled to Wala, one of the small islands off the coast of Northeast Malakula, to witness the arrival of the P&O cruise ship Pacific Sun. I thought, at that stage, that cruise ship tourism was going to be central to my research. A er all, by then I had seen an image of a slit-drum being bought by cruise ship tourists and dragged onto a ship at Ranon in North Ambrym in the 1990s in Knut Rio’s 1997 M.A. thesis. I did not make it to Ambrym on that first trip but knew, if I was to continue research in Vanuatu, that this island, as one of the prime places for art in the archipelago, was going to at least be on my itinerary. In 2008, as a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Melbourne, I returned to Vanuatu to do archival research at the Cultural Centre. In July 2009, I departed for Vanuatu to do longer term fieldwork. By that time, my aim was to research the meaning and value of material culture and the arts. I worked in several locations throughout the archipelago and one outside: Paris, where I retraced the paths of the drums and bwerang I started this book with—those I had seen leaving the shores of North Ambrym upon arrival to the island. Working in different places typifies what George Marcus and others have termed “multisited ethnography,” which focuses on a world system rather than just a local context (e.g., Marcus 1995, 1998). Objects and festivals drew me to Ambrym and later to Southeast Malakula and the Banks Islands in Northern Vanuatu. Ambrym and Malakula are important places for the revitalization of kastom, made visible each year in competitive listings of festivals, o en at concurrent dates. Each year, the Vanuatu Tourism Office (VTO) distributes a festival calendar to hotels and other tourist venues in town. Of all the festivals in 2009, for which I provide an overview in Chapter Three, I a ended

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the Back to My Roots Festival in Halhal Fantor, North Ambrym (26–28 August 2009) and the Malakula Festival on Uliveo or Maskelyne Island in the Maskelynes Group of Southeast Malakula (2–4 October). That I only made it to two festivals on the calendar was due to the concurrent dates and to competition in kastom but also to chaotic, last-minute organization and communication and to the inaccessibility of many of these places. On Ra, in the Banks Islands, I a ended the Saint Andrew’s Mini Arts Festival, which was not announced on the calendar. It was held outside of the dry, festival season, from 28 to 30 November, Saint Andrew’s Day. The Third National Arts Festival took place in Port Vila from 2 to 6 November. I provide detailed analyses of the Back to My Roots, Malakula, and Third National festivals in Chapter Three. The research project was approved by the relevant ethics commi ee at the University of Melbourne. Upon arrival in Vanuatu in July 2009, it was also approved by the Vanuatu National Cultural Council. During fieldwork, I was confronted with ethically difficult situations that I had to negotiate as a novice fieldworker. Early on, I was drawn into negotiations over art for money, by local people as well as tourists. By the time of my stay on Uliveo, in October 2009, tourists knew that I was “an anthropologist with a research interest in art” and approached me and asked me to be their mediator in negotiations (on their behalf, by interpreting and translating for them). They were yachties, as local people call them, people traveling on their own sailboats or yachts, reaching the otherwise difficult to reach locations with relative ease. Yachties will be an important tourist category throughout the book. They are the prime buyers of art objects. Because of my questions about the sale of objects, local people o en asked me if I was an art collector. Although most people know that they receive far less than they could in distant markets, they still seem to like collectors and were o en disappointed that I was not one. My explanation that I was looking at the sustainability for local people in the business meant that I got more involved, talking on their behalf. While to some locals I was a threat, others saw in me an access point to cash. Yet others called me an art promoter. The longer I was in the field, the more I was assumed to be acting as a middleman and a participant in the commerce of artifacts, arranging deals and se ing prices. This role had both advantages and disadvantages, as it affected how people engaged with me. An advantage was that I became an insider to some transactions; a disadvantage was that I was seen as partisan by some people. It is Cultural Centre policy that the researcher agree to the guidelines governing cultural research policy. The researcher submits a research proposal that outlines the general research objectives of the project, the field sites, and the possible outcomes for local communities. Per the procedure,

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the researcher is then assigned to a filwoka (fieldworker) of the location where he or she will be working, accommodated by the filwoka family. Filwokas are local men and women trained by the Cultural Centre to work on topics of kastom in their home locations. I will return to the workings of the Cultural Centre’s Filwoka scheme in following sections and in the next chapters, even though I operated largely outside of this network. In all field locations, I collected data by way of participant observation and by interviewing people and taking field notes, always with the consent of the interviewee. Some interviews were recorded with a digital voice recorder and transcribed. During more informal social moments, I took notes only, or just talked, for example during nightly kava sessions.3

Field Sites Central to the methodology for the book is that it is multisited. As I have noted, it was the arts and cultural festivals that brought me to different places in the archipelago and the trajectories of objects that brought me to Paris. Upon arrival in Port Vila in July 2009 for my long-term fieldwork, I signed the research agreement to ensure that the research and field sites were approved by the Cultural Council. I departed for Ambrym in mid-August 2009. From Ambrym, I traveled to Malakula and later Port Vila and Ra, in order to a end festivals. Ra is a tiny coral island connected by a reef and a lagoon to the southwestern tip of the island of Mota Lava in the Banks Islands. In the Banks Group, I also stayed in Vureas Bay on Vanua Lava, where the Vanua Lava Cultural Festival of 2009 had taken place not long before my visit, on 1 September (while I was still in North Ambrym, a ending the Back to My Roots Festival). I traveled to all these locations and back to Ambrym on Air Vanuatu Domestic planes, connecting to local motorboats or canoes in most places. As North Ambrym does not have an airstrip and is cut off from the rest of the island by the volcanoes at its center and by the huge calderas they created over time, the only way to reach this part of the island is by motorboat from West Ambrym. Later in my fieldwork, I traveled on several cargo ships that service the islands. As this is the cheaper way of travel for most local people, traveling on the ships turned out to be an excellent opportunity for additional fieldwork. Traveling between the different islands, I found myself being in transit and outside of the orbit of any particular “field.” This was an interesting interstice of and addition to my multisited ethnography. That I chose North Ambrym and specifically Fona as my main field site has to do with the pile of slit-drums and tree fern figures to be shipped to France that I found lying there on the beach upon my first arrival. Fona is

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the only place I witnessed such a scene. In addition, it is the village where the supervisor for my Ph.D. research at the University of Melbourne, Mary Pa erson, was based during her long-term fieldwork on the island from 1968 to 1971 and a erward. In Fona, I was welcomed by Chief Johnson Lengkon Koran and his family, the family into which Pa erson was adopted over forty years ago and with which she has maintained connections since. Staying with Johnson and his family gave me the opportunity to work outside of the filwoka scheme. This was a privilege that I was granted by the Cultural Centre in the person of Ralph Regenvanu because of Pa erson’s strong connections to the place. However, this also meant that I was firmly tied to the people and the area of Fona. This became particularly clear when I le Ambrym with the Back to My Roots performance group in November 2009 to a end the National Festival in Vila. By then, I had come to know different members of the performance group and had decided to travel with them, departing from Olal, on the northernmost tip of the island, on the cargo ship Halice. The ship was chartered by the Cultural Centre to pick up dance delegations in the islands. In Fona, this meant that my hosts were worried about my safety and about whether or not they were going to lose me as a source of income to their competitors in kastom of the Magam-Olal-Neuiha area in the extreme north of the island. It became increasingly clear that I was Johnson’s man and that I was supposed to operate as middleman to a local middleman, a position, as I have noted, that was problematic. On the other hand, I collected field results I would have otherwise not collected, walking with tourists, showing them the sites. Outside of Ambrym, I stayed with several local people and with filwokas and their families in the Maskelyne Islands of Southeast Malakula, in Lamap in Southeast Malakula, and on Vanua Lava and Ra in the Banks Islands. On Uliveo, in the Maskelynes Group, I stayed with a local family in the village of Lutes during the Malakula Festival. From Uliveo, I traveled with a fellow anthropology student whom I had met during the Malakula Festival, to Avok, a neighboring island in the Maskelynes, where both of us were accommodated by the filwoka for the area, Chief Andrew Nakel. Later, we also traveled to Lamap, Southeast Malakula. Lamap is an important place for the revival of culture on Malakula and in Vanuatu. In Lamap, we stayed in the hamlet of the family of Marcellin Abong, former director of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. We were accommodated by Marcellin’s twin brother Herna, whose kastom name and graded title is meleun. Herna Abong is a revived Big Man as well as a filwoka for his area. During my time on Vanua Lava, I was accommodated by long-serving filwoka for his area, Eli Field, in a house in his hamlet in Turmalau, in Vureas Bay. During visits to Mota Lava and Ra, I stayed in the local business,

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Paradise Bungalows on Ra, owned by Father Luke Dini and his wife Rona. On Ra, I was regarded by the locals as being in some sort of in-between space between anthropologist and tourist: I talked with them and spent my time in the village, I had nightly communal kava with them in the village nakamal, but I also stayed in a bungalow on the beach.

Figure 0.5. Map of Vanuatu. Province names are abbreviated island names: for example MALAMPA for Malakula, Ambrym, and Paama (source: www.nation master.com).

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Figure 0.6. The house used by the anthropologist in Fona, North Ambrym. It was built a couple of years ago with the financial assistance of Mary Pa erson (photograph by the author).

On Language I conducted the fieldwork for this book in Bislama, Vanuatu’s national language and a pidgin language that has evolved since early contact and trade history. Bislama is the language mostly used in the urban contexts of Port Vila and Luganville, where people from different islands live and work together. In the islands, it is spoken among people who come from other islands, for example by marriage or for work, mainly as schoolteachers. Among each other, villagers speak their respective vernacular languages, of which there are over a hundred in Vanuatu.4 In addition to Bislama and one or more local vernaculars, many local people also speak one of the former colonial languages, French or English. In all locations, I learned some daily speech and some words that specifically relate to my research (for example, the names of rituals and objects and certain indigenous concepts) in local vernacular language.5 In most places, former Francophone and Anglophone influence is very much still felt today. Johnson Koran, my Fona host, o en expressed the desire to communicate in French. As a former police officer for the

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Gendarmerie française in colonial days, he clearly misses the French language and culture. This meant that during my time in Fona I sometimes conducted fieldwork in French, talking to Johnson and his fellow Francophones in formerly French-influenced villages in North Ambrym. On the other hand, Herna Abong in Lamap does not speak French anymore, “for reasons of kastom,” he said, in order to “resist the influence of colonialism.” In the Banks Islands, during my stay in Turmalau, Vureas Bay, Vanua Lava, the importance of local language was made particularly clear to me by Eli Field, my Turmalau host and Cultural Centre local filwoka. Lanwis (language), Eli Field said, “is identity.”

Book Outline The book aims to address key questions on authenticity in relation to indigenous copyright, ownership, and the broader context of global art markets and museums. In Chapter One, I distinguish the main study areas with which the book deals: those of art history, the anthropology of art, and the anthropology of tourism. I provide an overview of Vanuatu ethnography, collectors, collections, and exhibitions, and discuss policy and the filwoka scheme of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. I go on to discuss the important concepts of kastom, copyright, Christianity, and respect, and I introduce the notion of a second kind of copyright that has recently emerged in Vanuatu as a way around rigid copyright prescriptions. In Chapter Two, I provide an overview of the historical context of production and consumption of objects, with additional material from my fieldwork. I introduce the problem of terminology, of art/artifact, and, briefly, the politics of museums, a topic that I return to in more detail in Chapter Six. I then discuss the roles of ethnologists Felix Speiser and A. B. Lewis in the archipelago in the early twentieth century, se ing the frame for a hundred years of collecting in the islands. The core of this chapter is a focus on what I call the protagonists of a collection history for Vanuatu and on the so-called masterpieces of that history. Protagonists are the much collected atingting, or slit-drums, and bwerang, or tree fern figures, from North Ambrym and the rambaramp funerary effigies from Southeast Malakula, while masterpieces are rare, even unique, things. In the chapter, I discuss the main collection locations in the archipelago, consisting of the geographical regions of North-Central and North Vanuatu—primarily Ambrym, Malakula, and the Banks Islands. The chapter also examines notions of authenticity by demonstrating that objects were always offered for sale and that the authentic token of culture, the truly authentic thing, was always one entwined with money and the market.

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In Chapter Three, I shi from the historical context of Ambrym, Malakula, and the Banks Islands, to the contemporary se ing and my own fieldwork. This chapter deals with the usage of objects and how this is interpreted by locals as well as visitors. In analyses of the Back to My Roots Festival, the Malakula Festival, and the Third National Arts Festival, I discuss the different kinds of use, from “real use” over “making authenticity” to “copy use” and making objects that are “just for sale.” In a section on Malakula, I return to the issue of copies and copy use and I reintroduce the second kind of copyright. I discuss what it means to “walk artifacts for sale” and what it means to sell things that are considered authentic or real. In Chapter Four, I discuss the issue of sale a er usage. In both Chapters Three and Four I treat festivals and tourism as loci of art production and consumption. In Chapter Four, I focus on the visitors: art collectors and tourists, both of whom buy objects at festivals a er use. At festivals, also, views are challenged among locals and visitors alike about what kastom is or should be and about the meanings of authenticity. Local people claim property rights to the objects they sell, whether these are supposedly real or copy. Usage, of any kind, authenticates the object. In this chapter, I argue that the authenticated object is not just an object of cultural revival but also one of commerce, a kind of tourist art that replicates “authentic primitive art.” In Chapter Five, I discuss kastom disputes and mistakes. I return to the historical context and to one object in particular, the lengnangulong sacred stone of Magam village, North Ambrym, now kept in a museum in Paris while in its original place it is regarded as alienated and highly contested property. Objects that were collected a long time ago belong not only to history but also to present-day society and local communities. Disputes over contested material culture items do not terminate with old objects reclaimed as family property. They also increasingly revolve around money and kastom. In the final section of this chapter, I contrast the context of art buying and art buyers in Vanuatu with that in Europe. I discuss the types of valuation in an art gallery se ing in Paris, the Parcours des Mondes, the abovementioned tribal art fair in Paris. In Chapter Six, the book returns to the museum se ings of the West. I discuss trade, the , repatriation, and the role of museums. I return to the history of collecting and to the complex life history of the lengnangulong sacred stone and examine recent examples of collecting and exhibiting the arts of Vanuatu. I highlight one exhibition and what it means to donate highly valued, “real” artifacts, those also desired by art collectors and museums, immediately a er their production and usage. This brings the creation of authenticity and of authentic art into a museum context and raises questions of representation.

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In the final chapter, I conclude by summarizing the main arguments of the book. Based on the fieldwork that was carried out, I reassess issues of the meaning and value of Vanuatu arts in local and global se ings of commoditization, trade, and the market.

Notes  1. Ghent University holds collections of materials from Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. The larger part of its Oceania collection consists of a donation in the early twentieth century of Melanesian materials by the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde of their “doubles” from former German New Guinea (Northeast Papua New Guinea, Neu Pommern [New Britain], and Neu Mecklenburg [New Ireland]), collected in the late nineteenth century and formerly part of the Franz Hernsheim Sammlung (named a er the trader who lived in the area and Micronesia between 1875 and 1880), added with several objects of the former Neu Guinea Kompagnie.  2. See, for example, the Mankind special issue “Reinventing Traditional Culture: The Politics of Kastom in Island Melanesia,” edited by Roger Keesing and Robert Tonkinson 1982.  3. Formerly a ceremonial drink reserved for men, kava is a mild narcotic made of the roots of the kava plant. It is now drunk by almost all men, and in the urban centers and in some locations even women, in communal houses called nakamal, a er the ceremonial men’s houses of the past.  4. Vanuatu has the highest number of languages per capita in the world. Tryon (1996) lists 113 languages, many of them with only a few speakers le .  5. For most locations, I take over orthographies from the existing literature. For the orthography of all North Ambrymese words, I use Michael Franjieh’s notation. Franjieh conducted the research for his Ph.D. in linguistics in Ranvetlam village at around the same time that I was based in Fona. He is the first linguist to concentrate his research solely on North Ambrym language. The Presbyterian missionary linguist Paton wrote a dictionary of the Lonwolwol language of West Ambrym (published by Australian National University in 1971 [Paton 1971a]), a language similar to North Ambrymese. Mary Pa erson, in her published work, follows the orthography as developed by Paton for North Ambrym language.

1  Art, Anthropology, and Tourism Art historical approaches to so-called tribal art were from their beginnings mainly concerned with questions of style and style areas, seeing cultures as unmovable and unchangeable, while studies of material culture were mostly intended as tools for problem solving in anthropology’s main study areas such as kinship, economics, and politics (for further discussion see also Forge 1973; Thomas 2001). As such, art was at the core of anthropological investigation, yet, within the discipline, was not treated as a subject on its own. Classic ethnographies such as Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1984 [1922]), Reo Fortune’s Sorcerers of Dobu (1963 [1932]), Gregory Bateson’s Naven (1958 [1936]), and Raymond Firth’s We, the Tikopia (1968 [1936]), to name only a few examples, all contain detailed descriptions of material culture but without really showing it or explaining it in depth.1 Franz Boas’s Primitive Art (1955 [1927]) stands out as what one could then call an early work of anthropology of art, as does some of the later work by Bateson and by Firth.2 Firth, furthermore, commented on some of the questions concerning anthropology and art history: “They may be answerable in a definite way neither by anthropology nor by art history, but to ask them may suggest closer analytical enquiry, and anticipate a closer co-operation between the disciplines” (Firth 1992: 36). In archaeology, General Lane Fox Pi -Rivers arranged objects from simple to complex in his famous (evolutionary) typological schemes

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(Pi -Rivers 1906; see also Chapman 1985; for a useful overview of typological method, see Morphy 2006). This kind of art historical arranging did indeed create a different kind of approach while basically treating the same kinds of materials. Series of objects, now categorized into styles, style areas, types, subtypes, and even peripheral types, were made, with much a ention given to aesthetic appreciation. Looking at objects was looking at how things were made, mainly in form. In other words, the art historical approach focused on comparative morphological analysis and was based on similarities and/or differences between objects, tracing them back to a time and place of origin (what I call “unmovable and unchangeable”) and sometimes even a person of origin. The person of origin is the one who created the work of art, the artist (for example, “in the style of Mutuaga,” a Massim area carver, or “the master of Buli” for Congo). This, in turn, added to their value as commodities, for a ributing a place or a person to a work of art made for higher prices on the art market. Today, connoisseurs as well as art collectors are still using qualifications of style and style areas to elaborate on art, and they are still demanding more of these kinds of art objects to find and buy. Iconic examples of the kind of literature that perfectly feeds into these demands are Karl Von den Steinen’s Die Marquesaner und Ihre Kunst (1969 [1928]), Heinz Kelm’s Kunst vom Sepik (1966), and Klaus Helfrich’s Malanggan: Bildwerke von Neuirland (1973), all wri en in conjunction with the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde and each containing an abundance of detailed but rather narrow information on the arts of these places.3 I specifically take the Berlin example to illustrate my point because of its very clear art historical tradition. Germany, specifically the Berlin Museum, indeed had a leading role in this kind of approach, but other European institutions have comparable histories, for example, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which combines the collections of the former Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and part of the collections of the Musée de l’Homme (for which Jean Guiart collected Vanuatu materials) and the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Brussels. That these museums produced the same kind of literature, freezing objects as “high art” in time and space by using the same jargon and glossy photography over the span of nearly a century (in the case of Berlin from Von den Steinen to Helfrich and in a sense still ongoing) is, to say the least, surprising, considering the many different methods of collecting and changing approaches to “primitive,” “tribal” arts that there were over time. Objects were discovered by explorers. In their wake followed whalers, traders, missionaries, ethnologists, early adventurers, and colonial officials, all with their own agendas as to why and how they were collecting. In art historical thinking, however, the object, an aesthetically pleasing

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work of art, remained the trope. Context was of less importance. That historical materials in museum collections have poor provenance is precisely because of this, having been first regarded as curiosities and later as high art. For these purposes, and for the ones in between, they did not need much provenance. Since Malinowski, anthropologists turned away from collecting and museums. Only since the 1980s has a certain interest in museums resurfaced within the discipline (e.g., Stocking 1985). In museum contexts, exotic objects were and sometimes still are set in “glass boxes,” to reuse Michael Ames’s phrase (1992), referring to the display cases in a typical exhibition hall of a Western museum se ing. There, they were to be contemplated for their strangeness or beauty or for any other reason, evoking, for example, a “dark Africa.” James Clifford raised the questions: How, at different historical moments and in specific market conditions are “antiquities,” “curiosities,” “art,” “souvenirs,” “monuments,” and “ethnographic artifacts” distinguished? (Why, for example, have many anthropological museums in recent years begun to display certain of their objects as “masterpieces”? Why has tourist art only recently come to the serious attention of anthropologists?) What has been the changing interplay between natural history collecting and the selection of anthropological artifacts for display and analysis? (1985: 240)

Today, Anglophone museum anthropology leads the way to new ways of working, in close cooperation with the source communities whose histories museums hold (e.g., Peers and Brown 2003). I will return to museums and James Clifford’s remarks in relation to masterpieces and tourist arts in more detail in the following chapters and in Chapter Six, where I will discuss the role of museums as arbiters of authenticity in their creation of the authentic work of art and in a frame of trade and the market. The anthropology of art (or anthropologists writing on art), as it was becoming a field of interest, still showed signs of the dominant art historical tradition. The Anthropology of Art by Robert Layton (1981) still had important introductory chapters on “style” and “style areas” and “the artist.” Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton’s Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics (1992) marked a turn, mainly in its introduction by Alfred Gell: “The Enchantment of Technology and the Technology of Enchantment.” Some years later, it was also Gell, in Art and Agency (1998), who a ributed real, active roles to objects rather than the passive ones of the past. Gell made objects into active agents, participants in the cultures of which they were part, in which they circulated. According to Gell, art is made through the enchantment of technology, “the extension of sociality into material form, so successful that it o en effaces the reality of its own production” (1992). Prior to Gell, Appadu-

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rai (1986) traced the trajectories of things according to “their ability to move in and out of different conditions of identification and alienation” (in Miller 2005: 4). Daniel Miller, in Materiality (2005), focused on ways of looking at the materiality of things in what was becoming the field of material culture studies. Miller included ways of investigating immateriality as well as materiality, tangibility as well as intangibility, objects as well as photos as objects, text, and video. Appadurai’s, Gell’s, and Miller’s emphasis is on social context, away from aesthetics, style, and the artist. Layton (2003) has a reply to Art and Agency, as does Howard Morphy (2009), arguing that removing the agency from human actors and a ributing it only to the object denies much of the artwork’s impact. Another problematic field of study and one my work equally engages with is the anthropology of tourism. Being in a sense much younger than the anthropology of art, the anthropology of tourism first emerged as a reaction to the worldwide mass tourism boom, due to what Dean MacCannell in The Tourist (1976) called the emergence of the leisure class of the 1960s–1970s. Many of the first publications reflecting on the quickly evolving tourism industry and its effects on the third and fourth world peoples it “overran” in a much bigger and much more penetrating way than before, were of a rather “fatal impact” kind, stereotyping tourism as being only negative and disruptive.4 Some recent publications still testify to such one-sided views. For Vanuatu, some developmental reports do so (for example Cassidy et al. 2006; Slater 2006). With an emphasis on the history of tourism in Vanuatu, Charles De Burlo (1989a) focused on Port Vila, Erakor, Tanna, and Pentecost, from the perspective of World War II veterans returning as tourists to the sites where they had been based during the war. Ngaire Douglas, in They Came for Savages (1996), charted the history of cruise ship tourism in wider Melanesia with a central role for Burns-Philp Ltd., the first company to also take private travelers aboard their ships (see also Douglas and Douglas 1996a and Buckley and Klugman 1981). As early as 1976, some authors touched upon the more complex nature of tourism. McCannell’s theory of tourism and the leisure class (MacCannell 1976), inspired by Veblen’s influential work of 1925, is still regarded as a primary source for anyone working on the anthropology of tourism. Nelson Graburn’s Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976b) focused on art within these renewed processes of exchange. Shi ing the emphasis to the specific interaction between tourists and locals, Valene Smith, in Hosts and Guests (1989), focused on cultural exchange and the impact the “guests” have on their “hosts,” and, in Being Ourselves for You (1998), Nick Stanley focused specifically on the host side. MacCannell (1976) and Graburn (1989) defined tourism as a ritual. Using Arnold Van Gennep’s iconic three phases of ritual (separation, limin-

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ality, reintegration), they defined separation as the departure of tourists, liminality as the holiday itself, and reintegration as the return home. Both these authors stressed the tourist’s “quest for authenticity” and the idea of a “lost condition.” John Urry, in his influential work on “the tourist gaze,” saw the tourist as “a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other ‘times’ and other ‘places’ away from that person’s everyday life” (1990: 9). “Tourists,” he wrote, “show particular fascination in the ‘real lives’ of others that somehow possess a reality hard to discover in their own experiences” (ibid.). Malcolm Crick (1988) mentioned “inauthenticity,” which MacCannell called “staged authenticity,” inherent to all cultures. Importantly, Urry added, “It is not clear why the apparently inauthentic staging for the tourist is so very different from the processes of remaking that happen in all cultures anyway” (1990: 9). Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington were the first to write an ethnography of tourism, Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (1991). Their work deals with the effects of tourism on a local people (the Chambri) in a global system (visiting tourists, the National Museum of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, and the international art market). Importantly, it is their blurring of those local/ global boundaries that deals with the dividing dichotomies that so o en categorize and break up lived realities. In Twisted Histories, tourism is part of these lives.5 Tourist art too, in the early days o en referred to as airport art, was in the older, art historical view considered in a negative way, as valueless, never used in its “traditional” context, made just for sale. If tourism was fatal, then its products were degenerate to say the least. Although also mentioning a certain loss, Nicholas Thomas, writing within a postcolonialist frame, commented on this: “If much certainly has been lost, the resilience and vigor of indigenous and postcolonial cultures is simply too conspicuous for the ‘fatal impact’ view to be sustained” (1995: 178). Previously, Graburn had provided the categories, steps of changing material culture, subsequently described in such terms as “art as artifact,” “early assimilation,” “resurgent ethnicity,” “tradition preserved,” “modernist ethnicity,” and “postmodern artists” (1993). These less fatal impact categories marked some of the issues we are still dealing with today. “Resurgent ethnicity,” to name only one, is a category that can be used in many contexts and throughout parts of the Pacific, with revitalization of art and culture by selection and promotion being relevant for many places. Today, tourist art is not necessarily so different from any other kind of object for sale on the market. Where objects used to be interpreted as material forms of indigenous belief systems, nowadays they are also valuable artworks in the Western sense of the word—to us

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but also to local people, who are increasingly aware of their monetary value and have been, for a long time, familiar with things offered for sale.

Vanuatu Ethnography, Collectors, Collections, and Exhibitions Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, is an island nation-state in what is traditionally referred to as the culture area of Melanesia in the Southwest Pacific. As the New Hebrides it was ruled by a joint Anglo-French condominium from 1906 until 1980, when it gained independence and took on its contemporary name. The area was documented from early contact history onward, first by whalers, labor traders, missionaries, and the like and since the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries by some of the earliest anthropologists. Then Cambridge students John Layard and A. B. Deacon carried out fieldwork in Vanuatu, respectively, in 1914–1915 and 1926–1927. Layard, a pupil of W. H. Rivers at Cambridge, worked on the Small Islands just off Northeast Malakula (Vao, Atchin, and Wala). Deacon, who was a pupil of A. C. Haddon, worked in Southwest Bay and very briefly on Ambrym. He died in Southwest Bay near the end of his fieldwork. Layard only published some of his main findings, abundant with data, in 1942 (on Vao, volumes on Atchin and Wala were supposed to follow but never did), while Deacon’s work, based on fieldwork a few years later but of a rather pessimistic “salvage anthropology” kind, was posthumously published in 1934.6 Even so, both authors raised a ention to the many changes as they occurred at the time. In particular on-present day Malakula and also Ambrym, the work of these two pioneers provides the background to cultural revival. Local people now use Deacon’s and Layard’s volumes (some copied pages or sometimes a copy of the whole work) to retrace their ancestry and claim their rights to rituals, performances, and objects. A er Layard and Deacon there was a period of disinterest. From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, Jean Guiart visited both New Caledonia and the New Hebrides several times (Guiart 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956a, 1956b). One of his monographs in the Journal de la Société des Océanistes is on North Ambrym (1951), the other on North Malakula (1952). The first to really reanalyze the substantial work of Layard and Deacon and do long-term fieldwork again was Michael Allen, from 1958–1959 onward on the island of Ambae (Allen 1967, 1981a, 1981b, 1981c, 1984a, 1984b, 1986, 1988). From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, some of his students at the University of Sydney also focused on Vanuatu (specifically Mary Pa erson for North Ambrym [1968–1971] and Margaret Jolly for South Pentecost [1970–1972]), which meant that anthropological interest in the area was reinstated.

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Other “second-wave” researchers include Robert Tonkinson for Southeast Ambrym (1968, 1981, 1982), William Rodman and Margaret Rodman for Ambae (W. Rodman 1973, 1977; M. Rodman 1981), and Lamont Lindstrom for Tanna (1981, 1989, 1993a, 1993b).7 They were once more interrupted by a moratorium on anthropological research from 1985 until 1994, imposed by the then new government of newly independent Vanuatu. A er 1994, many premoratorium, second-wave researchers of the 1960s–1970s returned, together with new researchers, o en their students. Since then, much work has been done in anthropology, archaeology (e.g., Spriggs, Bedford), linguistics (e.g., Tryon), and material culture and art (Bonnemaison et al. 1996; Rio 1997; Bolton 2001; Geismar 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005c, 2007). Before Layard and Deacon, W. H. R. Rivers’s History of Melanesian Society (1914) and Robert Codrington’s The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore (1969 [1891]) had both focused on the Banks and Torres Islands, today North Vanuatu. Codrington and Rivers as well as Layard and Deacon gave extensive a ention to what they termed “the male graded societies” of North and North-Central Vanuatu. In those societies, men a ained rank through public, competitive accumulation of prestige (wealth) and sacred status by means of ceremonial exchange and sacrifice of tusked boars, with other boars or mats as return payments. Especially in parts of Malakula, a man of high grade was not just a leader but also a kind of supernatural being. The male graded society was then also seen and redefined as a “politico-religious system” (Allen 1981a, 1981b), with gradations of the sacredness of graded men in most places (mostly on Malakula, Ambrym, and in South Pentecost, least on Ambae) and, more recently, as a “status alteration system” (Bolton 2003c). The la er terminology aimed to extend the “male” in “male graded society” to the “female” (for female practice, see also M. Rodman 1981; Jolly 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1994b, 1997; Bolton 1993, 1994; Pa erson 1981, 2001). Lissant Bolton, like other authors, entwines these systems of knowledge with notions of kastom, as in “women have kastom too,” aiming to extend male-dominated kastom to women. The male-graded societies are generally thought of as major loci for art production. This was the case for the Maki and (Ni)Mangki of Malakula (Layard 1942; Deacon 1934), the Mage of North Ambrym (Guiart 1951; Pa erson 1976, 1981, 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Rio 2002b, 2007, 2009), the Warsangul of South Pentecost (Jolly 1991b), and the Suqe of the Banks and Torres Islands (Codrington 1969 [1891]; Rivers 1914; Vienne 1979, 1984), which are all tied up with the practice of men a aining rank.8 Many of these locations have not received much further academic a ention since,

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except for Ambae (Allen; W. Rodman; M. Rodman; Bolton) and the Bolololi graded society of North Pentecost (Taylor 2003, 2008b).9 While anthropologists have o en stressed that there are more similarities than differences between the graded societies (Maki-Mangki-Mage and Suqe-Huqe/Hungwe), museum ethnologists have o en focused on a divide between them, based on differences in patri- and matrilinearity and thus also in art styles, drawn a er Felix Speiser’s model and crosscu ing Pentecost, where the north is matrilineal and the south patrilineal (see also, amongst others, Stöhr 1987: 259). What was termed the “overt patrilineal” area consisted of Malakula, the Small Islands, Ambrym and South Pentecost, the “common” matrilineal area being North Pentecost, Ambae, Maewo, Santo, and the Banks and Torres Islands. Joël Bonnemaison called the region reaching from the Torres Islands to North Pentecost an “Oceanic Mediterranean of influence,” a region that was interrelated and relating, “throughout which rituals and cultural innovations were constantly being transmi ed” (1996a: 208). Like Bonnemaison, Pa erson pointed to what she calls a system of cultural commerce between the adjacent area of South Pentecost, Ambrym, and South Malakula, a commerce that “reached its apogee just before the incursions of Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century” (2001: 47). West Ambrym was the entrepôt for most of this commerce, disseminating rituals from South Malakula to North- and Southeast Ambrym, at least until the enormous volcanic eruption of 1913, which wiped out entire parts of the island. Since 1913, North Ambrym took over the West’s hegemony, declaring itself “the last bastion of kastom” for the island (Pa erson 2001: 52). Pa erson distinguished fi een grades in the North Ambrym Mage graded society, all imported from Malakula, and on top of that the kin-based, “indigenous” grades of bwerang yanyan and fenbi, equally called Mage and considered the “zenith of power” (see Pa erson 1981). Except for the male graded societies, sometimes referred to as public societies, there were secret societies, in coexistence with the former. Even more than the graded societies, the secret societies were loci of art production. It was in these circles that the sacred aspects of male ritual life were embedded. Within the secret societies, such as Luan and Batù or Rom on Ambrym, there was abundant masquerade. However, much detailed information on these societies is lacking. Deacon provided the best information. For South Malakula, he described the Nalawan secret society and the Ruan society of the east coast that he tied up with the Luan society of Ambrym. He also compared Nalawan with the Tamate of the Banks and Torres Islands (Deacon 1934: 280, 434). The hats/masks/headdresses of Nalawan in which much masquerade was done (in Nimangki there was none) were Nalawan Mbalmbal. Wooden

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cylinders representing the crying voice of the ghosts were Naainggol (ibid.: 385). All objects of Nalawan but also Nevinbur, for Deacon the most sacred of societies but of which he admi ed he knew li le (with only two men at the time of his fieldwork who had taken part in a Nevinbur), were seen as especially sacred. Deacon collected a genealogy of mythological ancestors of the Nevinbur starting with Aiwut Mansip, Lieur, Lisivu, and Nevinbumbaau, names that return in the many masks, dance sticks, and other items called temes nevinbur (ibid.: 461). Looking closer at the arts of Vanuatu is looking at the iconic “high arts” of the graded men—the arts of Maki, (Ni)Mangki, Mage, Warsangul, and Suqe and, related, of the secret societies—at least in museum contexts in the West, where it is these things that are selected for view. They are the slit-drums, tree fern figures, and rambaramp effigies but also the different mask types and nevinbur puppets from Malakula that were given labels like “dramatic” or “expressionistic” in the Primitivism rage of early twentieth-century Europe. The a ention by avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso and surrealist André Breton transformed them into highly valued art objects. As a Cubist, Picasso had first discovered the arts of Africa in the Musée du Trocadéro (later Musée de l’Homme, now Quai Branly) and

Figure 1.1. Group of South Malakulan masks at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Slit-drums standing across the exhibition hall are reflected in the glass (photograph by the author).

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later of the Pacific, as did most surrealists by the 1930s. By that time, Paris had become one of the first places where “tribal art” was being transacted. Artists such as Picasso, Breton, and the German Expressionist August Macke became passionate collectors of these strange things that came to Europe from all over the world. For example, an evocation of André Breton’s atelier interior, stuffed with Pacific art, is held and exhibited at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou) in Paris. Philippe Peltier (1996) recounts the life history of a Malakulan Nevinbumbaau effigy, originally the upper part of a mask functioning in the Nevinbur society and now kept in the Picasso Museum in Paris. It was first owned by Henri Matisse, who put it in a toy chair and later gave it to Picasso. The largest collections of historical materials from Vanuatu are held at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel (2,480 objects collected 1910–1912 by Felix Speiser, whose publication of 1996 [1923] remains a source for anyone working on the arts of Vanuatu), at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (1,200 objects collected by A. B. Lewis; see Lewis 1932), at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (collected by W. H. R. Rivers, J. Layard, A. B. Deacon, and T. Harrisson), and at the Redpath Museum, McGill University, Montreal (collected by

Figure 1.2. Group of Nalawan figurines and puppets at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Slit-drums, the public, and Paris reflected in the glass (photograph by the author).

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Reverend Robertson on Erromango, see Lawson 1994). Some of the work of these art collectors or, be er, in their roles of collectors, resulted in major works on Melanesia and Vanuatu (Speiser 1923; Lewis 1996 [1932]; Rivers 1914). A. B. Lewis’ travels through Melanesia for the Field Museum South Pacific Expedition in 1909–1911 was specifically set up as a collecting trip, and he collected an astonishing 14,000 objects in Melanesia in total (in Welsch 1998). From 1908 onward, W. H. R. Rivers had continually carried out research in the area aboard the mission ship The Southern Cross, with short stays on several islands in Vanuatu (on one of his trips, he based Layard there in North Malakula) and the Solomon Islands. Basel ethnologist Felix Speiser’s expedition of 1910–1912 was also composed of short stays on different islands and particularly set up to “save” what “remained” of “traditional culture.” He visited Efate, Santo, Malakula, Ambrym, and the Banks and Torres Islands, but, as Christian Kaufmann noted, even for these locations his collection was incomplete, with nothing from Southwest Malakula and only partial coverage for the Banks Islands (1996b: 305–6). A er Speiser, the first major publication to focus on the arts of Vanuatu again was the catalogue of the retrospective Arts of Vanuatu exhibition (Bonnemaison et al. 1996). The exhibition opened in Vanuatu in 1996 under the title Spirit blong Bubu i Kam Bak (Bislama for The Spirits of the Ancestors Return; see also Geismar 2003a: 82). From Vanuatu, it moved to New Caledonia and different locations throughout Europe. The exhibition showed materials from the Vanuatu Cultural Centre collection with the addition of many valuable loans from the grand historical collections at Basel, Paris, and Cambridge. What I call the high art of male ritual was once more omnipresent, even though according to curator Kirk Huffman the exhibition was set up to show specifically those things that were “in danger of sleeping or dying out” (in Geismar 2003a: 66). What one saw in the exhibition as well as the catalogue were indeed some of the less prototypical arts: very rare and old items such as coral and coral tuff sculptures collected by a certain Captain Wolsch on Futuna in 1884 (Bonnemaison et al. 1996: figs. 38 and 39) and all sorts of other rare things. Old equaled valuable once more, with the focus of the exhibition being on ge ing ni-Vanuatu people interested in reviving their culture and arts. Vanuatu Stael: Kastom and Creativity, an exhibition at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2003 (Geismar 2003b), showed more innovative contemporary art pieces that drew on but did not necessarily replicate older pieces. For Vanuatu Stael, a much smaller exhibition, guest curator Haidy Geismar commissioned two South Malakulan masks in Lamap, the “twin” gulong and the Nalawan Luan Veuv or “daughter of Luan,” which were re-

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made a er visual repatriation of their historical examples from the then Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, together with other art forms that cover a range of things currently produced in Vanuatu such as baskets, mats, and other items plaited by women and works by contemporary artists such as Emmanuel Wa , Moses Jobo, Julie e Pita, Joseph John, and Michael Busai. These artists, all members of Nawita, the first contemporary artists association of Vanuatu (founded 1989), use kastom themes and techniques in their work.10 In Vanuatu, their work is regularly exhibited in the Espace Culturel Française in Port Vila. By 2008, when I was looking into this material, new artist associations included the Ambrym Artists Association, its members being Ambrymese wood sculptors, and the Ambrym Arts and Cra s Association, who were more concerned with “reviving traditional art forms” such as slit-drums and tree fern sculptures (as reported locally in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper of 10 June 2007 and the Daily Post of 14 June 2007). While Nawita and other artist associations are quite well known in the urban areas of Vanuatu, associations of local artists such as those of Ambrym are o en short lived. I do not know whether the Ambrym associations that I mention here are still operational in Port Vila. What is certain is that Ambrym individuals are active, on the market, transacting with tourists and collectors. On a national level, it is the Cultural Centre that plays a leading role in the promotion—but not o en in the accompanying commoditization—of the arts of Vanuatu.

Vanuatu Cultural Centre The Vanuatu Cultural Centre in Port Vila (VCC, Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta, or VKS, in Bislama) is a model cultural center for local people in the Pacific. Originally set up by the colonial government in 1956 as the National Museum and Cultural Centre, it has undergone many changes over the years. From 1977 onward, its director Kirk Huffman did not focus on objects and collections but instead on the loss of kastom and the revival and reperformance of ritual, a policy he extended well into the 1990s. In 1989, Huffman retired from his position to be succeeded, in 1995, by Ralph Regenvanu, whose focus was less on promoting and safeguarding cultural history and more on the challenges of the future for the literally young, independent country, while staying in touch with history. With currently over 50 percent of the population being under sixteen years of age, the Young People’s Project was one of Regenvanu’s first accomplishments (see also Mitchell 1998). In 2006, he was succeeded by ethnoarchaeologist Marcellin Abong from Lamap, Southeast Malakula,

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whose main interest was cases of repatriation of objects and human remains, such as the skulls in the rambaramp funerary effigies from his native area. In 2017, Abong was succeeded by another archaeologist and long-serving VKS staff member: Richard Japuneyo Shing. The National Museum resides under the Cultural Centre umbrella, together with the National Library and Archives. Museum practice at the VKS was never fully centered on the collection and exhibition of objects. Rather, it served and serves as a platform, a dynamic, continuously changing social space for ni-Vanuatu, or Vanuatu nationals. As Lissant Bolton illustrates, one of Huffman’s legacies at the museum is that it has always centered more on “the ideas and practices of the ni-Vanuatu in their own communities than on anything that was kept in the museum” (in Bolton 2003c: 38). She adds that this was a stance for which the VKS was o en criticized (e.g., Kaeppler 1994: 40). The museum continued to collect and exhibit, albeit from a marginal standpoint, always giving priority to people’s voices and opinions. The tabu room, or reserve collection, for example, stores objects ranging from material culture items to film footage, photographs, and song recordings. Only leaders and people entitled to access it can enter. The tabu room is a space of secret and sacred knowledge, of things not to be seen by everyone, of “forms of local knowledge that are o en highly restricted and unequivocally linked to particular persons and practices from local places” (Geismar and Tilley 2003: 179). Since 1981, the VKS has run the Fieldworker Program, in which local men are trained to work on kastom ma ers as outlined by the VKS in their places (Tryon 1999: 9–16). The Women’s Culture Project started in 1991 and the first Women’s Fieldworker Workshop was held in 1994, fostered by Lissant Bolton; since then it has taken place annually next to that of the men’s (Bolton 1994, 1997, 1999a, 2003c, 2007; Tryon 1999; Regenvanu 1999, 2005; Geismar and Tilley 2003). The fieldworker scheme evolved out of the Oral Traditions Project, instigated by Kirk Huffman and ethnomusicologist Peter Crowe from 1973 onward, when the two “had several long conversations . . . trying to think of ways ‘to get the Melanesians interested in the documentation and revival of their traditional cultures’” (in Bolton 2003c: 36). At the time, anthropologist Jean Guiart had given a talk at the VKS “in which he suggested that the Board of Management initiate an oral traditions recording program” (in Bolton 2003c: 36). Initially, it was Peter Crowe together with linguist Jean-Michel Charpentier who, in 1976, started developing the Oral Traditions Project, as Bolton illustrated, “more or less independently of each other” (ibid.: 37). When Kirk Huffman took over from Charpentier as VKS curator (Charpentier was temporary curator in 1976–1977) and coordinator of the Oral Traditions Project, he built it up

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and transformed his local trainees into the first generation of fieldworkers, filwoka in Bislama. In a report to the VKS board of 1977, Peter Crowe, in line with Huffman’s guidelines, described the workings of the original Oral Traditions Project as follows: The aim of our project is to record all forms of unwri en knowledge, aural and visual, by hand, on tape, video, cine or any available way. . . . But it is not entirely for preservation as if we were making another kind of museum. We also want to stimulate the revival and continuance of traditional ways, where the people feel it appropriate. (Crowe n.d., in Bolton 2003c: 38)

Today, the annual fieldworker workshops provide opportunities for fieldworkers to come together and discuss kastom ma ers and what is happening and changing in their home environments. On the other hand, initiatives that start in the Museum and the Cultural Centre venture out into the islands and to people in the villages in the person of the fieldworker. Within the filwoka scheme, the central but somewhat contentious concept of kastom, which I turn to now, is central.

Kastom There is an abundance of literature on the emergence of kastom as a political discourse in Melanesia and Vanuatu (e.g., Tonkinson 1981, 1982; Jolly 1982, 1992a; Bolton 1993, 1994, 2003c, 2007, 2011; Lindstrom 1994, 1997; Tabani 1999, 2002). In an article of 2005, Ralph Regenvanu treats the “changing face of ‘custom.’” Earlier writings by ni-Vanuatu authors tended to stress kastom, culture, and tradition—kastom, kalja, and tredisin in Bislama: Bongmatur (1994) and, at an earlier stage and not yet embracing tredisin, Ligo (1980).11 Extensions to female kastom were first established via the work of Bolton (1993, 1994, 2003c), Jolly (1994b, 1997), and Pa erson (2001). Roselyn Tor and Anthea Toka (2004) and John Taylor (2008c) wrote on rights for women in male-dominated kastom. Margaret Jolly wrote on performing kastom as commodity, treating the South Pentecost nagol, or land dive (1994a), and, related, (in)authenticity (1992b). Mary Pa erson has treated the commoditization of culture and the arts in North Ambrym since her initial research in the area from the late 1960s to early 1970s. In “Specters of Inauthenticity,” Jolly (1992b) argues that what is of importance is how local people see themselves and their cultures today (see also Bolton 1993: 97) and the repercussions of this for the future of kastom. It is important, she adds, to ask who decides whether kastom has to stay fixed, or authentic, and what this is or should be. Kastom divides as well as unifies (Larcom 1982: 333), not in the least in deciding what it is.

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In the cultural revitalization wave in Vanuatu, from the years prior to independence in 1980 to the present day, kastom has come to stand for many things to many people. As Roger Keesing put it, it “could mean (almost) all things to all people” (1982a: 297). Haidy Geismar provides a definition of kastom that is useful: It can be a plethora of objects and activities; it can be seen as knowledge, practices, artefacts, the use of the environment, persons, language, and as a form of interpretation itself. At the same time, as the interpretations of the VCC show, kastom is more than a set of ideas, ideologies, practices and representations. It is also increasingly institutionalized, especially in the VCC and the Malvatumauri [Indigenous Council of Chiefs], and instituted, in the development of practice and increasingly in law such as customary copyright legislation . . . and customary land tenure. Moreover, it is also increasingly materialized—stemming from the capability of objects to connect, and move between, places, both between islands within the nation, and between nation states in increasingly global networks. (2003a: 30)

Translated into actual circumstances, the broad concept of kastom can be interpreted in different ways, depending on which aspect of it is highlighted, resulting in the development of different kastom discourses in different places. For example Southeast Malakulans today refer to the Ambrymese and specifically the North Ambrymese as “stealers of kastom.” “They stole our tam-tam design,” it is said on Malakula, “and are since making big money with it.” What contemporary kastom in Vanuatu mostly stands for is a going back to the past, even though this is not always easily accomplished. Malama Meleisea, in the early years of cultural revitalization and emerging kastom discourse, reported for Samoa that “the problem of choice and emphasis is in deciding what aspects of culture are selected for preservation or promotion, whether the aim is to preserve aspects of an island’s cultural history or to maintain and foster or revive particular skills and arts” (1980: 22). For Vanuatu, Robert Tonkinson reported for Southeast Ambrym, a place known to have le kastom from early contact and mission history onward, that, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, people “worried about a return to grass skirts and penis wrappers, spears and bows and arrows, and wondered whether they would have to destroy non-kastom things such as hunting rifles, aluminum dinghies, outboards and so on” (1982: 310). If they were to return to the rule of kastom law and revive the graded society or male initiation, then “who among them still remembered enough to make such things feasible?” (ibid.), “who among them remembered enough to revive ritual” (ibid.). Such questions relate to discussions in the literature about “invention of culture,” “tradition,” and “authenticity” (Wagner 1981; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Errington 1998).

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Within the “invention of tradition” paradigm (e.g., Philibert 1986 and Kolig 1987 for Vanuatu), kastom came to stand for the discourse of an educated elite rather than that of a customary people, who, as a rule, are uneducated. In relation to wider Melanesia, Alain Babadzan opposed “the lived tradition” of “the rural village,” which he furthermore identified as “truly authentic,” to that “invented by the Western educated elites,” those who never knew “real custom” (1988: 206). This is a problematic view. In a sharp critique to Babadzan, Jonathan Friedman replied, rather sarcastically, that, in these lines of thinking, “these modernized populations” of “intellectual locals,” those emanating from “the most Westernised social classes, those most removed from traditional lifestyle and values . . . could not possibly know what their real cultures and traditions are all about” (1992: 850). This is a stereotypical, outspoken, white standpoint, a presumption. We now tend not to use terminologies like “invention of culture” or “invention of tradition” anymore, for in most places in the Pacific and elsewhere people do not necessarily like to be told that they are constantly reinventing their cultures. What we mostly remember from Wagner (1981) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) is that culture, like tradition and authenticity, is always transformed and transforming and that this process is not necessarily negative but, on the contrary, “dynamic, creative and real” (Linnekin 1990: 161). For Vanuatu, Lissant Bolton stresses the important notion of change in continuity, saying that, despite the dominant ideology among local people that “kastom does not change”: The key issue in relation to revival is that it is impossible to revive kastom without transformation. The motivations for ritual, the uses of objects, even specific relationships, no longer intersect with other aspects of people’s lives in the way that they once did, because those aspects have also changed. Revival necessarily involves transformation and innovation. (2011: 315)

During my stay in Fona in North Ambrym in 2009, I o en heard people complain that there was tumas kastom as they called it, or too much kastom. They were referring to the many pressures and prestations that come with it, for example the many kastom marriages and funerals that go on continuously and that are about the presentation and exchange of goods. For example, people rear pigs in order to pay for their son’s incision ceremony, or they feel pressured into organizing a tobuan (“pig killing” in North Ambrymese language: the sacrifice of a pig) or any other kinship-related ritual that involves the transfer of goods to family members. Especially in important kastom families, these pressures and the costs to fulfil kastom obligations are high, and people struggle to accumulate enough pigs

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and other goods and foods, and increasingly also money, to redistribute. Aspects such as the rearing of pigs were disrupted under influence of the missions and colonialism, resulting in a chain reaction of traditional pig payments becoming much harder to accomplish in contemporary contexts. At the same time, several local grassroots movements, o en in cooperation with the VKS, aim to bring traditional wealth back (for example, the Traditional Money Banks Project by VKS). The kastom that I focus on in this book is that of the performative male-dominated exhibitions that are mounted for art collectors and tourists. As I will aim to illustrate throughout the book, especially in Chapters Three and Four, where I discuss festivals and tourism, this is authentic or authenticated kastom, which is centered on revived male-graded ritual. That performative kastom for audiences is predominantly male dominated has to do with a range of factors. While on islands such as Ambrym, women now increasingly reclaim their kastom, they are o en still underrepresented in performance groups, or they are not present at all. Traditionally linked more to the Church than to kastom, Ambrym women are hardly ever seen dancing bare breasted. They are fraet (afraid, in this context also translated as “ashamed”). Christian men dancing in nambas (penis sheaths) are fraet as well, for a range of reasons that I will return to throughout the book, but it is women who mostly feel this pressure and who participate least. Bolton (2003c) outlined the influential role of Grace Molisa, ni-Vanuatu writer and feminist activist, in the development of female kastom practice since the 1980s. Molisa spoke for women at the 1990 men’s filwoka workshop, addressing them about the relevance of a women filwoka group (in Bolton 2003c: 64). In that same year, Molisa organized a workshop during the Women’s Cultural Festival in which she brought to light male domination in culture and revival: “In the last ten years it seems that whenever our leaders have talked about culture they have only spoken about men. They suggest that men have rights in custom, culture, and tradition but women do not. Women are nothing. Men are something” (Molisa 1990: 32, in Bolton 2003c: 61). In recent years, women have found new ways to empower their kastom. Some now actively engage in transactions of art for money between carvers and collectors, dealers, and tourists, or they, themselves, even carve. In North Ambrym, for example, Benedicta Tiningkon is the widow of an important kastom man. Having to raise her children on her own, she now claims his rights to ownership and sale of North Ambrymese slit-drums. In the past, this would have been impossible. Drums were important male items, the carving and use of which was concealed, particularly from women and children. I will return to Benedicta and other women’s roles

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in the artifact business in later chapters, when I discuss in further detail the commoditization of art and performance.

Copyright Kopiraet, the Bislama term for an indigenized kind of copyright in Vanuatu, or the right to the production of certain things and designs, is not new to the country or to other parts of the Pacific (e.g., Campbell 2002 for the Trobriand Islands). David Napier differentiates between what he calls a disjunction between cultural property and what he defines as “ownership which depends upon collective knowledge over generations” and intellectual property, “the ownership of which depends upon showing that what one knows is new” (2002: 299; for property rights see also Moustakas 1989 and Strathern 1999, 2001). Based on his fieldwork in North Malakula in 1914–1915, Layard mentioned rights to certain forms of production in his classic work Stone Men of Malekula. Much later, Geismar raised a ention to copyright claims in relation to intellectual property rights in Vanuatu (2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005c). In her Ph.D. thesis (2003a), she investigated ways in which the implementation of the Copyright Act of 2000 was put into practice in Port Vila and three island locations: Malakula, North Ambrym, and Central Pentecost. She defines the Copyright Act of 2000 as “official injunctions and restrictions that establish legitimate entitlement for individual or incorporated entities to circulate and profit at any particular moment from the material reproduction of specified forms” (2005a: 441). Before, Huffman defined copyright as “a system [that] recognizes certain individuals, groups or areas as the proper owners of cultural items, the rights to which can be purchased, sold and resold over large areas” (Huffman 1996d: 182–83). Huffman’s purchased, sold, and resold scheme largely refers to what Pa erson, in her work, called a system of ritual commerce (1981, 2001). Geismar’s project was defined particularly by the North Ambrym context of commoditization. As she put it: “the fusing of ideas about copyright with kastom entitlements behind the dra ing of the Copyright Act has been, to a large extent, precipitated by the success of men from North Ambrym in developing an international market for their carvings” (2005c: 37). Because of their “success” on the market, the Copyright Act was dra ed first and foremost because of disputes over (contested) ownership, particularly in North Ambrym and in Port Vila between North Ambrym men who are known as active entrepreneurs in the ongoing artifact trade. My work is ten years later than Geismar’s and at a time when formal copyright legislation as outlined in the Copyright Act of 2000 has been

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transformed by local people, to fit the needs of some, specifically on Ambrym but also on Malakula, where a second kind of copyright, defined as tu kaen kopiraet (literally: “two kinds of copyright”) emerged recently.

Tu Kaen Kopiraet In recent years, new and innovative ways have been found to ignore the rigid restrictions of copyright. It was in Lamap, Southeast Malakula, that I first heard of a second kind of copyright, or tu kaen kopiraet. The second kind of copyright is a recent one, developed since 2000 and locally translated as “the right to make copies,” in which copies stand for “things made for sale only.” It was Herna Abong of Labreav Pnoamb Nasara or ritual ground in Lamap, an important revitalized Big Man for his area, who first told me about tu kaen kopiraet and the fact that people are now entitled to two kinds of copyright: original copyright, or the right to reproduce objects and designs that are theirs (the original definition of copyright), and another kind, the right to make copies of things that usually require copyright. In the literature sometimes referred to as “commercial fine arts” (Graburn 1976), “replicas,” or “pseudotraditional arts,” copies were defined by Christopher Steiner as “art-forms which imitate traditional forms of art produced expressly for sale to outsiders” (1994: 35). Steiner adds that where he was working, in West Africa, these were sold as “antiquités” (ibid.). Under that name, they could easily as well be discarded as “fakes” or “forgeries” in global art market se ings. Within Vanuatu, copies of things are what can be sold quite undisputedly, but not without first securing agreement as to who has the “right to the copy,” the “copyright,” or “the right to sell the copy.” Without realizing it at the time, I first witnessed a transaction of the second kind of copyright at the Malakula Festival on Uliveo, an island in the Maskelyne group of South Malakula. This was a er my stay on Ambrym, at a time when my own role was increasingly evolving into that of some sort of an intermediary in transactions of art for money. By the time of my stay on Uliveo, the news had spread among several couples and groups of yachties that I was an anthropologist with a research interest in the arts. At the Malakula Festival, some of them approached me and asked if any of the artifacts that had been danced were going to be offered for sale a erward. I told them that I did not know but that I could easily ask someone. By then, I knew that most local people are pre y eager to sell. That same day, I went up to Fred Numa Longga, director of the local Malakula Cultural Centre in Lakatoro, North Malakula, who I had met before, and

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asked him if there was going to be anything up for sale a er the festival. To this he replied, “Yes, but we first need to arrange the copyright.” I remember being puzzled by that answer, for how could the copyright of things have to be arranged? Is such a thing not simply something you have and hold on to? What Fred Numa was referring to, of course, was the second kind of copyright, that of the sale of copies of things, doubles, for sale only. This is something to be arranged, to be agreed upon by all those concerned, at any time prior to a sale. It is not fixed like regular copyright, when someone knows what, in kastom, belongs to whom. When the festival on Uliveo was over, another yachtie couple approached me, asking me to follow them to a corner of the festival grounds, where some artifacts were now offered for sale. I realized that by now the copyright was probably arranged, although I still did not fully understand what this meant. Not knowing what to expect, I followed the tourists to advise them about what to buy or not to buy. This was my first interaction in such a transaction. The tourists’ inquiries were about the realness of these things, about their authenticity, and also about their aesthetics, whether or not they were well made. The seller was an older man from Tisman, a village on the east coast of Malakula, north of Lamap. Later, in Lamap, I learned that his name was Bongtete and that he was from a bush village close by Tisman. I also learned that Tisman has a kalja klab (culture club) for tourists, “where men perform kastom dances for vatu only” (the vatu being Vanuatu’s national currency). Bongtete is regarded as a man with a genuine interest in kastom. This is why it was decided that he deserved “the right to the copies.” But this is what I discovered later. On Uliveo, Bongtete was now selling the objects that Herna Abong, the important kastom leader from the Lamap area, had been wearing on his body during a silent passage at the festival. The tourists had recognized these things that were now offered for sale and even had photographs of Herna wearing them. I too remembered seeing them, thinking this was a strange passage of a leader walking the grounds in kastom dress in silence. These are complex issues of tu kaen kopiraet that are entwined with the performance of things. When worn only, things are not as imbued with the power they are meant to imbue as when they are danced. They are worn in order to make them authentic for sale. I return to these complexities in Chapter Three, where I will unpack notions of the authenticity of performance. The copies on Herna’s body that were for sale a erward were two panels, one that he had worn on his chest and one on his back. Herna had been accompanied by two younger men wearing nambas (penis sheaths) like himself and carrying a bow and arrows. One wore a headpiece. That all these things were considered to be copies by local people was outside of the tourists’ knowledge. It was later, in Lamap, that Herna admi ed to

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me to walking these copy artifacts for sale, a er my questions about his passage at the festival. It had been no coincidence, I thought, that only these things were offered for sale. I was right in my suspicion. Herna’s short and silent passage in nambas and carved and painted panels on his body and his compatriots’ carrying of bows and arrows and headpiece in the end resulted in a sale for 12,000 vatu (12,000 vatu is approximately 120 Australian dollars or 100 euros). The yachties initially bought only one of the panels, the one they liked most, for 10,000 vatu. A er long negotiations with Bongtete, through Fred Numa and me, they bought the whole lot for only 2,000 vatu extra. In the process, Bongtete had been annoyed that he was not selling everything at once. In the end, he told me in Bislama to tell the tourists that he would have to burn or bury the other things if they did not buy them. His strategy of “art for sale or to be burned later” worked. He sold everything and earned 2,000 vatu extra. Such a scene—of fields of power and struggle—illustrates perfectly that those who at first appear powerless in the transaction in fact have strategies that allow them, up to a point, to make transactions to their advantage.

Kastom, Christianity, Tourism The inhabitants of the New Hebrides were Christianized by succeeding waves of missionaries from the midnineteenth century onward. The major denominations, namely Presbyterian, Anglican, French Catholic, and Church of Christ, had and have different a itudes toward kastom and the adherence to its principal practices. New denominations, such as the Seventh-day Adventists (SDA), achieved a strong presence by the time of independence.12 However, most churches were also largely indigenized by independence. Among others, Pa erson has an account of early missionary a empts for Ambrym (1976: 6) and Geismar has one for Vao at the time of Layard’s fieldwork (2005b: 200). There, at that time, an SDA missionary was living on Vao, a Roman Catholic mission had already been established and gone, and there was a Presbyterian presence (ibid.). In the Banks Islands, the Anglican mission was successful from early on. Everywhere in Vanuatu, people were eventually persuaded to abandon their old ways. Early mission discourse was one from darkness (or “heathenism”) to light (Christianity), with many objects being referred to as “heathen idols” and with missionaries encouraging people to burn them or get rid of them in whatever way. Later, by the 1980s–1990s, the Church encouraged the incorporation of kastom in Christianity, so that Christians could reclaim their kastom past and incorporate it into a Christian way of

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life. The early problems with men who resisted conversion in North-Central Vanuatu have now dissipated with the deaths of most of them, but accommodation with Christianity still has its contradictions. As I will discuss in the following sections, not all kastom practices are fully compatible with Christianity. By the 1960s–1970s, it was the indigenous church ministers who redirected “the way of the Church” ( jos in Bislama, also skul) toward kastom. They promoted the view that kastom and Christianity were not necessarily opposed, not antithetical in the words of Tonkinson (1981: 261) and that certain aspects of kastom could and should be internalized within Christianity (see also MacClancy 1983; Bolton 2003c). According to Bolton, by about 1977, people in the islands started to be convinced that kastom and Church had to “come to an accord and achieve a mutually dependent balance like that of a canoe and an outrigger” (2003c: 18). While the past is characterized by longstanding and fierce oppositions between kastom and Christianity, nowadays most people claim allegiance to both. As early as the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Christians in North Ambrym started to participate again in masked rom ceremonies, and a rom purchase was initiated by Christians for the first time at that time (Patterson 1976: 35). Problems that go with kastom and Christianity revolve around what the Christian doctrine stipulates as acceptable for a Christian life, and around the shame of being malmal, or “naked,” and notions of copyright and ownership of certain dances and their objects. Another example is the problematic issue of pig killing in ritual and whether this can be accepted within Christian life. In some island locations of Vanuatu, the amalgamation of kastom and Christianity is clearly visible and can influence tourism development. During field research, this became very clear at the Saint Andrew’s Mini Arts Festival on Ra Island, Mota Lava, in the Banks Islands. While it had been promoted by the Vanuatu Tourism Office in Port Vila and other promotional organizations, in that year (2009) no expatriate visitors made it to the festival, except me. The main reason for this is that this festival is held at the start of the wet season, when tourist numbers and, accordingly, cultural festivities are down. As a kastom celebration of a Christian holiday, however, this festival cannot but take place on 30 November, Saint Andrew’s Day. On Ra, I learned that, in other years, there had been four or five tourists, and one year had even seen about twenty. As a combination of kastom and Christianity, the festival consists of three days of festivities to celebrate the patron saint, Andrew, culminating in an Anglican Church service and kastom performances on Saint Andrew’s Day. In 2009, the festivities commenced with a friendly volleyball match that was organized between the

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youths of Ra. Saint Andrew’s Day itself started with traditional leaf fishing early in the morning.13 Then followed the Anglican Church service for Saint Andrew, allowing kastom dances, dress, and singsing (singing) inside the church. The festival concluded with a dance locally referred to as the snake dance (némé in Mota Lavan, mwai in the Mota language), with black-andwhite striped dancers, a er the pa ern on the sea snake’s body, in the village church square. In other years, a dance featuring tamate masks was also performed, but in 2009 there had not been time to make the masks. There had been several weddings, people said, which had kept them too busy.

Rispek The concept that mostly ties together kastom and Christianity, according to most local people, is that of respect (rispek in Bislama). Bolton treats rispek, saying that, today, it is allied with rank and status, or “the showing of honour and respect to others” (2003c: 3). She continues, saying that it is a firmly indigenous concept. There is at least one word meaning respect in every local language, and ni-Vanuatu “identify the ‘way of respect’ as a defining characteristic of kastom” (ibid.). In other work, she gives the example of Willie Bongmatur Maldo and his role in the transference of ideas of rank and status to the national level, postindependence, through the formalization of local leaders as chiefs (Bolton 1998). Willie Bongmatur Maldo was the first president of the Malvatumauri, or National Council of Kastom Chiefs a er independence. Originally from West Ambrym, his father’s family was one of many who rese led to the north of the island a er the disastrous volcanic eruption of 1913. His position as president of the Malvatumauri, from 1981, was fiercely contested by kastom leader Tofor of Fanla, a man who prided himself on having never le kastom. Bongmatur, a converted Christian, only wore the nambas, for the first time in his life a er taking up his position of president of the kastom council. In an a empt to legitimize his political as well as kastom status, he took several graded titles at once, some even from different islands (Pa erson 2002a). Willie was a representative of a new kind of leader, claiming former Big Man status in both the colonial and the kastom system (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 18 March 2013). In the islands of Vanuatu, the word rispek signifies respect for kastom but also more generally kastom itself. During my time in the islands, I never questioned this equation: kastom was (like) rispek, it was the same. It was later, in Port Vila, that I discussed the notion of rispek with George Bumseng, a man originally from North Ambrym who at the time worked in Vila as a trainer for freshly arrived U.S. government Peace Corps volun-

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teers, before sending them off to their bases in the islands. George teaches them specific island sensibilities concerning kastom and kalja. He has, he said, had time to think about these ma ers. In the islands, I repeatedly heard people say that rispek is the binding factor between kastom and Christianity. To George, however, Christianity is indeed central to any understanding of contemporary kastom but on another level. Rispek, he said, “is a thing imposed upon us by the missionaries”: “that people now think and say that it is the binding factor between kastom and Christianity proves the missionaries’ success in replacing one religion with another, trading one God for another.” “If you listen carefully,” he said, “you will notice that people say it was the priests who first stressed that kastom and Christianity are one and the same thing, both founded on rispek for one another instead of the tribal warfare of the past.” “It is the one thing that Presbyterians, Catholics, and Anglicans have in common: they all made us believe that they were not replacing something old with something else but, instead, with the same thing.” The strategy was to familiarize people with the Christian God, by comparing him with local deities and customs. Therefore, the reconnecting of the Church to kastom was not a very difficult task. As George Bumseng said, it was accomplished by appropriation of an indigenized notion of rispek. To George, there is no word that adequately translates into rispek, at least not in the North Ambrym language. To him, it is an introduced Bislama term, like edukasen (education) or, recently, konservasen (conservation). This, he said, “does not mean that we did not know such things in our communities before.” The North Ambrymese word for edukasen, for example, is wuhuran, which embraces much more than just learning. The wuhuran principle can signify learning as well as teaching or being an apprentice, practicing to become good at something: “It embraces the whole process from student to teacher.” Instead of a uniform notion of rispek, George said, in North Ambrymese language and thought there are four different kinds of respect: gorran, tengenean, tangtitian, and rongtafanan. He explained the four types as follows: Gorran stands for speech and behaviour towards certain relatives, primarily your maternal uncles, but also your brothers-in-law, nephews, and your mother-in-law. You do not laugh out loud in their presence, or joke, or offer them food. You ask someone else to offer them food on your behalf. This is a taboo prescription very much still in practice today, even though people do not talk about it. It is a silent rule. Everyone knows how to behave towards your maternal uncles. Tengenean stands for respect for other people’s property. Tangtitian is respect towards nature, such as respect for a fishing taboo in certain periods of the year, or for that of climbing the slopes of the volcanoes while the yams are growing. Today, this is o en referred to by people as konservasen, under impulse of environmentalist NGO’s who introduced

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this word, as if konservasen is something new. Rongtafanan is respect towards elders and parents. It is translated in Bislama as harem save and is about listening and obeying. When an elder or parent tells you to do something, you listen and obey. All four levels work simultaneously. Take for example Etul or Worwor Yafu of Fanla, who died recently. Yafu means “man” but also God, but your maternal uncles and your nephews are Yafu to you too. They are man, God, and taboo to you. You treat them with respect of the gorran kind, and when they speak, you remain quiet, as in rongtafanan.

Silence is generally accepted by people as a sign of respect. Fabrice Leymang, who is a member of an important kastom family in Lamap, told me that rispek in a leader translates into “silent speech”: “he is someone who only speaks when he has something to say,” “he listens before he speaks,” but “when he speaks, the others listen.” A leader should first listen, and only then talk. This is a Big Man quality. Bolton refers to tok haed as “hidden speech,” “hidden meaning,” saying it was used to transfer secret and sacred knowledge in public (2003c: 20, 198). In Lamap, Herna Abong is such a leader and a man who has taken grades in the revived graded system. He certainly has the leader quality of being calm and quiet at important social moments. But Herna is also one of those who told me that there is no difference between kastom and Christianity. The only difference he could think of was that in kastom there is “penalty” (the word he used), while in Christianity there is none: “Christianity is about forgiveness.”

Notes  1. Malinowski does not show mwali or soulava, despite his extensive work being all about these important shell valuables. Bateson did show and collect Iatmul materials, which are kept at CUMAA (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). Firth presents a remarkable account in relation to objects, telling us of the instant when the Tikopians found his toothbrushes, which were made of a material that reminded them of their turtle shells, and decided to make new earrings out of them. Firth described this as an act of “acculturation” (1968 [1936]).  2. Respectively, “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art” and “Tikopia Art and Society” (in Forge 1973b).  3. Von den Steinen, who spent six months in the Marquesas in 1897, is somewhat exceptional in this list in the sense that he mentioned a Fremden, or tourist, industry on the island of Fatu Hiva (in Ivory 1999: 320), which he quickly discarded as a degenerate form of art production.  4. Exemplary “fatal impact” literature includes Finney and Watson (1974), Turner and Ash (1976), Farrell (1977, 1978, 1979), Rajo e and Crocombe (1980), Bolabola (1981), Dwyer (1986), Cole and Parry (1986), Bri on and Clarke (1987), Crocombe (1987), De Burlo (1987), and Helu-Thaman (1993).

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 5. Gewertz and Errington (1991: 218) also give an overview of the literature on the anthropologist as tourist, summing up Dumont (1977), Mintz (1977), Van den Berghe (1980), Boon (1982), Hamilton (1982), and Crick (1985).  6. Layard himself touched upon this in his “Note” to Deacon’s 1934 publication, saying that when he visited Southwest Bay in 1914–15, “it was already almost completely depopulated” due to imported diseases, resulting in many deaths (XXXVIII). At the time, North Malakula was still densely populated and rites were still being performed, even though the alien presence, in the form of missionaries and planters, was also felt in this part of the island.  7. A number of islands were renamed at the end of the colonial era. Ambae was once known as Aoba, Pentecost as Raga. The spelling of Malakula varied: Malekula, or in older French sources Malicolo.  8. Allen’s work was on the Nduindui Huqe of West Ambae, but it also compared the graded society systems of North and North-Central Vanuatu and broader Melanesia (e.g., Allen 1967). Blackwood (1981) compared the Huqe of Longana (East) and the Hungwe of Nduindui (West Ambae), the Maki of Vao (North Malakula) and the Mangki of Seniang (Southwest Bay). Jolly (1991b) compared the Huqe, the Maki, and the Warsangul. Pa erson (1981) compared and connected the Mage of Ambrym with the Lo Sal and Warsangul of South Pentecost.  9. In Codrington’s (1969 [1891]) and Rivers’s (1914) work, the graded society for North Pentecost is called Bololi. 10. As Geismar describes it, Nawita was to develop “an ‘indigenous’ form of contemporary art, using symbols, images, and forms taken from customary practice in innovative ways” (2003b: 4). To do so, their materials were from their beginnings restricted to acrylic paint, watercolor, tapestry, wood, and clay. 11. Bolton discusses the terms kalja and tredisin, saying that it was the French teacher Paul Gardissat, working for the French Residency Information Service from the mid-1970s onward, who called his radio program Kastom, Kalja, and Tredisin, thereby introducing the terms kalja and tredisin into Bislama vocabulary (2003c: 29, also 1999b). She adds that it took until at least the 1990s until the word kalja was used by people in the islands, and tredisin even later (2003c: 29). Gardissat used kastom to denote indigenous knowledge and practice, tredisin to denote introduced practices that had been incorporated into people’s lives (such as the singing of New Year’s or Bonne Année songs), and kalja to refer to all contemporary practice, whatever its source (ibid: 30). 12. Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of new denominations in the archipelago, such as the Assembly of God (AOG), Neil Thomas Ministry (NTM), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and The Church of Jesus Christ of La er-day Saints. 13. This is a kastom fishing technique that requires the whole community to work together. The people wade through the water early in the morning, at high tide, encircling the reef while holding a cord made of bunches of leaves. Slowly progressing toward the beach, the tide regressing, they enclose the circle while beating with the cord on the water. As a result, the fish are locked in the shallow water and are easy to catch.

2  Arts of Vanuatu A glass shadow, a tear in the sand, two children hand in hand. The animal that you see is not what you think. The fear that you have is not what you think. The eye that you cry is not what you see. It is always at the horizon, where the water transforms into formless shapes, where the circle closes and the spirit-birds guide the current of destiny toward new secrets.1 —Tristan Tzara on Vanuatu arts, March 1929, Sculptures monumentale de Nouvelle Guinée et des Nouvelle Hébrides

On Art, Artifact, and Museums The body of literature on the anthropology(ies) of art has for a long time tried to grasp what we were actually looking at, what we were actually studying. Some people see these strange things as art; others find them grotesque or dramatic as Picasso did in the Musée du Trocadéro in the early twentieth century. Since Susan Vogel’s influential work, titled Art/ Artifact (1991a), which focused on differences in the classifications of objects, art historians as well as anthropologists have been asking themselves whether they should treat these things as art or artifact, knowing very well that these categories do not always work. What do local people, the makers of these things, call them? How do they conceive of them? What are they to them? Are they material expressions of religion, or politics? Or are they to them what they are to us, beautiful or grotesque things to gaze upon? Is it really about beauty? As Christopher Steiner has put it, a recurring problem in the anthropology of art has been “the question of whether the concept of ‘art’ itself is universal or whether it is a distinctive feature of Western cultures that is generally not found in the non-Western

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societies most o en studied by anthropologists” (2002: 411). For the African context, Steiner illustrates the case as follows: If there is no word in any African languages that translates into “art,” then does this mean that there is no art in Africa? One answer to this rather thorny question is to point out that most African languages also do not possess an indigenous term which translates adequately into the word “music.” Does this mean there is no music in Africa? The negative answer to that question seems pre y obvious. (Steiner 2002: 411)

A li le further on, he continues, saying that the problem is no longer whether, for example, a Dogon ancestor mask or a carved wooden figure of a Micronesian goddess are works of art: The challenge is to understand the social institutions, agents, actions, and cultural frameworks of meaning that allow such objects to be viewed as “art” at all. In the context of a masked ritual held high in the Bandiagara Cliffs of Mali, a Dogon mask is a religious icon; in the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the same mask is, at least from a certain perspective, a work of Dogon art. (Steiner 2002: 411)

Museums have played and continue to play an important role in how objects are perceived in the West. In museums such as the Quai Branly in Paris, objects are exhibited as works of art. For objects in circulation, this adds to their value on the market. One significant example of an object speaking more through its absence than its presence in an exhibition hall occurred in the controversial Primitivism exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. There, for the first time, works of avant-garde artists were placed in juxtaposition with the tribal artworks that had inspired them and their makers. As James Clifford has illustrated, it was one small label of an object that had been removed from the exhibition “in deference to indigenous religious beliefs” that brought to the surface “one of few cracks in the show’s façade of Western hegemony” (1988: 209). The object in question was a Zuni war god from the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde, which was to illustrate its influence on Paul Klee’s painting “Mask of Fear” from 1932. The label read: “The museum was informed by knowledgeable authorities that Zuni people consider any public exhibition of their war gods to be sacrilegious” (ibid.). For Clifford, the discussion was not merely about art or nonart: “Here, in this seemingly innocuous li le label was evidence that living tribal peoples still had a voice in controlling the fate of their appropriated objects,” and the “art” objects on display “may in fact ‘belong’ somewhere other than in an art or an ethnographic museum” (ibid.). In contemporary Vanuatu, the problem of terminology is easily solved through local people’s use of the word artifak (Bislama for artifact) to refer

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to the arts of ritual. It is a word that is quite recent and that is not widely used except by filwokas and others who are familiar with art collectors, tourists, and anthropologists. In Vanuatu, an artifak can be a marker of ritual life, but it can also be a commodity. It can be a carved spoon or a knife. It can be for use, or it can be for sale. It can also be a “high art” piece, such as a mask that was used in revived ritual performance or one that was not used but “made for sale only” to tourists, museum curators, or any other kind of incoming buyer or art collector. It can be an Ambrymese slit-drum standing on a nasara (ritual ground) or in a village or one or two flanking the entry of a hotel in Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital town on Efate Island, or it can be one or many to be shipped off to Australia, New Zealand, the United States, or Europe. An artifak is art. On the other hand, requests are made with increasing frequency by local communities for the repatriation of old things from museums in the West, sometimes with copyright claims pending over objects and human remains such as ancestor skulls modeled into rambaramp effigies. As was the case with the absent Zuni war god in Primitivism, such objects are evidence that contemporary ni-Vanuatu people still (or again) have a voice in controlling the fate of their appropriated objects. Whether these objects belong in an art or an ethnographic museum is not so much the question. What is of importance for ni-Vanuatu are questions of their copyright and ownership. In this chapter, I discuss what I define to be the three protagonists of a material culture/collection history for Vanuatu. These are the atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp effigies that I introduced before. I commence by outlining the roles of two early collectors operating in the archipelago, the ethnologists Felix Speiser and A. B. Lewis, and the prices for artworks in the early colonial period, se ing the frame for a hundred years of collecting. In sections on atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp, I outline the collection histories of these things, culminating in the late colonial period, added with my material from fieldwork in Fona in North Ambrym, in Lamap in Southeast Malakula, and on Ra in the Banks Group. I refer to slit-drums and tree fern figures as atingting and bwerang, respectively, their names in the North Ambrym language (North Ambrym being where most slit-drums and tree fern figures were collected). In relation to atingting, I focus on the village of Fanla in North Ambrym and on the active roles of Fanla’s Big Men and Tessa Fowler, the European middle-woman, in the successful commoditization of this type of drum, and on the story I started this book with, that of the pile of slit-drums and bwerang awaiting shipment to France upon my arrival in Fona in 2009. In relation to bwerang, I focus on North Ambrym and the Banks Islands, where tree fern figures are more generally referred to as blak palm, their

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name in Bislama. In relation to rambaramp effigies, I focus on a recently made effigy in Lamap, Southeast Malakula.

“Hunting the Gatherers”:2 Buying, Buyers, and Prices in Vanuatu The hunt for the authentic artifact and the typologizing that accompanied it has a shared history with the development of ethnology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. For Vanuatu, ethnologists Felix Speiser and A. B. Lewis made major collections in the islands in the early twentieth century, their work focusing on material culture. They le some detailed information about their collection practices in their field diaries and, in Speiser’s case, in his reports published in the Basler Nachrichten (reprinted in Kaufmann 2000) and in his Ethnographische Materialen aus den Neuen Hebriden und den Banks Inseln (Ethnology of the New Hebrides, 1996 [1923]). Early ethnographers like Rivers, Haddon, Layard, and Deacon collected considerable amounts of artifacts as well, but their interests were more in the evolution of social organization, diffusion of cultural traits, and salvage anthropology than material culture. In the introduction to his Ethnology of the New Hebrides, Speiser himself touched upon this, comparing his work with that of Codrington (1969 [1891]), writing that Codrington’s work treated intellectual culture in great detail, with material culture receiving less a ention (Speiser 1996: 2). Rivers’s goal in collecting objects was to prove that different styles in the New Hebrides were related to different waves of immigrants, what he called the “kava and the betel people.” He also focused on how styles progressed from figurative to abstract, in his view to aid the secrecy of men’s cults (Rivers 1914). Deacon divided the islands into mat and fringe skirt areas, depending on patri- and matrilinearity (1934). At the time of their presence, about 140 years of regular contact had been established in the islands of the New Hebrides, starting with explorer Captain James Cook in 1774, who discovered that the islands were in fact an archipelago and not the “Great South Land” as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros had believed in the seventeenth century (Kelly 1966; see also Mondragon 2006; Jolly 2009b).3 In the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, what is o en described in the literature as a trade in curios was flourishing in the wider Melanesia region. It is a period o en typified as the expedition period in anthropology. As Robert Welsch has put it, as early as 1909, at the time when A. B. Lewis set off to Melanesia for the Field Museum South Pacific Expedition (1909–1911), “rare and valuable ethnological specimens” were becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain (1998: 3). Lewis was sent to the region by A. Dorsey, curator of anthropology at the then

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relatively young Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, in an a empt to compete in collecting with museums such as those of Berlin or Hamburg. Such museums were very present in the area at the time, primarily in what was known as German New Guinea, including the Sepik River (Kaiserin Augusta Fluss, also Expedition [1912–13]), Madang (Friedrich Wilhelmshafen), and Finschhafen and the islands of New Britain and New Ireland (Neu Pommern and Neu Mecklenburg). In a le er to F. J. V. Skiff, director of the Field Museum, Dorsey wrote: New Guinea, as a whole, is in the peculiar position of a country freshly opened . . . where the natives are willing to part with the objects . . . in exchange for the cheap knives, hatches, axes, adzes, beads, looking glasses, etc., of German manufacture. In other words, the conditions there are absolutely ideal for museum collecting. (le er by A. Dorsey, dated December 22, 1908, reprinted in Welsch 1998: 1:22–23)

According to Welsch, A. B. Lewis was “suspicious of the trade” (1998: 3) and was specifically on the hunt for things that showed no signs of “acculturation,” eschewing objects that showed “modern” influences, such as trade beads and metal tools (ibid.). Lewis nevertheless amassed 1,200 objects in the New Hebrides for the Field Museum Expedition. In the New Hebrides, on the island of Paama, he met ethnologist Felix Speiser on 20 April 1911 (in Welsch 1998: 3). By then, Speiser had been actively amassing objects in the New Hebrides for almost a year. Both Lewis and Speiser were on a quest to find as much as they could, a empting to make complete series of things, o en resulting in series of “doubles.”4 According to Huffman (1996b: 283) and Welsch (1998: 372), the encounter between the two was a friendly one. “Apparently there was no professional jealousy,” writes Welsch (1998: 372). “Speiser even seems to have helped ABL acquire several tree fern figures and carved poles from dance grounds” (ibid.: 410). Lewis spent only four months in the New Hebrides out of a total of four years in Melanesia. He spent most of his time in Papua New Guinea, where we know he bought many items, especially of the Sulka from the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. On New Britain, he bought several masks with the help of Phoebe Parkinson, sister of the renowned Queen Emma, plantation owner at Ralum, Kokopo, and the widow of Richard Parkinson (ethnologist and author of the classic work Dreißig Jahre in der Südsee [Thirty Years in the South Seas] 1907). A. B. Lewis’s diary entries for New Britain contain an inventory of prices for some of the objects: Visited Mrs. Parkinson and took lunch there. Found she had go en from the Sulkas some rare masks, and agreed to take 4 large masks (hémlaut) and 9 smaller ones (sisiu) for M. 1000.; two duk-duk and 2 tubuan from Raluana, for M. 200.; one dancing belt (vipit) from Raluana (no. 4001); 3 feather dancing

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caps (averok) from Sulka, and 1 fine long feather mask (?) from Baining, very rare. (This was the first one Mrs. Parkinson had seen) for M. 50; a number of miscellaneous objects (nos. 4002–4044, 4048–4053) for M. 200.; and a finely ornamented ceremonial canoe from Raluana for M. 250. (entry by Lewis, 27 September 1910, reprinted in Welsch 1998: 331)

There is a friction between art history and anthropology when it comes to prices and pricing of artworks. In art history, the transaction and the trade that necessarily comes with acquiring something is o en silenced, for obvious reasons. Old things that are kept in museums are now of incalculable worth. This stands in sharp contrast with the valuation of objects in their time, as Lewis’s prices on New Britain in 1910 illustrate. Typologies of art of Vanuatu in museums traditionally focused on the islands of Malakula, Ambrym, South Pentecost, and the Banks and Torres Islands, which made items from those places the best investments for the future. Waldemar Stöhr distinguished four style areas for the archipelago (Stilregionen): Ambrym and Southeast Malakula, Southwest Malakula, Northeast Malakula, and the Banks Islands (1987: 257; see also Bühler 1969). Using Speiser, Stöhr added that the islands of Epi and Pentecost are an area of transition of the Central Ambrym–style area (“Randbereiche der Stilregion”; Stöhr 1987: 259; cf. Speiser 1996 [1923]: Taf. 104, Abb. 4). Specifications of styles and style areas added to the aura of authenticity of these kinds of tribal works of art.

Felix Speiser Felix Speiser, like many ethnologists of the time, first received a degree in science (a Doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Basel, Switzerland), in 1904, before turning his a ention to the study of ethnology via his maternal uncle Paul and cousin Fritz Sarasin, both ethnologists maybe best known for an expedition they jointly undertook to Sulawesi (then Celebes), Indonesia. A er his collecting trip to Vanuatu, then the New Hebrides, Speiser first became a Lecturer and later Professor of Ethnology at the University of Basel and, later, Director of the Basel Museum für Volkerkunde, the museum that holds his collections. As Christian Kaufmann points out, Speiser did not record an awful lot about his collection practice: “from the few notes that have survived we can see that he followed Von Luschan’s advice to collect skulls” (2000: 210).5 His collecting techniques are best illustrated in his “Introduction” to the Ethnology of the New Hebrides (1996). As Speiser wrote: “[m]y principle was to acquire everything that could still be obtained of the objects constituting the native culture. However, when I was in the islands, the culture

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was already in a sorry state of decay almost everywhere, and I probably arrived only just in time to salvage what was le of a material culture that had once been so rich” (Speiser 1996: 2), adding that “apart from some fine old pieces, my collection also contains a large number of modern items which do not compare to their advantage with the old ones but which suffice to define the type of certain utensils” (ibid.). “A great deal, particularly in the class of ceremonial objects, has already disappeared completely” (ibid.). Speiser mentioned barter with the natives (ibid.) and his use of local middlemen, adding that in most locations it was hard to find people who were willing to negotiate (ibid.). In his reports for the Basler Nachrichten, a Basel newspaper of the time, Speiser’s tone of voice was somewhat more dramatic. As Kaufmann illustrated, people in Basel at the time would read about the ethnologist’s experiences in the archipelago, for example on Ambrym: The White man arrives and the women and children retreat with a variety of cries. Slowly the men and boys come closer and his crew of four explain the White man’s intentions, which regularly provokes intense laughter and disbelief. Next they question the White man about his name, where he lives, whether he will be stingy with his money, his likes of food, tobacco and drinks, how many guns or pairs of trousers he owned, and so on. Concluding the interview, they form an opinion as to whether the White man should be treated as a dangerous magician—in which case everyone would retreat—or as a fool. The la er response immediately provokes the men to test him, trying to sell worthless old objects at very high prices. This begins long negotiations about what to offer and what to sell. (Speiser, translated in Kaufmann 2000: 210)

By 1910, the Ambrymese had long been among the most enthusiastic and numerous of participants in the labor trade, working on the sugarcane plantations of Queensland, Fiji, and New Caledonia. They had had some fi y years or more of intense experience with the waetman (white man) and his strange ways, including the collection of curios. Speiser’s trope in the Nachrichten, or Kaufmann’s interpretation of it, suggests another story, one in which the ethnologist was among the first to arrive. It is telling that the intent to collect objects would have provoked “laughter and disbelief” and, once it was accepted that the waetman was a collector or, to put it (presumably) in the words of the Ambrymese, “a fool,” and not a dangerous magician, that they would try to sell him worthless objects at high prices and, when business got serious, that negotiations started about what to offer and what to sell. Speiser did not find his transactions very satisfying: “O en, at the moment of leaving, those who had refused to take any interest in selling an object would, with a simple nod, motion him into a corner and sell the same object they had vehemently refused to part with earlier” (in

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Kaufmann 2000: 210). He mentioned money only exceptionally, for example the price of 40 Swiss francs for one curved boar tusk (Basler Nachrichten of 5 November 1911, in Kaufmann 2000: 210). His tone of voice was somewhat lighter where he wrote about a man from Dip Point, West Ambrym: “Only through him was I able to obtain a number of pieces that I would otherwise not even have seen. He really understood what I intended to collect” (Basler Nachrichten of 12 November 1911 in Kaufmann 2000: 210–11). Speiser only spoke Bislama (which he called biche de mer a er the most important trade product of the day, the sea cucumber [Speiser 1996: 3]) fairly fluently by the time he reached Espiritu Santo and, later, the Banks Islands (Kaufmann 1996b: 306), thus a er his time on Ambrym. His man from Dip Point was a middleman, someone interpreting and translating for him, and someone providing him access to objects. Kaufmann also mentioned this, saying that most people handed their object to a third person who would negotiate the selling price, but also that the third parties more easily rejected prices if the offers were too low (2000: 211). We know that Speiser wanted “to buy a few bullroarers,” leading to “some embarrassment” and to the fact that he was “hushed into the men’s ceremonial house” (Kaufman 2000: 211). He describes his impression of being in “a real museum,” where “his mouth was watering” in view of “the splendid things hanging there”: “However, these things still mean too much to the community to be given away and there is stalement [sic]” (Basler Nachrichten of 12 November 1911 in Kaufmann 2000: 211). Eventually, an old man “in a trembling state” handed him a carefully wrapped bullroarer with instructions not to show the object to anyone (ibid.: 211). Speiser also remarked that “local populations were so depressed that they lacked any drive or cultural vision,” due to decimation by introduced diseases. Nearing the end of his stay, he visited the Santa Cruz Islands, where “he was struck by the difference in terms of the more relaxed colonial administration and in indigenous life, for he found people were still actively engaged in making items of material culture that were already a thing of the past in the New Hebrides” (ibid.: 211). Collecting as much as he did during his two years in the islands, his general a itude toward the New Hebrides, remarkably, was one of loss and neglect.

Alfred Buell Lewis A. B. Lewis spent only four months visiting the islands of Vanuatu, in 1911. He spent two months on Malakula and Ambrym, to him the most interesting of the New Hebrides group, where the Western influence, as he

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called it, was considerably less. Here, he collected “a number of very rare specimens, including some of the large drums and carved wood figures” (le er by A. B. Lewis, dated 30 September 1911 in Welsch 1998: 375). Like others, Lewis found that objects were “ge ing scarce in the islands” and, “unless we get the things soon, there will be nothing le ” (le er, dated 30 September 1911 in Welsch 1998: 375): The southern islands have lost almost all of their old culture, and there is little to be got from them. The central group is also practically exhausted, and these islands are more se led by whites. Ambryn preserves some of its old life, but the natives are quite well-to-do, and refuse to part with their good things. I found it impossible to buy a good drum, and they also refused to show me any masks, tho known to have many. Money is no object to them. Large wood carvings are very rare, but they are known to have a few. Tree fern figures are more common, almost every village having one or more, but not so many as in Malekula. The making of these figures is said to be a recent importation from Malekula, and the style is very similar. (from Lewis’s field notes, entry of 29 July 1911 in Welsch 1998: 408)

As I mentioned, Lewis was suspicious of the trade and, in the words of Welsch, “eschewed objects that illustrated the acculturative process in favor of ‘traditional’ things, which included both old pieces and those recently made with traditional materials” (1998: 7). He seems to have had a clear judgment as to which, to him, were good pieces and which were not. In a le er, dated 21 September 1911 to a certain Mr. Simms at the Field Museum, he wrote: There is not much in the New Hebrides or New Caledonia, but I got a fairly representative collection. Prices are very high, even in the islands. Look up Webster’s catalogue and you will find that his prices are too! For example, the natives themselves are willing to pay from $75.00 to $150.00 for a shellband armlet like one I have in the collection. A dealer in Sydney asked £50 for a similar one. The natives have plenty of money, and value their old things highly. (in Welsch 1998: 373)

Reverend Fred Paton, son of the missionary John G. Paton, sold about twenty objects to Lewis (Welsch 1998: 371). This was on Malakula, where Fred Paton was living at the time. “Five or six other Presbyterians also sold him small collections, the largest numbers coming from Dr. Annand at Tangoa and Dr. Taylor at Noguru” (ibid.), both on Santo. Lewis himself was of Presbyterian background, which is probably why he bought almost exclusively via Presbyterian sources. These were his contacts. On Ambrym and in Southeast Malakula, he collected with the assistance of a trader who lived on Ambrym named Thomas C. Stephens, who helped him ship the objects to Chicago: “In all, Stephens acquired more than two hundred pieces for Field Museum, including a large number of elabo-

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rately decorated masks, modeled skulls, and a variety of other objects” (ibid.: 372). McAfee, another trader, who lived in Southwest Bay Malakula at the time, sold about seventy-five objects to Lewis (ibid.). From Lewis’s Malakulan field notes we get some of the richer information in an entry of Saturday 29 April 1911. The entry illustrates the accidental nature of collecting and of payments in pigs. It also illustrates the collection of things that are from another place. It tells of Lewis’s acquisition of two double figures near Bangor, carved on commission in Southwest Bay by a Bangor chief. When Lewis found the figures, they were set up on an old dance ground that also contained “half a dozen drums” set up as a group at its center, “all old and ro en.” He bought the two sculptures from the village chief for five shillings each and mentioned that none of the locals were willing to help him to transport them to the beach: On inquiring into their history, I found that the 2 double figures came from Bangor, and were made by men from S.W. Bay. One of the chief men of Bangor had lived in S.W. Bay many years before, and had been struck with the type of figures there. One he had bought, and had got some men from S.W. Bay to come to Bangor and make 9 others. For these about 20 pigs had been given, which the men took back to S.W. Bay. A feast of many pigs was also held at Bangor when the figures were set up. Only two figures of these were of hard wood, and a er the others had decayed these two were given (sold?) to village where I got them. (Lewis, 29 April 1911 in Welsch 1998: 380)

Arts of Vanuatu In Vanuatu, art objects, or rather objects regarded as art by their gatherers, were collected in several ways and for different reasons by early discoverers; missionaries; colonial officials; ethnologists such as Speiser and Lewis; anthropologists such as Rivers, Layard, Deacon, and, later, Guiart; and art collectors and curators. Once in Europe, as I mentioned, artists such as Pablo Picasso started using them as inspiration for their artworks. Later, from the 1940s–1950s, art historians started analyzing them. As we also saw, the largest historical collections of Vanuatu materials, at Basel, Paris, Cambridge, and Chicago, hold thousands of objects, mainly from the north and north-central regions of the country. Rather remarkably, it is only some of these objects, almost exclusively from Malakula, Ambrym, South Pentecost, and the Banks Islands, that over time gained fame as true objets d’art, or masterpieces, such as a Malakulan wooden mask referred to as unique by Anthony Meyer (1995: 418, pl. 474) and Speiser’s spider web mask (1996: pl. 1), which he collected between 1910 and 1912 and a ributed to East Malakula.6

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Guiart described the lengnangulong sacred stone, also known as müyü ne bü, that he collected in North Ambrym in the 1940s, as one of few pieces of world standard for Vanuatu (2005). Another object generally recognized as a masterpiece is the trrou körrou statue, carved on commission on Malakula for a Malo chief. The trrou körrou is kept at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre, next to the lengnangulong and three Banks Islands tree fern figures, where they are exhibited in the permanent Chefs d’oeuvres or Masterpieces exhibition. The trrou körrou’s catalogue entry describes its style as characteristic of Northeast Malakula “with its long chin and lack of neck,” concluding in art historical prose that “the inward looking face, and the elongated, tense body increase the intensity of this outsized figure which wavers between the ornate and the austere” (Huffman 2000b). Outside of the geographical regions of North and North-Central Vanuatu, there was not as much available for collection once collecting started to accelerate. Exceptionally, a collection made up predominantly of tools and weapons but also some fine examples of women’s bark cloth and mats is known from Erromango and the southern islands, collected there by Reverend Robertson from 1872 onward and kept at the Redpath Museum in Montreal (Lawson 1994). It is known also that Speiser bought a collection of Tannese pierced stones from Aubert de la Rüe in 1946, probably to add to the completeness of his collection, which showed lacunae for Erromango, Tanna, and, at the other end of the range, Mere Lava, Mota Lava, and the Torres Islands (in Kaufmann 1996b: 306). In the geographical regions of North and North-Central Vanuatu, North Pentecost, Ambae, Maewo, and Espiritu Santo are underrepresented in museum collections, as is South Vanuatu (at least when compared to Malakula, Ambrym, South Pentecost, and the Banks Islands).7 Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay sketched a wooden figure on Epi in 1879, and Codrington sketched two masked dancers on Maewo in 1891 (in Kaufmann 1996a: 17). Codrington also mentioned masquerade on Maewo in his work but added that the Maewo suqe, as he called it, was nearly extinct at the time and that the gamal, or men’s house, was used by old men as a “convenient resort” (1969 [1891]: 112). On Espiritu Santo, which suffered some of the severest depopulation in the region, grade-taking ceremonies had ceased by the late nineteenth century, mostly due to deadly epidemics (Bonnemaison 1996a: 202). Today, the island may be best known for its po ery, particularly on the west coast of the island, in particular in the village of Wusi (Galipaud 1996). Wusi pots are a successful revived art form for Santo. They are also popular items among tourists and are sold at several handicra markets in town. Inside the geographical frame of Malakula, Ambrym, South Pentecost, and the Banks Islands, I distinguish what I call the “protagonists” of a

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collection history for the archipelago. These are atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp effigies. They are the things that, over time, were taken out of the country in large quantities, primarily in the late colonial period. Other things are known precisely for their uniqueness, their rarity. They were singled out (cf. Kopytoff 1986). I have already pointed to the unique mask in Meyer (1995: 418, pl. 474) and that in Speiser (1996: pl. I), to the lengnangulong stone and the trrou körrou statue, and in the introduction to some exceptional wooden masks from Ambrym and South Pentecost. In an a empt to enhance their monetary value, these things are defined by the market as “masterpieces.” They include “the rare” and “the old,” even though these are not always aesthetically exceptional, as well as items judged as “high arts” or “the sublime.” Rivers collected a tamate mask on Mota in 1914, kept at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, that also fits the category of the masterpiece. Its photograph is published in the article “Whales Teeth, Turtle-Shell Masks and Bits of String: Pacific Collections and Research at Cambridge” (Herle 2005: pl. 6).8 Other rare masks are less known, such as those that served in luan and batù rites on Ambrym, or ancient ngulong masks that were destroyed right a er performance (Pa erson 1996: 255). Rom masks from Ambrym are slightly be er known in collections, because they could be kept a er their emergence and their rites were continually performed.9 As Lissant Bolton has illustrated in relation to Western museum contexts, it was mostly objects that could survive the rigors of international transportation that became part of museum ethnography collections (2003c: xviii–xix). This is the more practical reason for the collection of some objects and not of others. “Objects whose size defied transportation, such as dancing grounds, and those whose fragility defeated it, such as leaf and flower decorations, were usually not included” (ibid.). Addressing her own research on textiles, Bolton added, “Despite the fact that most ethnographic objects circulate uneasily in the system of relative value established between museums, some objects are even less successful there than others. O en damned with the classification ‘cra ,’ textiles, and especially non–loom-woven textiles, are among the least well regarded” (ibid.: xxii). Monumental sculptural art was most aesthetically pleasing and most interesting as it related to male-graded ritual.

The Protagonists: Atingting, Bwerang, Rambaramp By referring to atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp as the protagonists of a collection history, I give them prominence. By using their local names, I tie them to fixed places. Atingting and bwerang are Ambrymese slit-drums

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and tree fern figures. Rambaramp refers to Southeast Malakulan funerary effigies. Together, these items have been selected and collected for a long time, roughly over the past 150 years. Together, they make up some of the best known art pieces for the archipelago, on local and national levels but also internationally, in exhibition halls of museums in Australia, Europe, and the United States, as tropes (or trophies) of a collection history. In the tribal art markets of places such as Paris, Brussels, and New York, it is this trope that keeps the markets going. That these art pieces were selected testifies to the overwhelming presence of, for example, rambaramp effigies in the collections of the Musée du Quai Branly. In the early days, supply and demand were limited and only some high art pieces were collected (for example, Speiser’s four slit-drums, eight tree fern figures, and two rambaramp effigies). By the late colonial period, a much greater demand and a consequent excessive increase in supply had its own problematic aspects, which I discuss in the following sections. By then, it was almost exclusively atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp effigies that were selected for sale. The lengnangulong sacred stone, the trrou körrou statue, an exceptional tamate mask, and the different mask forms and puppets that served in secret society rites such as the nevinbur, are rare or unique masterpieces. Their value seems to lie in the fact that they are one of a kind and not a leitmotif of a culture, like atingting, bwerang, and rambaramp. Exceptionally, a specific atingting, bwerang, or rambaramp can become a masterpiece as well. Specific objects can be exceptional in form, in the stories a ached to them, or in their pedigrees. They are made to stand out among the masses, as masterpieces in their genre. Three Banks Islands tree fern figures that are exhibited in the permanent exhibition of the Pavillon des Sessions at the Musée du Louvre are such art pieces. They are exhibited there next to the lengnangulong sacred stone and the trrou körrou statue. A rare rambaramp effigy, kept in the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle et d’Ethnographie in La Rochelle, has two “heads,” thus containing two overmodeled skulls, and forms another example of a protagonist turned into a masterpiece, being unique in form.

Atingting While the material culture of most of Vanuatu’s north, north-central, and central regions as far south as Efate is characterized by the appearance of slit-drums, it is the North Ambrym drum or atingting that over time became the best known of its kind.10 By virtue of some of the most entrepreneurial Big Men of the 1960s–1970s, Tain Mal and his son Tofor of Fanla, who sold these drums on a larger scale than anyone before, they achieved

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the fame and renown they now have on national and international levels of traffic and commerce, being well represented in museums worldwide. Ambrymese but also Malakulan drums stand upright just like the human figures they represent, unlike the drums of the Banks and Torres Islands, where the longest, most important “mother” drum was placed horizontally on the ground. The specific North Ambrym–style drum or atingting has a typical elongated head o en referred to as “ovoid” in form (a er Speiser 1996 [1923]: 392), with large crest and eyes and eyebrows carved in deep relief. The eyes are represented by large disk shapes. Rows of “toothing” (Pa erson 1996: 259) represent the hair, and a pair of smaller hands can be carved on either side of the face above the slit, even though this is a design that requires copyright, which is traditionally claimed by Fanla men. The slit-drums usually have one face, but two or three faces can also occur, again depending on the owner’s copyright. Since Tofor’s inventive tactics, drums can even have up to six or seven faces, even though such designs are nowadays locally heavily disputed. That precisely North Ambrymese–style drums were collected excessively for the market instead of Malakulan ones was certainly due to Tain Mal’s and particularly Tofor’s actions but also because these drums, with their grand ovoid faces and large chin and forehead and disk-shaped eyes, are much more o en seen as art pieces than their Malakulan variants, which as a norm have only a truncated top with squat stylized facial traits in low relief. However, as Pa erson argues, the two styles are inextricably linked. Pa erson uses a photograph taken between 1910 and 1912 by Speiser in South Malakula and a watercolor of a scene in Lamap, Port Sandwich, of 1875. The watercolor shows that what is now widely considered to be the North Ambrym–style drum with the elongated head also occurred in South Malakula, at least at that time (Pa erson 1996: 259–61). It is only in recent years, with copyright nomenclature being transformed and transforming at an accelerating pace, that such flexible mutual grounds of cultural commerce are no longer common. People in Lamap now refer to particularly the North Ambrymese as “stealers of kastom.” As Herna Abong in Lamap put it, reclaiming the Ambrym-style drum as Malakulan: “The North Ambrymese steal everything; they even stole our tam-tam design and ever since are making big money with it.”

Fanla: Tain Mal and Tofor There are some older slit-drums in museum collections (e.g., four by Speiser in Basel), but the documented history of commoditization and,

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subsequently, saturation of atingting on the market commences with Big Men and entrepreneurs Tain Mal and his son Tofor, running a lucrative artifact business out of their village Fanla and out of Port Vila and into the world in the 1960s–1970s (see Pa erson 1976, 1981, 2002a, 2002b; Rio 1997, 2000). At the time, the kastom people were an important minority in the kastom movement as well as the tourist arena that was equally emerging in those years. Knut Rio noted that he found “no record of the commercialization of carving in North Ambrym before the 1960s’,” and that this was “a period that marked the beginning of increased air travel and more systematic development of tourism in Vanuatu” (2000: 3). Tain Mal and Tofor were influential not just because they controlled considerable resources but also because of their reputation as adepts at sorcery (Pa erson 1976: 31). By Ambrym standards, they were wealthy men (ibid.). Charlene Gourguechon, who spent two years in the archipelago in the 1970s in the company of photojournalist Kal Muller and photographer and filmmaker Jacques Gourguechon, testified: [Tofor] has discovered . . . that he has a product to sell to the Europeans: art objects. . . . Gone are the days, he declared, when you could buy a statue from him for a bo le of rum and a scrap of calico! Now he knows what things are worth. . . . He controls a veritable assembly line of trinkets to sell to tourists. He knows very well that these objects have no value, but he also knows that they bring in the bacon. In this domain he has no scruples. The true custom is not compromised if imitation ritual objects are fabricated and palmed off to unsuspecting foreigners. Tofor is possibly the only man-bush in the archipelago who knows how to swim the waters of European capitalism. He bought a Port Vila taxi and pays a man from Paama island to drive it. He owns a half interest in a trading boat. He is sorry not to be able to read and write, but he is instinctively strong in arithmetic. He does not bury his profits, like his bo les of Beaujolais in his hut. He has a bank account in Vila. (1977: 273)

Tain Mal and particularly Tofor claimed copyright to their slit-drums and had well-established contacts with European and American dealers, enabling them to make large profits. They commissioned sculptors to carve slit-drums for them, paid them a small fee, and then collected the full price for the sculptures themselves, from the people who bought: With the money obtained from this source they were able to become bankers, lending various sums at an interest rate of 20 percent. Interest on loans is payable in advance in accordance with traditional practice in the case of pigs. Outstanding debts to the father and son duo . . . amounted to hundreds of dollars. . . . Many men were forced to borrow the cost of their passage to another island to work on plantations. In 1969–70 wage labour in New Caledonia was a popular means of obtaining cash but those who wished to go inevitably lacked the airfare and were forced to borrow. The wealthy pagans provided one of the few sources of funds. They were also

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able to recover debts in some cases, by means of deals with planters. The planter paid the debt and took the debtor as a labourer for his plantation. (Pa erson 1976: 31)

With his business thriving, by the 1970s Tofor set the price for his drums at 200,000 vatu per piece (approximately 2,000 Australian dollars [AUD] or 1,500 euros), an astronomical price that he did not always get, but as Tessa Fowler, who acted as his middle-woman, remembers: “To Tofor it was not necessarily about the price but more about the prestige for him to set the price this high” (personal communication, Tessa Fowler, Port Vila, 7 December 2010). Such slit-drums now stand in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.11 They are some of many that were acquired via Tessa and commissioned by Tain Mal and Tofor, most of them carved by their compatriot in kastom Tin Meleun. According to Eric Kjellgren (2005), the tall atingting at the Metropolitan Museum was bought in Fanla in 1971 by George Staempfli, a New York–based dealer and gallery owner. Once in New York, it was bought by the Met during the Staempfli Gallery exhibition Tumbuna: Ritual Art from Melanesia (Staempfli 1972). In Vanuatu, in reality, the transaction had been via Tessa herself, who told me in Vila in 2010 that dealers hardly made it to Vanuatu in those years, and certainly not to Ambrym. The Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds another atingting with a remarkable pedigree. That drum is one of two that were presented as gi s by Tofor to both his colonial rulers, Queen Elisabeth II and former President Charles de Gaulle (Gourguechon 1977; Geismar 2003a, 2005a).12 The queen donated her drum to the Cambridge Museum, where it has been exhibited since. Of de Gaulle’s drum there is currently no trace in any public museum collections or institutions in France (personal communication, Philippe Peltier, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 20 June 2011). As Geismar pointed out, the Copyright Act of 2000 was designed almost exclusively for the North Ambrym context (2003a, 2005a, 2005c). About Fanla, she wrote: The passage of the Copyright Act and the increasing awareness of the economic potential of the legitimate production of artefacts had led to an acceleration of tensions related to making and selling kastom carvings that highlighted the resonance of copyright within the local political economy. . . . According to Fanla villagers today, any man can make a business carving and selling drums by paying a pig and 6,000–8,000 vatu (approx. $53–$70) to a family member who already holds such a right. This entitles one to sell one- or two-faced drums. (Knut M. Rio, personal communication, 5 July 2002, in Geismar 2005a: 448)

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Geismar added that Fanla men “underscore their dominance in copyright claims using their genealogical connections to some of the highest-ranking men in the region, legitimating access to the richest material fruits of the Maghe and, thus, the greatest access to the profits of the international art market” (Geismar 2005a: 450). When Geismar says “Fanla villagers today,” she refers to the time of her fieldwork in 2001. Rio’s fieldwork on atingting was in 1997 (see also Rio 1997). My work is later and for the most part away from Fanla. While I certainly agree that “any man can make a business of carving and selling drums,” by the time of my fieldwork on Ambrym only a few men paid, in pigs or in vatu, for their rights (to carve, paint, etc.) to make and own atingting. Now the development of a second kind of copyright creates new creative opportunities. Today, the North Ambrym atingting is arguably the most representative artifact for Vanuatu, represented all over its local place along roads and beaches, at anchorages, and in villages or on the har, or ritual ground. On the national level, it is present in the marketplace, in tourist markets, and in hotel lobbies. Pa erson commented on the national flag being draped over an Ambrym-style drum on state occasions (1996: 254) and the title to Rio’s M.A. thesis on the North Ambrym atingting was Standing Drums in Vanuatu: The Cultural Biography of a National Symbol (Rio 1997). Internationally, atingting are present in museums all around the world while, on Ambrym, people still carve slit-drums as if the market never dropped.

Figure 2.1. Tofor of Fanla painting an atingting in North Ambrym in the late 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

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Many of these newly made drums are not sold and rot away, which is seen as a bad thing. If one is sold, it is for a much lower price than in Tain Mal and Tofor’s time, or even at the time of Geismar’s research. Geismar gives figures of about 100,000–200,000 vatu per atingting (approximately 1,000 AUD or 800 euros to 2,000 AUD or 1,600 euros), while I have figures of 45,000 and up to a maximum of 60,000 vatu for an atingting of up to three meters (approximately 470 AUD or 375 euros to 625 AUD or 500 euros). Everyone on Ambrym remembers Tofor’s prices of the 1960s–1970s, and most people seem to agree on at least one thing: the market is “spoiled” as they call it, and no good money can be made by selling artifacts anymore. Yet, local people still find their ways to justify why and exactly how to make and sell, stretching and thus transforming the notions of kastom copyright and traditional ownership along the way.

Fona Fona is where I conducted my research in North Ambrym beginning in October 2009. This was just a er the French collector had le , the one who had bought the atingting and bwerang that I started this book with. Shortly a er my arrival, I helped Johnson Koran, my Fona host, transport this shipment of artifacts to Luganville and on to France. The collector, as Johnson put it, first came as a tourist in 2002 and then, in 2007, to collect for the first time, making his 2009 visit his third trip, and his second collecting trip. During his stay of about a week and a half, Johnson took him on tours into the hinterland of North Ambrym every day, leaving his chores, such as his garden work, aside. Because certain areas are reserved to certain collectors, and because of tensions and disputes, Johnson took his collector to the area south of Fona, as far uphill as Fanla, on the slopes of the volcanoes. The villages north of Fona, Johnson said, were David Baker territory, an Australian collector. For his work as a middleman, Johnson was promised an unstipulated sum of money by the collector that was to be paid a er the drums arrived in Paris. By December 2010, they had long since arrived there, but Johnson had not received any money for his work. In the year that had passed, both men had spoken to each other on the telephone and the collector had told Johnson that the drums were not sold yet, and that two had been damaged during transportation. In Fona, Johnson Koran realized that he was certainly not going to get paid for the damaged goods that were now unsaleable in Paris. However, he was still expecting some money as a translator and a middleman. A er all, he said, “without my help, Sauvage [the collector] would not have been able to buy all these tam-tams for such good prices” (“good” meaning “cheap,” a low price).

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The problem of the middlemen works on the level of locals versus visitors but also between locals themselves, between local middlemen and commissioners and carvers. For example, young Johnson Wobung of Bwehaltalam village in North Ambrym recalls carving an atingting for Benedicta Tiningkon of Halhal Tawor, the entrepreneurial woman that I introduced in Chapter One. Benedicta paid young Johnson 3,000 vatu (approximately 30 AUD, or 25 euros) for the carving of the head on the drum. This, it is o en said, is a part of the drum that requires a lot of skill. According to young Johnson, she later sold the drum for 60,000 vatu, thus earning 57,000 vatu herself (approximately 600 AUD, or 490 euros). At the other end of the range, in Fona, Johnson Koran had a similar experience. As an occasional commissioner (when he has the money), he had commissioned a chief and carver from Neuiha village, North Ambrym, to carve two faces on two of his drums: one for 3,000 vatu and another, slightly bigger, for 5,000 vatu. A er carving the faces on Johnson’s crude drums, this carver kept the drums instead of returning them to Johnson, even though they were Johnson’s property (they were made out of his trees, and they were felled on his ground). Eventually, the carver sold both drums to a collector, but without Johnson’s approval. As Johnson himself told me, he never knew the price that they were sold for. What he did know was that he had lost his investment of 8,000 vatu (approximately 85 AUD or 70 euros) and that another man, whom he had previously trusted, earned the money that in kastom would have belonged to him. Exceptionally, a large atingting is sold for more than the current price of 40,000–60,000 vatu. There is one story of an atingting from Ranon that was to be sold to a Japanese couple for 300,000 vatu (approximately 3,000 AUD or 2,500 euros), some years prior to my research in 2009. Popular belief now has it that, a er finishing the drum, its carver was too proud of his work to sell. Another exception is that of a colossal atingting at Halhal Fantor, which, in 2009, in my presence was negotiated for purchase by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. As Chief Sekor, the owner of that drum, told me in 2009 in his village, Saint-Louis, that drum too will only leave North Ambrym if an acceptable price is paid. In Linbul, Sawan Lensi has a twelve-year-old (in 2009) atingting standing in his village garden plot. He was offered 60,000 vatu for it by Johnson’s French collector but did not want to sell for that price. As Sawan told me, he himself had paid 45,000 vatu for the production of the drum, from the felling of the breadfruit tree on his land uphill, to dragging it down, preparing it for carving and the hollowing out of the trunk, to carving and painting it. While anyone who has the strength can in fact fell a tree, the hollowing out, carving of the head, and painting of eyes and nose is specialist work for which, as a kastom owner, one is expected to pay. Sawan paid for this work and for the food for all who were

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working for him. And now (in 2009), twelve years later, Johnson’s collector was willing to pay 60,000 vatu for it. Selling for this price was losing money, so Sawan took the risk of keeping it this time around, with hope of a be er price soon. When I saw traces of usage on the drum, I asked what it was used for. To this question, Sawan answered that, today, atingting o en function as a kind of doorbell: “When I am in my garden uphill and people need me they just beat my drum and I know I need to come down.” There are different versions of the origin story of atingting. Knut Rio documented one, told to him by Gulgul of Fona (in Rio 1997). By the time of my stay in Fona, Gulgul, who was originally from Metamli village, had died. My version is by Gemgem of Bwehaltalam, who traces the original copyright of atingting back to the now deserted village of Bangim. According to Gemgem, from there it spread to Bwehaltalam, Likon, Ranhor, Metamli, and Neuiha. Melvar and even Fanla, he said, had to pay to acquire the right to the slit-drum. The story as it goes is that the first atingting was in stone and that the first wooden atingting came to someone in a dream (see also Rio 1997 and Geismar 2003a, who briefly touches on dreaming innovation). While for Gulgul this was a Metamli chief by the name of Meleunkon (in Rio 1997), for Gemgem it was a boy. A er dreaming, he made a drawing of the drum. He showed this drawing to his father, who made the first standing drum by hauling a trunk over a tree. Hemta, the first sculptor, was, according to tradition, also from Bangim, as was Lilonbu, the mother of Big Man Mal Meurt of Fanla. Johnson translated Hemta for me as “martin pêcheur,” or kingfisher bird. This is a bird, he said, that works the wood with its beak, just like a carver. To Gemgem, all Fanla men should pay for the right to atingting and to designs, to one of the six original villages. As a claim to authentic rights, such stories vary. It is interesting, for example, that to Gulgul it was Metamli, his own village, that played a prominent role in the creation myth of the atingting, while to Gemgem it was his village, Bwehaltalam (the second one in the chain of acquisition according to him). Some people grant a lot of validity to such competing origin myths, in order to claim the kastom copyright to objects; others do not. These days, most people seem to agree that it is the carving of the head that requires the most skill. Drums are not so much valued for their tone anymore. The skill required to make a drum that sounds well, where each lip of the slit has to be finely shaped in order to give it its characteristic sound when beaten, is largely lost. Drums are used as doorbells, as in Sawan’s case, or, under the influence of the Church, as school bells or church bells. From time to time they are used for traditional occasions, such as when an important kastom man dies. However, this too is a stretchable context. For example, in 2009, for the death of Gilbert Bangror of

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Bogor, a man generally considered an important man for kastom for North Ambym, the village of Bogor was “blocked” as locals call it, for mourning, but the drums were not beaten. The one who is locally recognized as the last man who knows how to play the drums, Saksak Batokon of Fansar, a village next to Bangim, at the time was invited by the French Embassy in Vila to play for French guests. As a result, for Gilbert Bangor’s death in North Ambrym, the drums remained silent. Saksak is also one of a few le in North Ambrym who remembers some songs to accompany the drum beating. During the Back to My Roots Festival, which I discuss in the next chapter, Saksak was the only one who beat the drums. To date, he has no apprentices.

Bwerang Bwerang, figures sculpted out of tree fern, in Bislama o en referred to as blak palm, are like their counterpart, the slit-drum, recurrent in all of North and North-Central Vanuatu. Today, bwerang serve next to atingting as national symbols of the country, being represented all over town in Port Vila; in and around hotels, resorts, and casinos; and on the streets and being for sale in the markets. Bwerang is the generic name for a tree fern figure in North Ambrym, where most were collected. In all locations in the north and north-central regions of the country, tree fern figures served in graded society rituals, called mage on Ambrym, nimangki and maki on Malakula, warsangul in South Pentecost, and suqe in the Banks and Torres Islands. Within these areas, nimangki and mage ritual was particularly related, having been traded from one location to the other over time. While on Ambyrm, the names of individual graded titles and their respective sculptures are quite well-known, most people in the Banks Islands do not remember the names of individually graded sculptures. In museum collections, however, it is Ambrymese and Banks Islands sculptures that are particularly well represented. For North Ambrym, Pa erson’s exhaustive account of the mage (1981) gives the details of some fi een grades, mostly imported from South Malakula via West Ambrym (the highest of which were from the Small Islands off North Malakula). In addition, there were two indigenous rituals, bwerang yanyan and fenbi, closely tied to kinship, that, Pa erson argues, were an indigenous form of mage (as in the nimangki of Vao and Atchin [Layard 1942] but unlike that of Southeast Malakula).13 Pa erson’s is the only detailed description of the operation of the mage and its history, recorded during her fieldwork in North Ambrym from 1968 to 1971 and gained from informants who either had been or were still involved in the

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mage. The account details the complexity and difficulty of the rituals and their particular politicocosmic nature. Despite earlier accounts of the graded society as a largely secular institution, Pa erson argued that mage had a religious foundation: mage was a status system that produced a hierarchy with differential access to temporal and ancestral power. In all its forms and in all locations in the north and north-central regions, where the graded society occurred, it had a sacred fire (tambu fae in Bislama) as a central element, where men of communal grade prepared and ate their food (kaikai tambu fae in Bislama). Participation in the graded society required the accumulation of difficult to rear boars whose tusks were induced to curve in a spiral and, thus, a huge expenditure of effort from these men to support the required payments for all aspects of ritual life. Speiser provided a typology of the different statues (1996 [1923], 1934), but not without mentioning the difficulties of ge ing accurate descriptions of things and their contexts.14 In relation to indigenous names, he noted that he stopped asking people to give him the names, because he realized a er a while that they were informing him “with every kind of nonsense and obscenity” (Speiser 1996 [1923]: 3). Speiser wrongly referred to North Ambrym tree fern figures as nenna, saying that they existed in four different genres, or GaĴungen. His GaĴungen were based on formal characteristics of the carvings, not their context in ritual. His first group were spirits or ghosts (Geister) with large disk-shaped eyes similar to those on atingting and with the limbs bent backward. He referred to Codrington, who called these statues with their awkward postures Vuis, or ghosts. Speiser’s second group were what he called souls (Seelen), consisting of a head only, sometimes with animals carved underneath the head, such as fish, lizards, or pigs. His third group were the actual grade statues in which, he said, the limbs were represented in a natural, humanlike form, with the genitals well represented. To him, the female statues of this type were meant “to entertain” the men. About his forth group he remained somewhat unclear, referring to them as serving in “phallic cults” (Phallische Kulte) and being of an “obscene kind” (Obszönität, Speiser 1996 [1923]: 392–93). To Speiser, bwerang were like slit-drums, with the notable difference that drums were in wood and had hollowed-out trunks. He also remarked that tree fern might have been used more o en than wood because it is more easily workable and can stand the rougher atmospheric circumstances of tropical weather and reoccurring cyclones. In relation to the fabrication, he remarked that tree fern figures, especially those with large heads, were made by binding the tree trunk while growing. A er felling, the trunk was turned upside down and the thickest piece was used for the carving of the head (ibid.: 392).

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Jean Guiart (1963), translating bwerang as “sculptures en fougère arborescente” (tree fern sculptures) and defining them as “secular art,” was of the opinion that full-body sculptures were used only in the highest grades and that many of those Speiser referred to were only partial figures for the lower grades. Guiart mentions a shi of representation, from the head only over the full body to the couple statue. The marker of achieved status was a tree fern sculpture, together with a stone monument, erected, dressed, and painted differently according to the grade that was reached (1963: 110). Guiart provided an overview of the different statues and their respective grades, but, like Speiser, he did not go much into their ritual context.

Four Bwerang Ne Mage Ne Bul = Four Secondary School Fees In 2009, during the time of my fieldwork, Chief Justin Ramel, an exquisite carver who claims descent from high-ranking ancestors with copyright to both bwerang and atingting designs, had four mage ne bul for sale in Magam village, North Ambrym. These painted figures were executed in exactly the same style and technique as their historical predecessors. Justin had four statues for sale because, in 2009, he had four teenage sons in secondary school. School fees mean incredible financial pressure for people with limited access to cash. The occasional production of copra from dried coconuts is one way of generating income, the sale of art is another. Copra is sold via cargo ships, at least when its always fluctuating price is worth doing this labor-intensive, dirty work. In 2009, the price for a ton of copra was at a low and, as a consequence, hardly anybody was producing and selling copra. By 2010–2011, when I returned to Ambrym to follow up on fieldwork, the price had gone up to 70,000 vatu (approximately 740 AUD, or 600 euros) per ton, which is a good price. As a result, almost everyone was drying copra again, more frequently and in bigger quantities than I had ever seen in any island location before. This shows that people quickly adjust to new market conditions. While in 2009 in North Ambrym I helped drag atingting and bwerang onboard a cargo ship; in 2010 my main contribution in daily chores and work was dragging bags of copra down to the seaside from uphill copra beds to sheds on the beach and onto the ships. The price for a year of secondary education for one child is about 75,000 vatu (approximately 50 AUD, or 40 euros, amounts can vary per location). Three of Justin Ramel’s four sons were a ending secondary school in 2009, with one, the youngest, soon to follow. While people generally agree on the importance of a formal school education for their children, many, such

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as Justin, cannot bring together these kinds of funds. In fact, the pressures of school fees is the most heard of complaint in the islands. It has been calculated that 40 percent of the country’s youth does not a end school because their parents cannot afford it (Roy Obed, Pacific Islands Report, 14 September 2009). In remote areas such as the Banks and Torres Islands, this number is thought to be even higher. Primary school fees were waived by the Vanuatu government only in 2010, with aid from Australia and New Zealand. There is talk of waiving the more expensive secondary fees but not much has come of these plans (personal communication, Ralph Regenvanu, 14 March 2012). With copra prices always fluctuating, and children’s much valued school education at stake, it may be no surprise that selling atingting and bwerang at 40,000–60,000 vatu per piece is considered to be “easy work” and “easy vatu,” even though everybody also agrees that these are low prices. In addition, there is always the risk that objects do not get sold. I saw Justin’s mage ne bul statues for the first time leaning against a huge banyan tree just outside Magam in 2009. On my return trip in 2010, they were still standing there, somewhat away from the bush so that they would not age (rot) too fast. They looked somewhat older, their paint dissolving and peeling off due to the humidity, even though they were never used in mage ritual. A er all, they were carved for sale. I did not ask Justin whether all his sons had made it to school that year or, if they did, how he assembled the money for the school fees. These four beautifully carved bwerang ne mage ne bul most probably were not sold and ro ed away against the banyan tree where I saw them standing two years in a row. This time around, Justin’s “easy work” did not give him access to any cash, even though he had spent weeks selecting tree fern trunks, preparing them, carving, and painting them. By 2010, also, I saw a lot of atingting lined up in the bush near Magam. That lot, presumably, had been ordered a while before by an Australian collector. By 2010, the time I saw it, that collector’s pickup was long overdue. Justin was responsible for this order as well. As he told me, such situations occur regularly, with collectors ordering things and then not coming back to collect them a erward.

The Banks Islands Many tree fern figures in museum collections, next to those from Ambrym, originate from the Banks Islands. The Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre Museum in Paris exhibits three of them, as masterpieces of tribal art. One of them has an entry in the catalogue: “Vanua Lava sculpture,

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Figure 2.2. Mage ne sagaran tree fern figure owned by Chief Sekor of Saint-Louis, Halhal Fantor har, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

19th century, Banks Islands, north of Vanuatu; statue for a male graded ritual (kwetie tamat), tree fern, 200 cm, On permanent loan from the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle/Musée de l’Homme, Inv. M.H. 90.27.3” The catalogue text reads:

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This sculpture comes from the south east of Vanua Lava Island, the biggest of the Banks Islands (348 sq. km). It was picked up in the 1880’s during an extensive collecting expedition, at the outcome of which the businessman John Higginson donated an important collection of items from Vanuatu to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The social and cultural system of the people of Vanua Lava centred on mana, the spiritual power inherent in certain things and places and the acquisition and circulation of shell currency. The fernwood statues were used for men’s grade rituals. They were set in front of the houses of high-ranking men as a mark of their status, or near the stone dancing walls to show that rituals had recently been held there. They could be made only by professional artists according to specific rules which the uninitiated would have been unable to follow. This sculpture meets the precise stylistic criteria, for example the anthropomorphic face with schematic features, sketchily drawn eyes, mouth and nose, the long legless cylindrical body and open arms, the position of the clasped hands, and above all the ritual head-dress with its complex designs, reserved for men in a high grade. Its immediate charm comes from its informal, suggestive beauty and the dynamic and yet languorous movement of its lines. (Huffman 2000b: 46)

In 2009, I saw a replica of this Louvre sculpture on Ra Island, just off Mota Lava in the Banks Group, in the village garden plot of Father Luke Dini. As an important island for kastom, Ra, like Rowa in the nearby Reef Islands, was a kastom bank, a former center of production and storage of shell money in the Banks Islands. Luke Dini, a former minister of infrastructure and development in the Tufala Gavman of 1978–1980 and, later, state secretary to the third president of the Republic, now retired from politics, is an Anglican priest on Ra. Together with his wife, who is from Ra, at the time he owned Paradise Bungalows, a local bungalow business on sandy, white Ra beach. Among his achievements as a politician are the airstrip at Sola (the provincial capital of TORBA, the Banks and Torres Province) on nearby Vanua Lava, and that of Craig Cove in West Ambrym (by Ambrymese sometimes referred to as Dini Airport). By 2009, Father Luke was an important man for Christianity as well as revival of kastom on Mota Lava and Ra. Like Justin Ramel on Ambrym, he was a member of an important kastom family (in Luke’s case, in fact, of two branches of his family: as a child, he was adopted by family members on Mota Lava; he thus owns land in the Torres Islands, where he was born, as well as on Mota Lava and Ra). As in the entry for the kwetie tamat, his tree fern figure is planted in the ground in front of his house on Ra, as a (renewed) status marker, amid his bungalows on the beach that he rents out to occasional tourists and visiting government officials. Father Luke claimed to be a wonyeqo, which, he said, is one of the higher grades in the now defunct suqe male-graded society of the Banks Islands. As he explained, on Ra Island there were only two men of higher grade

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still alive in 2009, two tamasuria, or neptagtag. In 2009, I was traveling in the Banks with Codrington’s list of grade names for the area, from his classic volume of 1891, and I was able to identify the tamasuria but not the neptagtag grade. To Father Luke, both names signified the same grade in

Figure 2.3. Copy kwetie tamat just like the one in the Louvre Museum in the garden of Father Luke Dini, Paradise Bungalows, Ra Island, Banks Islands, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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the past. As he put it, “Codrington probably did not record the neptagtag which is its secondary name.” According to Father Luke, his own grade is probably one in between lano and poroporolava as described by Codrington, but certainly not as high up as the womteloa (on Mota Lava/Ra this is womtelo). The womteloa was the highest of the competitive grades for the Banks Islands: welgan, wesukut, wetaur o meligo, and tiqangwono were inherited and were, in fact, the highest grades; however, Father Luke corrected Codrington, saying that in reality wesukut was the highest grade, not tiqangwono. He added that his grandfather from his mother’s side was a wesukut from North Mota Lava (for the complete list of grade names, see Codrington 1969 [1891]: 104–5). He also added that, to him, there are no men of high grade le in the Banks and that he was thinking of traveling to Ambrym in the near future to buy more rights to graded titles and objects, as politician Willie Bongmatur did in his personal trajectory back to kastom in the 1980s.15

Rambaramp Rambaramp, originally from the Lamap region of Southeast Malakula, are funerary effigies containing the overmodeled skull of a deceased Big Man. They are made of wickerwork on bamboo and cane frames wrapped with spider web in human form and adorned with the ritual paraphernalia achieved and worn by the deceased in his lifetime, such as his pig tusk bracelets. In that sense they are artworks made of composite materials much admired by the international tribal art scene as well as human remains. Locally, they are interpreted as the highest step in the nimangki male-graded ritual for the area, the last sacred or tambu fire, the last climb up the ladder of power to become a supernatural living ancestor. In its place, the destiny of a rambaramp was to be planted in the ground on the enclosed nasara or ritual ground, where it stood until it disintegrated into the ground. The man’s spirit, and his skull, stayed on the nasara. By 1991, the production of rambaramp was revived in Lamap, its original area, a er a cessation of about at least twenty years. This first remade effigy was collected immediately a er its production by a French anthropologist. Local people now say that this anthropologist stole the effigy because, despite the promise of payment, no money was ever received a er he exported the effigy to France. The incident put a halt to further production, until recently, when a rambaramp was constructed for/of elder Donatien Tasso on Dravail nasara, in Lamap. Lamap, known as Navsak in local language, is one of few places in the archipelago where Captain Cook landed, in 1774. He named it Port

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Sandwich, but had to retreat fast due to the “unfriendly” welcome he and his crew received (see Kaeppler 1978). Ever since, Lamap has had a violent reputation, both between locals and against whites. There are several reports of “savage cannibalism” on the spot. One “mythic character,” the namal of Bangherere, at the time known as the strongest Big Man for the area, was reported as particularly cruel, as he was said to “eat people, especially children, for pleasure, and so deliberately provoked missionaries and se lers alike” (Monnier 1987 in Geismar 2003a: 67). The namal was assassinated by colonial naval forces in 1896, which le the people of Lamap without a customary leader. As a result, the Catholic missionaries became increasingly successful. Lamap became the regional center for the Catholic Mission and, later, the headquarters of the French colonial government for the area. According to Herna Abong, brother of Marcellin, the Abong family nasara (called labreav pnoab) was destroyed by the French a er the family was chased away from their land with “muskets” (i.e., firearms). The sacred stones on the nasara were used by the French to build a tennis court, he said, the remnants of which I saw during my stay in 2009. Herna is now slowly rebuilding his former tennis court nasara that, he said, is crying (nasara i stap krae). While, originally, the Catholic Church was responsible for the loss of kastom in the area, by the 1980s it was the Church that became the leading actor in its revival. In 1984, a nimangki was performed by request of the French Canadian Bishop Lambert, who had served as a priest in Lamap from 1949 to 1955 (Monnier 1987 in Geismar 2003a: 68). Spectators at this performance were Lambert himself, locals, tourists, and museum curators and collectors (Geismar 2003a: 68). In 1987, the performances were repeated for the centenary celebration of the Church in Lamap. Elders began to teach boys and young men the ways of kastom. Unlike on Ambrym, no living elder had seen a nimangki before or even an incision, but they remembered their fathers’ stories. Communities resurrected their old nasaras and boys were put through incision and began preparing for the taking of grades. In 2003, Geismar described Herna Abong as “a man of pnoab nasara, only 30 years of age,” reaching the high grade of meleun and becoming a “venerated Melanesian Big Man again” (ibid.). In 1999, the Abong family men remade two masks that were collected in Lamap around 1890 and have since been held at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. They are called Nalawan Luan Veuv and “twin” gulong. The remade masks were collected by Geismar for the exhibition Vanuatu Stael and are now kept at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I will return to these masks in Chapter Six, where I discuss in more detail museum collections and collecting.

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Donatien Tasso My first encounter with a real-life rambaramp, that is, sculpture of a dead man containing his skull, was on Dravail, or marar baringaï nasara. Dravail is a hamlet next to Lamap airstrip, belonging to the greater Lamap/Port Sandwich area. This nasara is used by Herna Abong while he is rebuilding his own nasara at labreav pnoab. As he put it in 2009, he has the Dravail nasara “on loan.” Dravail is also where Herna’s brother Marcellin Abong, former director of the VKS, took his nimangki to acquire the grade of gulgul in 2008. That nimangki grade-taking was a ended by a couple of French anthropologists and David Baker, the Australian collector who returns in later chapters. The newly made rambaramp that I saw standing on Dravail nasara in 2009 is that for/of Donatien Tasso, one of few of the original men who returned to kastom in the 1990s. It was Donatien who promoted the revival of rambaramp in the early 1990s, resulting in the first remade rambaramp effigy in decades, the one that was taken away immediately a er by the French anthropologist. Donatien can be seen in Marcellin Abong’s book on the Nagriamel Movement published by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, La Pirogue du Dark Bush, handing over an object to Father Alain Luquet of the Roman Catholic Church (Abong 2008: vi). According to both Herna and Marcellin, it was Father Luquet, more than Lambert, who was a major instigator for the promotion and revival of kastom in Lamap in the 1980s. Père Luquet is buried in Lamap, on batu labver, or lambouvar nasara, encircled by stones. Entering into the enclosed nasara at Dravail in 2009, I saw the stones of Marcellin’s nimangki of 2008, the bushes of plants and flowers reserved to certain men for the decoration of their body and, in the back, a tall men’s house. In the front, there was a temporary enclosure open on two sides. In it, I saw the contours of what I recognized to be a rambaramp effigy. This was Donatien’s effigy. Donatien had died a while before and had been buried. For the assemblage of his rambaramp effigy, his skull had been excavated and overmodeled with clay, painted and adorned, and fi ed onto the figure. It was Herna together with a few men he now works with who had decided to make a rambaramp effigy using Donatien’s skull, a second a empt a er the failure of revival in the 1990s of these particularly dramatic and formerly heavily commoditized objects/human remains. This rambaramp, Herna said, is one to keep and not one for sale or to donate to a museum. It is one to stay on the nasara until it is gone, until it disintegrates into the ground. The effigy was set in a temporary enclosure because he knew of some “vatu kranky [crazy, greedy] men,” Herna said,

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who know the value of rambaramp on the market. These men, he said, are only interested in making vatu out of kastom. By keeping the effigy in a separate shed on the nasara, Herna was protecting it from the and sale to incoming collectors and dealers. “The same vatu kranky men,” he said, “would have charged you [me] entry into the nasara if they knew we were in here together.” So, while Herna is recognized by all as a legitimate revived Big Man of high rank for Lamap, it is clear that he does not have all power when it comes to protecting and safeguarding material culture items.

Notes  1. Une ombre de verre—une larme sur le sable—deux enfants se tiennent par la main. L’animal que vous voyez n’est ce que vous croyez. La peur que vous avez n’est pas ce que vous croyez. L’œil que vous pleurez n’est pas ce que vous voyez. C’est toujours au large où l’eau palpite de créations informes que le cercle se ferme et que les oiseaux-fantômes guident les courants des destins vers de nouveaux secrets.  2. A er the volume by O’Hanlon and Welsch, Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870’s–1930’s (2000).  3. The earliest collections of assembled materials from the Pacific and Vanuatu were those acquired by Captain Cook (see Kaeppler 1978). The information on context and use of the objects is quite limited. Thomas pointed out that, for Vanuatu, collected objects were “limited almost exclusively to weapons— clubs, spears, arrows, and the occasional implement” (2000: 275). Items of what Thomas calls the large-scale sculptural traditions that flourished in Malakula during Cook’s second voyage, when he landed there in 1774, are “entirely unrepresented in Cook voyage collections” (ibid.: 275). He a ributes this to the hostility of the islanders and to the fact that “no voyage participant did as much as sight a village let alone enter one” (ibid.). For Vanuatu, he concludes, “It is a small wonder that the range of material culture collected was as limited as it was” (ibid.).  4. In making lists of things as complete as possible, many things were doubly collected. Similar things of the same type/style ended up in the same collections. This was considered unnecessary. What was wanted was one good example of each type/style. For Vanuatu, it is known that many of Speiser’s doubles (DoubleĴen in German) were not catalogued at the Basel Museum but were, upon arrival, almost immediately “exchanged, donated, or sold to other museums and public collections in Hamburg, Geneva, St. Gall, Cologne and Dresden, and possibly to Berlin, Zurich and other places” (in Kaufmann 2000: 212).  5. Von Luschan in Kaufmann’s text refers to Felix Von Luschan, then director of the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde and Speiser’s main mentor.

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 6. Huffman a ributes this mask to South Pentecost (1996c: fig. 24).  7. Missionization and se lement had begun in the south of the archipelago, marked by early depopulation and antagonism to Europeans. Kastom was abandoned at different times in different islands, with the “pacification” of the north-central region and Tanna being much later than other places in the archipelago.  8. The caption to this mask reads: “‘Owl,’ wis, mask of painted wood, pith and pandanus roots decorated with red seeds, fowl feathers and fibrous streamers. The glistening black surface, much admired locally, was referred to as pei ta Vava, or the water of the Torres Islands, where the method of making this pigment originated. Mata, Banks Islands. William Rivers Collection. CUMAA Z 359. 168 x 37 x 36 cm” (Herle 2005: pl. 6).  9. The rom was much less secret than, for example, luan and batù, which were associated with sorcery. Entering luan and batù cost much more and the seclusion period was much longer than that required for rom. As a consequence, their societies and rites were abandoned sooner, by the 1950s–1960s. According to Pa erson, a “late” luan mask was sold in secrecy to a Catholic priest in Olal in 1968 (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 1 June 2012). 10. Early photographs are proof of the occurrence of groups of drums on Efate, for example, a photograph taken by Lucas in 1895 in Mele (in Kaufmann 1996a: fig. 37), another one in Mele by Felix Gaillard in 1887 (in Huffman 1996b: fig. 359) and one by Lindt in 1891 on Lelepa Island, just off Northwest Efate (in Crowe 1996: fig. 167). One watercolor, by a certain A. B. M., painted in 1875, shows slit-drums on the island of Nguna (in Philibert and Rodman 1996: fig. 374). A drawing by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay of 1879 shows a group of slit-drums that are planted in the ground at Tasiko, on Epi (in Crowe 1996: fig. 167). 11. Shelly Errington opens her seminal work of 1998 with a photograph of two North Ambrym atingting heads that are centerpiece protagonists at the M. C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. (Errington 1998: ill. 1). The caption reads, “The Met’s new treasures.” The photograph is a New York Times Magazine cover of 1982, which is when the Rockefeller Wing opened its doors (personal communication, Shelly Errington, 16 October 2012). 12. Mary Pa erson wrote the notes that accompanied the drum, at the behest of Darvall Wilkins, the British district agent for Central District No. 2, which included Malakula, Ambrym, and Paama. Wilkins also organized the drum’s delivery (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 26 November 2012). 13. Of bwerang yanyan and fenbi rites, Pa erson remarks that they were last performed sometime in the 1930s or early 1940s and that they were only performed by extremely high ranking men, of whom there were very few at the time. She adds that, to her knowledge, there are no bwerang from these rites in public collections, nor are there any headdresses worn by the initiator, called lilian (Pa erson 1996: 257). The carving of this kind of bwerang resembled that of the grade mage ne im gatlam, or “mage of the big house,” except that it had no arms and that it was decorated differently (ibid.).

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14. Among other things, Speiser noticed that, because of intensified bartering between the natives, “objects were o en introduced into one group of islands from another and then figured there as autochthonous products” (Speiser 1996: 2–3), nevertheless adding that he “succeeded in accurately determining the place of origin of such items because most of them are unique objects (combs, fish-hooks and earplugs etc. from the Solomons) which stand out from the common ruck” (ibid.: 3). 15. In kastom, a man cannot just acquire a (copy)right to ritual and objects, except if he finds a sponsor who inducts him into the grade, in exchange for which the sponsor is presented with the entry fee to the grade, preferably paid in pigs, with at least one circle tusker boar sacrificed for the title. The right is then acquired by this performance and by the transfer of pigs (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 2 April 2013).

3  Making Authenticity Introduction: Tourist Arts and Festivals The items generally thought of as tourist arts are the well-known handicra s, in the literature also referred to as “acculturated arts,” or “novelties,” for sale in handicra markets in almost all regions of the world (cf. Silverman 1999). Their main characteristic is that they are small enough to fit into a buyer’s suitcase or backpack. Another kind of tourist art is that which is bought by the kind of tourist who sees him- or herself as more knowledgeable. He or she is one who is not satisfied with handicra s but who is a er “the real thing,” “the authentic.” These are objects, as Raymond Corbey put it, that “scarcely differ as far as style and quality are concerned from those made for ritual purposes” (2000: 81). For Vanuatu, these are the objects I distinguished in the previous chapter, those recra ed a er their historical examples in a context of cultural revival. In an overlapping context of tourism development, it is also these objects that are sold to self-acclaimed knowledgeable tourists but also to art collectors and dealers. These things end up in galleries, museums, or private living rooms around the world. They are a kind of tourist art that o en is (almost) indistinguishable from “the real thing.” In contemporary Vanuatu, moreover, they are also o en considered to be “the real thing.” They are used in revived ritual performances and at cultural festivals, thus breaking down the presupposed dichotomy between so-called authentic primitive art (Errington 1998) and the prototypical tourist arts. Revived ritual art is used in ritual, but sometimes such use serves as a vehicle for sale. These things are “performed for sale.”

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“Making authenticity” is just this: it is the use in performance of objects such as North Ambrymese atingting, bwerang, and rom masks, or Southeast Malakulan nevinbur puppets and their reproductions at festivals, to “make” them “real,” saleable, to achieve a be er price. They are not just miniature mantelpiece atingting or bwerang carved out of so wood and made to fit into a suitcase. Those that are considered “real” rom masks, made in a variety of light, vegetal materials, are sold in secrecy in black plastic bags a er performances, behind the scenes, in what Dean MacCannell called the back side of the tourist site (1976: 92). Those that are considered “not real” or “copies” can be sold more easily, even though, by their looks, they o en are also indistinguishable from “the real.” Their difference lies in the fact that they were not performed, not danced in revived ritual performance. In Fona in 2009, my host Johnson Koran sold a club, called nalnal in Bislama and womrral in North Ambrymese, that was indistinguishable from what would be perceived as a real nalnal by the locals, to a couple of yachties. It was his grandson George who “made it real,” by wearing it and showing to the buyers how a nalnal was worn in the old days. This is use for sale only, in this case the walking or wearing of an object for sale. The same goes for newly made nevinbur puppets or any other copy item. These items resemble museum “masterpieces.” They are, once more, “frozen-in-time masterpieces of tribal art.” Local people in the islands of Vanuatu sometimes use the English term “authentic” to refer to objects. They know that physical traits are not enough to sell the object. In the islands, “authentic” equals “used.” The problem is that “use,” in local terms, also makes a thing real. This is why a “second kind of use,” like a “second kind of copyright,” emerged: the walking or wearing of things or, in the case of slit-drums and tree fern figures, their standing on a nasara. Standing there, they at least give a semblance of use. When an object is used, it is o en thought to contain a spirit. On Ambrym, for example, whenever I asked questions about contemporary rom masks being used in performances, it was made perfectly clear to me that rom, in current se ings of revival and commoditization, are spirits.1 An object such as a mask becomes real through performance, conferring on it a spiritual essence. This starts when the object is being made, the maker of it being in a taboo state, secluded from the rest of the community, as is the case for rom, or, more importantly, when it is worn, performed, used, in a ritual performance. This is not just the case for rom masks on Ambrym. On Malakula, the discourse that has evolved revolves around the nature of cultural revival and the sale of artifak. When Herna Abong told me in Lamap in 2009 that “not too many spirits should go anymore,”

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he was expressing his wish that they should not leave, be sold, anymore. He was referring to highly valued and important items such as nevinbur puppets but also to various mask forms as well as the rambaramp effigies from his area that contain the spirit (and the skull) of an ancestor. In this chapter, I discuss tourist arts and festivals. By way of introduction, I return to tourist arts in theory, evolved since the 1970s (MacCannell, Graburn), and then move on to discuss the tourist art business in Vanuatu. At this point, I include all kinds of tourist arts, for context. Handicra s are a prototypical tourist art category. Next to handicra s, as I mentioned, objects recra ed a er their historical examples are now also for sale. As I will show, such objects can be considered a masterpiece by the consumer or buyer but increasingly also by the producer who is aware of and is increasingly appropriating the masterpiece trope. I then discuss festivals as loci of revival of culture and performance and the dynamics at play at such “celebrations of culture,” aimed toward successful revitalization as well as a commoditization of culture and the arts. I provide various accounts of the several forms of usage of objects. In following sections, I analyze the festivals that I a ended during fieldwork in 2009: the Back to My Roots Festival at Halhal Fantor in North Ambrym, the Malakula Festival “Reef Island Life” on Uliveo Island just off Southeast Malakula, and the Third National Arts Festival in Port Vila.

Tourist Arts The first author to treat tourist arts as a legitimate research subject was Nelson Graburn, in Art as a Mediating Mechanism in Acculturation Processes (1969). In his own words, that text “emphasised the positive role of commercial arts in economically transitional contexts, suggesting that they provide a livelihood, are not subject to wage labor discipline, and bring prestige and pride to minority peoples rather than the low status a ached to the forms of manual labor usually available to them” (in Graburn 1999: 338). In 1976, he defined tourist arts as “ethnic art and cra products produced for an external audience, an audience that is typically unfamiliar with the culture and aesthetics of the producers society” (Graburn 1976: 8), adding that the study of tourist or fourth world arts is “the study of changing arts—of emerging ethnicities, modifying identities, and commercial and colonial stimuli and repressive actions” (ibid.: 2). By 1986, Arjun Appadurai defined tourist arts as “objects produced for aesthetic, ceremonial, or sumptuary use in small, face-to-face communities [that] are transformed culturally, economically, and socially by the tastes, markets, and ideologies of larger economies” (1986: 26).

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Referring to his own influential work of 1976, Ethnic and Tourist Arts, Graburn, in 1999, summarized the then quickly evolving field of tourist arts: Up until the publication of Ethnic and Tourist Arts, the anthropology profession’s analyses of non-Western arts were dominated by models of the symbolic, ritual, and political embeddedness of these “authentic, traditional” functional arts, otherwise known as “primitive” or “non-Western” arts (Gerbrands 1957). The ethnic and tourist arts were the “marked” cases— that is, the anomalous arts produced in colonial and trade contexts, works that, because of their bastard or derivative nature, were in the opinions of many not worth examining and analyzing. Recent studies in anthropology and art history . . . have almost succeeded in reversing the situation. We now realize that practically all the objects in our ethnographic collections were acquired in politically complex, multicultural colonial situations. (Graburn 1999: 345)

Likewise, Phillips and Steiner call it an irony of the authenticity paradigm that many of the things collected “during the heyday of collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, in fact, commercially produced replicas, although curators and collectors were frequently either unaware of this fact or chose to suppress it” (1999: 10). Phillips and Steiner give the examples of Eskimo toolkits and Plains Indian weaponry and beadwork specifically made for the market. They also mention Knut. H. Stolpe, who, by 1896, “lamented the ‘difficulty’” of working with one Native American collection, because “it so o en bears obvious traces of the influence of the white man’s industry. The furniture nails driven into clubs or pipestems, the garniture of glass beads on all sorts of articles, prove that the style is no longer genuine, but spoiled by European importations” (1927 [1896]: 93). Things o en dubbed the first tourist arts include argillite pipes of the Haida of the Canadian Northwest and, earlier, intricately carved Sapi-Portugese ivories (salt cellars, cutlery), curiosities from the shores of West Africa that were introduced in Europe in the 1500s via the port of Genoa (Bascom 1976). These were things that were not made for own use, only for export. For the Pacific, Greg Dening mentions Marquesas Islands’ stilt steps, things now widely found in museum collections and probably among the first things to go (1980: 235 in Ivory 1999: 318). To Carol Ivory, stilt steps were the first tourist arts: “commodities spurred on by a foreign market a er their initial Marquesan function ceased to be integral” (1999: 318). On the other hand, foreign, unfamiliar influences assimilated into art were sometimes well received and successful, on both sides. Examples are contemporary masquerades among the Central Pende of Congo (Strother 1999) and the “white man” or onyeocha among the Igbo of Southeast Ni-

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geria (Clifford 1988: cover photograph). Colon figures among the Baule of West Africa are maybe the best know example. Being a person’s “spirit lover” in the “other world,” these figures were originally not produced for the market, but for own use (Ravenhill 1980; see also Steiner 1994). Depicting modern, fashionable dress, a colon figure “is neither a replica of a European nor the expression of a wish for a European otherworld lover, but rather a desire that the ‘Baule’ otherworld lover exhibit those signs of success or status that characterize a White-oriented or dominated world” (Ravenhill 1980: 10). Colon figures, originally quite derogatorily dubbed “tourist arts,” became desired art pieces by the 1960s–1970s, and by now are pricy collectibles, produced for export on a much grander scale than before. Somewhat similar to the presence of the “White Man” or onyeocha among the Igbo in Nigeria (Clifford 1988), Jill Sweet (1989) has shown that unfamiliar otherness is not just assimilated into sculptural art. It can also be assimilated in performance. Sweet reported on the inclusion of four types of tourists in Zuni Pueblo performance: the “New Yorker” or “East Coast” type, the “Texan” type, the “Hippy” type, and the “Save-thewhale” type, all appearing in Zuni dance routines, and increasingly also in the dances and satires they perform for tourists: “Hippies” are represented as wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, a empting uninvited to join in the Indians’ dances, and as incessantly asking questions about peyote and mescal, and so on. The “save-the-whale” tourist dancer is played by an Indian wearing hiking boots, tan shorts, a T-shirt with a message, and a pair of binoculars carved out of a block of wood that he uses to study the Indians. The “East Coast” tourist is represented as a woman played by a male Indian wearing high heels, wig, dress, mink coat, dimestore jewelry, clutch purse, and pillbox hat. As “she” awkwardly approaches the dance ground, she stops to coo and cluck over the small Indian children along the way. In their tourist routines, the Zuñi represent all types of tourists as disappointed that they (the Zuñi) do not fit the stereotype of plains Indians who hunt buffalo and live in tepees. (Sweet 1989 in MacCannell 1992: 32)

Charles Lindholm, too, has noted something similar, saying that, as old certainties declined in local communities, the “other” reflected “us,” not only by producing “pseudoauthentic art objects” that would be valued, they imagined, by the connoisseurs in the West, but also by performances: “by manufacturing for themselves copies, parodies, and pastiches of the new world that was entering into and rapidly disintegrating their own” (2008: 21). But this is a kind of tourist arts before tourist arts or a kind of tourist arts that is not tourist arts, such as the performance and incorporation of alien presences in Zuni dancing, as parodies or pastiches—or

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perhaps as a new kind of authentic performance. Tourist arts offer a range of possibilities.

Handicrafts Tourist arts, at their inception, included such things as T-shirts and dishtowels printed with pictures, for example of a sight (MacCannell 1976: 148–49). Graburn (1976) added handicra s, miniatures, novelties, and souvenirs. In those years, tourist arts looked unfamiliar, markedly different. As a result, distinguishing something as a piece of tourist art, or as a fake or a forgery, was relatively easy. It went from the furniture nails driven into clubs and pipestems (e.g., Stolpe in Phillips and Steiner 1999) to Inuit soapstone carving (e.g., Graburn 1976). In Vanuatu, handicra s are offered for sale on handicra markets in town and on the beaches of cruise ship locations throughout the islands. On Ambrym, Moise Wobung ships his sculptures-on-pedestals, as I saw him do in 2009, from Fona to his cousin in Vila. Moise sells him the average sculpture for 500 vatu. His cousin tops this price with another 500. In the end, the sculpture for sale at the cousin’s handicra stall in Port Vila has the fixed price of 1,000 vatu (approximately 10 AUD). On the island of Vanua Lava, women sell their plaited baskets and men sell their beautifully cra ed wooden food knives through Activ Association, a fair trade organization based in Port Vila. People sell their cra s to Activ for 500 vatu per piece but, as Eli Field told me in Turmalau in 2009, Activ asks up to 5,000 vatu per piece from tourists in town. At handicra markets such as the Hebrida Market in downtown Vila or the Seafront marketplace on Vila’s seawall, the majority of things on offer are serially produced and presented in huge quantities. Only some artifacts are offered as authentic by their vendors; these are placed in the back of the market. They can be positioned against a wall in the back of a stall or be kept under the counter, barely hidden from view, to arouse the viewer’s curiosity. Their prices can be higher, their stories different. As MacCannell wrote, “Simply having a back region generates the belief that there is something more than meets the eye” (1976: 93). “Even when no secrets are actually kept, back regions are still the places where it is popularly believed the secrets are” (ibid.: 99). “Entry into this space . . . allows adults to recapture virginal sensations of discovery” (ibid.). By permi ing the buyer to penetrate into the back region of the marketplace, the seller underscores the value and authenticity of the object he is showing. Handicra stalls in Vila are mostly owned and run by North

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Ambrymese men and, as a result, most artifacts for sale are North Ambrymese. Bwerang are visible in the back of some stalls. These, as a rule, are unpainted, leaving the trunk visible as a sign of authenticity or supposed use: the wear and tear of time. Slit-drums are not o en offered at handicra markets and are almost always life-size. The only smaller drums I saw during fieldwork were two that were le behind on Fona beach by

Figure 3.1. Moise Wobung shipping his sculptures-on-pedestals to his cousin in Port Vila, Fona beach, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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an art collector who was not interested in purchasing them back in 2009. They had been carved by Gemgem of the village of Bwehaltalam a while before but, as Gemgem told me, “They did not look old enough, and they were probably too small.” In most cases, as I noted, the carver in the islands as well as the vendor in town earns 500 vatu per item sold. Of that money, the carver pays the shipping cost to Vila. The piece of wood that he uses to carve is his own, for free, harvested on his land. The stall holder in town, however, has a lot of extra costs. In 2006, when I was looking into this material, I met Kathy Nifia, who is a market stall holder at Vila’s Seafront market. According to Kathy, it cost any vendor in town in 2006 up to 6,000 vatu per year to rent a stall (approximately 60 AUD, or 50 euros). In 2010, when I went to see her again, she told me that, on top of that, she also paid 500 vatu for a permit per year and another 6,000 for a business license. Moise’s cousin in town has the same expenses of paying rent, permit, and business license, on top of the 500 vatu he pays per item. The vendor in town also has the risk of not selling everything, creating an overstock of objects in their homes in town, while the carvers in the islands get their money when they sell through the vendors.

Figure 3.2. Miniature wooden carvings of slit-drums and bwerang at one of several handicra markets in town, all in Ambrym style, Port Vila, 2006 (photograph by the author).

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Figure 3.3. Souvenir stall in Port Vila harbor during a P&O cruise ship stop, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

Figure 3.4. Handicra stall on Wala Island during P&O cruise ship stop and transaction of a miniature carved stone, Wala Island, 2006 (photograph by the author).

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Customary Arts Another, more recent way to refer to what was previously termed “tribal,” “primitive,” or “first arts” is “customary arts.” These arts are particularly tied to cultural revitalization and tourism and are characterized by an interplay between tradition and innovation. Customary arts are thriving in the Pacific and elsewhere. According to Damian Skinner and Lissant Bolton, customary arts are made by a wide variety of producers, representing the ongoing relevance of the past in the present and the continuation of older art forms within contemporary social contexts (2012: 467). Skinner and Bolton use the word “customary” rather than “traditional” precisely because these practices are not static but represent processes of adaptation and change. “The past does not appear in the present in an unchanged state, but is reinterpreted according to the needs of contemporary makers and the various audiences for whom they produce art” (ibid.). In Vanuatu, customary art items, recra ed a er their historical examples, can be sold to the self-acclaimed knowledgeable tourist and to art collectors and dealers. These items include life-size North Ambrymese atingting and bwerang but they can also be masks, puppets, flutes, clubs, ra le anklets, or any other form of body decoration. They can be beautifully plaited mats from Ambae or Maewo, or baskets and knives from the Banks Islands. Some of these things are small enough to fit into a suitcase; others, such as atingting, are not. This makes the category of customary arts a fuzzy one. Beautifully carved Banks Islands knives, for example, are popular among tourists, but they are also much valued objects of cultural revival locally. Beautifully plaited mats are offered for sale on tourist markets, but they can also be exchanged in the islands or bought by family members in town, who can then use them in ritual exchanges. In The Future of Pacific Arts, Philip Dark wrote: If an image of the new and the old can be linked with what has passed, then it is possible to revive an art form, albeit one which is different from its forerunner. . . . Direct connections of the present with the past may not be there, but the new connections made, within the limits of observable relations between present and past style, give a revived art form its validity. (1993: 216)

“Revitalization” as a term was first coined by Anthony Wallace (1956) in relation to Native American culture, for example, the great “Kwakiutl Renaissance”(/revival) of roughly 1875 to 1920 (in Graeber 2001: 147). Graeber wrote that anthropologists and historians have noted: The remarkable bursts of cultural creativity that so o en occur during the first generation or two a er many traditional societies are suddenly integrated into a larger world economy. If the conditions are right—if the group

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maintains some degree of political autonomy and happens to be in a relatively advantageous position in relation to the market—the result can be a spectacular expansion and enrichment of existing cultural forms: of art, architecture, drama, ritual, exchange. (2001: 147).

He added that such circumstances provide opportunities for individual self-realization of certain people (Graeber 2001). As I have previously discussed, for Vanuatu this first took place in the 1960s–1970s, in the run toward independence in 1980, parallel with the tourism boom of that era. This was a period that was also marked by a tribal art market boom and a period of intensified collecting (e.g., Staempfli for Vanuatu), a presence that has since been disrupted. A pitfall of revival can be the use of anthropological books to go back to kastom. I have already mentioned present-day Malakulans using Layard’s and Deacon’s work. Bolton (2012: 213) pointed to the collapse of the tamate secret society in the Banks Islands due to copies of The Melanesians by Reverend Codrington being circulated a er publication in 1891, a book considered by the locals to be containing knowledge that was too sacred and secret to be known by all. Inextricably linked with revitalization of culture, customary arts embrace material culture items as well as the performances and rituals in which the items are used. Locally, a sharp distinction is made between that which was used and that which was not used. To sell that which was used, in any sort of ritual performance, o en poses problems, while that which was not used in ritual can be sold undisputedly. It is considered not real, not authentic by local people. It was made just for sale. That is the purpose of the thing. It is a piece of tourist art and of customary art at the same time, at least in appearance. In order to give things that are made for sale a semblance of age, they can be stored above a kitchen hearth to be blackened. The kitchen hearth in Fona, for example, almost always had some artifacts blackening above it, and in the Banks Islands I witnessed similar scenes. Particularly in Fona, some smaller drums and other wooden sculptures were blackening above the hearth for months. Such objects are considered not real, but they look real. However, even here there is a nuance: local people o en also prefer dark, blackened objects for own use. On Ambrym, this is the customary treatment for most wooden items, such as clubs, and it is also a method of preserving them. Once they are completely black, they are rubbed with coconut oil. This is both an aesthetic and practical treatment. Banks Islands food knives are another example. Such knives were used in the past by men of equally high grade during communal meals inside “the sacred fire” (tambu fae, separate eating hearths). With no or hardly any legitimate Big Men le in the islands, these knives are no

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Figure 3.5. Banks Island food knives, carved by Eli Field, Turmalau, Vanua Lava, 2009 (photograph by the author).

longer used. They are still being carved, however, for the sake of revival as well as sale and are sometimes blackened. In the following sections, I will go into the circumstances of the transportation of two larger customary art items that were sold. One is a lifesize Banks Islands wooden sculpture, the other a large bwerang from Ambrym. Both were bought and exported from Vanuatu and on to France by people who do not necessarily define themselves as tourists. I will also go into the circumstances of production and the role of a recently made wooden sculpture on Mota Lava. While it was not necessarily made for sale, this sculpture too is for sale if an interested buyer comes along, one who is willing to pay an acceptable price. In these contexts, the discourse is one of sale and not so much of cultural revival. In the second part of this chapter, on festivals, I will focus on customary art forms that feature in revived ritual performances.

ARC 2000, the French Alps, and Paris Somewhere in the early 2000s, Eli Field of Turmalau sold a tall Banks Islands wooden sculpture to a friend of Sophie Caillon, a French ethnobiologist who at the time was doing her Ph.D. research on taro irrigation on

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the island of Vanua Lava. Sophie’s friend bought the sculpture while he was visiting her, but it was Eli, in 2009, who told me the story of the sculpture, which, he said, was of the nertum style. This is a popular Janus-faced design in Banks Islands imagery. Later, when I contacted Sophie, she told me the ongoing story of the sculpture in France. Sophie’s friend owns a ski shop in the Alps at Arc 2000 in the Haute Savoie region of France. His sculpture now stands there, planted on two skis flanking the entrance to his shop. Sophie also told me about another friend, Manuel, who at around the same time was working for an NGO based in Luganville on the island of Espiritu Santo. In his leisure time, Manuel had made a trip to West Ambrym, where he bought a large bwerang tree fern figure. Manuel now lives in Paris, where I visited him and his huge West Ambrym bwerang, which is standing tall between two couches in the living room of his Paris apartment. Both of Sophie’s friends went to the trouble and the risk of loss or damage by purchasing a sculpture. They shipped their unique, large sculpture to their homes in France on a ship. Unlike art collectors and dealers, who buy a lot (also literally: “a lot,” such as at auctions) and fill up whole containers, they both had only one sculpture sent home, not to transact but to own and keep. Positioned somewhere between the prototypical tourist and the art collector, these men illustrate what I mean when I refer to the self-acclaimed knowledgeable kind of tourist, distant from the kind of tourist who packs a mass-produced miniature object into a suitcase. Manuel refused to call himself a tourist, even though he visited Ambrym in his leisure time and in leisurely mode. He went to a lot of trouble to establish himself as different, as an authentic cosmopolitan adventurer who appreciates the real, the authentic. By negotiating the price himself in Bislama, he made a claim both to his own status as a consumer of authentic experience and as a knowledgeable collector of artifacts. He did miss out on the fact, however, that an unpainted bwerang like the one he bought is one that was not used in any ritual before it was sold. Such a figure resembles old bwerang in museum collections. On Ambrym, people know this and sell unpainted bwerang as a way to cater to demand for authentic art.

A Mota Lavan Masterpiece During my stay on Mota Lava and Ra in 2009, I saw a masterfully carved, newly made wooden statue in the local tourist bungalow compound of Franklin Woleg in the village of Ngerigman, on Mota Lava. It was remade a er a historical sculpture, by visual repatriation from a European mu-

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seum (a photograph). Franklin, like Herna Abong on Malakula and Eli Field on Vanua Lava, is a filwoka for the VKS for his area. He is also an exquisite carver who was given the photograph of the sculpture a couple of years ago by Ralph Regenvanu, then VKS director. By now, neither Franklin nor Ralph remember where the photograph came from (and, thus, in which museum the sculpture is kept). Stylistically, it is very similar to one published in Meyer (1995: 415 photograph), kept at the Musée des BeauxArts in Chartres, France, even though this sculpture, described as the top of a staff or pestle, is much smaller than the remade statue in Ngerigman. Franklin does not keep his exquisitely carved statue outside, but inside in his best equipped house, on an altar-like table in the dining/lounge area of his tourist bungalow compound. That way, it is protected, unlike atingting and bwerang on Ambrym, from rough climatological conditions. Franklin Woleg keeps his sculpture protected and clean. He does not know what the sculpture was originally used for, nor what its name was in the past. Not long a er Franklin carved the sculpture (shortly before my arrival on Mota Lava), there had been an interested buyer. The director of the Alliance Française in Port Vila, a known art lover, wanted it for what he called his sculpture garden, on the private grounds around his house near Vila. This buyer’s sculptures thus stay in Vanuatu instead of being shipped off to places such as the French Alps or Paris. The director had wanted to buy Franklin’s sculpture for 15,000 vatu (approximately 150 AUD, or 130 euros), but Franklin had declined the offer, saying that it was far too low. As Franklin explained to me, “Not just everyone can carve such a thing, such a well-cra ed, almost exact copy of an ancient masterpiece” and “It requires a lot of skill.” He added, “The original sculpture in an oversees museum is now of incalculable worth.” Thus, a price of 15,000 vatu was unacceptable. A er the incident, Franklin’s relationship with the director was “a bit spoiled,” as he called it. He had known this man for many years as a frequent customer buying things for his sculpture garden and had been surprised that, this time around, he was not willing to raise his offer in order to get the piece. According to Franklin, the director in turn had been annoyed that he could not buy the piece for a lower price. Franklin, in the end, remade the statue first and foremost for the sake of cultural revival, by means of visual repatriation. It is an almost exact copy of a historical piece that is kept somewhere in a European institution. And it is for sale if an interested buyer comes along, one who is willing to pay a decent enough price and not the 150,000 vatu the director was willing to pay. It is certainly not going to rot in the bush. By early 2011, when I visited Mota Lava and Ra again, Franklin was still keeping it on his altar-like table in the best house of his bungalow compound.

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By then, Father Luke Dini was considering buying the statue. I introduced Father Luke in the previous chapter as the man who has a kwetie tamat sculpture (see Figure 2.3) in the garden of his tourist bungalow compound on Ra, just across the lagoon from Mota Lava. That sculpture, as I noted, is a copy of the kwetie tamat in the Chefs d’oeuvres or Masterpieces exhibition at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre. Father Luke was an Anglican priest and a self-styled revived Big Man for his area, who from time to time bought sculptures from local carvers. He planted them on his bungalow compound, to promote kastom, but also to display his status. But Father Luke was also Franklin’s competitor in the tourism business. Both men own a local bungalow business close to each other. With only few tourists Figure 3.6. Statue carved by Franklin and art collectors visiting the re- Woleg, on Mota Lava, remade a er visual mote Banks Islands, Franklin’s repatriation (photograph by the author). chances of selling sooner rather than later are limited. If an occasion occurs to sell for an acceptable price, Franklin said, he would not hesitate and sell it. If sold, he added, he would just make another statue instead.

Festivals The making of authenticity is not just the making of an object that looks authentic but also, and more so, the making of authenticity itself. This is done at festivals, held throughout the islands in a context of cultural revitalization. It is at festivals that authenticity is turned into a commodity. Much more than making an authentic-looking object, it is the authenticating process that sells it, in what I call a used-worn-danced frame. When

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an object is worn, it is “made authentic” without necessarily being “truly authentic” to local people. When an object is made in the right way, for example by a carver who is secluded from the rest of the community during the time of production, and used in what is locally considered to be the right way (danced, with musical accompaniment), people these days attribute a spirit to it and consider it “really real,” authentic. Every revival entails a looking back into the past, a recreation of traditions, demonstrated in the present. At festivals, a discourse is created, or various and overlapping discourses, of cultural revival as well as commoditization. All kinds of audiences are allowed to watch: men, but also women, children, and uninitiated men and, of course, expatriate visitors and buyers. Festivals are like “living museums” (Karp 1991: 280). As “celebrations of kastom and kalja,” they can be held for the sake of cultural revival. As moments at which today’s local entrepreneurs offer their “made authentic” wares, they can be held as vehicles for commoditization of objects. In this case, these wares are not offered for sale at the handicra stalls in the markets in town or on the side of the nasara in the bush in the islands, but in fact on the nasara or ritual ground, inside the back region, center stage. At these moments, the ritual site becomes the back region of a tourist site. At the same time, tourists (and other spectators such as anthropologists) experience a feeling of exclusivity, or authenticity, by entering these otherwise closed-off hidden bush locations. Festivals can be organized by local men, the Cultural Centre, or the Tourism Office. They can be sponsored by the state, the Cultural Centre, the Tourism Office, as well as other promotional and funding and aid bodies. As such, festivals serve different agendas, with different goals set by different stakeholders. Their context is dual, offering a legitimate response to the paucity of means to make a living by selling valued items as commodities as well as an equally legitimate desire to promote kastom. This relates to earlier movements, when ritual and its objects were traded between local groups, with some men, the Big Men and their communities, receiving great power and prestige from this, what is known in the literature as a system of “cultural commerce” (Pa erson 2001). Festivals, as moments for kastom as well as commoditization are competitive. This too relates to the male-graded societies and Big Men tactics of the past. Kastom unites, but it divides as well, by way of rivalries and competition, as it did in the past. Old kastom rivalries between villages and areas that continue to exist in present-day society are now dealt with in festivals on commercial ritual grounds. Local organizers compete in ge ing as many visitors as possible to their festivals. The visitors are local people but also tourists and art collectors and dealers. O en organizing their competing festivals at the same time, organizers force visitors to choose.

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That, nowadays, only a few men climb the ladder of prestige of the male-graded society again, or that women have access to things they previously never had access to, generates discussion and disagreement on the local level, not in the least about copyright and the nature of kastom. What is brought to the stage is some sort of bricolage of ritual, fragments of the vast and powerful ritual complexes of the past in which sacred and secular elements were combined and that consumed a lot of peoples’ energies and resources, both uniting and dividing them. While, in the past, ritual cycles could take many years of preparation, it is now only the most dramatic fragments, their culmination moments, that are reenacted. In between these highlights of culture, demonstrations of native lifestyle are put on, such as gardening techniques or kastom kaikai cooking (traditional island cooking such as laplap preparation), and local vendors sometimes sell some of the smaller, cheaper handicra s on the side.

A Celebration of Kastom and Kalja In the Pacific, festivals serve as platforms for the reestablishment of sociopolitical ties and, particularly in Melanesia, for the reenactment of ritual and the recra ing of its paraphernalia. For Vanuatu, the festival that first infused the cultural revitalization wave was the First National Arts Festival, held in Port Vila in 1979 and described by Bolton as the time “when the country saw itself as a country for the first time” (2003c: 30). Several authors have pointed to the fact that it was particularly since the late 1960s–1970s that festivals have been increasing in all parts of the world (e.g., Chako and Schaffer 1993; Getz 1997; Arnold 2000; Picard and Robinson 2006), although o en in a tourism-only frame, in what they then termed “festival tourism” and parallel to the tourism boom (Arnold 2000; Long and Robinson 2004; Picard and Robinson 2006). As Picard and Robinson put it, “Festivals, whether as ‘traditional’ moments of social celebration or as constructed and highly orchestrated events, have been absorbed into the expansive stock of ‘products’ that tourists desire” (2006: 2). Festivals such as the Pacific Arts Festival have been taking place every four years since 1972 in different locations throughout Oceania. The Melanesia 2000 Festival of 1975 in Nouméa, New Caledonia, was comparable to what the First National Festival was for Vanuatu: uniting the people. Local festivals such as the Goroka Show are continually held in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Cochrane 2007: 76–87). In Vanuatu, succeeding local festivals were the Pentecost Festival in 1982, the Malakula Arts Festival in 1985, the Tomman Arts Festival in 1988, the Women’s Cultural Festival in 1990, and a range of sand-drawing and sailing canoes festivals. In 1991,

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the Second National Arts Festival was held in Luganville, on Santo. The first Ureparapara Festival was held in August 2005. By 2007, the yearly Fanla Arts Festival was announced in a local newspaper as “celebrating Kastom & Kalja in Lolihor, North Ambrym.” Like the Ureparapara Festival, it was considered a success, with “9 yachts anchored off the shores of Ranon beach,” cargo ships bringing in visitors “from Santo, Port Vila, Epi and Pentecost” and tourists “from across Asia, Australia, Europe, UK, New Zealand, South America and the South Pacific,” “members of the Australian High Commission, Vanuatu Kaljural Senta, a Tahitian journalist and editor of 5 Tahitian magazines,” anthropologists, volcanologists, and a handful of the usual NGO volunteers based throughout the islands (Vanuatu Independent, 29 July 07). By 2009, however, when I was based on Ambrym for my research, the Fanla Arts Festival was in disuse due to competition by a new festival, called Back to My Roots. In recent years, some men, mostly from Neuiha or Neuiha linked through marriage, began hosting the Back to My Roots Festival on the commercial har (the North Ambrymese term for nasara) of Halhal Fantor. This har belongs to Chief Sekor of Saint-Louis. While Fanla is situated on the slopes of Mount Tùvyù, a steep climb uphill from the anchorage at Ranon, Halhal Fantor is situated on relatively flat land, near the seaside and the easy-access anchorage of Nobul, which is used as the entry point for Back to My Roots. Partly because of the easier accessibility, Back to My Roots developed from a small local festival to one of the biggest (visitor-wise) for the country. Moreover, the village of Neuiha is an age-old competitor and rival of Fanla. Guiart mentioned as early as 1951 what he called a “lute de prestige . . . entre Mal Meleun de Neuiha et Tain Mal de Fanla” (fight for prestige, or the ba le for status, between Mal Meleun and Tain Mal) and said that it was Tain Mal who was much higher up on the mage ladder of power. He was a man of exceptional high status. At the time, Tain Mal was the highest of only five mal le in Fanla, Neuiha, Ranhor, and Melvar (Guiart 1951). In a recent a empt to regain the hegemony over kastom for North Ambrym, Bongmeleun of Fanla, one of Tain Mal’s last surviving sons, built a Fanla har at Erakor lagoon, close to Port Vila’s hotels and resorts.2 But, as James Bae told me in Fanla in 2009, “Even tourists know that a Fanla har on Efate is out of place.” This means that Fanla, the famous kastom village of the past, is struggling to maintain its reputation as keeper of kastom, its festival being in disuse, its Efate har empty, with only a rom dance occasionally ordered in Fanla by tourists. In contemporary Vanuatu, a calendar of festivals is consultable each year at the VTO and the VKS. Festivals are also announced in airports

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and in town, on leaflets, advertising boards, and in hotels and resorts. Festivals are held in the dry season, from late July to October, in what is locally known as the “festival season” or the “yachtie season.” During the festival season, the weather is pleasant: it is dry, sunny, and not too hot. In 2009, the season started on 15 July with the Sameou Mini Arts Festival in Sameou village, Southeast Ambrym, and the North Ambrym Fanla Arts Festival that was planned for the 16th and 17th but was canceled, as I later learned due to “no visitors.” In August, the Southwest Bay Festival was held, from the 12th to the 14th, and the Nalawan Festival, also on the 14th, both in Southwest Bay Malakula. The Back to My Roots Festival in North Ambrym took place from the 26th to the 28th, and the Northern Malakula Festival, announced as a big nambas grade-taking ceremony in Leviamp village, on Malakula’s northwest coast, from 31 August to 4 September. On 1 September, the Vanua Lava Cultural Festival took place in Vureas Bay and the Lalinda Mini Art Festival, on Ambrym’s southern coast, from the 9th to the 13th. The Gaua Festival was planned in September but, like Fanla, it was canceled due to “no visitors.” From 2 to 4 October, the South Malakula Kastom Festival “Reef Island Life” took place on Uliveo Island in the Maskelynes group of Southeast Malakula. Exceptionally, the St. Andrews Mini Arts Festival on Ra, a kastom celebration of a Christian holiday, took place outside the season, due to its date and the fact that it is a Christian celebration. Occasionally, a festival is held that is particularly “not for tourists” such as a Tanna toka ceremony in 2009 that was not announced on the Tourism Office calendar (personal communication, Ralph Regenvanu, 8 August 2009). Of all the 2009 festivals, I a ended the Back to My Roots Festival in North Ambrym, the Malakula Festival on Uliveo, and the St. Andrews Mini Arts Festival on tiny Ra Island. In addition, I traveled from Ambrym to Port Vila to a end the Third National Arts Festival, held there from 2 to 6 November. Both Ambrym and Malakula usually host four festivals per year. On Ambrym, the festivals (Sameou, Lalinda, Halhal Fantor, and Fanla) are complemented with four competing hiking trails on the volcano craters, offering cultural as well as natural tourism alternatives. North Ambrym is closest to the volcanoes, but it is also the hardest to get to because of the lack of an airstrip. Its trail starts close by Ranon, in Ranvetlam, where one local entrepreneur owns a local bungalow business and two outboard motorboats. On the south coast of the island, the trek starts in Lalinda, and in the southeast in Ulei, close by Sameou, which also has the airstrip for this part of the island. West Ambrym does not have a festival (yet), even though we know that this part of the island was an important dissemination point for the cultural commerce in the area and a place for strong kastom up until the disastrous volcanic eruption of 1913. Its

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trail, popular among volcano tourists, starts in Meltungen, close by Craig Cove and Dip Point anchorage. Tourists climbing the volcanoes from the north side o en do this combining nature and culture, paying for one or another cultural performance, mostly rom and mostly in Fanla. While I was on Ambrym, the North Ambrymese imposed a taboo on the climbing of the volcanoes in the yam-growing season (September to February), which is “an old kastom thing” to do. The taboo was soon li ed by the North Ambrymese Council of Chiefs, however, since none of the other locations (Meltungen, Lalinda, or Ulei) were respecting it. Most North Ambrymese agreed to li the taboo, offering volcano treks again in an a empt to remain competitive in tourism with West and Southeast Ambrym.

Back to My Roots Festival3 I le for Ambrym, initially to a end the Fanla and the Back to My Roots Festivals in August 2009. This was when, on arrival in Fona, I saw the drums and bwerang awaiting shipment to France. This is the story I started this book with, a narrative I return to later. As I have outlined above, the Fanla Festival was canceled in 2009 and has been in disuse since. Like other festivals, Back to My Roots (herea er BTMR) started out small, with no or hardly any visitors (paying customers) a ending in the first years. It started in 2001, making 2009 the eighth edition. Chief Sekor of SaintLouis, whose wife is from Neuiha, is the organizer of the festival and is in charge of the kastom ma ers. Sekor collaborates with Norbert Nabong, the principal of Tobol Secondary School in Bogor, who is in charge of the more practical ma ers that come with organizing a festival. It is Norbert who gave the festival its name. “Back to Your Roots” is not just English; it is also a phrase that suits visitors’ desires and expectations: seeing the roots of these peoples, their bygone cultural traditions. As Norbert told me, BTMR was never intended for profit only but first and foremost “to show the youths the old kastom ways” and “to encourage them to return to their roots.” As the presenter at the festival, he announces each year in both French and English that it is “pour l’éducation de nos enfants, for the education of our children.” It is this in a twofold way. First, it is to show the youths the old kastom ways, literally. Second, the entry fees are used to pay for the children’s school fees. On the festival program were several dance performances, such as bata (this is a dance traditionally associated with boys’ incision), music demonstrations (drums and flute), the culmination points of two mage grade-takings, and a rom performance.4 Job Tiningkon of Halhal Tawor took the grade bwerang ver and, on the third day of the festival, the right to

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rom. At the time of the festival, he a ended secondary school in Port Vila, sponsored by festival incomes. As payment for entry into bwerang ver, he offered a pig to his ritual sponsors. In return, he received the stone that then became his property, a marker of his newly acquired status. Norbert took the higher mage ne sagaran grade, together with a man from Neuiha. To do so, they climbed a bamboo platform that was erected on the har. Their sponsors, in this case Gratiano Tamtam of Neuiha and Chief Sekor (men who already hold the grade), traditionally mount the platform be-

Figure 3.7. Norbert and fellow grade-taker claiming their mage ne sagaran grade on the platform, Halhal Fantor, North Ambrym, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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fore, as they did at the festival. Under the platform was placed a bwerang: the carved and painted mage ne sagaran statue (see Figure 2.2). Much as in the old days, Norbert and his fellow grade-taker, once on the platform, were stoned by other men, dancing together on the ground underneath them, in a circular dance called gaum. A er the stoning, still on the platform, they proclaimed their new names and bestowed upon themselves the title of sagaran, spreading their arms like the wings of a hawk and, coming down, accepting the leaves that were now the markers of their newly acquired grade. Concluding the performance, Norbert gave a tusked boar to Sekor as payment for his sagaran grade and statue. Job’s mage ne bwerang ver and Norbert’s mage ne sagaran were a enuated mage grade-takings, only showing the more dramatic culmination points of the rites, even though they were considered to be real gradetakings by Norbert and Sekor. The male-graded society system of the past is disrupted, with no continuity of transference of grades or knowledge. It is now impossible to accumulate the wealth necessary for several grade-takings. Mage performed at BTMR incurs only a fraction of the former costs that entailed transfers of energy and wealth for each item to which the candidate gained access (sacred insignia, dances, songs, the right to perform the hawk) and community participation in certain se-

Figure 3.8. The payment for the mage ne sagaran grade, a tusked boar, being paid to the ritual sponsors, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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quences, all of which has no place in today’s revived mage, which is performed by only a few men. It is a spectacle to watch, not one to take part in. The timing of the rites and the duration of the festival are too short for anything to be real time, with many in-between performances keeping up the pace for the audience. At BTMR, culture, in the form of the mage and the rom (see below) is performed for visitors and for local audiences, who are proud to see some of their lost and powerful past again.

Rom On the third day of the festival, the rom was introduced by Norbert as a rite sacré, le numéro un du festival, the highlight of the festival, a performance that was going to last an hour. Rom formerly functioned in the secret rom society. Rom ceremonies know a continuity of performance and are popular among locals and tourists alike. At the festival, the rom masked dancers emerged from Sekor’s tambu house, his rom nakamal or ngor, close by but hidden from view in dense bush, slowly making their way onto the ritual ground. They approached the har in line formation, with the men singing and dancing in between their rows, encouraging them, guiding them onto the har. Two rom tatatoro, or rom with pipes, generally regarded as the highest graded rom, led the other, lesser graded masks.5 Together, the formation included some twenty rom masks, of many different designs and colors. Among the dancers, Job was wearing a newly acquired mask and the traditional a ire that goes with it, consisting of a banana leaf cloak that disguises the human body called rablarr, a set of ra le anklets called wongbal, and a “wicker arm” called veran rom (cf. Pa erson 1996: 255). Nowadays, most people seem to agree that rom are spirits. Rom performances occur a er the yam harvest, when the intense labor of growing yams is over. To Norbert, the rom ceremony is a feast, with the sacrifice of pigs, and a celebration of the harvest. By coming out and beating and chasing away uninitiated men, women, and children, it is also a game. The masks are made of a variety of light, natural materials, although nowadays there is a variant in hardwood, unwearable and made for sale only. The right to rom, essentially, is the right to its colors and designs. But even wooden rom can be painted with one’s colors and designs, and thus require copyright. When the colors fade, rom masks lose their power, it is said, and they are destroyed: buried, burned, or sold. To Norbert, the generations of rom are disrupted, due to the large numbers of young men who subscribe each season to work in the apple harvest in Otago, New Zealand, and increasingly also Australia. They stay away for about six months each year. In Norbert’s view, this has resulted in

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more rom initiations and performances.6 However, the historical context of movement and wage labor is also one of men going away and returning to Ambrym over a long period of time. Moreover, rom ceremonies were also given a boost again in the 1960s, when the kastom people together with the Christians decided that the la er could participate in them (Pa erson 1976: 35). This was well ahead of the kastom revival that begun in the late 1970s, when it became national procedure to encourage Christians to participate in reviving all kastom rites and dances (e.g., Tonkinson 1982). At the festival, the different types of rom entered the har, slowly, procession-like. Once there, the accompanying drumbeats started to accelerate and the line formation opened up with the rom running in parallel lines, zigzagging over the har. To Norbert, these line formations originate from what he called “the waetman’s [white man’s] marching.” As he told me, a er blackbirding, “the rom came back differently” (or the men came back and started to do the rom dance differently).7 To Norbert, the waetman’s marching that was introduced was styled a er the example of marching in Queensland, Australia. While it is now seen as traditional, he said, it goes back to the 1800s. Even the drumbeating, according to Norbert, is influenced by the army drums of Australia. In Norbert’s view, it is the first sequence of the rom, the slow procession onto the har, that is the oldest, most Ambrymese sequence of the performance. The second sequence, with the intensified drumbeats and running, is that influenced by the waetman. Importantly, he added, for any new thing that is incorporated into rom, such as a new design or, in this case, a new dance routine, a pig is sacrificed. Norbert called this “making it the Ambrym way.” Norbert’s view is interesting, particularly since most people who never le Ambrym were equally exposed to marching in the colonial era and certainly during World War II, when U.S. troops were based in the archipelago. Earlier, so-called maze dances such as that of the rom were reported by Layard (1942) and Deacon (1934) and are a feature of dance in all areas of North and North-Central Vanuatu and not just in the North Ambrym rom. When the festival was finished, I stayed behind on the har for a li le while, talking with some local friends and with David Baker, the art collector and dealer I briefly mentioned before. While talking, young Job suddenly emerged from the ngor once more, wearing his rom mask and complete a ire, and ran toward the villages. Baker, who had been his sponsor for quite some time (literally, his school fee sponsor), called out his name, but Job did not reply and ran on. To Norbert, this was a good thing, for, he said, “he was not Job anymore, he was a rom now.” People should not think or say “look, there is Job” but instead “look, there is that

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rom.” Through word of mouth, everyone would eventually know that this was young Job running and showing off in his newly acquired rom mask and costume. However, while it is the social life of rom to run and raid the villages in the weeks a er their emergence, Job was the only one I saw doing this, wreaking “havoc” as Pa erson called it (1996: 255), chasing away women and children with their sticks. In the weeks a er the festival, I did see some children wearing self-made masks and banana leaf cloaks with a toy stick, beating each other. I saw them on the road between Fona and Magam, near a cooperative store at Ranmuhu. The boys were chasing their friends with the sticks. Later that day, I asked Gemgem if this had anything to do with rom. He said that it did, that these children were practicing rom while playing, and that this was an old thing. My question triggered something and Gemgem went on about rom in the old days, when he was a child. That was “rom for the blak man,” he said, “not for the turist,” with nightly dancing and singsing, all “things that are gone now.” In the end, Gemgem and most other elders did not like the festival very much. I o en saw him walking away, uninterested in what was being shown on the commercial festival ground. To him, “the bata was not even

Figure 3.9. Chief Sekor leading the rom dancers onto the har at Halhal Fantor, Back to My Roots Festival, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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Figure 3.10. Young boy in self-made coconut shell mask chasing his friends, Ranmuhu, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

a real bata, because it did not have anything to do with boys’ incisions” but also “because it was too short and had too few participants.” The mage ne sagaran grade-taking, too, he said, was not real. The payment of one boar was wrong and the rom performance was too short, being only the culmination point, the emergence of the masks.

Sydney, Brisbane, Shanghai But have not travellers always encountered worldly “natives”? Strange anticipation: the English Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock in the New World only to find Squanto, a Patuxet, just back from Europe. —Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

In 2010, Norbert, representing the BTMR group, applied at the Vanuatu Ministry of Tourism and Trade to be part of the official delegation to the World Expo in Shanghai, China. Adding a DVD with video footage of the 2008 edition of the festival, his application was successful. Nine BTMR men traveled from North Ambrym to Shanghai to represent Vanuatu at the World Expo in 2010.

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In late 2010, a er their return, Sekor told me they had spent about a month and a half in Shanghai, accommodated in a high-rise hotel on one of the upper floors. In 2008, the group had also performed a rom dance at the opening of the exhibition “Ambrym: Art from Vanuatu” at Annandale Galleries, Sydney (22 July through 20 September 2008). For this exhibition, the Australian art collector David Baker had bought all the artifacts at the BTMR edition of the previous year, 2007. A er the National Festival in Port Vila in 2009, the BTMR group was to perform another rom dance, at a gallery in Brisbane, also arranged by David Baker. However, due to Baker’s sudden death just a er the National Festival in Port Vila in 2009, a sad event that I will return to later, the Brisbane rom was canceled. The Sydney rom of 2008, however, was still a topic of heated discussion in North Ambrym in 2009. In Sydney, a newspaper article titled “For a Culture’s Sake, Chiefs Sell Sacred Works” reported on the exhibition: Ambrym’s chiefs gave the gallery permission to show and sell their work, which sparked a feeding frenzy among galleries and museums. . . . Most of the works, carved by chiefs and cra smen from Ambrym, were snapped up before Tuesday’s opening of the exhibition. . . . The Australian Museum has reserved four pieces, including a four-metre wooden drum worth $32,000. The National Gallery of Australia has its eye on a $35,000 face carved from a fern tree. The Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria also have artefacts reserved. (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 2008)

And: By selling art to Westerners, the chiefs hope to convince young people the old customs can be as profitable as a formal education and keep them from leaving. “We want to show them we are not a dying culture,” Mr. Napong [Norbert] said. (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 2008)

Back on Ambrym, the tumult about this trip was not so much because chiefs had sold sacred works of art but because one man who had joined the group, Pierre Celestin of Neuiha, had died in North Ambrym soon a er their return from Sydney. He had dressed up with pigs tusks and danced the rom while, on Ambrym, everyone knew that Pierre had never bought the (copy)right to any of the rom, nor did he have the right to dress up like a Big Man, with pigs tusks. It is no wonder, people said, that he died, for he had made a severe kastom mistake. Both Pierre’s and David Baker’s deaths have to do with kastom disputes and mistakes and sorcery. These are issues I return to later, when I treat kastom disputes and mistakes in Vanuatu. The context of traveling kastom is widespread in and out of Vanuatu and not unique to BTMR. In 2006, a group of Lamap men, led by Herna Abong, performed kastom dances in Paris at the Maison Culturelle du

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Monde.8 The Gaua Women Water Music group has been touring widely since 2007, performing, for example, at the International Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, in 2008 (Vanuatu Independent, 17 August 2008). They introduce water music into their kastom, recreating “the sounds made by marlin, dolphin—even jellyfish,” weaving “these sounds into the custom stories they have of these marine inhabitants” (Vanuatu Independent, 30 September 2007). Probably the most widely toured performance group of Vanuatu is Futuna Fatuana, its members originating, as their title says, from the island of Futuna, which is a tiny Polynesian outlier in the southeast of the archipelago. In 2009, Futuna Fatuana toured throughout Europe, visiting most major cities. In Vanuatu, they are resident performers at Iririki Island Resort. The main problem with internationalizing kastom is that it brands certain practices that are widely known in Vanuatu, belonging to wider groups of people, as singular things. As is o en heard in Vanuatu, kastom belongs to everyone, not just to one or another group and certainly not to an individual. Eli Field in Turmalau, for one, strongly disagrees that water music is something of Gaua and Gaua only. “Women on Vanua Lava have been practicing this kastom too,” he said, “for a long time, but nobody talks about them now.” According to Eli, water music, called seselit in the Banks Islands language, is an old game of “all women Bankis.” On Avok Island, in the Maskelynes Group of Southeast Malakula, Chief Andrew Nakel told me that the namwele leaf on the national flag represents the kastom of “all man Vanuatu”: it does not belong just to the few who go out and about, presenting kastom and kalja to audiences.

Malakula Festival “Reef Island Life,” Avok, and Lamap I traveled to Malakula to a end the Malakula Festival “Reef Island Life,” from 2 to 4 October 2009 on Uliveo or Maskelyne Island, by boat, leaving Port Vila late in the evening of the 1st to arrive at Uliveo early the next morning. Uliveo is the main island of the Maskelynes, a group of low-lying coral islands to the immediate south of Southeast Malakula. The festival took place on the school grounds of Sangalai, which is one of four villages on the island next to Lutes, Pellonk, and the main village of Peskarus. Upon arrival, our li le group of festival visitors was welcomed by some local people and a couple of expatriate volunteers at the time based on Uliveo and working for Australian aid organizations. As I later learned, this couple was responsible for the successful advertising of the festival on a national and even a global level, announcing it on a blog they created. A

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Dutch couple who arrived on Uliveo a day late for the festival even chose Vanuatu as their honeymoon destination because of the festival announcement on the volunteers’ blog. Previously called the Nalawan Festival, this festival, which is VKS sponsored, is usually restricted to South Malakula. In 2009, however, it incorporated two North Malakulan dance troupes, one from Uripiv Island and one from Unmet, a big nambas village on the northwest coast of the island. Southwest Bay, Farun, and Lamap, important kastom competitors in South Malakula, hosted the festival before. In 2009, it was unclear whether the festival had now turned into a festival for all of Malakula, appropriating North Malakulan kastom, or if it was still a festival celebrating the Nalawan secret society of South Malakula. South Malakulans seemed to agree that this was the fourth Nalawan Festival, for the first time with a new name and for the first time held in the Maskelynes. Southwest Bay, however, was still organizing its own Nalawan Festival, next to a Southwest Bay Festival (thus not just competing with the Southeast but also among themselves). The group that was supposed to come from Southwest Bay did not make it to the festival because, it was said, their boat was broken and stuck in Luganville. While North Malakula was represented by groups from Uripiv and Unmet, Southeast Malakula was represented by groups from Avok, Lamap, Dravail, Akhamb, Farun, and Vien, all belonging to the sphere of influence of the wider Lamap-Port Sandwich area. In the first days of the festival, there was no festival program, but the expatriate organizers knew something had to be put together for the tourists. In the end, the only day that had a program, wri en on a school blackboard by one of the volunteers, was the third day. Many local people criticized this lack of organization since, they said, “that is not what the waetman wants” and “these people do not come here to waste their time.” Others were saying that what the waetman wanted did not ma er, that this festival was a celebration of kastom and kalja for Malakula and that turists are just inevitably always there. Uripiv, Unmet, Avok, Lamap, Dravail, Akhamb, Farun, and Vien all performed several dances, many of them masked. In between the performances were native lifestyle demonstrations of hunting and kastom cooking, and weaving, carving, and sand-drawing demonstrations. Southeast Malakula had the most prominent role, with the most dramatic performances reserved for the groups from Dravail and Lamap, such as a gulong masked dance by Lamap. Farun is generally also recognized as a place for strong kastom in South Malakula. Mansif of Farun, an old and highly graded man “who never le kastom,” many seemed to agree, is a Maur, a high grade in the nimangki graded system of the past. Of the big nambas group, one performance stood out, referred to by Guiart as sempel stuma, with a birdlike dancer, the nimbel, painted fully white with red dots

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(Guiart 1952, 1956b).9 It was during this dance that I first noticed someone walking in between the dancers, meticulously picking up everything that fell off their bodies. In this case, it was Chief Virembat, VKS filwoka for his area and descendant of Kali and Virembat of Amok village. I later saw Herna Abong do the same for his group. I call such men kastom coaches. They are assistants to their dancers but also their teachers in kastom ma ers. What they do when they pick up things that fall off the dancers’ bodies is make sure that none of the regalia that they wear, such as cocks’ feathers or bits and pieces of their anklets, are le on the grounds a erward. Even the tiniest feather that falls off a dancer’s body can be picked up by onlookers with bad intentions, who can then do harm to the dancer by performing black magic or sorcery on him. As I later learned, such dangers can only come from others, not from one’s own men. The cleaning of the ritual grounds a er performance is something that is done for away performances only, when uncertain about the intentions of the audiences. During the festival, four ni-Vanuatu guides that were hired by the Cultural Centre were explaining the performances in English and in French to the expatriate visitors and tourists. As one of the guides told me during one of the performances, they did not always have much information to go with. They got their knowledge from the performance groups, who told them in advance what the performance that was to take place was about. At times, this resulted in rather vague explanations, for example, during the masked gulong dance, when the explanation given by the Lamap performers was that there was “no explanation,” that this was a taboo dance, the knowledge of which was secret and sacred, not to be shared by everyone. On the other hand, the Lamap performers knew very well that tourists expect some explanation. They also knew that the secrecy aspect enhances the charm and a raction among most tourists. Of all groups at the festival, Avok and Lamap were most prominent. Avok stood out because it is a place going back to kastom in the rightful way, Lamap because it is a place of strong, stret (straight) kastom. Avok is the only Maskelyne island that began to buy dances in what is considered to be the correct way. At the festival, the Avok men performed two dances, one bought from Farun and the other from an older Avok man living on Uliveo, a man who remembers Avok kastom. At the time, Avok was also planning to buy a dance from Lamap and, in the near future, the right to knowledge of reproduction of masks. Uliveo, the festival’s host and neighbor of Avok, was fined a pig by its guests, payable to Lamap, the self-declared holders of strong kastom for Malakula. Officially, the fine was for not performing at the festival. Later, in Lamap, Herna told me that, in reality, the Uliveo men were not fined because they

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did not perform but because everybody knows that Uliveo, a popular yacht anchorage, dances in nambas all the time for money when nobody sees without having the right. This, he said, is not stret kastom but Vatu kastom (kastom for money). Uliveo did not pay for the right to wear the nambas. This was the real reason for the fine. At the festival, Uliveo’s head of the Council of Chiefs gave a speech and offered a pig to Lamap as payment, apologizing for the fact that the island did not perform. In the speech, he asserted that Uliveo does have kastom and that they were going to bring it back. He, however, knew that his dancers were not being fined for not performing but for illegitimate dancing for tourists. The last song at the festival was by Lamap. It was an old Uliveo song, as Herna told me, “to teach Uliveo a lesson.” Later, in Lamap, Herna and I heard that the Uliveo men had danced in nambas again, for 5,000 vatu for yachties from New Caledonia who had arrived late for the festival. I had met those yachties and had had kava with them and some local men in the village nakamal at Lutes on my last day there before my departure to Avok. They had told me that they regre ed having missed the festival. That evening, however, none of the men in the nakamal offered to dance for money. This may have been because I was there, being perceived by the locals as a researcher with links to the

Figure 3.11. The Unmet performance group from Northwest Malakula, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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Figure 3.12. Herna Abong and his men during a performance by Lamap at the Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

Figure 3.13. Masked gulong dance by the Lamap performance group, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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Cultural Centre and thus someone who would disapprove of this Vatu kastom, like the Lamap men, of this kind of illegitimate dancing in nambas for tourists.

Avok I le for Avok together with a fellow anthropology student I had met on Uliveo. Fresh Cargo, the boat that had brought us to the Maskelynes, had long picked up its other passengers to return to Vila. The yachties were gone as well. My anthropology peer and I went to Avok precisely because it is a place now returning to stret kastom. At the time she was working on a project concerning urban youth culture in Vila and initially came to the festival as a tourist. Together, we canoed over to Avok with Kalo, my Lutes host. On Avok, we were welcomed by Andrew Nakel, Avok chief and newly appointed filwoka for the Maskelynes region. Not long before, he had been touring the Maskelynes, he said, collecting the names of graded titles that used to exist, visiting the few people who remember and assembling a total of seventeen grades for the Avok-Farun area. We soon started talking about the right to dance and the right to wear the nambas, and that this was payable with a pig to men who already (or again) hold that right. As Nakel told me during our first meeting, the Avok men paid for the right to wear the nambas to Mansif of Farun, who, he added, was a Maur but also a devout Presbyterian. As I had introduced myself and my research before, Nakel added that the Maur was the highest grade for the Maskelynes in the past and compared it with the grade of Tain Mal for North Ambrym. What the Avok group did not do at the time of the festival, he said, was to cook and eat separately on the sacred fire (tambu fae), as would have been the case in the old days: eating separately from women, children, and men of other grades. They should have done this from the moment they each killed a pig for Mansif, two or three months prior to the festival. Something else that Avok is going to buy soon are the rights to play the slit-drum. First, for the rights to carve and paint the drum, other pigs will need to be sacrificed, always payable to the person who holds that right before you. Avok also voiced a desire to pay for a third dance, probably from Lamap. From Farun, in the person of Mansif, they plan to buy the rights to knowledge of the reproduction of masks. The dances at the festival on Uliveo were Avok’s first legitimate dances in a long time. Before, Avok men danced on the beach or on the deserted nasara for yachties, who had requested dances on Avok for the first time in 2005. Since then, some men were beginning to realize that if they were going to dance kastom

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they might as well do it the right way, the kastom way, by making kastom payments to legitimate owners to obtain copyrights. The dances Avok performed during the festival on Uliveo were the socalled stick and broom dances. The stick dance, or the dance of the pigeon, was bought from Farun in 2005, with pigs and kava. The broom dance, or luan seser, was bought more recently, from an Avok elder on Uliveo. As on Ambrym, luan were secret societies. Luan seser, it is said, in past times was about “cleaning the grounds a er a fight,” “for the peace to come back.” Other known dances are the sivi, about the exchange of food, and baringai, also about food and featuring three bird dancers and a flying fox. Nowadays, luan seser is performed to welcome government officials and guests: “It is a kind of welcome dance, a dance of peace and unity.” The Avok men will continue to perform their dances for kastom reasons and, if they want to, for tourists. They can now freely choose whether they want to dance for tourists, since they own the copyright and perform in the right manner and cannot be criticized. According to Chief Nakel, Avok was a place of strong kastom in the past. As on Ambrym, there was a lot of movement of people and goods, resulting in the fact that there are two kinds of man Avok now. Those originally from South Malakula who moved to Avok to escape the tribal warfare of

Figure 3.14. The stick dance by the Avok performance group, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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the past remember their sites of ancestry on the mainland. They brought along strong kastom. At the First National Arts Festival of 1979, Uliveo performed an Avok dance, “Malakulans knowing all too well that Avok was the kastom place of the Maskelyes before.” The regained rights to dancing and the nambas by Avok now are only the first steps on the long rod long kastom (the way of kastom). The men are careful to perform in the right way and to use only vegetal materials for their nambas and not the leather belts and buckles of European manufacture that kept the nambas in place in the 1960s–1970s. Belts are easy, however, and are still used in some locations, but they are seen as a sign of slak kastom (weak kastom).10

Lamap From Avok, still accompanied by my anthropology peer, I traveled to Lamap on a motorboat. We were dropped off on mainland Malakula at Point Doucère, where the road to Lamap ends on the beach. We walked past Lamap airstrip and Dravail village and into Lamap and the compound of the Abong family, who, we were told, owns a local bungalow business there. At the time, that bungalow was in disuse and Jacky, who is Herna’s and Marcellin Abong’s brother, offered us the house that the la er uses with his family when he is in Lamap. Upon our arrival, Herna, whose graded title and kastom name is Meleun and who is a VKS filwoka for his area, was at work on Dravail nasara, Jacky said, making preparations for the National Festival. In fact, he was making the masks for the National Festival. Wider Lamap is the former headquarters of the French colonial government for Malakula, Ambrym, and Paama (formerly Central District no. 2). It is Francophone and Roman Catholic. In the Roman Catholic calendar year, the month of October is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. On our second day in Lamap, a procession was held for the Sainte Vierge (the Holy Virgin), and I was asked by some of the men to be one of the bearers of the large stone statue of Mary, set on a wooden stretcher for the occasion and decorated with all kinds of beautiful flowers. Herna led the procession, halting at several stations. As a kastom man who does not go to Church anymore, he does this, he said, “to fulfill his duties and obligations toward his community, as a community leader.” Herna, in Lamap, was one of the first who told me about the Church and kastom “working together now,” in all of Vanuatu but certainly in the Lamap area, tying the two opposites of the past together by the word rispek. As he explained, one of the founding fathers of the revival of kastom in Lamap was the Catholic missionary Père Alain Luquet, who lived in Lamap for many years. It is Père Luquet who encouraged the Lamap men

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to go back to their customs in the 1980s–1990s, taking Christianity along on their way. Marcellin and Herna are a later generation (born in 1971). They were young men in the 1980s–1990s. Herna showed an interest in kastom early in life. He was chosen by his father Augustino for a life in kastom, or the blak man edukasen as it is o en called. Marcellin, his twin brother, showed more of an interest in the waetman edukasen. He was chosen for a formal school education. Herna has now climbed the steps of the nimangki ladder up to the grade of Meleun, which is the highest grade for the Lamap area. To reach it, he went through eight sacred tambu fires on his own, cooking his own food and living in solitude from the rest of the community.11 Marcellin, who eventually graduated as an ethnoarchaeologist from a French University, took part in a nimangki in 2008 in order to acquire the grade of Gulgul on Dravail nasara, also known as marar baringai nasara, a ended by two French anthropologists and art collector David Baker, who bought all the regalia a er the grade-taking. There are currently six men in the Lamap area who are reentering the nimangki, taking grades in the revived graded society system and working together. As I noted in Chapter Two, Herna nowadays uses Dravail nasara, which he calls a “nasara on loan,” while he is rebuilding his family’s nasara, labreav pnoab, the one that was made into a tennis court by the French in colonial days. In return, as I witnessed at the Malakula Festival, he trains the Dravail group of men in kastom. He is their kastom coach. His closest compatriot in kastom, Fabrice Leymang of batu labver or lambouvar nasara, whose kastom title is Batix, trains Herna’s men, the Lamap group. When I visited Fabrice at his home in Lamap, he showed me Father Luquet’s grave on his family’s nasara. Fabrice, like Marcellin and, on Ambrym, Norbert, is an educated man. Yet, like Norbert, he has an interest in the kastom of his place, not as a revived Big Man competing again in the nimangki but as a kastom leader and teacher. A couple of years ago, Fabrice declined a scholarship offer for study in New Caledonia. Instead, he works on kastom ma ers in his place. For Fabrice, who was born in 1976, a life in kastom does not necessarily mean one has to leave behind all things of the waetman. Fabrice is very keen on reading French literature and could not imagine a life, he said, without his books. Like Herna, he thinks that combining kastom and Christianity is the way to go forward. To these men, the history of Christianity is simply too long and too present to ignore. Roman Catholics, they say, adhere as much to kastom as to Christianity, “more than Presbyterians who were not allowed to combine the two.” That is why, Fabrice said, the festival on Uliveo was not much of a success. According to Fabrice and Herna, the only places of strong, stret kastom for Malakula are Lamap, Southwest

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Bay, and the big nambas territory of North Malakula (Leviamp, Unmet). This was overwhelmingly obvious at the festival, with a prominent role for Lamap. As I noted in Chapter One, it was Herna who had walked some artifacts at the festival on Uliveo, those that were later offered for sale by Bongtete of Tisman. I also mentioned George Koran in Fona, North Ambrym, who made a nalnal (club) real just prior to sale by wearing it. This is the core of making authenticity: the walking of artifacts without any musical accompaniment or dancing, with the goal of selling them. I also mentioned Herna, admi ing to me only a er the transactions that he was wearing things on his body for sale. It was in Lamap that I first heard why objects are walked to confer an aura of authenticity upon them to achieve a be er price.

Figure 3.15. Silent passage of copy items for sale at the Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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However, things that are danced in rites can sometimes be sold as well. On Malakula, Herna is opposed to such practices. To him, use equals real at all times. He is of the opinion that “not too many spirits should go anymore” (meaning real objects, things that contain spirits—by dancing— and that are continuously sold by some). He did not see a problem in the fact that he himself wore what could then be considered copies for sale to aid his friend and family member Bongtete. As a leader and a kastom chief, he said, he can do this. He has this right. In Lamap, when he explained the principle of tu kaen kopiraet, I finally fully understood his silent passage at the festival on Uliveo. Wearing something that was made for sale at a festival gives authenticity, the festival serving as authenticator.

The Third National Arts Festival, Port Vila, 2009 I traveled to Port Vila to a end the Third National Arts Festival, held from 2 to 6 November 2009 in Port Vila. Boarding at Olal, North Ambrym, I traveled to Vila with the festival delegation for Ambrym, the BTMR group of performers, on the cargo ship Halice. By then, I had come to know Norbert and Sekor very well as well as some of the men and women of the group. The Halice had been expected for days before it anchored at Olal and was supposed to have onboard performance groups from Ambae and Pentecost, but only two out of three Ambae groups were present when we boarded. The other Ambae group had been late for the ship and did not make it to the festival. The Pentecost performance groups came on another ship. Since Halice was so delayed, all of us who were to travel were assembled and waiting in Olal, where we had communal dinners and slept together on our mats in a new church building, just downhill from Olal’s impressive Catholic Church. Once on the ship, I installed myself on the roof with the BTMR men. This is when I realized that some of them were in fact not part of the BTMR group but Seventh-day Adventist youths who were on their way to Vila to register for seasonal work in Otago, New Zealand. They were forbidden by their Church, they said, to dance kastom, but they were friends with some of the dancers. On our way, we stopped at Baiap in West Ambrym, Paama, Epi, and most of the Shepherd Islands (Tongoa, Tongariki, Buninga, and Emao), picking up people and cargo. It took us three days and nights to reach Vila, being just in time for the festival. A er we arrived, the ship’s owners were fined for being severely overweight. Some people blamed this on “those SDA boys, traveling for free on a VKS chartered ship while they are against kastom.” “They just profit from kastom,” some said, and “They sometimes carve as well, but only for tourists.”

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For the National Festival, the BTMR group consisted of about twenty men and four women. The group was downsized because of the death, just prior to our departure, of Gilbert Bangror of Bogor, a man recognized by all as an important man for kastom. Many group members, men and women, stayed behind on Ambrym to mourn his death. They were replaced by Ambrym chiefs and youngsters living in town. The East Ambae group consisted of twelve women and sixteen men and was led by Stuart Nato. Formerly an Anglican, Stuart returned to a life in kastom a er being influenced by his aunt Jean Tarisesei, a leading women filwoka for Ambae (cf. Bolton 1993, 1994, 2003c). The West Ambae group from Nduindui consisted of twelve women and twelve men and was led by VKS filwoka Timothy Taitai. The gender bias was thus much less for the groups from Ambae, an island that is part of the matrilineal area within the north and north-central region of the archipelago. Lesser known kastom locations were also present. Paama was represented by a group who performed their kastom for the first time at the National Festival. Other groups focused on “worship” (praying). This was the case with the North Pentecost group, whose leader chanted Christian prayers through a microphone while his group danced and sang along. Among the groups considered the weakest by most people were those from North Pentecost and Santo. The Santo delegation wore calicos and tinsels as kastom dress, for which they were criticized. The group from Walarano, a known cruise ship location in northern Malakula, was discounted by many merely as a “tourist group.” The festival officially started with speeches by several government officials and dignitaries, such as the then president of the Malvatumauri, and an opening dance by Lamap. The theme of the festival, which was government and VKS sponsored, was “Cultural Diversity toward a Sustainable Economy.” It was held at several venues throughout town, centered on the Saralana grounds in front of the Cultural Centre and, across the road, the grounds in front of Parliament House. The audience was primarily niVanuatu. Some anthropologists were also present as well as NGO volunteers and yachties and other tourists. A master of ceremonies (MC), a locally well-known Wan Smol Bag theater actor, announced the events through a megaphone. His discourse was one of kastom, kalja, and tredisin. At times he made statements such as “This is not Polynesia; this is Melanesia” (hinting at the “living culture of Melanesia,” as opposed to the then presumably “dead culture” of Polynesia) and “Shefa has kastom too,” referring to the Shepherd Islands and Efate, locations that are generally thought to have lost their kastom since early contact history. The MC also repeated over and over again one of the most commonly heard slogans in tourism advertisement: “Vanuatu,

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the Untouched Paradise.” The people I spoke to, local and tourist, experienced these kinds of slogans as disturbing. Si ing down with Jacky Abong, watching what the MC had announced as the tuturun dance that was performed by Farun, Jacky told me that he was wrong, that this was

Figure 3.16. Vao dancer at the National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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the sacred taur dance, another dance of southern Malakula. Such misa ribution, however, only upset a few Malakulan men. The BTMR group reperformed the climax of Norbert’s mage ne sagaran grade-taking that they had previously performed at the BTMR Festival and the rom dance, reusing the masks that were used at BTMR, at least the ones that were not yet sold. Other groups also reperformed dances I had seen them perform before, such as the group from Unmet, who reperformed the nimbel dance they first performed at the Malakula Festival. For Ambrym, most BTMR participants seemed to agree that Norbert’s grade-taking was some kind of a repeat and not the real version that was performed during the festival on Ambrym. No pig was sacrificed, and only the most dramatic part was reperformed: the stoning of the candidate on the platform. Before the rom was performed in Vila, Norbert asked me to ask an American yachtie couple who had bought a rom mask from Sekor on Ambrym to return it for the occasion. The situation was such that some of the rom masks that had been brought over from North Ambrym were damaged, due to three days of

Figure 3.17. Southwest Bay dancers among the crowds on the performance grounds of Parliament House, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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rough seas on an overloaded ship. The American couple, who had not made it in time to BTMR but who later bought a mask on Ambrym, with me acting as a middleman, were more than happy to loan their mask to Norbert: “At last we are going to see a rom performance.” What’s more, they were going to see their own rom mask performing in a rom dance at a festival. At the close of the festival, a er speeches were given by several government officials and by the president of the Republic, the MC announced that there would be some sales of artifacts, such as a bow and arrow offered for sale by Farun for 15,000 vatu, without much success. A closing dance was performed by Lamap. Herna Abong sacrificed a pig and Sethi Regenvanu, former minister in the Tufala Gavman and Ralph Regenvanu’s father, said a prayer. I stood next to Fabrice Leymang at the time, who was outraged about how some delegations had performed. As Fabrice said, “Lamap did very tambu things here, while others were just partying.” On the national level, it was clear that people from different islands a ribute different values to performances and that they contest the authenticity of others.

Figure 3.18. BTMR group rom and four female dancers entering the performance grounds of Parliament House, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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Figure 3.19. Sekor and Eli Tiworwor leading the rom dancers, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

Rom at Moorings Hotel and Spa When the National Festival was over and the audience was leaving, I saw Armand Kitor, one of the BTMR crew and a dear friend, rush away from the festival grounds. He was carrying what I recognized to be his nambas in a small plastic bag. When I asked him where he was going, he replied he was off to Moorings Hotel, where Norbert had arranged another rom performance. Even though I had not been invited by Norbert, I decided to join Armand. We soon caught up with the rest of the group.

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They were dragging along a couple of rom masks, banana leaf cloaks, and two veran rom wicker arms, the traditional regalia of rom. Once arrived at the hotel, the small group of men went backstage to dress up. I went to the restaurant and bar area where the performance was to take place. Mingling among the hotel guests who were awaiting the performance, I overheard remarks ranging from “naked men” to “warriors.” Male guests were particularly disappointed that they were not going to see a performance of voluptuous Polynesian belles but, instead, one of fierce, naked men. None of the hotel guests I talked to had a ended or even heard of the National Festival that had just finished in center town. The men came out, only two of them wearing a rom mask, cloak, and veran rom, the others wearing their nambas. In that sense, they were “young, naked men,” dancing on the marble dance floor of a major Port Vila hotel and spa near the ocean. The dance floor was installed with spotlights and two television screens that continued to play music videos before and during the rom performance. One North Ambrymese man who was at the time working at Moorings served as interpreter for the occasion. He had been Norbert’s contact to arrange the performance. He introduced the dancers as “the warriors from Ambrym.” Some tourists came to take a closer look from behind the bar, but most stayed there, looking from a distance while sipping their tropical fruit cocktails. A er the short and meager performance, I joined the men backstage and helped the rom dancers undress. The two masks were now literally falling apart, having been used for the third time (at BTMR, the National Festival, and now at Moorings). Norbert arranged one more performance, the day a er, at Le Lagon Resort, postponing the group’s return to Ambrym by an extra day. While most of the BTMR men of the group agreed a erward that the rom at Moorings and Le Lagon were not real rom, Armand later told me that, to him, they were all real rom; “for how,” he said, “can a rom ceremony not be real?”

Conclusion: Walking Artifacts In contemporary Vanuatu, all sorts of objects are for sale, ranging from small, “unfamiliar” looking handicra s considered ridiculous by art connoisseurs to highly valued paraphernalia of revived ritual performance. On Ambrym and Malakula, making authenticity is, literally, the making of an object that looks authentic. It is, however, also the creation of an object’s authenticity. This is achieved by incorporating the object in a performance or a performative space. Such actions add to the monetary value of the object.

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Imparting an aura of authentic ritual essence to an object of kastom is almost an obligation. Festivals show the contested nature of authenticity, as Gemgem’s negative response to Back to My Roots has illustrated or Fabrice’s to the National Festival. Competition at festivals transforms them into fields of cultural production—or fields of struggle—for control over valued sources (Swartz 1997: 121–22), with authenticity of people and things being constantly negotiated. Customary arts, linked to cultural revival as well as tourism, include Banks Islands knives but also life-size bwerang and atingting. If made for sale, or not made for sale but sold anyway, they are also prized commodities. Such items are commodities by destination (intended for exchange) or by metamorphosis (objects placed into the commodity state; Appadurai 1986: 16). Festivals are authenticating organizations. Their context is dual, however: they are motors for cultural revitalization—“celebrations of kastom and kalja”—as well as a commoditization of culture and the arts. They offer a legitimate response to the limited means to make a living by selling valued items as commodities as well as an equally legitimate desire to promote kastom. Worn and walked objects are made for sale. It is their purpose. When an object is truly used, or considered to be truly used (as in when it is danced in some way), its sale is more problematic and this happens in secrecy. The authenticating mechanisms are the performances themselves, with the revived kind of kastom being easier to perform than before, taking up less of people’s time, effort, and wealth. Sometimes, as on Avok, the revived kind of kastom is stimulated by the former tradition of performances for tourists. At the National Festival in Vila, Norbert Nabong reperformed the mage ne sagaran grade that he first performed at BTMR in North Ambrym. Such reperformance would have been unthinkable in the past. There are, of course, regional differences. Of all performance groups, only that of the BTMR group of men claims that they can now keep and reuse their nambas, and only they reperform their graded ritual as a repeat, as a copy (for example, Norbert’s sagaran grade at the National Festival). They do this in reply to the global demand for authentic experience. In the process, this creates another kind of authenticity, one for export, one that transcends the local se ing. Both on a local and a global level, “the real,” “the authentic” is a contested category. On a global level, kastom practices are branded as singular things by groups, which poses yet other problems. Kastom is not a thing owned by a few who perform it, but by all ni-Vanuatu (cf. Bolton 2007, 2011). In the next chapter, I will focus on tourists and collectors and specifically on transactions of art for money. Artifak were commodities long before they became art. Since use authenticates the object as well as the

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experience of authenticity for tourists, the “selling authenticity” frame in which this happens is important. In separate sections, I will discuss the history of the authenticated experience for money, using one example of what is maybe the most commoditized ritual performance for all of Vanuatu, the nagol of South Pentecost, followed by a discussion of the categories of tourists, middlemen, and several art collectors.

Figure 3.20. Copy items for sale a er being walked by Herna Abong, Malakula Festival, Uliveo Island, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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Notes  1. According to Pa erson, in the 1960s–1970s, rom were not referred to as spirits (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 7 July 2010).  2. In the 1990s, another a empt had been the building of a tourist har next to the old har at Fanla. It was built to include a men’s house that tourists could enter and where they could buy things. In those years, the tourists were not permi ed into the old har, where ancestral shrines on which pigs were killed together with the bones of deceased ancestors and Tain Mal’s house were situated (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 9 November 2012).  3. Another analysis of this festival was published as “Back to My Roots: Artifak and Festivals in Vanuatu, Southwest Pacific” in a special issue of Critical Arts titled “The Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art” 27, no. 6 (2013): 768–83.  4. A rehearsal for the festival bata was held overnight a few days prior to the festival. It was organized in Likon, uphill from Fona. The morning a er, Gemgem, who had a ended, came to tell me that this had been the first bata in at least twenty, thirty years. It had taken all night, and in the morning food had been distributed. However, no boys had been initiated (as it was a rehearsal). Pa erson was told in the 1960s–1970s that the last bata that was performed in North Ambrym, which was part of actual incision rites, was in the 1940s. A bata was also performed for Pa erson’s farewell in North Ambrym in 1971 (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 25 November 2011).  5. Rom tatatoro are thought to originate from West Ambrym, from a place called Toro. Another highly graded mask is the rom tatapi, which is crowned by a wooden superstructure instead of cocks’ feathers.  6. Norbert talks about some fi y types of rom that are currently in use. Outside of the festivals on Ambrym, there were rom performances in North Ambrym in Metamli in 2005 and in Melvar in 2006.  7. The term “blackbirding” refers to the period of wage labor migration from Polynesia and Melanesia to the sugar cane plantations of Queensland, Australia. Later, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, this became an industry, with involuntary departures and kidnappings in many islands, which ended in a slave trade.  8. A er the performance at the Maison Culturelle du Monde, Herna donated the objects to the institution. According to him, they were later donated by the Maison Culturelle to the Musée du Quai Branly.  9. Guiart wrote that the sempel stuma dance requires the participation of a birdman, the nimbel. His body is completely covered with gray, white, and red paint (1956b: pl. VII, photograph by Freddy Drilhon). Simpson has another caption of the same dance, wrongly referring to it as the naleng: “Na-leng dance with Big Nambus tribesmen painted half-black, half-red, and a rather ghostly ‘Eaglehawk Man’ running in to give a solo performance” (Simpson 1955: facing p. 72, “ektachrome taken at Amok by Freddy Drilhon”). 10. The nambas is a strip of woven pandanus that is wound around the penis, pulled up and tucked under a wide bark belt that is kept in place with a thin

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woven pandanus strap tied in a knot to secure the belt. The strap can now be kept a er performance, just like the anklets, on Avok called vivang. The complete nambas is too powerful to be kept. On Avok, for example, it cannot be reused and is to be disposed of a er use. 11. When nimangki operated throughout society, the men of each grade or of some contiguous grades cooked and ate food together from the same fire. Now, with so few members participating in the graded society, this important aspect of the past is largely ignored or, as in Herna’s case, has to be done in solitude.

4  Selling Authenticity Introduction: Tourism, Tourists, Middlemen, and Art Collectors The arts of Vanuatu that are for sale to tourists and art collectors are the handicra s and any other kind of tourist art items present in handicra markets, but they can also be customary art forms, made in contexts of cultural revitalization as well as tourism. However, there are no clear boundaries between these categories. In the previous chapter, I referred to customary arts as a fuzzy category. Each item that is made using customary forms, materials, and designs, and that is sold to a tourist or an art collector, can also be described as a tourist art item. A customary art item that is made for sale is usually not used in any kind of performance. Examples are the Banks Islands wooden nertum sculpture and the tree fern figure from West Ambrym, now both in France (discussed in Chapter Three); the Mota Lavan sculpture made by Franklin Woleg (discussed in Chapter Three); and the copy kwetie tamat on Ra (discussed in Chapter Two). However, many things can be “made authentic,” through use. A thing is “copy used,” as I have termed it, when it is walked or worn without musical accompaniment. Specifically on Malakula, something is considered to be truly used when it is danced. As I noted before, authenticity itself is turned into a commodity at performances, by way of charging entry fees. Fees are also charged for entry into ritual tourist sites and for taking photographs. This is the wider context of selling authenticity, when the experience is being sold. Selling authenticity thus entails the sale of the made authentic object as well as sale of the authentic experience.

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Things “looking authentic” are o en dubbed “authentic” by connoisseurs in the West who admire them, collect them, and deal in them. In their place, these things can be considered inauthentic (unused), made authentic (walked/worn), or truly authentic (performed). All of them can be sold. Some things are sold in secrecy, the wider community being unaware of the transaction. Buyers range from resort and hotel and cruise ship tourists to people who see themselves as the exceptional kind of tourist, those who buy objects on their own, who know the place and speak the language (Bislama), and who, they say, have access to “the be er art.” Such buyers can miss out on the fact that their items were, for example, le in the bush for a while or placed above a kitchen hearth in order to look older faster. Still, they are among the few who travel to remote island locations on their own, buying singular things that sometimes look exactly like old museum pieces. As I have illustrated before, in the islands these kinds of objects are not always sold and o en rot in the bush. As I have also illustrated, it is the local commissioner who takes the risk of placing an order for slit-drums or free fern figures and who leaves them in the bush, for aging, and not the carver. It is the commissioner who can lose his investment by leaving things in the bush for too long. Some people do not take that risk and keep their artifacts inside. Others, particularly in North Ambrym, keep their carvings outside to age, with the risk of loss if not sold. This chapter is about transactions. As a consequence, the focus is on the buyers. First, I will outline the tourist se ing in Vanuatu. Second, I will discuss what selling authenticity means, in a literal way, offering an authentic experience on the ritual tourist ground by way of charging entry fees. I will illustrate this by using an example from South Pentecost: the nagol, or land dive. Third, I will discuss the context of selling authenticity in object form. I will mainly treat one kind of buyer, the kind of tourist who moves freely between the islands on his or her own, on their yachts. They are the yachties, as local people call them. They want an authentic, real context. They are not just interested in buying a beautifully cra ed, old looking object. They want an object that was used in ritual performance and preferably one that they saw being used (and have a photograph of the performance in which their object features as a memory). The fact that copy items are o en “walked” in order to “make” them authentic for sale is outside of their knowledge. Art collectors require less context. To them, an object just has to look authentic, old, like historical examples, what I have before called “frozenin-time masterpieces of tribal art.” Collectors buy from the supply that is at hand, on opened up ritual grounds, in sheds, and on beaches, or some-

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times even at handicra markets in town. Once in the West, collectors can make up any story, making an object into an authentic piece of art in whatever way they want by storytelling or by raising their customer’s a ention to its stylistic-aesthetic qualities.

Tourism Tourism is Vanuatu’s fastest growing business (40 percent of the GDP), with most tourism development taking place in and around Port Vila and elsewhere on Efate.1 Another center of development is in and around Luganville, on Espiritu Santo. Efate, Santo, and Tanna have the best and best kept road infrastructure and are the most accessible places by air and sea. They have been the main tourist sites in Vanuatu since the 1960s–1970s (De Burlo 1989a). Today, we still see a focus on development for these locations (e.g., the Vanuatu Tourism Development Master Plan 2004–10 and Millennium Challenge goals, including the completion of Efate Ring Road and Santo International Airport). On Efate specifically, the push for development has resulted in major problems over kastom land ownership. By 2008, expatriates leased 55 percent of all land on the island and up to 90 percent of all coastal land (Rawlings 2008). By 2011, tourism, “a er years of stagnation, experienced a rapid growth” (Wi ersheim 2011: 325). In the period from 2006 to 2011, there has been a massive increase in the number of cruise ships visiting the archipelago, the arrivals tripling in those years. “Their number rose by nearly 40 percent in 2008 a er increasing by 60 percent in 2007” (ibid.).2 “The number of visitors arriving by air rose by nearly 14 percent in 2007, and by over 16 percent in 2008. And despite the world economic slowdown, tourist arrivals by air in January 2009 were 28 percent higher than in January 2008” (ibid.). By 2010, the total number of tourist arrivals exceeded 100,000 for the first time. Cruise ship tourists arrive by the thousands in Port Vila and Luganville but also in the more remote parts of the archipelago, where they can spend a couple of hours snorkeling or playing beach volleyball and enjoying some culture on the side. In and around the urban centers of Port Vila and Luganville, there is hotel and resort tourism, from basic to luxurious with swimming pools and casinos. On Efate and Santo, guided tours and excursions are available, for example to Chief Roi Mata’s Domain in Northwest Efate, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is managed by the local community under the Roi Mata Cultural Tourism Project.3 Some tourists take part in more adventurous activities on offer, such as hiking the Millennium Cave on Santo, diving Million Dollar Point and the SS President Coolidge just off Southeast Santo (the Coolidge is promoted as

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“the world’s most accessible shipwreck”), or climbing Yasur volcano on Tanna (promoted as “the world’s most accessible volcano”). On the next step up the adventure ladder, adventurers can visit the outer islands on their own, where there are fewer tourists. Once there, they are catered to with a multitude of local bungalow businesses that offer the authentic experience of sleeping in a village hut under a thatch roof. These most adventurous of tourists go for rougher, less organized hikes, such as the Kula Trail in South Malakula or climbs up the rugged volcanoes on Ambrym. Updates on new additions to this kind of adventure tourism are regularly reported in the “What’s On” section of the Vanuatu Independent newspaper (for example, “Tourism Opens Up in the Banks,” 4 March 2007, “Paama Has Bungalow: First Stop on Road to Tourist Mecca,” 29 April 2007, and “Southwest Bay Yacht Club Opens,” 21 September 2008). Many of these tourism alternatives are unsuccessful and do not last very long. It was Lissant Bolton who first noted the “increasing reach of tourism in the outer islands” (2007: 27). Tourists, evangelists, anthropologists, art collectors, NGO workers, and Australian, English, French, and other expatriates living in Vanuatu continually visit its many diverse islands. With the exception of yachties, they all venture into the islands almost exclusively by air. Small airplanes cater to almost all of the inhabited islands, such as Malakula, West and Southeast Ambrym, and Gaua, Vanua Lava, and Mota Lava in the Banks Group. Cargo ships, such as Sarafenua, Makila, and Halice, also service the islands, and, more passenger friendly, are Fresh Cargo and its predecessor Island Gateway. Today, tourist categories are known, but one kind of tourist can easily turn into another kind along the course of a trip: all-in package deal tourists may explore outside of the safely enclosed gated community beaches of their resorts or vice versa, adventurers may want to experience some luxury in one of the fancier accommodation options at hand. Another kind of tourist that has been emerging recently is ni-Vanuatu nationals living and working in town and visiting the outer islands in their leisure time, enjoying the varied nature and culture of their country. Elite ni-Vanuatu also increasingly travel to Fiji, New Caledonia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States, visiting family or friends there or simply vacationing, making outbound tourism the latest addition to the list of tourism alternatives. In the reverse direction, descendants of ni-Vanuatu labor trade generations now living in Australia return to Vanuatu for the holidays, where they retrace their family histories in the different islands of the archipelago. The development of tourism is closely linked with the revival of culture. Cultural tourism brokers follow in the tracks of revivalist move-

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ments and festivals. Some island communities are happy to allow them into their sites and festivities; others vehemently refuse. Vanuatu Toktok, held to a ract tourism brokers and wholesalers to the country, is one such event, growing each year (Daily Post, 31 August 2012). In 2007, it was announced as follows: Toktok Vanuatu is a huge event that brings to Vanuatu those who will be selling tickets to this country for a long time to come. We have a vibrant culture, beautiful islands and the region’s best hospitality. We don’t do silly things like organise coups or burn down half the town and we are closer to the larger regional population centres than those who do. Whoever you are, whatever your business or occupation, make the visitors welcome this week. They will surely come back. (Vanuatu Independent, 26 August 2007)

The “What’s On” section of the Vanuatu Independent announced the 2007 Back to My Roots Festival, describing the rom ceremony as follows: “Long live the Rom and the Rommers, and may the visitors bring in heaps of revenue to keep the Rom the way the Rommers like it and provide them with some cash for their children’s school fees” (Vanuatu Independent, 28 July 2007). Announcements of this kind uncover the complexities that go with tourism and revival. This specific announcement, for example, does not try to hide, as could be expected of touristic discourse, that performing the rom is also about earning an income in order to pay for children’s school fees.

Selling Performance The wider context of selling authenticity is when the performance, the experience, is being sold as authentic. This happens at festivals but also at any other kind of performance for audiences, by charging entry fees. In her work on the souvenir, Susan Stewart wrote that the authentic experience “becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience” (2003 [1984]: 133). Barbara Kirshenbla -Gimble particularly tied tourism and festivals together, writing, “To festivalize culture is to make every day a holiday” (1998: 62). The staged performance becomes some sort of artifact, repeated, “frozen-in-time”: “They [performances] become canonical. They take forms that are alien, if not antithetical, to how they are produced and experienced in their local se ings, for with repeated exposure, cultural performances can become routinized and trivialized” (ibid.). In Vanuatu, this kind of performance-as-artifact is offered inside hotels and resorts by dance groups of islanders living in and around the urban areas but also in island locations such as North Ambrym, where the Back to My Roots Festival is becoming a duplica-

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tion of previous editions, with repetitive and sometimes “double” mage grade-takings. In town, dance groups include those of Ekasup Cultural Village, close to Vila and set up specifically for tourists, and Tara Beach Culture Night, on Tara Beach just outside Vila. Transportation to and from these locations is by pickup and drop-off points in front of the hotels and resorts. Tourists can order tickets to these dance performances and arrange the bus transfers at their hotel lobbies and front desks. For Ambrym, Knut Rio noted, “Sculptural art from Ambrym currently plays the role of spectacular and highly visible national symbols and represents an important asset for the island’s tourist trade” (2009: 283), and mage ceremonial displays are “nowadays displayed in ceremonial grounds for tourists” (ibid.: 285), and its objects “can easily be destroyed, banished, or sold to collectors and tourists” (ibid.: 306). For Vao, Haidy Geismar briefly mentions tourism, saying that Vao Islanders today, while almost exclusively Christian, maintain their nasara as a site of ancestry, memory, and identity and ban tourists from visiting the sacred site unless a large sum of money is paid (2005b: 198). The Vao Islanders dra ed and approved a local cultural tourist policy to effectively enforce this ban. On Vao, it is forbidden to take photographs in the nasara without paying a fee (ibid.). In 2009 in North Ambrym, it cost yachties 500 vatu (5 AUD) to take a photograph of the standing atingting in the village of Melvar. People charge money to safeguard the authenticity of their ritual sites and objects, or what they wish to present as authentic. They achieve this by excluding or strictly controlling tourist access. To the tourist, access conveys authentic experience. Their desires meet somewhere in the middle. The opening up of ritual sites at controlled moments generates some income. At the same time, it provides an authentic experience to tourists. Tourists do not just enter sites. They sometimes also order dances. On Ambrym, they combine this with a hike on the volcanoes, or they come for the hike and order a dance performance on the side. Coming in by motorboat from West Ambrym, they arrive in Ranon, the first access point in the north, in the a ernoon, and watch a rom dance in Fanla. They stay overnight in one of the huts of a local bungalow business in nearby Ranvetlam, the departure point for hikes to the volcanoes, and do the hike the next day. Some even hike back west to the airport over the volcanoes, hiring a tent and a local guide. Prices for dance performances vary per location. The price for three days of festivities at Back to My Roots is 7,000 vatu (approximately 74 AUD or 55 euros) per expatriate visitor. Ambrym carvers who sell their wares on the side of the har at Back to My Roots pay 5 percent of their earnings to the organization, in the person of Norbert Nabong. The female performers of the group earn 4,000 vatu for three

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days of performing, the male dancers 6,000. I was told by several people that in an a empt to standardize the prices for North Ambrym, an AusAid volunteer who was based in Fanla in 2004 set the price for a thirty-minute performance at 4,000 vatu. Soon a er that volunteer le , however, people started charging more money again, resulting in disputes, especially between the men of Fanchiwiri and those of Metamli, who, it is now said, neglect the prices that were once agreed upon “by knowledgeable people, elders, and chiefs,” thus “spoiling the market.” Like art objects, performances were a commodity first. Colin Simpson, in Islands of Men, mentioned the French resident commissioner Pierre Anthonioz, who ordered a nagol, or land dive, in South Pentecost in 1952, as well as Irving and Electra Johnson, who were on a world tour with their yacht Yankee at the time and who saw a nagol in 1954, making them among the first spectators to the spectacular dive (Simpson 1955: 123–24). Chief Nakel on Avok told me that the history of performing for visitor audiences on Malakula commenced in 1968. In that year, Kali of Amok came down to Southeast Malakula, by request of the French authorities, to perform big nambas dances for the inauguration of Lamap airstrip. According to Johnson, in Fona, the first tourist performances in North Ambrym were rom dances for cruise ships that halted between Fona and Nobul in the 1980s–1990s. Christopher Tilley reported on performances for cruise ship tourists on Wala in 1993 (1997: 79). As he wrote, these tourists were disappointed by the performances, calling them a “Disneyland in Vanuatu” and saying, “We did not come for that” (ibid.: 79). According to Tilley, local onlookers in turn called these performances fake and “only for the money” (ibid.). Festivals, taking up to a couple of days, provide a more authentic experience. Unlike performances for cruise ship tourists, they are not solely put up for visitors but also for local audiences. Traveler-tourists go through great effort to reach the remotest island locations. Tied to tight time frames of airplanes and connections, their time in the islands is limited. In Chapter Three, I briefly mentioned a Dutch honeymoon couple that was late for the Malakula Festival on Uliveo because they had missed the arranged transportation for the festival (the ship, Fresh Cargo). They flew into Lamap a day late and from there made their way to Uliveo over land and sea. An Italian couple that traveled with me on my first trip to North Ambrym in 2009 chose Ambrym as a destination precisely because of the Back to My Roots Festival that, they thought, was going to take place 16 to 18 August, as some advertisements in town had announced. I traveled with them on an airplane from Vila to Craig Cove, West Ambrym. Sharing a motorboat from West Ambrym to the north, we started talking, and I told them I had other dates for the festival, from the 26th to the 28th (ten days

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later), and that my info came from the Cultural Centre. They told me that their international connections to Australia and on to Italy only allowed them a couple of days on Ambrym and not an extra ten days. When they le our boat in Ranon, the first anchorage in the north, they were quite worried about missing the festival, hoping that I was wrong and that their information was right. I did not see them at the festival ten days later and heard there from Solomon Laan Douglas from Ranon that they had climbed the volcanoes instead but were disappointed about missing the festival. Such incidents o en happen, with wrong announcements or festivals being canceled at the last minute. In the following section, I discuss in more detail what is probably the most commoditized ritual performance for Vanuatu: the South Pentecost nagol, or land dive. As part of the festival calendar, it is a ritual performance turned festival. It has nothing for sale except for the dramatic performance itself. Like other performances, its setup as a commodity is by way of charging entry fees. Like other performances, the nagol is also performed for a selected audience, daytrip tourists who fly in for the day with special package deals. However, nagol is sometimes also performed for cruise ship tourists arriving by the thousands at regular intervals on Southwest Pentecost shores. Selling the nagol is selling authenticity, but it is also selling performance in a way that starts to blur the boundaries of what is considered authentic, on both sides.

The South Pentecost Nagol The history of the South Pentecost nagol is complex and is unmistakably linked to the commoditization of performance in Vanuatu. It illustrates the dual nature of festivals and of kastom itself in its formation years as a politicized movement for unification as well as a vehicle for commoditization. It also illustrates the movement of time- and place-centered rituals and the difficulties that come with their reconfiguration. Freddy Drilhon, in 1958, referred to it as “big business,” and Margaret Jolly, who was based in South Pentecost for her Ph.D. fieldwork from August 1970 to January 1973, called it a “tourist spectacle” (1979, 1994b). Kal Muller, working in the area shortly before, made a film on the nagol for National Geographic titled Land Divers of Melanesia (1972b), and more romanticized imaginings of the dive are common (e.g., Amadio 1993). The commoditized nature of the nagol is best illustrated by Jolly’s account of her 1970 arrival in her Ph.D. dissertation of 1979. Mistaken for a filmmaker like Muller, upon arrival Jolly was not accepted in her field site, the traditional village of Bunlap on the east coast of the island. The

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people of Bunlap had contracted a deal with Muller, in the person of Bong (also Bumanari Kaon), the last influential Big Man for the island. The people were “reluctant to allow any rival to thus jeopardize the success of their contract” (Jolly 1979: 4). Jolly tried to dissociate herself from filmmaking by identifying herself as an anthropologist, like Robert Lane and Barbara Lane, who completed fieldwork in the area in the 1950s (R. Lane 1956, 1965). In the end, the people of Pohurhur, age-old rivals with Bunlap, who felt le out of the film profits, accepted her, by way of competition, as a “rival beneficiary” (Jolly 1979: 4–6). During the nagol, men dive from a tall, built construction, the nagol tower, head down, with lianas tied to their ankles. To Jolly, this is the only ritual which remained—and remains—of rites around the yam harvest in this place, adding that the status of the rite as a tourist spectacle should not obscure its importance to the way male power was constituted in precolonial times and the present (1979: 306). She recounts a version of the origin myth, which tells of a man named Tamlie who mistreated his wife. As the myth goes, he kept her forcefully against her will, but she managed to run away several times. Tamlie, however, was always able to catch her. On one of these occasions, she decided to climb a banyan tree. When Tamlie came a er her, she decided to tie lianas to her ankles and jump. He jumped a er her, falling to his death, but his wife was saved by the lianas around her ankles (Jolly 1979: 306–7). A er telling this story, Jolly wrote, most of her male informants then added, “Men have learnt women’s tricks and now we jump from the tower and they dance underneath” (ibid.: 307). The timing of the nagol, traditionally sometime in April, was at the start of the dry season, in association with the yam harvest. This timing “had both a technical and a ritual rationale” (Jolly 1994b: 135). The timing has been modified many times to fit visitors’ itineraries. An iconic example is the nagol of 1972, performed by the Christians of Point Cross for the visit of Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II to the New Hebrides. Jolly recounted this event: The kastom people . . . were aghast at this suggestion for several reasons. First, they noted that it was absolutely out of season in the middle of the wet, and thus the woods for the tower would be too spongy, and in particular the lianas would not have the requisite tensitility. They also doubted whether the elders at Point Cross had the appropriate skills to instruct and the young men the necessary experience and daring to make the dive safely. As it transpired, their worst fears came true. From a platform in the middle of the tower a young man from Point Cross plummeted. Both his lianas broke, his back was broken in the plunge, and he died in hospital soon a er. . . . The kastom people strongly condemned the way in which their Christian kin had been persuaded to perform like “circus animals,” as one old man said, just to please the English Queen. (Jolly 1994b: 137–38)

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In recent years, the nagol has been organized to be performed from April to July, stretching its time frame by an extra three months to overlap with the festival calendar. In addition, the dives are now organized on the southwest coast of the island, which is more accessible to cruise ships and airplanes than the remote and difficult to reach southeast coast. By the early 1980s, Bong was increasingly inviting tourists to Bunlap on the southeast coast, realizing that the “tourist dollar,” as Jolly called it, was otherwise going to bypass him (1994b: 140). Jeremy MacClancy wrote that, by 1981, Bong was offering the Bunlap nagol for 50 AUD per person. Dives were a ended by “expatriates from Vila, Australians visiting the islands, and Americans, touring the Pacific on their yachts, who specifically sailed in” (MacClancy 2002: 223). Bong was late, however. The Christians on the southwest coast were more successful, taking over the enterprise from Bong and the kastom village of Bunlap. Tourists can now book a one-day return flight from Vila to Southwest Pentecost and back with Air Vanuatu on Saturdays, the day fixed for commercial land diving each year between April and July. The success of this formula has inspired Norbert Nabong in North Ambrym to start up negotiations with Air Vanuatu in an a empt to organize rom ceremonies on Halhal Fantor har in a similar way, with airplanes to Craig Cove and motorboats up to the north and back. As Norbert told me in 2009, Air Vanuatu rom ceremonies could be on Thursdays, not to interfere with weekly nagol Saturdays. Displacing the nagol to other, more accessible islands was another plan. In 1990, building a nagol tower on Efate was proposed, where it was to serve as a feature in the South Seas romance Till There Was You (Jolly 1994b: 140). Later, building a tower in Luganville, close to hotels was suggested. Both plans were withheld by the Pentecost Council of Chiefs “on the grounds that this was a kastom unique to Pentecost and should not be exported, because this would risk losing its value and threaten its identity as a custom of South Pentecost” (ibid.). In Luganville, the suggestion was also opposed by a Santo chief “on the grounds that this trespassed on their island and preempted Santo and Malo islanders from being able to show their own kastom to tourists” (ibid.). Since 1 January 2006, there has been a ban on any commercial filming of the nagol, imposed by the Cultural Centre. This ban has been ignored by many, for example in 2008 by a National Geographic film crew that did not apply for permission (nor did they pay the fee that is payable to the VKS when permission is granted). The scam came to light because of another accident that happened. Two young local boys were badly injured while helping to carry camera equipment to the top of the tower, when the tower suddenly collapsed. This happened on 5 April 2008. Their mother

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told her story in the Vanuatu Independent, asking “National Geographic, the Vanuatu National Tourism Office and the Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation” to compensate her injured sons (“Nagol Mother to Sue,” Vanuatu Independent, 20 April 2008). In another article in the Independent, former VKS director Marcellin Abong and Chief Telkon Watas of Bunlap protested against the idea of setting up a bungee jump business as a tourist a raction. The bungee jump is a direct derivative of the nagol. As Chief Watas said, bungee jumping as it is known worldwide is a “straight copy” of the traditional nagol, but property rights from the original owners in Pentecost were never obtained. To Watas, having a bungee jump a raction in Vanuatu would damage the nagol’s traditional value (“Abong/Tekon Say NO to Bungee Jump,” Vanuatu Independent, 20 April 2008).

Selling Art The object part of selling authenticity is that of the sale of customary art forms. As I have illustrated, these are made authentic in several ways. When an object is made and danced in the right way, it is considered real and

Figure 4.1. Detail of the head of a painted tree fern figure in a pile of slit-drums and tree ferns awaiting shipment to France, Fona beach, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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authentic by local people. It contains—or, be er, it is—a spirit. Its purpose is one of revival, and certainly not one of sale. Yet, real things can be sold, for example on Ambrym, where rom masks that were made and used in the right way are sold and presented to buyers in plastic bags. When an object is worn/walked/stood/ painted for sale, it is considered a copy by local people, who are able to distinguish “the real” from “the copy,” even if they look the same. Real as well as copy customary art items are offered for sale to tourists and collectors, who see all of them as authentic, as long as (they look as if) they were used in authenticating contexts: on the nasara, in revived ritual performances. While the wearing and/or walking of an object, as opposed to truly dancing it, is not always exemplified to onlookers, the Figure 4.2. Painted tree fern figure for the size of a larger item and whether “double” mage ne sagaran grade-taking of or not it is painted are more ob- Norbert Nabong at the National Festival, vious authenticity markers. The Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author). finely cra ed tree fern figures of the previous chapters were all life size, but some were unpainted to resemble museum masterpieces for sale. Other tree fern figures were painted, such as the one used during Norbert Nabong’s mage ne sagaran grade at BTMR in 2009 or that used during his “double” grade-taking at the National Festival. Paint signifies use, at least by local standards. But paint, or blackening above a hearth in the case of wood, can also be applied to deceive, in order to give a made-for-sale item a semblance of authenticity. Examples are Justin Ramel’s four carved and painted mage ne bul tree fern figures that I discussed in Chapter Two and that he made for sale to pay for his sons’ school fees. Another example is one brightly colored tree fern figure that I found among the pile of slit-drums and tree ferns awaiting shipment to France on Fona beach upon my arrival in 2009.

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Figure 4.3. Unpainted tree fern figure along the streets in town, on the corner of Lini Highway and Avenue Winston Churchill, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

Figure 4.4. Two small atingting carved by Gemgem, one of which is an atingting rom, not shipped to France and le behind on Fona beach, 2009 (photograph by the author).

For the larger items, size is the easiest marker. Smaller tree fern figures are offered for sale at the side of the nasara or at one of the several handicra markets in town. As a rule, they are unpainted. Figures of this kind also stand in the streets in town and in hotels and resorts. Smaller slit-drums do not occur much. As I have noted in the previous chapter, the only drums of this kind I saw during fieldwork were those carved and painted by Gemgem, which were le behind on Fona beach by the French collector because they were considered too small. In the following sections, I will discuss in more detail the different kinds of buyers of art. These are tourists, of which I will highlight cruise ship tourists and yachties, and art collectors, such as museum and gallery

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curators. Operating between local people and tourists and collectors are the local intermediaries. The focus remains on customary arts that are made authentic, in performances and at festivals, for own use, and, particularly in this case, for sale.

Tourists For Vanuatu, tourism and tourists were and are of all sorts, with an acceleration of the business, as in the rest of the world, in the 1960s–1970s. Cruise ship tourists are and have been overwhelmingly present, briefly at certain moments, in some of the most remote parts of the archipelago, but it is yachties who are the prime buyers of art. Like cruise ship tourists, yachties reach these remote places and see and experience what is not seen or experienced by tourists in hotels and resorts in town. Unlike cruise ship tourists, however, yachties are alone in these places. In fact, yachties resent cruise ship tourists. They prefer to be alone or just among each other and somewhat in contact with local people in these remote places (while cruise ship tourists are never alone). Occasional independent travelers who reach these places on their own, by airplane, or by boat, do this on their own as well, or as a couple or in a small group. They order a dance performance on their own somewhere in a village and sometimes buy an object, on Ambrym in combination with a hike on the volcanoes and on Malakula with a Kula Trail hike. Like cruise ship tourists and yachties, this backpacking type of tourist is a welcome guest in the islands. Unlike them, they are in need of accommodation during their stay, in one of the many bungalow businesses on offer. They do not stay long, however, due to the pressures of international flight connections, and only some of them, for reasons of transportation, buy bigger items such as atingting. During BTMR in 2009, there were over twenty yachts anchored in front of Nobul, North Ambrym. Only some tourists flew in by airplane: one Spanish couple and three French women. The Spanish couple, who I had seen arriving shortly before the start of the festival, was carrying a Banks Islands fish trap. These are not too big, nicely cra ed artifacts that, like Banks Islands wooden knives, can be easily transported as carry-on luggage, but they are also still widely used in the Banks Islands. The couple said they had bought this particular trap at a market in Vila, and they regre ed that they were not going to make it to the faraway Banks Islands during the course of their trip. Being limited in time and space, they did not buy any artifacts at BTMR. On the side of the har at Halhal Fantor, some smaller tree fern figures with price tags were offered for sale. Some

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Figure 4.5. Banks Islands sculptures in wood and tree fern, price tagged on the side of the festival grounds, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

things were not offered for sale but were in fact sold behind the scenes a er the festival, such as several rom masks. At the Malakula Festival on Uliveo, the tourist audience consisted of the Dutch honeymoon couple that flew into Lamap a day late for the festival, some NGO workers visiting the festival in their leisure time, and some yachties who came to Uliveo for the festival. As I have illustrated before, a er the Malakula Festival no paraphernalia that were used during any of the performances were sold. Only the items walked by Herna Abong were sold, to a couple of yachties.

Cruise Ship Tourists Travel by sea, first by explorers and traders and later by cruise ships and cruising yachts, is the oldest form of movement between the islands (cf. Douglas 1996). Today, the cruise ship business has a clear overall presence in Vanuatu. In overwhelming hordes, its passengers reach desolate, faraway places that are otherwise very hard to reach. P&O ships dock regularly at Port Vila and Luganville and in more remote outer island locations

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such as Mystery Island (just off Aneityum in the south of the archipelago), Wala (just off North Malakula), Champagne Beach on Santo, Lamen Bay on Epi, and locations throughout South Pentecost, North Ambrym, and Ureparapara in the Banks Islands. Frequenting Vanuatu waters the most are P&O cruise ships: the Pacific Princess, the Pacific Jewel, the Pacific Sun, and the Pacific Dawn, which has a capacity of 2,050 passengers. Other ships also dock in Vanuatu, which are owned by Australian, New Zealander, American, French, or other companies. The most visited locations, on a weekly basis, are Port Vila, Mystery Island, and Wala Island. In recent years, P&O has deleted the North Ambrym stop, due to local disputes over income, just as in 2008 they were thinking of staying away on Wala. Dance performances for cruise ship tourists are among the most massively a ended ones (e.g., Pacific Dawn, 2,050 passengers) in remote locations such as Mystery Island or Ureparapara. As in ritualfestival se ings, income is generated but, unlike in these places, no sense of authenticity occurs. On Mystery Island, an old whale blubber boiling pot turned into a “headhunter pot” now serves as a photo requisite, with tourists posing in it for the occasion (personal communication, Barry Amos, South Sea Shipping Ltd., Port Vila, 2008). Cruise ship tourists buy mostly handicra s, but they can also buy larger items. Unlike independent travelers, who move around on small airplanes, local outboard motorboats, and local trucks, they have more than enough space onboard the vessels that carry them. In the 1980s–1990s, Club Med ships anchored at North Ambrym shores on several occasions, at Ranon, and, higher up north, between Fona and Nobul. Their passengers bought large tree fern figures and slit-drums (cf. Rio 1997). According to Johnson in Fona, the first tourist performances in all of North Ambrym were rom performances that he and his brother-in-law Willy Tasso organized for visits of the cruise ship World Discoverer in the 1980s.4 This was on the now deserted har at Fona. To Johnson, Club Med passengers were the best spenders. He particularly remembered one instance, when his former chief of police, a man of Algerian descent who he and his colleagues used to call Couscous, came back to Vanuatu “as a tourist” on one of the cruise ships and came ashore at Nobul. In those years, items for sale included large tree fern figures and slit-drums and rom masks bought by the passengers on Fona har. American cruise ship passengers had the reputation of being big spenders as well, like the French, but unlike Australians, who, according to Johnson, “do not spend anything.” Like P&O, Club Med ships now stay away from Ambrym, much to local people’s regrets, missing yet another opportunity to acquire some income but also, as Johnson put it, missing the experience of these ships in front of their beaches at night, all lit, looking like “a city on the sea.”

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Wala Since 1996 cruise ships carrying thousands of Australian tourists have docked on the small island of Lifou, New Caledonia. Once every two weeks or so, boatloads of excited, photo-snapping tourists are ferried between the massive Pacific Princess cruise ship and a dock constructed especially for them by the island’s indigenous Kanak people. Australians in Bermuda shorts and bikinis swarm onto the shore, taking a moment to glance at a group of Kanak singing traditional songs of welcome. They then head up to a large thatched pavilion, built exclusively to receive such a horde. Inside the pavilion, Kanak women in brightly hued “Mother Hubbard” dresses sell small sandalwood carvings and shell necklaces while Australian couples peruse racks of shirts reading, “Do it the island way—tomorrow.” Later in the day a Kanak dance group treats the tourists to a traditional performance while the Aussies, mouths agape and camcorders running, look on. Soon a er, the tourists hurry back to the boat with pictures and t-shirts, all to remind them of their exotic South Pacific experience. —LeFevre, “Tourism and Indigenous Curation of Culture in Lifou, New Caledonia”

This opening paragraph by Tate LeFevre, describing a cruise ship stop on Lifou, is almost identical to what I witnessed on Wala, a small island off the northeast coast of Malakula, in 2006. The only difference worth noting is that the ship I witnessed at Wala was the Pacific Sun instead of the Princess and a lack of T-shirts for sale. Miniature artifacts and shell necklaces, and within Vanuatu o en also small “sacred stones,” are for sale here as well, together with dance performances. Women sell handmade woven baskets. Occasionally, one can see a sea turtle in a washtub or a boa around someone’s neck, and mangoes and coconuts are for sale all around. The dancers on Lifou are all members of the Troupe du Wetr, now an internationally known group of dancers that emerged out of a need for New Caledonian dancers at the 1993 Festival of Pacific Arts in the Cook Islands (LeFevre 2007: 79).5 By contrast, the dancers on Wala and other cruise ship stops in Vanuatu are not internationally known. They are local people or people living in proximity who gather at the dock site to perform and make some money. Others, employed in the nearby town of Lakatoro, North Malakula, come to meet up, hang around at the site, and look at the strangers on their beaches. They are people who have an income and who do not need to make money in the tourist industry. At the Wala stop in 2006, a “cultural tour” for the cruise ship tourists was led by a local chief who had made a deal with South Sea Shipping Co. in Vila. During that tour, I saw small as well as big nambas dance performances in a sort of innovative mix that could never have taken place

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in the past. The small nambas performance that stood out was that of the canoe naleng of the Small Islands, which Layard described so eloquently in Stone Men of Malakula (1942, cf. Tilley 2002, who refers to it as a paddle dance). Layard described the dance as a burlesque, not of a very serious or religious kind. What I saw was more or less what he recorded nearly a hundred years before, namely two rows of dancers carrying paddles, with a hawk-like figure running in between them with his arms spread over their heads. A couple of stops further on the “cultural tour,” where the tourists were halted for the next performance, a big nambas dance was performed by some men and women of Mae, which is a big nambas village on the mainland of North Malakula. A er the cruise ship was gone, I talked to members of several dance groups. The young chief of the Mae group told me about a French couple who had just ordered dances in his village in the upcoming days. On Wala, he invited me to come along to Mae, where I saw the preordered performances. As I later learned, Mae is described in the Lonely Planet guide for Vanuatu as one of few villages where big nambas dances can be ordered, for various amounts.

Yachties Yachties are and have been the prime buyers of objects in the islands. In the late nineteenth century, Count Festetics de Tolna, honeymooning with his wife on their yacht Tolna, was in addition to being an early yachtie also an early collector, who collected hundreds of objects on Tanna and Ambrym between 1893 and 1896 (Festetics de Tolna 1903; see also Boulay and Ferloni 2007).6 Like de Tolna, contemporary yachties prefer to buy the bigger, “be er” art, what to them is “the real thing.” Unlike the masses on the P&O ships, they do not o en buy handicra s or any other kind of recognizable tourist art item. They want a thing to look authentic, but they also want an authentic, real context, an authentic experience. Yachties are welcome visitors in the islands. They trade things such as rope, flashlights, ba eries, and empty wine bo les for fruit and vegetables. They order dance performances in villages on their own and not as part of one or another packaged deal or organized tour, and they o en also buy one or another object, a tangible memory of their visit. While independent travelers who order a dance performance o en come in for an a ernoon only, yachties can anchor their boats for up to a couple of weeks in one place. As they themselves like to put it, they “know these places and people.” They are “really there,” as “some of the few.” Of all tourists, yachties transcend all categories, in the sense that they are able to move freely in the islands and are able to stay longer than

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anyone else (at least if weather conditions allow: in the dry season or the festival or yachtie season). They call themselves “people living on boats” or “cruisers” rather than “yachties,” differentiating themselves from the “racers” who partake in competitive yachting. Having the comfort of their homes with them, they can go anywhere, even uninhabited places, sometimes cruising Vanuatu waters for years. American yachties on a circumnavigation trip start somewhere on the coasts of the United States and, depending on their departure points, travel via the Caribbean and the Panama Canal into the Pacific, where they dock in places such as French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji, before they reach Vanuatu. Many of them are younger retired couples. Some are younger and choose a life on the ocean, working along the way. Younger yachties o en stressed this: “We are not rich,” “It is not because we own a boat that we are rich,” “This is all we have,” and “We work along the way.” They buy objects in the islands and ship them home, to family or friends, whenever they can. Some of them still own a house in the United States, France, or wherever they are from. Others plan to buy one when their world trip is over. As one yachtie told me, “When I return home to the U.S., I want to have a house with one room stuffed with all the things of our travels. We have very beautiful Kuna mola’s and many sculptures from the Marquesas Islands and Fiji.” I first encountered buying yachties at the Back to My Roots Festival at Halhal Fantor. Later I saw them at the Malakula Festival on Uliveo, on Avok, and in Lamap. At Back to My Roots, one yachtie bought one of the smaller unpainted tree fern figures that were standing price tagged on the side of the har. Later, at the Malakula Festival, I first learned about tu kaen kopiraet and the existence of copies or doubles for sale because one yachtie couple was interested in buying things. On Avok, one dancer sold the anklets he had worn at the Malakula Festival for 2,000 vatu. This was the first transaction in which I played a negotiator role, on behalf of another yachtie couple that came to Avok and later Lamap in search of me, to get to “the good stuff,” as they put it. It was also the first transaction for the young Avok dancer, who had no clue what price to ask for his anklets, on Avok called vivang. In the end, I together with him decided on what everyone considered to be a fair price for his pair of anklets. In Lamap, these yachties bought a nevinbur puppet and a circumcision piece from Herna Abong and, a er giving me a ride to North Ambrym on their yacht, Johnson Koran’s nalnal, two bamboo flutes, and a rom mask from Sekor. Another yachtie, initially mistaken by Chief Sekor to be a collector, arrived late for the Back to My Roots Festival and bought a slit-

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drum for 55,000 vatu (approximately 580 AUD or 450 euros), three bwerang, a sculpture called temar ne batù, and a rom mask from Sekor. This was while I was on Uliveo for the Malakula Festival and on Avok and in Lamap. Sekor’s fixed price for a rom mask is 15,000 vatu (approximately 150 AUD or 130 euros). For the transaction I witnessed between him and the yachties who had brought me back to Ambrym, he selected a lesser graded mask for the price of 15,000 and a rom tatatoro (a rom “with pipes,” a higher graded mask) for 20,000 vatu. Both of these masks had been danced before, in the rom ceremony during Back to My Roots. For the transaction, the masks were put on sticks. The yachties, in the end, bought the lesser graded mask for 15,000 vatu (the one on the le in Illustration 4.8, below). As I noted before, they later lent it back to Norbert Nabong to see it reperformed during the rom ceremony at the National Festival, and were very happy to finally see their mask perform.7 Thus, unlike the mage, the rom can be reperformed. The fragile assemblage of the mask, however, means it is very susceptible to damage. Reperformance of a rom mask is only done as long as its colors and designs do not fade, as long as it does not look old. When a mask has been used several times, it is meant to be buried, burned, or sold. Another mask will then be made and painted and newly commissioned by the owner of that particular rom type.

Figure 4.6. Rom placed on sticks in Fanla in the late 1960s (photography by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

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Figure 4.7. Decoration of a rom mask in Fanla in the late 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

Vanuatu 4 You Some yachties stay in Vanuatu for years, and some of them even have jobs. In fact, it was one yachtie who had been responsible for my first (virtual) encounter with the Back to My Roots group of men, when I saw them on a big screen in the airport upon my first arrival in 2006. Between 2006 and 2011, that yachtie, an amateur filmmaker, owned a video business in Vila, on top of the café Au Peché Mignon. Together with his Japanese-American wife, he filmed pristine, authentic culture and nature in the outer islands on a freelance basis for the Vanuatu Tourism Office. In those years, compilations of his film footage could be seen on screens in the airport and in town, in the post office and in the bank. Upon my first arrival at the airport, I watched the full loop of the video, drawn to these images that were so close to what I came to study: cultural tourism. In the airport video, the Back to My Roots Festival name and dates were block le ered on the screen, and I saw for the first time the men that I would later get to know as friends, such as Chief Sekor, Norbert Nabong, and all the others dancing at Halhal Fantor har. The films, called Vanuatu 4 you, were for sale at Au Peché Mignon and in several hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other tourist venues throughout town.

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Figure 4.8. Rom masks on sticks, for sale outside of Chief Sekor’s rom nakamal, Halhal Fantor har, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

In 2009, during Back to My Roots, I finally met the filmmaking yachtie, who was given a front row VIP seat at the festival by Norbert, his camera equipment at hand, on the har. During BTMR, I learned that he is Belgian, like me, and that he had been cruising the Pacific for years. He called

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himself a “promoter” of the festival and a “fan” ever since he first came and saw it “as a tourist” in 2005. Over the years, he announced it over the radio, convincing yachties in Vanuatu waters to head to Nobul’s natural harbor to a end what he called the best festival in the country. He filmed it each year, from 2006 onward, and included it in all his films. In fact, Norbert’s CD, which he added to his application for participation in the World Expo in Shanghai, was with footage shot by the yachtie of the festival edition of the previous year (2008). I later met this yachtie again, on Vanua Lava, where he was trying to get some good shots of the saltwater crocodiles that are said to live there, north of Sola in the Sulphur River delta. In Lamap, I missed him, but Herna told me later that the “yachtie who makes films” had tried to convince people to open up Dravail nasara, the one containing Donatien’s rambaramp effigy, for filming and, eventually, to open and allow tourists inside.

Middlemen Middlemen interpret and sell works of art (Jules-Rose e 1984: 16–17). In contemporary Vanuatu, they operate between carvers, commissioners, those who have the right to objects, and tourists and art collectors and dealers. O en, they are men and increasingly also women and o en they act as commissioners too, ordering items from the carvers they work with. A erward, it is they who sell the work of art to interested buyers. In relation to the African context, Christopher Steiner has called this the paradox of authenticity (1994: 138), the local middleman being caught between locals’ and buyers’ desires. “On the one hand,” he wrote, “by offering authenticity markers,” local traders and middlemen provide “an invaluable service to tourists” (ibid.). “On the other hand, their role as middlemen and economic intermediaries denies the tourist direct access to a wellspring of ‘genuine’ cultural encounters with the actual art producers and users themselves” (ibid.). While the middleman is the one “betwixt and between the groups he brings together,” his success resides in the separation of buyers from sellers (ibid.). In this sense, he fits Eric Wolf’s classic definition of the middleman as a person “who stand[s] guard over the critical junctures or synapses of relationships” (1956: 1075). The role of the middleman is to make and at the same time bridge a gap in different kinds of communication. That bridge must be well guarded at all times, because “perfect communication will mean that the middleman is out of a job” (Bailey 1969: 167–68). Middlemen are mediators, but they are able to control neither the supply nor the demand that they mediate. “They can neither create a stock of objects necessary to satisfy the market,

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nor can they create a market for the objects they have in stock” (Steiner 1994: 155). Supply is dependent on the availability of objects from village sources and on the production potential of artists. Demand is set by museums and auction houses in the West and depends on what tourists and collectors drag out of these regions of the world. “The best the art trader can do is manipulate the perception of the objects he has at hand in order to meet what he believes are the tastes and demands of the Western buyer” (ibid.). In Vanuatu, too, this can result in an overstock. In town, a market stall holder can lose his or her investment when an item does not get sold. In the islands, the middleman loses his investment if slit-drums, tree fern figures, or other items do not get sold. In Vanuatu, buyers’ demands have been radiating back into the islands for a long time, so that supply, in effect, is o en fine-tuned to demand. Objects for sale are meant to resemble historical masterpieces. This is what the well-informed tourist and collector want, and it is what the local knows. Yachties want even more. They do not just want their object to look authentic; they also want it to be authentic, used in revived ritual performances. In North Ambrym, Johnson Koran serves as a middleman to the French collector who bought up the lot I started this book with but also to his compatriots in kastom such as Gemgem, whose nalnal he sold a er it was worn by his grandson George to make it more authentic to the yachtie couple that had brought me back to Ambrym on their boat. In the extreme north of the island, Norbert Nabong and Chief Sekor do their dealings with different collectors in what locals call the Magam-Olal-Neuiha area. They are the prime contacts in North Ambrym for the purchase of rom masks. As I noted above, they sell the masks at fixed prices. Later, they pass on the money to the rightful owners of the masks, all men who are part of their performance group. As the rightful owners, these men are the commissioners of their individual mask. They pay for its production, for the right to entry in rom, and the right to wear the mask, use it, and eventually sell it, if they want to do that, through Norbert and Sekor. Fred Numa Longga, acting middleman for the occasion during the Malakula Festival on Uliveo, did not sell “the real.” Fred Numa sold copies only, those worn in silence by Herna on his body. Numa’s discourse, however, his interpretation for the yachties, was one of “real” and “true.” He kept quiet about the fact that what he was ge ing rid of, on behalf of the elder Bongtete, were considered to be copies by the locals. Collectors and curators are treated somewhat differently. They are less informed about the context and more about the market history of a specific piece. In the 1960s–1970s, expatriate middle-woman Tessa Fowler catered to the growing demands by museums for more art. By that time, all parties

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involved (the museums, Tessa herself, and local people) knew that what was desired were things that stood out in collections, exhibitions, and publications. Supply was fine-tuned to demand, even if there was a shortage of things, with the known results (e.g., the case of Vietnamese skulls in rambaramp effigies). Expatriate middlemen, it seems, can sometimes be more effective, manipulating the market and influencing supply and demand by use of their international networks and contacts. Tessa, in her days, dealt with dealers such as Staempfli in New York or museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. She was the first link in what Steiner referred to as “the long chain of distribution” (1994). Local middlemen and women today operate in a context of less demand. Their contacts do not reach as far as Basel or New York. They have occasional contacts with gallery owners and collectors, curators, and dealers in New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Australia. Being increasingly positioned between buyers and sellers, they combine their roles of middlemen and commissioners. In the old days, commissioning items was done by men in the graded and secret societies for own use. Today, middlemen and women assign work to carvers and painters in order to sell.

Collectors Collecting is generally seen as “a product of Western metropolitan identity formation, of a compulsion to classify, or as an aspect of material consumption” (O’Hanlon 2000: 1). The guise of the collectible is that it has to be surrounded by an illusion of discovery (Steiner 1994: 133). Part of the collector’s quest “is to discover what had previously gone unremarked” (ibid.). In tribal art circles, it is generally assumed that it is “the gi ed connoisseur,” and not the local African or Pacific Islander, “who first ‘sees’ the aesthetic quality of a piece and thereby ‘transforms’ a neglected artifact into an object of art” (ibid.). It is this aesthetic quality, informed by Western connoisseurship, that determines whether an object is considered worth collecting or not. As I have noted before, to collectors, an object has to look authentic and old enough, like a historical example. As I have also noted, once in the West, collectors and dealers can make up any story, making an object into an authentic piece of art in whatever way they want. They are suppliers of things, like their counterpart, the local middleman in the place of origin, but with accessibility to wider channels: auction halls and art fairs in cities where tribal art is familiar to specialists, transacted, and exhibited. Collectors who come in use tourist trails and facilities set out for entry into some of the remotest of locations. David Baker, the Australian collec-

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tor I mention throughout the chapters, bought on Ambrym and Malakula and also planned to buy in the Banks Islands in the near future. As I outlined in Chapter Three, Baker had organized the Ambrym exhibition at the gallery in Sydney and had arranged for the Back to My Roots group to perform a rom ceremony at the opening. By 2009, he was preparing a Malakula exhibition at the same gallery, for which he bought all big nambas grade-taking paraphernalia in Leviamp not long before. In Lamap in 2008, he collected the paraphernalia of Marcellin Abong’s nimangki for the taking of his gulgul grade. There, he paid a fixed price for all objects, set by the Cultural Centre, of 400,000 vatu (approximately 4,250 AUD or 3,500 euros). This is a considerably higher price than when local people set prices on their own. In 2005, in the Banks Islands, Baker a ended the Ureparapara Festival but had been thwarted by the cost and difficulty of transport from such a remote location. On Ra, I heard of only one other collector who had come in some years ago. He had convinced some men to sell their tamate masks. That collector came to Ngerigman, Mota Lava, in the middle of the night with a seaplane, collecting the masks in secrecy. That transaction is now seen as the by the community. It has resulted in discussions about the nature of kastom and disputes over ownership, and it has put a halt to the sale of artifacts in the area. Calling himself a promoter rather than a collector, David Baker’s main area of collecting was North Ambrym, and particularly the extreme north of the island, the Magam-Olal-Neuiha area, where his contacts were Norbert and Sekor. Sometimes, he also dealt with Freddie Bule of Fanla, a well-known carver and a descendant of Tain Mal and Tofor, whose work he had previously sold to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Baker also a ended the National Festival in Vila, where he bought four slit-drums from Tomman Island and some rom masks from Norbert for an upcoming rom ceremony in Brisbane. A day a er the National Festival, upon his return to Sydney, Baker unexpectedly died. The news of his death spread fast in Vanuatu and was soon a ributed to the fact that he had bought the four Tomman drums. People seemed to agree that the drums had simply been “too tambu to be bought.” Kastom can kill, it was said, if rules and taboos are not respected. The Tomman drums were of a kind that was not to be bought by anyone. They were considered by all to be real. Their meaning and value lay in the fact that they were drums from Tomman, an important place of kastom in the Malakulan sphere of influence and for the archipelago. Yet, I had witnessed the negotiation and the transaction at the festival and the eagerness with which the Tomman islanders wanted to sell their drums. Due to Baker’s death, the transaction of the colossal atingting at

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Halhal Fantor (Figure 3.9), negotiated for purchase between Chief Sekor and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra through Baker, was aborted. The drum remained on Halhal Fantor har, maybe for a next buyer or to stand there until it deteriorates. Due to Baker’s death, also, the Brisbane rom was canceled, as was the Malakula exhibition for which he had

Figure 4.9. The collector David Baker seated between the Tomman slit-drums that allegedly killed him, National Festival, Port Vila, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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bought in Leviamp and the Banks Islands exhibition that he was planning in the near future.

Conclusion: Selling Culture Authenticity frames all transactions. There is the authenticity of the site, of the performance, and of the object. More importantly, these authenticities are negotiated on different levels, by local people themselves as well as their visitors. Within these negotiations, it becomes clear that authenticity, in all its variants, is a construction. The authenticity of the site and of performance are inextricably linked with the payment of entry fees to enter and a end. In the same vein, objects are made authentic to achieve a be er price. An important nuance is when what is sold is considered truly authentic by local people, such as the four Tomman drums that were bought by the collector, resulting in his death. Most of the examples have shown that the engagement between the art world and local interpretations of the arts of Vanuatu overlap. Ni-Vanuatu evaluations of objects are increasingly fine-tuned with those of tourists, collectors, and curators. How these things have come to represent the arts of Vanuatu in the world is not just due to the la er’s active involvement but also due to reproduction, selection, and sale by local people. David Baker’s death, due to the fact that he collected what was conceived to be uncollectible, is an example of a rupture, one where kastom wins from commodity. The way consumers conceive of meaning and value relates to how producers conceive of it, but not always and certainly not always in the same way. Consumers and producers compete to impose their own particular tastes as legitimate (Swartz 1997: 164). From the local perspective, the authentication process is inevitably fraught with copyright, tu kaen kopiraet, and conflict because of social changes that have made it increasingly difficult to establish a code. Most tourists do not buy handicra s (anymore). Exceptions include cruise ship passengers and hotel and resort goers in and around Vila and on Efate, in Luganville and on Santo, and increasingly also on Tanna. The yachties, in particular, prefer to buy the larger, life-size items. They are joined by occasional independent travelers who reach remote island locations on their own and who arrange the transport of one or two larger items on their own and by art collectors such as museum and gallery curators who come in to buy larger lots. In local se ings, the quest for “the real” has resulted in disputes and discussions about the nature of kastom. By the time the disputes surface, the tourist, who bought one or two items, or the collector, who sometimes orders shipments and fills up con-

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tainers, are long gone. During cultural performances and festivals, buyers come together and compete at the same time and in the same place. This parallels competition in kastom itself. As the nagol example illustrated, the timing of ritual can be extended to fit visitors’ itineraries, and their places can be altered to provide easier accessibility. Local commissioners and middlemen arrange copyright of all things for sale. On Ambrym, people have areas designated as for them, to keep to, where they do the dealings with their contacts. When mistakes are made or when any other kind of problem surfaces, kastom can strike back and punish and even kill a wrongdoer. On Ambrym, Norbert and Chief Sekor perform the climatic parts of the mage again, those where the titles are bestowed upon them, in ritual sites that are otherwise off-limits to visitors. They sell the paraphernalia of their commoditized ritual performances. To them, kastom is not lost. Instead of focusing on loss, they search for ways to bring kastom back. In the next chapters, I will return to questions of meaning and value in the West and combine commodity and authenticity with copyright claims and claims for the repatriation of highly valued, long gone items of material culture by local ni-Vanuatu. In Chapter Five, I will discuss the kastom mistakes and disputes I introduced in this chapter and tie this up with realness and authenticity. Closing the chapter, I will provide a short ethnography of a tribal art market that I a ended in Paris in 2011. In Chapter Six, I will continue to discuss value and meaning in the West and elaborate on museum contexts of collecting and exhibiting art.

Notes  1. Le Méridien, Le Lagon, and Iririki Island Resort, the three largest resorts in the country (Sla er 2006: 11), are all in or close to Port Vila. The first five star hotel for Vanuatu, the Havannah, named a er Port Havannah on North Efate’s coast, opened its doors a couple of years ago. The Sebel Vanuatu, on Vila’s seawall, is the first high-rise building for Vanuatu and contains eight floors and seventy-four rooms (Vanuatu Independent, 8 April 2007). It opened its doors in 2007. In Vila Bay, a helicopter offers “scenic flights” over parts of the island, and water scooter, parasailing, surfing, snorkeling, and scuba diving options are widely available.  2. Problems that come with the cruise ship business include the illegal dumping of waste oil, for example by P&O at Etas Landfill on Efate in November 2006 (reported in the Vanuatu Independent, 14 October 2007).  3. The Roi Mata Domain, an archaeological addition to tourism options in Vanuatu, consists of three sites in Northwest Efate, centered in the village of Mangaliliu and nearby Lelepa and Artok or Retoka Islands. Retoka, also referred to as Hat Island, is the mass burial site for Roi Mata. It has long been

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disputed land that was leased by an Australian owner. To archaeologists (Garanger 1996; Spriggs 1996, 2006; Ballard 2004, 2007), Roi Mata was a chief who, as a Polynesian immigrant, arrived on Efate before the enormous volcanic eruption that destroyed the island of Kuwae in 1452 AD (the now dispersed Shepherd Islands). David Luders (2001) opposes this view, revisiting José Garanger’s oral tradition research and claiming that Roi Mata was not a Polynesian chief but in fact a chiefly refugee from Kuwae. The Roi Mata Cultural Tour, for now, keeps to the more generally accepted version, of Roi Mata as a paramount chief, the bringer of peace for the Central- and North-Central islands. The Daily Post reported on the land alienation case before the site became UNESCO protected (“Proposed Hat Island Hotel Under Fire,” Daily Post, 18 April 2004; “Hat Island: World Heritage and Tourism or Expatriate Speculation,” Daily Post, 27 March 2006). Willy Tasso, a Christian originally from West Ambrym, was an exquisite carver who carved items for sale from early onward, even though he did not have the kastom copyright to do so. The Fanla men, family members of those of Fona through Malur, Tain Mal’s daughter and mother of Johnson Koran, were outraged by his behavior for several reasons. Up to today, rumor has it that it was Luan, one of Tofor’s brothers, who killed Willy Tasso, by poison (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 4 December 2012; see also Pa erson 2002a). In Vanuatu, the troupe du Wetr is comparable to Futuna Fatuana. The two groups even performed together at the 2005 Festival Folklorico de los Pirineos in Jaca, Spain. (h p://www.jaca.com). Count de Tolna’s collection of Oceanic art is dispersed in museums throughout France: the Quai Branly, and museums in Lyon, Rouen, Cherbourg, and La Rochelle (in Boulay and Ferloni 2007). A er the rom at the National Festival, the yachties invited Sekor, Norbert, and me to their boat to return the mask and to have a glass of wine and some food together. Once there, Norbert asked me not to tell any of the men of the BTMR group about his acceptance of wine and food on the yacht. As he told me, he was meant to be in a tambu state, eating from the tambu fae a er his mage ne sagaran grade-taking at BTMR. Drinking wine and eating cheese was—and would be seen as—a breaching of his tambu state for his climb up the mage ladder. Incidents such as this illustrate the complex and mixed contexts of contemporary revived male grade-taking.

5  Commodities and Authenticity Authenticity in Art In traditional (tribal, ethnic) art history, the definition of an authentic work of art centered on the question: “Was it used in its traditional context?” (e.g., Olbrechts 1940). If it was, it was an authentic work of art. Accordingly, it had to look old, used, and sometimes, especially in the African art case, covered with the patina of ritual actions such as dried blood or saliva, seeds, nuts, and so on (cf. Appadurai 1996: “the patina of history”; for the used frame, see also Phillips and Steiner 1999). The response from Africa, and from the rest of the world, was that it was increasingly these kinds of things that were produced and offered for sale, looking old and used and bearing traces of the wear and tear of time, even if they were newly made. Once in the West, the connoisseur became more and more unable to distinguish between that which he considered truly authentic from the nonauthentic. Over time, the la er came to stand for a myriad of things, ranging from fakes and forgeries, or copies, to the commercial, later stereotyped as airport or tourist arts. Only the last category was more easily recognizable. However, this gap was closed as well, certainly in Vanuatu, where newly made things not only look exactly like their historical forebears but are also increasingly sold to tourists. Copies, or doubles, moreover, are what would be termed fakes or forgeries by connoisseurs, if they knew what they were handling. But what exactly is a fake or a forgery in a contemporary se ing or a traditional context? Are Malakulan rambaramp effigies containing Vietnamese skulls really so fake? Are they not merely a sign and signal of creativity, produced not by a Tristes Tropiques-kind of

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“primitive” (Lévy-Strauss 1984 [1967]), but by “ex-primitives” (MacCannell 1992), Big Men as entrepreneurs (Sillitoe 2000), or what John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff have more recently termed “ethnopreneurs” (2009). Shelly Errington, in The Death of Authentic Primitive Art (1998), has shown that the stress of what she called APA (Authentic Primitive Art) has long been on the “authentic” component of “primitive art,” especially a er “the primitive” himself had vanished from the scene. Dealers, collectors, and museum curators refused to see anything that was labeled tourist art or, on another level, a fake or a forgery, as equally genuine, real, and authentic. These were degenerate forms, acculturations. Following such narrow definitions, there soon was a shortage of “real” things, which, in turn, infused the market with more fakes and forgeries and, willingly or not, stimulated the production of things like rambaramp effigies containing Vietnamese skulls. Errington saw the emergence of what she called “high ethnic art” as a last way out of the authenticity paradigm. Moving away from “high primitive art,” this was a way out of problems of the inauthentic (1998: 138–41). Ethnic artists, she wrote, work with new media such as paint and canvas (ibid.: 139). Well-known examples are the Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings (Myers 1991) and Highland Papua New Guinea war shields made from pickup truck carcasses and other unconventional materials and bearing new motifs such as beer logos or flames referring to warrior’s “hot bellies” (O’Hanlon 1995). For Vanuatu, the contemporary artist association of Nawita is the best-known example, its members using wood and paint but also tapestry and clay in order to come to new forms of expression and representation (Geismar 2003b: 4). In relation to my work, the move back to APA is more important than the move away from it. As I have shown, in contemporary Vanuatu this is accomplished by remaking what I called the “protagonists and masterpieces” of collection history in a context of cultural revitalization and tourism. Because of the shortage of what is generally seen by both producers and consumers as authentic art, the supply that was added was not so much that of the “high ethnic” but instead of “the copy,” in tribal art milieus o en stereotyped as “the fake.” These are items that are intended for the market, their main purpose being to be sold for the most advantageous return. As I have noted, by the time the item is in the gallery or the museum, the connoisseur is unable to tell the difference between what to him is the true objet d’art and the copy or the fake. That local people as well as all kinds of possible buyers in the West consider the same things to be authentic is precisely because the la er shaped the definition of an authentic work of art as one that was used or, on a less demanding level, one that looks old. This was the message that radiated back into the islands

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of Vanuatu and that fine-tuned supply and demand for a long time while applying the use definition to all that was for sale.

Creativity in Art In 1937, Tom Harrisson wrote, “Creative art” was “very rare” in the New Hebrides and “tradition” dominated this part of life “as it dominates all parts” (1954 [1937]: 275). Referring to clubs of the nalnal or, on Ambrym, the womrral type, he added, “In any tribe the war-clubs . . . are of only two or three types. One of the commonest has four knobs at the end, always and only four knobs; not three knobs or five knobs. No man would consider the making of other than four” (ibid.). In his work on creativity in art, Daniel Biebuyck wrote that doubts could be raised as to “whether or not it is possible to speak about creative originality and conscious innovation” in regard to communities that “focus heavily on corporate solidarity and collective action” (1969: 7). In these views, the “tribal art” of which they spoke was monotone and volume, a sign and symbol of sociopolitical and religious cohesion in and between communities. In traditional art history, the only one who was creative was the rare artistic genius. Seen as one who resisted the forces of conservativeness, the “tribal artist” was a challenging study topic.1 Howard Morphy (1991) and Susanne Küchler (1999, 2002) used the term “templates” to refer to conservative aspects of tribalness, saying that formal properties of artworks are fixed by a technical code that is learned as an aspect of esoteric knowledge that implies a process of mechanical reproduction (Wassmann 1994: 655). Thus, if we are to follow the older art historical literature, creativity is a thing of restriction. Innovation in art is most o en discarded by the international tribal art scene as nontraditional, not good, not worth much money. Adjusting to Western tastes and desires, objects were and are made to look authentic, like old masterpieces. In local views, if a new design enters, this is o en explained as something that came to the artist in a dream (e.g., Glaskin 2005; Geismar 2005c for Vanuatu). Again, this denies the artist a claim to creativity. In the Banks Islands in North Vanuatu, creative tamate masks are now sometimes embellished with new decorations such as a papier maché airplane or a helicopter (Hess 2009: 178; Simeoni 2009), much to the dislike of leading kastom men in the area, on the grounds that these are designs that are not kastom and not part of culture. In North Ambrym, Lafu of Nehatling, who died during my fieldwork in 2010, was an exquisite carver and a specialist flute carver; his flutes often had intricate and new designs, which he called tingting blong mi nomo,

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or “just my ideas.” (see Figure 5.1, below). He was a remarkable figure who, as a member of Holiness Fellowship, was forbidden by his Church to carve the “idols” and “fetishes” of “heathenism” but who, in his own way, found new ways to continue carving. During all of my fieldwork in Vanuatu, he was the only artist who claimed copyright to his new designs as his own, producing objects that were not restricted by kastom kopiraet. Lafu’s flutes were particularly successful among yachties and collectors, most of whom knew him as “the flute carver of Ranon” (the village of Ranon being where he offered his flutes for sale on days when yachts were anchored there). Lafu’s work illustrates that innovative work, exceptionally, can also be successful among buyers.

Imagining the Native Following the connoisseur’s view, only an “authentic primitive” can make an “authentic work of art.” As such, authenticity has as much to do with how “we” see “them” as with genuine, “real” culture, “as it really is.” In the history of representation, for a long time, we have been presented with

Figure 5.1. North Ambrym incised bamboo flutes showing new designs, made by Lafu of Nehatling, North Ambrym, 2009 (photograph by the author).

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images of “how it really is,” the images themselves being signs of different agents and agendas. Missionaries were prone to banish “heathenism” and its “idols.” Other imaginaries were more exotic, of the Pacific as a tableau of a “tribal utopia,” an unspoiled paradise. Roger Boulay, in Kannibals et Vahinés (2001), unravels part of this dichotomy. The kannibal in his title refers to the renowned Melanesian cannibal of the past, always male, while the vahiné refers to the Pacific belle, a Polynesian, ukulele-playing, bare-breasted maiden: the opposition between the Melanesian male, dark and man devouring, and the Polynesian female, fair skinned and voluptuous. Two of Boulay’s images show the Malakulan cannibal as portrayed in Europe in the 1910s–1920s. One is from the series Voyages Lointains, Aventures Etranges. It is titled “Le Diable de Mallicolo” (The Devil of Malakula) and shows a woman tied to an Ambrymese-style drum, reddish, with a smiling “face” and the addition of devil’s horns. Two masked men guard her. Around the woman’s feet are skulls of, we may assume, other victims. The other image is from the Journal des Voyages and is titled “Un Jour de Sabbat à Malicollo” (Sabbath Day on Malakula). This image shows two masked dancers and, again, skulls on the ground. The dancer in the back is portrayed wrongly wearing a tatanua mask of the Malagan ritual complex of New Ireland (Images from Boulay 2001: 78, 117). This kind of primitivist encounter was also evoked in film. In 1922, Martin and Osa Johnson released their movie Headhunters of the South Seas, and in 1931 Titayna and Lugeon released Chez les Mangeurs d’Hommes. Both films were shot on Malakula and intended to show a cannibalistic scene. In the 1970s, David A enborough shot part of an episode of his documentary series The Tribal Eye on Malakula (“Man Blong Custom”) featuring a nasara, a nakamal, a performance of nevinbur puppets, and, as the highlight of the documentary, several rambaramp effigies lined up in a dark men’s house, everything as if nothing had ever changed. Land Divers of Melanesia, which I mentioned in my discussion of the nagol in Chapter Four, was shot by Kal Muller in South Pentecost in 1972 and also exoticized “the native,” filming him from a distance, with a voice-over explaining the scenes. In L’île Noire, released in 1998 by B. Segur, the subject for the first time had a voice. The documentary, shot in North Ambrym, tells a rather naïve story of Johnson, my Fona host, who goes out fishing in his outrigger canoe. Unable to catch a fish, he decides to go up to Fanla and ask Tofor for advice. On our way to Fanla, we witness the felling of a tree for carving by a group of men and, a bit further, an older man carving an atingting. In Fanla, Johnson asks Tofor about his inability to catch a fish, in response to which Tofor blames him for not fishing in the kastom way but with modern fishhooks. This, Tofor says to the camera, is the reason for his lack of

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Figure 5.2. “Un Jour de Sabbat à Malicollo,” in A. Reuze, “Un Jour de Sabbat à Malicollo” (Journal des Voyages, July 1913; reproduced in Boulay 2001: 78).

success. The consultation over, Johnson retreats to the volcanoes to make offerings to the spirits. The film ends with a successful fishing trip. By telling us all this, we are witness to the highlights of Ambrym: the kastom

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Figure 5.3. Tain Mal and Tofor looking at a photograph of Tofor taken by Kal Muller, Fanla, 1960s (photograph by Kal Muller, reproduced with kind permission).

village of Fanla, the making of the well-known atingting, and the mighty volcanoes that form the island. For Vanuatu, it is only recently, alongside the development of tourism, that a paradise discourse parallel to that for Polynesia has developed. “Vanuatu, the unspoilt paradise” is now a popular slogan in all sorts of tourism-related promotional materials and daily speech. Popular literature such as the photographic booklet Vanuatu (Bonnemaison 1980, photographs by Bernard Hermann) show, among other things, images of Chief Virembat’s daughter, also known as “the Mona Lisa of the New Hebrides,” beautiful, bare breasted, and wearing the red fibrous wig characteristic of big nambas women (p. 75), and a Pentecost man wearing the nambas and a hibiscus flower in his hair, carrying a club over his shoulder, loosely, in dandyesque fashion, and posing for the camera (p. 44). It also contains a photograph of Bong of Bunlap and Virembat, talking about kastom matters in Amok, Northwest Malakula, in the 1970s. Lamont Lindstrom, in “A Body of Postcards from Vanuatu” (2007a), provides an overview of this kind of native imagery for Vanuatu, from Nagapate, the big nambas chief immortalized by Martin Johnson and Osa Johnson in their photograph of 1917, to the particularly (homo)eroticized body of the Pentecost dandy. MacCannell also refers to (homo)eroticism as one of the prime characteristics for male native imagery in Melanesia, next to cannibalism and violence (1992: 35).

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Romanticized images are also widespread on the internet. One example is a 2007 photograph of Worwor of Fanla on Flickr (see Figure 5.4, below). Comments posted in response to this photograph included “beautiful light!!! It’s a very misterious [sic] portrait!!! Is he a warrior?” (by perfectdayjosep) and “this is THE male” (by Stefano Kerberos).

Figure 5.4. Worwor of Fanla, North Ambrym, photograph posted on Flickr in 2007 (copyright by Eric Lafforgue, reproduced with kind permission).

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“Imagining the native” works on one more level, when it is enacted by that “native” himself, what both Nick Stanley (2007) and Charles Lindholm (2008) call “autoexoticism” (a er J. Leerssen), or the exoticization of one’s self. Worwor of Fanla, for example, was not just exoticized by the photographer, he also exoticized himself, by posing for the camera the way he did. Autoexoticism also strongly relates to performance and ritual. In relation to the Chambri of Papua New Guinea, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington noted that the Chambri, “if they continued to sell their initiations (and perhaps other ceremonies) as tourist a ractions, they would themselves no longer find them convincing and effective” (1989b). Stanley, drawing on Gewertz and Errington, put it, “Once a gap has been created between lived experience and the account of such experience a sense of unreality creeps in” (2007: 12). “The account, the performance, comes to become u erly self-conscious and exotic,” and it gradually congeals into “a meaningless muddle” (ibid.). “The very self that is displayed becomes an alien presence, never to be fully captured. This, in turn, leads to the second process, the loss of belief” (Stanley 2007: 12). For Vanuatu, Tilley’s account of performances for cruise ship tourists on Wala is comparable. He describes them as “an empty vessel of tradition, form without sentiment” (1997: 81). Dancers sell their bodies, he writes, in some sort of parody, a theater (ibid.: 81–82). “By constructing a bricolage of different elements from different sources,” however, they are also “true followers of ‘ancestral ways’” (ibid.: 84). Selling culture to tourists rather than to neighboring Atchin islanders “is merely an adaptation to the exigencies produced by global modernity” (ibid.), in which former natives take charge.

Commodities and Authenticity The uneasy relationship between money and art is rooted in nineteenth-century Europe, when industrial revolutions separated art and the artist from the public, from society, with the artist retreating to his ivory tower. The myth of the artist as a noncommercial or even anticommercial agent was born. Because of a decline in art patronage, a new system of art production was governed by critics and dealers (Zolberg 1990: 53). Artists were marginalized and at the same time idealized, and they idealized themselves, as “true artists,” as a “suffering but persisting creator” (Wolff 1981: 11–12). What they created was art for art’s sake. They were misunderstood, and they were poor. Such an image of artistic authenticity denied and denies “the fact that most artists employ conscious economic strategies to ensure their survival

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as art-producing professionals” and “their active involvement in commoditization processes” (Svasek 2007: 89–90). In relation to “the primitive” and “the native,” this strengthened the nostalgic desire for the unspoiled, the nonindustrial era, and the artistry that only a “true primitive” was capable of. As I have noted, following the connoisseur’s view, only an “authentic primitive” could and still can make (and sell?) an “authentic work of art.” As I have also noted, natives, as outsiders saw them, had vanished from the scene by the 1960s–1970s but, more importantly, have been returning since the cultural revival of the 1970s–1980s. Now they are back, center stage on their nasaras, willing to perform themselves and their bodies for us, “adopting the Western pursuit of alterity,” “becoming ‘other’ to their own selves” (Jolly 1992b: 53). The context of commoditized objects is that of commoditized performances and festivals. However, if the true primitive is the only one who can create a work of art, then can he really also sell it? As Kopytoff pointed out, in the West “we usually take salability to be the unmistakable indicator of commodity status.” It is nonsalability that “imparts to a thing a special aura of apartness from the mundane and the common” (1986: 69). Accordingly, it must be in the “authentic commodity” that the “special aura of apartness from the mundane” is established (Spooner 1986). In such contexts, the ideal commodity is not sold. It can be contemplated in situ, for example on Ambrym or Malakula. It can also be contemplated in the museum. In the la er case, we do not want to be reminded that the authentic work of art we are looking at was once bought, traded, or simply stolen. As I have shown, in the former case it can be sold in a context that is made authentic. When the context is made authentic, the object can be danced or, in the case of copies, walked. The transaction can also be made authentic when the seller wears the nambas and closes the deal on the nasara. This is the closest a buyer can get to what to him or her is an authentic work of art, one that is almost impossible to buy. Negotiations for such artifacts are awkward, however, the buyer buying an item that is used in its traditional context and, contradictorily, that is offered for sale a erward. Objects are sold in back regions in the back of the nasara or in closed-off sheds in villages and o en wrapped in black plastic bags so no one can see them. These kinds of sales infuse disputes over ownership and the nature of kastom. In Vanuatu specifically, the incompatibility between money and art is translated into an incompatibility between Vatu and kastom, or the Vatu kastom of which I spoke before. The dominant view is that things that mark culture and identity should not be for sale. Vatu kastom is seen as a bad practice by all, even by those who operate at its core. For example, Norbert Nabong, the organizer of Back to My Roots, who sells rom masks to yachties and collectors a er their performance, told me in Vila in 2009

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that he too thinks that “carving is a bad practice.” He was not referring to his own Back to My Roots men, but to those of Fanla and other competing villages, and to the SDA youths that carve for money only. One of the main problems, Norbert said, is that “too many people now carve without having the right,” or that “they carve more than they have the right to.” In the case of performance, this translates into circumstances in which men now perform dances that formerly required a graded status, without actually having that status. This brings along heightened tensions in relation to copyright, transforming at an accelerating pace and stretching the meanings of it along the way.

Kastom Mistakes What local people refer to as “straight” (stret) kastom is sometimes also called “full” kastom or “whole” or “complete” kastom (cf. Bolton 2003c: 7). The kind of correct way of handling that is stret kastom and, within it, kastom mistakes and disputes, are what mostly preoccupies people. Mistakes can be a range of things. Smaller mistakes include wrong use of paraphernalia. An example is when the BTMR group used a wrong kind of hibiscus flower as body decoration for their performance in Vila because they did not find the right kind of flower there. More severe mistakes include the killing of the wrong pig (e.g., the killing of a sow in male ritual), showing tambu things to tourists, or ignoring a period of mourning when a Big Man dies. For example, when Gilbert Bangror died in Bogor in November 2009, only five days of mourning were observed. So, the dancers, many of whom were family members of Gilbert Bangror, stayed behind on Ambrym instead of travelling to Vila to perform at the National Festival. That is why Norbert had a shortage of dancers at the National Festival in Vila; too many dancers had stayed behind on Ambrym to mourn instead of traveling to Vila to perform at the National Festival. However, five days was too short. Also, no drums were beaten a er his death, as should have been done. More severe is the case of Pierre Celestin, who died a er unrightfully dancing in nambas and pig tusks in Sydney in 2008 and that of David Baker, who died a er buying four Tomman slit-drums at the National Festival in Vila: drums, it was decided a er his death, that had been “too tambu to be bought.” In 1991, a North Ambrym man died because he climbed a mage platform without having that right during the Second National Festival in Luganville.2 When not executed correctly, or when strict rules are not obeyed, the intrinsic power of kastom prevails. When kastom is not respected, it kills, as everyone knows it did before.

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Concerns about right or wrong execution of kastom are very strong in Lamap, where Herna Abong told me about markers to see whether men are in kastom for the right reasons and not for reasons of Vatu only. Herna knows whether those he recruits or who ask to join his group are in kastom for the wrong reasons when they make mistakes, for example in their dancing. This has to do with the power of kastom, he said. When an incoming member executes a dance move wrongly or wears a mask wrongly or, worst case scenario, when he drops a mask while dancing, he is probably in kastom for the wrong reasons and he is kept a closer eye on. As Herna said, once a man is inside his dance group, he will be told about the secrets, restrictions, and taboos that go with dancing, those of the former male-graded and secret societies. According to Herna, he is inside the dance troupe much like men in the past were inside the nimangki. He receives the knowledge of masks and other a ributes in subsequent steps. He is allowed on the nasara, and thus could easily take away stones, masks, tree fern figures, or any other kind of item and sell them to incoming yachties and other collectors. At Labreav Pnoab nasara in Lamap, such an individual could now take away the recently made rambaramp of Donatien Tasso and make money with it. Controlling his boys and men and seeing to it that they do not make mistakes in their dancing are the only parameters Herna Abong has to know if they are reliable and trustworthy and respect kastom enough to be part of his dance group.

Kastom Disputes When no kastom mistakes are made, the kastom is “straight” (stret in Bislama). Stret kastom, a much-heard phrase, is opposed to kiaman or “false” kastom. As I have shown in Chapter One, kastom only started gaining meaning and importance in the run toward independence in the late 1970s.3 Stret kastom and, its opposite, Vatu kastom, followed in its tracks. Both Kirk Huffman, former director of the Cultural Centre and Museum, and linguist Darrell Tryon, formerly running the filwoka workshops, strongly opposed perspectives that suggested that the kastom with which the Cultural Centre dealt could be a source of dispute. “Although at one level Huffman always held that disputes and jealousies are themselves part of kastom, he took care that the VCC was not drawn into disputes about kastom, especially in connection to land ownership” (Bolton 2003c: 74). Huffman “always made explicit use of jealousy in promoting kastom. He used news of programs (such as regional festivals) in one area to stimulate groups in other areas to similar achievements” (ibid.: 50). In 1992, when long-serving filwoka Jacob Sam Kapere taught Jean Tarisesei

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aspects of VCC work to prepare her for future female filwoka workshops, “he warned her to be alert in recognizing when she was being asked to record ‘family business’ as kastom and not to record information about land” (ibid.: 74). Kastom disputes can range from issues over land and kopiraet, both of which center on ownership, to the nature of kastom itself: whether one is involved in stret kastom as opposed to Vatu or kiaman kastom. Different views are generated by different people concerning the revived kind of kastom. People never openly accuse each other of participating in Vatu kastom, but many agree that those who participate in revived kastom do it for the money. On the other hand, people who do not make money through culture are o en jealous of those who do. On Ambrym, Gemgem said of the BTMR group that “they just jump around, they do not know anyting” (oli jump olbaot nomo, oli no save nating). To him, kastom is lost (kastom i lus) and cannot be brought back. Therefore, he said, people should not try to bring it back, and certainly not for reasons of money. Before, Gemgem said, a man had to earn a grade, and even though the graded society system was competitive, there was a certain level of selection. Young boys and men had to show Big Man qualities from childhood onward. Now, there are no Big Men le to pay grades to, at least not in a rightful manner. At BTMR, Gemgem wondered why Norbert was offering a pig to Sekor to acquire the sagaran grade. What was the point? As he pointed out to me, there are no legitimate sagaran le . Disagreements are rampant precisely because the last legitimate Big Men, such as Tain Mal and Tofor of Fanla or Tuli of Melvar, died without transferring their knowledge and grades onto successors. Norbert and Sekor now offer pigs to each other on commoditized festival grounds in the climactic parts of the performed rituals. They do not always pay the right amount of pigs. The offering of the pig serves as an example to show to the tourists how payments were done in the past. Norbert and Sekor claim that their grades and grade-takings are real, while many others disagree. For North Ambrym, an earlier grade-taking that was of the same order was that by Magekon and Bongmeleun, two sons of Tain Mal and half-brothers of Tofor, who communally took a hiwir grade in Fanla in 1982. As Gemgem told me, they too did not pay the proper price for their grade, the proper amount of pigs to the rightful grade holders before them. Moreover, Magekon and Bongmeleun now claim to be meleun instead of hiwir, which is higher up the mage ladder. According to Gemgem, the confusion is that there used to be two kinds of meleun, low meleun and high meleun, or hiwir meleun (cf. Pa erson 1981, who provides a detailed account of all mage grades). He added that Magekon and Bongmeleun did not even pay the right price for their hiwir grades (meleun was much more

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expensive). To most North Ambrymese, the last legitimate hiwir of North Ambrym was Gilbert Bangror, who died in Bogor in 2009. As Gemgem said, Gilbert had paid the proper price for his mage ne hiwir in the late 1970s, “at a time when hardly anybody was doing mage anymore.” Gilbert, it is now said, had respected the taboos and restrictions that came with the grade. He had put a lot of time and effort into the accumulation of wealth, all of which he distributed at the ceremony. Only a few years earlier, Tofor bought his father Tain Mal’s mal title and set a precedent by buying it with only one tusked boar (Pa erson 2002a: 130).4 From the contestations about the nature of revived kastom and grades and grade-takings emanates another one, that of the shame of dancing malmal or “naked” during performances for audiences. I briefly noted the aspect of shame in Chapter One, in my treatment of Christianity and rispek. Malmal or “nakedness,” sometimes also translated as kastom dress, is a common problem among Christians performing for audiences. It is in the context of Christianity that nakedness is traditionally seen as a bad thing, a sin. Kastom dress, however, is not just nakedness. In the case of men, it is the a ire of nambas, with anklets, leaf and flower decorations, and other sings of rank such as pig tusk bracelets. As I illustrated in Chapter Three, Lamap, the avowed holder of strong, stret kastom in Malakula and, by extension, Vanuatu, fined Uliveo, its host at the Malakula Festival, a pig, officially for not performing at the festival. In reality, the fine was because they had not paid for the right to wear the nambas again, wearing it without having that right in dances that they offer to tourists. When a Christian dances in nambas, this can be a laughing ma er. In contrast, when a kastom man dances in nambas, this is certainly not a laughing ma er and those who laugh at such a performance can be fined. Local people, who know who is who, know this. If the Uliveo men had danced at the festival on Uliveo, locals would have been allowed to laugh at these men, who would have been perceived as merely naked men. This problem became even more significant at the National Festival in Vila, where different groups came together and where audiences were mixed. Norbert particularly complained about the shame of the Ambrym youths that he had recruited in Vila because of his shortage of dancers due to Gilbert Bangror’s death. As with men, women are shy and afraid (fraet) of dancing malmal. As with men, also, this relates to being Christian as well as being afraid of being laughed at. In the case of women, this mostly translates into the shame of exposing their breasts. At the National Festival, the women of the BTMR group were among the few who danced bare breasted, when they accompanied the rom dancers onto the festival ground (see Figure 3.18, Chapter Three). Those of most other groups, even those from Ambae

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and Maewo, in which women were well represented, wore a length of fabric or used leaves or woven garments to cover their breasts. This is not due just to Christian shame but also to the fact that women performing kastom for audiences is a relatively new thing in Vanuatu. Among the few who continued to perform bare breasted in grass skirts are the big nambas women of Northwest Malakula and those accompanying the nagol in Southeast Pentecost. For North Ambrym, Pa erson has illustrated that, while men were busy presenting their “kastom as spectacle,” even including Christians on occasion, “women had always been excluded” (2001: 48). Referring to filmmaker Kal Muller, she added, “Rigorously screened out of stills and films, and not even invited to perform on the margins at festivals, women, who had neither made nor worn grass skirts since well before World War II, were simply not exotic enough in their Mother Hubbard dresses.” (ibid.: 48–49).5 Now, the Back to My Roots women are pioneers, reintroducing bare breasts as strong female kastom.

The Lengnangulong Sacred Stone6 Mistakes and disputes do not just center on right or wrong contexts but also on objects themselves. The history of the “authentic commodity” in object form is best illustrated by the example of the lengnangulong sacred stone from Magam village, North Ambrym, exhibited since 2000 at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre in the permanent exhibition “150 Chefs d’Oeuvres du Musée du Quai Branly” (formerly part of the collections of the former Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie). The stone is generally considered a masterpiece. According to its collector, the French anthropologist Jean Guiart, it is “one of few masterpieces” for Vanuatu (2005). Now invaluable, it was collected by Guiart in 1949. The original owners in Magam have been asking for its repatriation for several years. Thought to be restless in the museum in Paris, it is said on Ambrym, the stone wanders around in the exhibition hall at night, trying to escape and come back home to Vanuatu. Guiart mentions the stone and has a photograph of it in his extensive 1951 article on North Ambrym, published in the Journal de la Société des Océanistes (pl. VI.12). Its label at the Pavillon des Sessions reads: “Sculpture, XVIIIe–début du XIXe siècle, Nord de l’île d’Ambrym, Vanuatu; Pierre a magie pour l’acquisition des cochons, tuf volcanique, collectée par Jean Guiart 1950.” The National Museum in Port Vila has a reproduction of the stone on exhibit, labeled “Stone, North Ambrym, Chief Zaki Farbu; Village: Magam, North Ambrym.” Guiart’s caption, in his 1951 article, reads, “Pierre sculptée müyü ne bü, du village

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de Ralitor, No. 49-5-80. Hauteur: 35 cm., épaisseur maximum: 7 cm. 5, largeur maximum: 16 cm.”7 While müyü ne bü can be translated as sign or symbol (müyü) of (ne) (a) pig (bü) and refers to stones for performing pig magic, this stone’s particular name is lengnangulong, a er the mythological pig-devouring creature that is associated with it, giving pig wealth to the owner. Its entry in the Pavillon des Sessions catalogue reads: This sculpture was collected in 1949 in the north of Ambrym Island in the Vanuatu archipelago. Its owner believed it had caused the illness of his eldest son and he wanted to get rid of it. Magic stones, known as müyü ne bu, are still used in Vanuatu, but they are not displayed. Their function was to influence the weather and ensure the fertility and prosperity of both men and animals. They were also expected to help the owner acquire castrated boars with tusks, on the best possible terms. Boars whose upper canines had been extracted to encourage the development of the tusks on the lower jaw were particularly prized as commercial and spiritual currency. The people in Ambrym also believed that the müyü ne bu represented the materialisation of the spirit of Lengnangoulong, known for its magic powers and appetite for tusked boars. When Lengnangoulong was killed, the stone was handed down from generation to generation, bringing its possessors wealth in the form of pigs and the highest grade in the social hierarchy. This sculpture is admirable for its curves and counter-curves. The distortion produced by the slightly hollowed forehead and the nostrils elongated as if to suggest the boar’s tusks gives this piece a totally original dimension, a daring design with no equivalent in Melanesia. (Huffman 2000a: 48)

The label of the copy stone at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre reads, “This is a very powerful stone which brings prosperity and good fortune to its owner. This particular stone appeared on the face of pre-Independence French franc coins. This is a copy of the original stone which is in Le Musée de l’Homme, Paris.” I was in Magam on several occasions throughout 2009. During one visit, a young man approached me, holding a photocopy of a photograph of the stone. His name was David Jacky Tubuwiwi, he said, and he was a member of the “straight family line” that is the kastom owner of the stone, starting with the first Tubuwiwi of the Farbu har, some nine generations ago. As David told me, the stone contains the spirit of lengnangulong, the boar-devouring creature that originally came from South Pentecost. A er lengnangulong was killed, it was the Farbu men who found the stone. Since then (until 1949), it brought them prosperity in the form of multitudes of tusked boars and highly graded men over generations. A first request for repatriation dates from 1997. Further correspondence between the parties involved are dated 2001, 2004, and 2005 and are ongoing. In 2001, specifically, Jacky Tubuwiwi, David’s father, and Ralph Regenvanu, then VKS director, appealed for the return of the stone in a

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le er to Christian Coiffier, Oceania curator at the then Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In the le er, Jacky explains how he, as its kastom owner, had a chance to see the stone in 1996 in the National Museum in Vila, before it traveled back to Europe in the exhibition Spirit blong Bubu i Kam Bak (The Spirits of the Ancestors Return). In the 2004 le er to Bernard Sexe, then ambassador to France in Vanuatu, Marcellin Abong again appealed for repatriation: I am writing this le er to request the repatriation of the sacred stone of Ambrym Island called lengnangulong, currently exhibited at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre in Paris; in the exhibition “Sculptures, Afrique, Asie, Océanie, Amériques.” This is a magic and sacred stone used for the acquisition of castrated boars (müyü ne bü) that is known in Vanuatu as the lengnangulong. (Abong 2004, my translation)8

In the le er, he added the list of people who had until then been involved in the process: Stéphane Martin (president of the museum, now Quai Branly), Joël Bonnemaison, Philippe Peltier, Christian Coiffier, JeanHubert Martin, and Jean-Christophe Gallipaud. “The late Joël Bonnemaison,” Abong wrote, “had intended to provide significant assistance in this process, but his tragic death in 1997 put a temporary halt to the plans for repatriation. Now we wish to resume this process with this official request” (Abong 2004, my translation from French). The same le er also mentions the core of the problem, namely that Guiart bought the stone, in 1949, from people who were not its kastom owners (those from Ralitor, not Farbu). In 2005, Guiart himself replied to the request for repatriation, in an article in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper (13 November 2005). In it, he calls Jacky Farbu Tubuwiwi “a self-styled chief,” making “quite a wrong claim.” In three points, Guiart defends his position and the stone’s presence in France. First, he writes, Magam is a Presbyterian village. Second, denying Jacky’s claim, “The only residual rights remain with the line I bought the stone from.” Third, the stone “has a great commercial value today” and, at present, is “in full security” at the Pavillon des Sessions (Guiart 2005). People on Ambrym are now convinced that Guiart stole the stone. To them, it does not ma er that he admi ed to paying a small amount of money to acquire it back in 1949. In kastom, they say, paying for an object to someone who does not have the right to sell equals stealing. In more informal correspondence between Ralph Regenvanu and Philippe Peltier at Quai Branly, the former acknowledged that the VKS considers Jacky Farbu Tubuwiwi (also Tubuvi) to be the legitimate owner of the stone and, being aware of the enormous monetary value the stone now has, that Jacky “has commi ed to having the stone stored and displayed at the National Museum in Port Vila” if it was to be repatriated,

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“and not to come back to Ambrym” (email of Ralph Regenvanu, 15 December 2005). If the stone was to return to Vanuatu, Ralph added, the museum would invest in “24-hour surveillance” (email, 14 December 2005). Other options suggested by Ralph, writing on behalf of Jacky Tubuvi,

Figure 5.5. The lengnangulong sacred stone, exhibited at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre, Paris (photograph by the author).

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were that “you/France could pay ‘rent’” for displaying the stone, “which would include outstanding rent since the 1960s,” or that the museum could make a one-time payment of compensation to the family for having the stone (email, 15 December 2005). Peltier, in turn, replied that repatriation is not an easy task, writing, “Discussions start on our side between institutions involved. As you know, the museum is not entitled to make such a decision. The stone belongs to a state organization and to the public collections and, as such, is by law ‘inalienable’” (email by Philippe Peltier, 12 December 2005). In her powerful critique of the Quai Branly Museum, Sally Price has elaborated on this, saying that especially in France museums are “solidly under the thumb of the State” (2007b: 23). Collections are state goods: “not a single piece can be purchased, sold, exchanged, or even accepted as a ‘gi ’ without the approval of the Direction des Musées de France [French Museums Board], which is part of the Ministry of Culture” (ibid.: 23–24). Like Peltier, Price repeated that museum collections in France are in fact “inalienable goods” (ibid.: 24). As most North Ambrymese would agree, the beauty and aesthetics of the lengnangulong stone is unrivaled in Ambrym art. Because of its current monetary value, it has raised awareness locally of cultural property, of what it means to own something, especially in the case of skillfully carved sacred stones. For example, when I visited Fansar, I was shown a carved stone in the village garden plot of a Presbyterian minister, a son of Saksak Batokon. Not long before, the minister had taken it out of the bush just outside Fansar, a place believed to contain the former har of the longdeserted village of Bangim. As he said, he was afraid that people would steal it and then sell it to the occasional collector. To the minister, this was an old stone, and he wanted to safeguard it for the future. He first kept the stone in his house but, having two young children, he said, this was too dangerous. He had noticed on several occasions that the stone moved around in his house at night, just like the lengnangulong is thought to do in Paris. It could do harm. That is why he hid it outside, in his garden, the carved face turned upside down facing the earth, for nobody to see. On other occasions, I saw crudely carved replicas of the lengnangulong sacred stone, for example when I visited Nehatling on a buying tour with some yachties and later at the Hebrida Market in downtown Vila.

Trrou Korrou Generally referred to as “the blue man” from Malo, the trrou körrou or turu kuru wooden statue shares its exhibition space at the Pavillon des Sessions

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with the lengnangulong and three Banks Islands tree fern sculptures. Like lengnangulong, the trrou körrou is a ributed to one existing family line and, recently, one man, Worahese of the village of A aripoy on Malo (Coiffier and Huffman 2011). Worahese, who is a descendant of the last known kastom owner of the statue, has not (yet) asked for the repatriation of the statue. “The blue man” was collected during the Korrigane Expedition, in 1934–1935 in Port Vila. The Korrigane Expedition was something in between a cruising yacht trip undertaken by some friends and adventurers and a collecting expedition for the then Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, collecting some 2,800 objects in the South Pacific Ocean. By 1935, when the Korrigane returned to France, carrying its treasures, the Trocadéro Museum had closed its doors and was transformed into the Musée de l’Homme. Korrigane collection pieces still regularly pop up on the market, for example in 2010 when a Sepik River twin figure formerly part of this collection was offered for sale by the auction house Christies, its price set between 80,000 and 120,000 euros (Christies online catalogue). The trrou körrou, as one of the top pieces of the Korrigane collection, is now invaluable. Its name on Malo now is atur kuru or “celui qui n’est plus à sa place” (“the one who is no longer in his place,” a er J. C. Galipaud, in Coiffier and Huffman 2011: 369). Coiffier and Huffman, in their work of 2011, discuss the trrou körrou’s mixed stylistic features combining those of Vao, where it was produced, and Malo, its kastom source. They consider its history, starting, as do earlier sources, in Sakavas village on Malo (Coiffier and Huffman call it Asavakasa). As they recount, around 1850, a Vao man named Melte Lemb married into the Malo community, thus strengthening existing trade links between North Malakula, Southeast Malo, and Ambae. Melte Lemb was from the Nalu clan at Pete-Hul (cf. Layard 1942: 33, 67–69). It was Kana, later Kana Supé, descendant of Melte Lemb and a chief at around the turn of the century, who ordered the statue in North Malakula, to celebrate his high grade in what Coiffier and Huffman call the namangui graded society of the island, as well as his Vao and Malo “pluriethnic” descent (Coiffier and Huffman 2011: 374). The statue stood in front of the men’s house, or rombö, of Sakavas until, a er conversion to Christianity, it was sold by the Sakavas people to the Italian planter G. Marinoni, who was stationed at the Tisbel plantation at the time, on Malakula’s west coast. Marinoni was known to buy objects from the locals “for the cheapest possible price” (le plus bas prix possible, Van den Broek d’Obrenan 1939: 102–3, in Coiffier and Huffman 2011). Later, the statue ended up in Vila, where it was collected by the Korrigane Expedition members. By that time, it was painted blue.9 Coiffier and Huffman show photographs of the statue in situ in front of Kana Supé’s

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Figure 5.6. Room view of the Pavillon des Sessions, Musée du Louvre: on the le are three Banks Islands tree fern figures, on the right, “the blue man” or trrou körrou. In the back, right, is the lengnangulong sacred stone from Magam (photograph by the author).

rombö in 1915 and later, when the men’s house was completely deserted (photograph 4, p. 375 and 6, p. 377).

Copies One way out of mistakes and disputes in relation to objects is by the production of copies or doubles for sale. Copies are used when they are walked and worn on the body, or, in the case of slit-drums and tree fern figures, positioned center stage on the nasara. Particularly on Malakula, things are walked and worn to resemble “the real.” Things that are considered real are thought to be imbued with spirits, a er the example of the Ambrym rom but also lengnangulong, who was a wandering spirit journeying from Pentecost to Ambrym to quench his hunger for pigs. W. H. Rivers described Ambrym temes (grade sculptures, bwerang) as a container for the paternal grandfather of the man who erected the statue (1914: 229; cf. Deacon 1934: 280). To Rivers as well as Deacon, rom were ghosts, like the Nalawan temes of South Malakula (Rivers 1914: 229; Deacon 1934: 393,

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434–35). Moreover, Rivers compared the rom secret society and the Malakulan temes with the Suqe and Tamate societies of the Banks and Torres Islands, saying that aggressive Tamate ghosts (masks) had saka sticks and clubs (Rivers 1914: 91), just as rom dancers have the veran rom (wicker arm) as an a ribute, with which they chase away and hit everyone on their path while raging through the villages. Copies are not spirits. According to Ambrymese and Malakulans, they have nothing in them, no life whatsoever. As I have shown, they are made “just for sale,” and they are “made authentic,” in order to make them saleable. The real, on the other hand, is increasingly a ributed with supernatural qualities. The authenticating process for what is considered a real piece is its tambu production and use. A er use, such an item can be burned, buried, and in recent times also kept, or it can be sold, in more or less secretive ways. The authenticating process for a copy is that of “copy use” (walking, wearing)—use toward a successful sale. Arguing against Rivers and Deacon, Rio noted that Ambrymese bwerang are in fact containers of nothing (he calls them “pure objects,” “empty,” “passive,” “without agency,” containing “the agency of no agency,”; Rio 2009: 285). Using an excerpt from the diary of Charles Murray, a Presbyterian missionary on the island, he notes Murray’s mention of Chief Malnaim’s bwerang erected for his mage grade-taking in West Ambrym in the 1880s. Malnaim saw the bwerang as purely material, inanimate, or, as he told Murray, an object simply “for making chiefs” (Murray 1887 in Rio 2009: 284–85). Bwerang were nonmystified objects, with no spirit inside, yet “gaining so much apparently religious a ention among the primitives” (Murray in Rio 2009: 285). The man “takes object form and stands as deprived of subject status; no longer having a life, in the eyes of the audience, he is a glorious, huge, brilliantly painted statue-man” (Rio 2009: 301). The copy, or the double, or the fake, purports to be the real, but what is the real in contemporary contexts? In Culture and Authenticity, Charles Lindholm defined authentic art objects as “original,” “real,” and “pure” if they are “what they purport to be, their provenance is known and verified, their essence and appearance are one” (2008: 16). Literature on the copy and the fake is more wide ranging. As Steiner pointed out for the African context, the fake is created by imitating “signs of age, ritual wear, and indigenous use” (1994: 106). This consists of the faking of ritual actions and the addition of substances such as dried blood and saliva, or the wear without the tear. It can also consist of the blackening of items above a hearth. Raymond Corbey wrote, in relation to Tellem ancestor figures of Mali, “The demands of the art and tourist market have triggered a quick re-

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sponse, especially among tanners and blacksmiths” (2000: 81). Contemporary Dogon people smear new carvings remade a er Tellem antiquities “with kitchen soot, bury them for a few weeks near a termit [sic] mound, soak them in millet gruel, and dry them in hot ashes, all to give them the highly valued patina of long ritual use” (ibid.). “Finally, they try to sell them as Tellem” (ibid.). “This term, which can be used to denote a precise and datable civilization . . . in the language of the contemporary art market should be translated as ‘We hope to convince you this is old.’” (Van Beek 1988 in Corbey 2000: 81). Shelly Errington’s examples include the famous tau-tau effigies of Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia, which she calls fakes because they were placed in the burial cliffs to replace “real” (old?) effigies that were previously stolen and sold, “so that tourists would see what appeared to be a pristine site rather than one denuded of effigies” (1998: 131). Contemporary anxieties about the fake are an aspect of the authenticity issue. These anxieties are informed by the trade and by collectors and dealers who are still on the hunt for “the last of the real.” As I noted in the introduction, the worldwide appeal by the VKS for the repatriation of human remains from Vanuatu resulted in only a few actual repatriations. One skull from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. was sent back to the VKS in 2011, as were two rambaramp effigies from Marseille, France. Moreover, the Smithsonian Institution considered their repatriated skull to be a “fake” (personal communication, Smithsonian Institution, September 2010). Tests had been done on the skull, which proved to be that of a young boy or girl and not, as would be expected, that of an elder who had reached a high grade in the nimangki graded society of South Malakula during his lifetime. According to the Smithsonian, the skull was collected during the 1940s–1950s. It thus does not fit the Vietnam scheme. It is a fake of another order, maybe one containing a skull that was excavated by the locals on a local burial ground to cater to the demands in those years.

A Short Ethnography of an Art Market: The Parcours Des Mondes, Paris A curator from one of Britain’s largest ethnographic collections commented to me that he used to be able to buy a Malekula club for a couple of hundred dollars, recalling his amazement when one fetched over US$30,000. “Sure! Now they’re ‘art!’” he said, implying that the term was absurd. —Satov, “Catalogues, Collectors, Curators: The Tribal Art Market and Anthropology”

It was when I first arrived on the shores of North Ambrym, in 2009, that I realized I had yet another field site, outside of Vanuatu. The pile of ating-

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ting and bwerang waiting for shipment that I saw in the dusk upon my arrival, I soon learned, had just been bought by a Paris-based dealer. While I had initially expected and hoped for such a result—of art moving “in and out of different conditions of identification and alienation” (Miller 2005)— this was my first encounter with such a se ing in the islands. It is what led me to Paris, France, a er my fieldwork in Vanuatu. In Fona, however, Johnson Koran had been quite reluctant to give me the contact details of what he clearly saw as “his” dealer. What if I was going to ask awkward questions about prices for art? Johnson clearly did not want to lose his valuable contact and access to cash. Deliberately or not, he gave me the wrong telephone number and address. A er some unsuccessful telephone calls and one returned (undelivered) le er, I decided to go to Paris, for the first time in July 2011. Not very surprisingly, I did not find the dealer on that first trip. On a tour of the tribal art galleries in Paris, I did not get much wiser either, and when I asked Philippe Peltier at the Musée du Quai Branly if he knew of this specific dealer, he told me he had never heard of him. A woman, working at the Paris branch of Entwistle, a well-known gallery, told me to return in early September of that year, which is when the Parcours des Mondes takes place. At the Parcours, she said, “everyone who is important in the business is in Paris.” I did as she said and returned to Paris for the Parcours des Mondes, which is the biggest annual tribal art fair of its kind. In 2011, the Parcours was held from 7 to 11 September (tenth edition) and promoted as a “salon international des arts premiers.” Here, I finally traced Johnson’s Paris dealer. As it turned out, the Paris-Ambrym dealer did not participate in the 2011 edition of the Parcours. As he told me, it costs gallery owners 5,000–7,000 euros to subscribe, depending on the location, which is a lot of money for an owner of a small gallery. I met with him in the gallery he owns in the Rue de Mon essuy, in the shade of the Eifel Tower, around the corner from the Musée du Quai Branly. At the time, he did not have the slit-drums and tree fern figures exhibited in his gallery but in his house in Provins, a town some fi y miles southeast of Paris in the Seine-et-Marne Department of the Ile-de-France region. The only Vanuatu items he had on show were four bamboo flutes unmistakably made by Lafu, next to other Pacific, Indonesian, and African art items. Johnson’s dealer did not know Lafu’s name, however, nor did he remember where he had bought the flutes. As he said, he only spent about a week in North Ambrym, always accompanied by Johnson Koran, who took him to so many places and in such a short stretch of time that it was impossible for him to remember all the people and places. While talking, he also told me that four of the slit-drums had been damaged during their

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transportation from Luganville to France. In Fona, Johnson Koran had told me of only two damaged drums and thus the loss of income for two drums instead of four. By 2011, none of the drums had yet been sold, even though the dealer’s intention, at least so he said, was to sell them at only 1,000 euros per piece. The more prestigious galleries that host the Parcours each year are centered at the Rue des Beaux-Arts and the Rue Visconti in a neighborhood somewhat comparable to that of the Sablon, the tribal art gallery neighborhood in Brussels. It is in the sixth arrondissement, close by the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the borders of the Seine river. Galleries that participate include Meyer and the Paris branch of Entwistle, which opened its doors simultaneous with the opening of the Quai Branly Museum in 2006. At the Parcours in 2011, Heathcote offered a North Ambrym atingting for sale, two Banks Islands tree fern figures, and some beautiful Malakulan hair combs. Gallery De Grunne had a nevinbur puppet for sale at 8,000 euros, as did Voyageurs et Curieux who asked 5,800 euros for it and 3,000 and 2,800 for two finely carved Malakulan spearheads. Gallery JeanYves Coué also offered Malakulan spearheads, one of them presented as a masterpiece and for sale at 10,000 euros. Coué also had something labeled “protecteur des cranes” (protector of skulls), South Malakulan in style and sold at 9,700 euros by the time I saw it. Brussels-based art dealer Kevin Conru had a rambaramp for sale, the one I mentioned in the introduction. Gallery Visser had a Banks Islands tamate mask for sale at 9,000 euros, one that was bought seven years earlier from an American collector in Dallas. But it was Conru’s rambaramp that had the best pedigree, having been part of the former well-known Fowler collection (not connected to Tessa) and known to have been in Fowler’s hands since at least the 1960s. From there, it had gone to another American collector for some thirty years. To Kevin Conru, it is very much like the one bought in the 1970s by David A enborough’s cameraman. In Paris in 2011, it was for sale at 45,000 euros. In a white gallery space or a museum, the objet d’art is set on a pedestal, lit by the best possible spotlight, and thinly described as high art, providing only some provenance. Such an item has gone through many hands. This is a context that is very different from the local context. In 2009 on Malakula, for example, Herna Abong sold a beautifully cra ed nevinbur puppet and a circumcision piece for a total of 13,000 vatu (approximately 140 AUD, or 110 euros), while the Paris nevinbur, less beautifully cra ed, was for sale at 8,000 euros. In Lamap, Herna’s sales are firsthand. His artifacts are kept in a brick house in the back of his hamlet. While his two pieces were sold for about 100 euros, the Paris pieces were sold for a price

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Figure 5.7. Malakulan spearheads for sale at Gallery Jean-Yves Coué. The one on the le was described as a masterpiece and was for sale at ten thousand euros. Parcours des Mondes, Paris, 2011 (photograph by the author).

of over eighty times higher. At art fairs such as the Parcours, a frozen-intime kind of age and use, the wear and tear of time, almost impossible to verify, still seems to be the main determinant of value.

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Figure 5.8. South Malakulan rambaramp effigy (former Fowler collection) for sale at forty-five thousand euros at Gallerie Ivana de Gavardie, Parcours des Mondes, Paris, 2011 (photograph by the author, taken with kind permission of Kevin Conru).

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Art History Mistakes One mistake generally made by art collectors, dealers, and museum curators is that by Felix Speiser of his a ribution of North Ambrym bwerang or tree fern figures as nenna. As I have mentioned earlier, Speiser was unable to speak any of the local languages and was hardly able to speak Bislama during his time on Ambrym. In the introduction to his Ethnology of the New Hebrides, he also mentioned that he was not able to win the trust of the locals (1996: 3) and, as he “had no means of keeping a check on their statements,” that he “preferred to give up collecting native names for things” (ibid.: 3–4). As I learned during fieldwork, in the North Ambrymese language, nenna means “face” (cf. Pa erson 1996: 258, who spells it nana). This can be the face of humans, but it can also refer to the face of a bwerang. The confusion in Speiser’s case might be that he found and collected mostly partial tree fern figures, o en heads only, which were then probably offered to him as nenna. The Gent bwerang is one example of wrong a ribution, its label in the collections and catalogue referring to it as nenna, a er Speiser. There are many other examples of North Ambrym bwerang that are mislabeled as nenna (another example is a nenna in the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York). Another mistake by Speiser was one I came across during fieldwork on Vanua Lava in the Banks Islands in 2009. At the time, I was staying in the hamlet of VKS filwoka Eli Field in Turmalau, Vureas Bay. Eli is the bestknown carver of Banks Islands knives for the area. As I have noted, such knives were formerly used by graded men for preparing and eating food together, separated from women, children, and uninitiated men. In Eli’s house in 2009, I saw some recently carved knives (see Figure 3.5, Chapter Three), two of which were in a style that I, being strongly informed by my art historical background, recognized as “the Gaua knife,” a er Speiser (1996 [1923]: pl. 23, fig. 28), Gaua being a neighboring island to Vanua Lava in the Banks Group. Eli reacted, quite agitated, that this was a mistake that was made by far too many people. He said, “It is not because Speiser only saw and collected one such knife on Gaua that this means this is a Gaua knife only.” The knife is of the popular nertum or Janus-faced design. Bearing two faces, it is easily recognizable. To Eli, nertum is the term for this design in the now extinct Keregebon language of Vanua Lava, and not Gaua. Like the nenna mistake, the Gaua knife mistake is widespread in the literature as well, where it has been repeated several times. Local people who are involved in cultural revival now take it over from the literature, resulting in heated discussion and dispute over origin, ownership, and

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Figure 5.9. Handles of two knives carved by Eli Field in the nertum, or Janus-faced, style, exact replicas of Speiser’s knife in this style that he collected on Gaua and wrongly labeled “the Gaua knife,” Turmalau, Vanua Lava, 2009 (photograph by the author).

copyright. Kirk Huffman—who knows Eli Field very well and dedicated an article on Banks Islands knives to him, calling him “Vanuatu’s most prolific wooden-knife carver today, who rescued many styles from oblivion”—also a ributes the knife to Gaua in the catalogue to the Arts of Vanuatu exhibition, reusing Speiser’s drawing (Huffman 1996e: 207; Speiser 1996 [1923]: pl. 23, fig. 28). To Eli, nertum is a design that belongs to all Banks Islanders, and not just to Gaua. These kinds of mistakes, Eli said, have been made for about a hundred years now, and most people in Vanuatu do not even know or remember that they are mistakes that were made a long time ago: “They take the mistakes for real and claim ownership to things that are not theirs.” In this frame of misa ributions, disputes, and mistakes, functions the art market and the museum.

Notes  1. Biebuyck provided an overview of the literature on creativity up to that stage, summing up Firth (1925, 1936), Bunzel (1928), O’Neale (1932), Himmelheber

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(1935, 1938), Herskovits (1938), Herskovits and Herskovits (1934), Griaule (1938), and Vandenhoute (1948). Relating specifically to artists, he mentioned Himmelheber (1963), M. W. Smith (1961), E. Fischer (1962), Fagg (1965), Gerbrands (1967), and Forge (1967; in Biebuyck 1969: 7). Bolton recounts another story illustrating the power of kastom, that of Aviu Koli, a renowned sorcerer and VKS filwoka until his death in 1994, and Kirk Huffman, former director of the VKS who in 1984 became seriously and inexplicably ill. “Koli identified the cause as a sorcery object Huffman had recently acquired for the collections that had not had its potency neutralized. Koli counteracted the malevolent effect, and Huffman (who was hospitalized at the time) recovered immediately” (2003c: 49; see also Huffman 1996a: 291). Bolton follows the linguist Darrel Tryon, who suggested that the term kastom was introduced into Bislama in the 1920s, having no direct cognates in the vernacular languages of Vanuatu. According to Tryon and Bolton, the term kastom was not widely used in Vanuatu until the 1960s (in Bolton 2003c: 10–11). Tofor bought the mal title in 1971 as part of the mortuary payments for his father (Pa erson 2002a). That he bought it with only one tusked boar was seen as unconventional and as an inferior way of acquiring rank. The last undisputed ceremony for North Ambrym, according to local people, was Tofor’s acquisition of the mage ne meleun gatlam or mage lon bul title in 1969 in Fanla (Pa erson 1976, 1981, 2001, 2002a). In order to acquire this title, Tofor lived up to the yearlong preparations and long lists of restrictions and taboos that went with the grade, even those that came a er the dramatic culmination, the period of seclusion. The culmination of the rite, with Tofor painted fully red and with spikes hammered in his scalp, was a ended by some colonial officials, tourists, and collectors, what Pa erson called the “anomalous Europeans” of those years (2001: 41). It was also documented by Kal Muller in his article in Natural History (1971b). The Mother Hubbard dress is the traditional dress of ni-Vanuatu women. Originally a Victorian nightgown introduced by the missionaries in the late nineteenth century, this dress served and serves to cover women’s bodies. Over time, it was made “indigenous” by the use of flower designs and bright colors. The Mother Hubbard is o en seen as inauthentic by the expatriate voyeur who wants to see pre-Christian tradition, or nakedness. An analysis of the history and current ownership claims of the lengnangulong sacred stone was also published as “Property and Ownership in Vanuatu: The lengnangulong Sacred Stone from North Ambrym at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre,” Museum Anthropology 40, no. 2 (2017): 111–27. Ralitor was the domain name. Magam was a composite village, like Fona containing members of a number of depleted domains in the vicinity. The Presbyterian mission had purchased the ground on which Magam village stood. By the time the stone was sold, the villagers had been encouraged for years by the Presbyterian missionaries to get rid of any kind of magical items that they had and held on to. The lengnangulong sacred stone was one of these items (personal communication, Mary Pa erson, 18 November 2012).

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 8. Je vous écris ce e le re afin de lancer à nouveau une demande officielle pour faire rapatrier une pierre sacré de l’île d’Ambrym appelé Lengnangoulong actuellement exposé dans le pavillon des Sessions du Musée de Louvre à Paris; une exposition intitulée ‘Sculptures, Afrique, Asie, Océanie, Amériques.’ C’est une pierre magique et sacrée destinée à l’acquisition des cochons males castrés (müyü ne bü) et qui est connu à Vanuatu sous le nom de Lengnangoulong.  9. Bolton notes that the blue paint that was applied to “the blue man” is Recki ’s Blue, a synthetic dye, originally a laundry whitener first produced in Hull in 1852, containing a synthetic ultramarine combined with sodium bicarbonate (2012: 191). “It was introduced in the Pacific within a few decades of its development, and became an item of trade, not for its whitening properties but for its clear blue colour” (ibid.). She adds that German traders were certainly selling a washing blue in the Bismarck Archipelago from the 1880s onward, resulting in the fact that, particularly in northern New Ireland, it was rapidly added to the range of colors used on elaborately carved masks and figures in the malagan ritual complex there (ibid.).

6  Museums Objects and Museums Museums are the authenticating institutions of the West. As arbiters of authentic works of art, they have a central role in the shaping of the market and in supply and demand. From their beginnings, museums were interested in assembling as much material as possible. In 1683, the Ashmolean Museum was established in Oxford, United Kingdom. As George Stocking illustrated, the collection of the Tradescants at this earliest of museums, “along with the dodo, the marine unicorn (or narwhal), and the stirrups of Henry VIII” also included “native” items such as the “habit” of Pohaton, “King of Virginia,” “all embroidered with shells” (1985: 7). The British Museum was founded in 1753, and the London Missionary Society (LMS), a fiercely enthusiastic collector in the Pacific, in 1795. The LMS was specifically set up to convince middle- and upper-class Englishmen to donate money to the missions to continue the conversion of their “heathen” subjects worldwide. As proof of their success, missionaries brought back items of victory, se ing up missionary exhibitions and showcasing “heathen idols.” In France, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro was founded in 1878. In the United States, as Ira Jacknis (1985) illustrated, the early career of Franz Boas as assistant curator of ethnology and somatology at the American Museum of Natural History was marked, as in other places, by efforts to exhibit material forms of life, particularly by the exhibition of Native American “life groups.” Ever since curiosities, rarities, ethnological specimens (“primitive,” “tribal,” “ethnic”), arts, and artifacts were distinguished and collected, traded, stolen, sold, or given, people have been trying to make sense of

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them, possess them, and showcase them. The Northern European Renaissance artist and uomo universalis Albrecht Dürer was a collector of ethnographica (or artificial curiosities; cf. Kaeppler 1978) from Africa that he bought in the port of Genoa. The seventeenth-century cabinet of art and curiosities of the Grosser Kurfürst (elector) von Brandenburg, a Prussian prince, later became the Königliche Preussische Kunstkammer (Royal Prussian Art Cabinet). A er 1829, this contained a relatively independent ethnographic collection that developed into the Museum für Volkerkunde in Berlin, founded as such in 1873 (Corbey 2000: 23). In this era, “ethnographic specimens were collected haphazardly,” writes Adrienne Kaeppler, and were “displayed as a clu ered mass” (1978: 37). “Because there was no Systema Naturae . . . by which to arrange them and no precise terminology with which to discuss them, few took them seriously” (ibid.: 37). Objects were valued principally as trophies, “icons of conquest a esting to unbridled Western power in the Age of Discovery” (Steiner 1994: 108) or, as James Clifford put it, as part of a “marvelous,” “real,” and “present” “Golden Age” (1985: 241). Since the 1980s, the role of museums has been the subject of serious critique by prominent authors, involving a range of issues such as the establishment of authenticity and its connection to the emergence of the notion of art in curio collections and emerging market values (e.g., Stocking 1985; Price 1989; Karp and Lavine 1991; Vogel 1991a, 1991b; Ames 1992; Clifford 1985, 1997; Errington 1998; Kirshenbla -Gimble 1998; Peers and Brown 2003; Stanley 2007; for the localized Melanesian se ing and Vanuatu, see Bolton 2003b; Geismar 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c; Geismar and Tilley 2003). As Sally Price has shown, the transformation of “ethnographic curios” into examples of “primitive art” has o en displaced indigenous meanings and notions of ownership in favor of provenance and the history of Western ownership of these objects. Value was added in terms of a pedigree, in turn adding to the value of an artwork on the market (Price 1989: 102). “An African figure,” Price wrote, “that was once owned by Henri Matisse or Charles Ra on or Nelson Rockefeller is unrelated to a sculpture by the same artist that was not” (ibid.). Christopher Steiner made a similar comment about a Cameroonian bangwa sculpture, known as the Bangwa Queen and sold at auction in New York in the 1990s. Sotheby’s head of the Tribal Art Department, Bernard de Grunne, said, “Part of the value of this carving is its pedigree” (New York Times 9 February 1990, in Steiner 1994: 123). Steiner continues, writing: The figure was collected at the turn of the century in Cameroon by a German explorer (not surprisingly described as “the first white man to reach the African Bangwa kingdoms”). It was deposited in 1898 at the Museum für

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Volkerkunde in Berlin, where it remained until it was acquired in 1926 by a German collector who then sold it a few years later to Charles Ra on, a Paris dealer. The Princess Gourielli (Helena Rubinstein) bought the queen figure from Ra on in the 1930’s, at which time it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s first African art show in 1935. . . . Around the same period, the figure was photographed by Man Ray, who posed a nude model at its feet. The sculpture is now in the possession of an unnamed collector who bid recently at auction $3.4 million, the highest recorded price for an object of African art. (Steiner 1994: 123–24)

In a similar fashion, Igor Kopytoff treated “a Picasso” or “a Renoir” as a trademark, adding the notion of “pricelessness”: A Picasso, though possessing a monetary value, is priceless in another, higher scheme. . . . Hence, we feel uneasy, even offended, when a newspaper declares the Picasso to be worth $690,000, for one should not be pricing the priceless. But in a pluralistic society, the “objective” pricelessness of the Picasso can only be unambiguously confirmed to us by its immense market price. Yet, the pricelessness still makes the Picasso in some sense more valuable than the pile of dollars it can fetch—as will be duly pointed out by the newspapers if the Picasso is stolen. (1986: 82)

And: What of a Renoir ending up in a private or inaccessible collection? Of one lying neglected in a museum basement? How should we feel about yet another Renoir leaving France for the United States? Or for Nigeria? (ibid.: 67)

Kopytoff concluded by saying that museums and art dealers will name prices, be accused of the sin of transforming art into a commodity, and, in response, defend themselves by blaming each other for creating and maintaining a commodity market (1986: 83). Museums have been described as temples of civilization, sites for the creation of citizens, forums for debate, se ings for cultural interchange and the negotiation of values, engines of economic renewal, imposed colonialist enterprises, havens of elitist distinction and discrimination, and places of empowerment and recognition (Kratz and Karp 2006: 1). “Tribal” and “ethnic” art objects have been de- and recontextualized in exhibition halls and basements of museums and galleries, serving all of these and other goals. As I noted in Chapter One, by the early twentieth century, their reception in Europe was one in terms of aesthetics. “Tribal art” was “full of expression” (which inspired the Expressionists), sometimes “grotesque,” always “dramatic.” It did not take long before things started gaining value “in vaults or on the walls of bourgeois living rooms” and were “made and judged according to shi ing criteria of authenticity” or “brought from the Museum für Volkerkunde in Hamburg to hang beside a canvas of Joan Miró in New

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York” (Clifford 1985: 244).1 James Clifford suggested that such objects “‘belong’ nowhere, having been torn from their social contexts of production and reception,” given value in systems of meaning outside of their realms (ibid.).2 Such a view, however, ignores much of people’s agency in the transaction of culture. Even Jean Guiart, now accused of the the of the lengnangulong sacred stone by the North Ambrymese, warned of the pitfalls of transactions: From the very beginning[,] studies of “Primitive Art” have been linked with anthropology as well as with collecting and everything that goes with it. Thus was born a conflict between scientific interest and more mundane problems such as speculation, inflation of prices, evasion of taxes, and transfer of capital from one country to another. Oceanic art pieces are worth tens of thousands of dollars each, and this is one of the dimensions of our problem, as we study the pieces (some of which are kept from us for very special reasons) and when we are asked to return them to their rightful owners. Today we are confronted not only with others than ourselves, private collectors and merchants, but also with islanders. At long last our value is being weighed and judged. We made ourselves the keepers of the island cultures: yet what have we done with their plastic, symbolic, and intellectual values? What can we say in our defence? We have collected what we could ship, what could stand wear and tear, saving masterpieces we did not know then as such and forge ing about function and content. (Guiart 1979: 405)

More recent work has focused on more positive, dialectical relationships between Western museum se ings and the source communities whose histories they hold. The development of the museum as a contact zone is one example. James Clifford, in Routes (1997), focused on the different agendas that museums and other sites of heritage and cultural performance can have. In Clifford’s interpretation, in a contact perspective, “museums become way stations rather than final destinations” (2000: 63). Peers and Brown (2003) outlined a theory of museums as places of negotiation and cooperation between the descendants of the people whose objects (and o en also their bones) are kept in museums and those museums themselves. These are dialectical relationships, in which indigenous peoples are increasingly involved, having their say in storage, exhibition, and management of their cultural heritage as well as requests for repatriation by their communities. On the other hand, the range of museum roles, definitions, and cross-institutional relations, entails different agendas, interests, goals, perspectives, and possibilities, by different agents, thus renewing debates, tensions, collaborations, and conflicts of many sorts and levels that cannot be simply neglected. As Kratz and Karp have put it, these are new challenges, “museum frictions,” that can have both positive and negative outcomes (2006: 2).

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Vanuatu Objects and Museums Many white people have come here to make collections. It’s true there is plenty of stuff around, but what of it? What now? Yes, there are all these nice places, with air conditioning and everything, but it’s not for everyone. Because when white people collect these things, they take them as part of their studies in anthropology, studies to understand life in a society, and if you collect artefacts over a long period of time, you can compare them to each other. So that’s them, but for us, it’s different. We don’t look at things like that, we look at the spirit of the object. That’s why when we look at a drum that seems to be nothing, it is tabu to touch because of the spirit inside. You can’t touch things even if they seem like nothing. Even in nature (because our museums are in nature) some stones which seem to be just stones—it’s tabu to walk by them. And this means that our a itudes to objects are controlled by respect. Some Europeans try to interpret what use these objects have, you see? Why are they carved like this? But this is just interpretation. If you have created something here, you live with it. The full spirit of it lives with you. (Sero Kuautonga, Nawita Group member, 19 July 2001, in Geismar 2003b: 17)

In the history of collecting art, the older pieces have always been seen as more valuable. Jean Guiart, in relation to Vanuatu, has literally called the older pieces the be er ones (1969: 95). Speiser and Lewis were on the hunt for “the old”—in Speiser’s case, particularly used skulls. Rio mentions the missionary Frater on Ambrym, who said that Lewis and Speiser “bought up from the natives large numbers of heathen images and curios of all kinds, for which they offered big prices. The people parted with their best and most finely-carved images” (Frater 1922, in Rio 2011: 230). Around 1870, Commodore Goodenough, a senior Royal Navy Officer operating in the New Hebrides at the time, mentioned in his journal that he bought an old and ro en mage statue on Ambrym (a bwerang) for the price of two of his knives (Goodenough 1876, in Rio 2011: 229). Rio adds that Goodenough had arrived just as people on Ambrym were ge ing ready for a mage grade-taking and that “they were unwilling to sell him the new mage [statue] and the pig-killing club that they were going to use for the ceremony” (Rio 2011: 229). Instead, they sold him their old and used stuff for the price of two knives. In contemporary Vanuatu, objects continue to hold validity, whatever their age, as signs and symbols of kastom and identity and markers of ongoing cultural relations, property rights and ownership. Jacky Tubuvi’s claim for repatriation or at least payment of rent by the Louvre Museum for what he considers to be his property, the lengnangulong sacred stone, is only one example. As I have shown, being part of a French collection makes the stone sculpture inalienable, meaning that it is practically im-

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possible to repatriate. This is a museum friction (Kratz and Karp 2006). The trrou körrou is another example. While a request for repatriation has not yet been made, the trrou körrou has recently been a ributed to a living person (see Chapter Five; see also Coiffier and Huffman 2011). Yet another example is one particular slit-drum from North Ambrym that is exhibited at the Quai Branly Museum and is now claimed as property by Justin Ramel of the village of Magam. During fieldwork in North Ambrym in 2009, Chief Ramel approached me with a piece of paper. It was a photocopy of a photograph in a book by Christian Coiffier, Traditional Architecture in Vanuatu (1988: p. 76). The image showed the Quai Branly drum in question. On the back of its head, this slit-drum bears an intricate design carved in a style that, according to Justin, belongs to his “straight family line.” In 2009, Justin had not yet made an official claim for ownership of the slit-drum, but he was planning to do so in the near future. In museums, stories of people reclaiming their property or, conversely, of ethnopreneurs willingly selling theirs, are o en silenced. This would diminish the object’s authenticity. At the Quai Branly, while moving geographically from New Caledonia to Vanuatu, one discovers in a dark cave-like passageway a forest of rambaramp effigies and, right across from them, a selection of carved and painted stones from Malakula, Ambrym, and Pentecost. Collection dates range from the early to the mid-twentieth century. Coming out of the cave, one enters Vanuatu passing by another forest, this one of colossal slit-drums and tree fern figures, again mostly from Malakula and Ambrym, and showcases of Nalawan masks and temes figures (rambaramp) and puppets, both from South Malakula (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2 in Chapter One). Except for the group of slit-drums and tree fern figures, all pieces are set in the dark, with other pieces, the public, and Paris reflecting in their showcases. To the layperson, the message that the things on view should not be missed is achieved by showing them in the dark. The dramatic effect works: people in the dark tunnel, a most intimate corner in the museum, halt and marvel at a group of humanlike figures shimmering in the dark and, on the other side, a collection of tambu stones. Nothing is mentioned on the labels about the request for repatriation of objects or the appeal by the VKS for repatriation of all human remains. For the 1996 traveling exhibition Arts of Vanuatu, curator Kirk Huffman focused on showing things that were, as he called it, “in danger of sleeping or dying out” (Huffman 1997, in Geismar 2003a: 66). As I have shown, Huffman was always particularly concerned with issues of preservation, of “recording and passing on knowledge while it was still available,” which is the main reason behind his development of the filwoka program

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(see also Bolton 2003c: 33–35, 46). Huffman has always been keen on telling a positive story. In informal correspondence with the VKS, he elaborated on his influential scheme for the exhibition: My idea was to concentrate on trying to gather together, from museum collections, types of objects that either no longer exist in Vanuatu, or are extremely rare, in the hope that ni-Vanuatu viewing these (maybe now partially forgo en) things, could revive them: i.e. an exhibition with a practical aim (not one of your usual arty-farty exhibits with the usual Ambrym tamtams, tree fern figures and Malakulan masks). (Huffman 1992, quoted in Geismar 2003a: 82–83)

Addressing the staff at VKS, he added: Remember that your main aim should be to exhibit for ni-Vanuatu—tourists, etc., are only secondary. Don’t make the mistake of exhibiting just for white people otherwise ni-Vanuatu won’t come regularly—unfortunately most Pacific museums and cultural institutions have made this mistake. (Huffman 1992, quoted in Geismar 2003a: 82–83)

At the European locations of Arts of Vanuatu, in Paris and Basel, some pieces were added that were considered too powerful to be shown in Vanuatu, such as one sacred mask in Basel. At the National Museum in Vila, carved stones were hidden within an enclosed replica of a nakamal, erected inside the museum for the occasion. The nakamal was guarded by male ni-Vanuatu a endants, keeping uninitiated men, women, and children outside of the enclosed space. In Basel, a similar interpretation of a nakamal was erected, to evoke the idea of a tambu house rather than reconstruct it. In Basel, women and children were allowed inside. Huge screens showing enlarged photographs by Speiser functioned as walls. The secrecy aspect of the stones was suggested by hiding them behind the screens (Geismar 2003a: 87). Jacky Tubuvi saw the lengnangulong sacred stone that he now claims to be his property for the first time inside the so-called tambu house at the National Museum during Arts of Vanuatu. His family’s claim predates this exhibition, but seeing the sacred stone in the museum sparked his own desire to have a connection to it again. As I have noted throughout the book, objects were traded, stolen, sold, or given and moved hands and owners over time, gaining monetary value in galleries, museums, vaults, and basements. Through figures such as Speiser, Lewis, Guiart, Tain Mal, Tofor, Tessa Fowler, and, more recently, Chief Sekor, Norbert Nabong, and David Baker, objects shi ed and still shi from commodity status into ritual status and vice versa. A er they have been collected, such objects remain both commodities and secret and sacred material items, gaining not just monetary value but also inherent value and sacredness among locals. Nowadays, the lengnangulong sacred

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Figure 6.1. Group of slit-drums and tree fern figures from Malakula and Ambrym at the Musée du Quai Branly (photograph by the author).

stone seems to have significance to all North Ambrymese, more than it had to the people who, rightfully or not, sold it with the encouragement of the missionaries to Guiart in 1949. It shi ed and is still shi ing in and out of commodity and sacred status during the trajectory of its complex life history. As a valued object, it was exhibited in Vanuatu next to other valued items for a brief moment, before it traveled back to the Louvre in Paris. The spirits of the ancestors did not return home, as promised in the exhibition’s title, Spirit blong Bubu i Kam Bak; they only briefly visited.

Vanuatu Stael: The Twin Gulong and the Nalawan Luan Veuv The “twin” gulong and Nalawan Luan Veuv masks, which I introduced in Chapter One, illustrate the complex context of revival and collecting. The masks were made in 1999, a er visual repatriation of the original masks that are kept in Paris. They were danced, adding to their authenticity, and immediately a er collected by Haidy Geismar and shown during the Vanuatu Stael exhibition at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2003 (see Geismar 2003b). A few years be-

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Figure 6.2. North Ambrym slit-drum: detail of the back of the head of the drum, bearing a design that is now claimed by Justin Ramel (photograph by the author).

fore, the original Paris masks had been rediscovered by Marcellin Abong during the Paris version of Arts of Vanuatu, when Marcellin was studying there toward his degree in ethnoarchaeology. Marcellin took photos of the masks and sent them home to his brothers in Lamap, the location the

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masks had been estranged from over a hundred years before. The remade masks are now stored at CUMAA, in the reserve collection there. The label of the Nalawan Luan Veuv at CUMAA is reproduced in the booklet catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, recounting its history and context: The Luan Veuv mask is one of the sacred masks which sacred highranking men from the Lamap area wear on their heads when performing the dance called luan veuv. This is truly a sacred dance and only men who have “bought the tabu fire” of this dance can take part in it and hold the knowledge associated with it. Admiral Bineau was the commander of the ship which collected the original version of this mask from the Marivar nasara near Port Sandwich (Lamap) in 1890. This was the last time the mask was used until the one exhibited here was made in 1999. The luan veuv dance was also not performed again until 1982, when it was revived from oral tradition and performed at the opening of Lamap’s new church building. Marcellin Abong who is from the Labreav Pnoab nasara or clan and who is also a staff member of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre had the opportunity while studying in France to see the original mask when it was exhibited as part of the Arts of Vanuatu exhibition at the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie in Paris. At that time he took a photo of the mask to be able to show people in Lamap the actual luan veuv mask which was lost from this area 100 years ago. In 1999 the Labreav Pnoab nasara remade the mask from the photo provided and used it again for the first time on the 28 April as part of the luan veuv dance, which is part of the larger bar leun ceremony. This ceremony was performed on the occasion of the Catholic church’s celebrations of St. Pierre Channel in Lamap. This was the first time the mask had been seen in Lamap for 100 years! This mask belongs to the chief or batik of the batu of Labreav Pnoab nasara who is Richard Abong. He bought this mask with a pig whose tusks had curved back into its jawbone. (in Geismar 2003b: 16)

This label treats the visual repatriation (a photograph) of the old mask by Marcellin, the local reproduction, reperformance, and, in a sense, immediate recollection by Geismar for the Cambridge exhibition. It also treats intellectual cultural property rights in the form of local knowledge and its objects and the notion of copyright at a time when the Copyright Act was being passed. The label does not mention any of the disputes concerning indigenous copyright issues that have been taking place for a considerable time. As I have shown in Chapter Five, these disputes revolve around people claiming rights to reproduce, reuse, and resell an item within the context of contested kastom or, in other words, stretagainst Vatu kastom. What is not covered in the label text is what the immediate collection of the remade masks meant to the people in Lamap. When I visited the Abong family in Lamap in 2009, Herna Abong, Marcellin’s twin brother, who was sent the photographs of the masks, told me that it was certainly be er to directly donate to a museum than to sell to a collector or a tourist.

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To Herna, there is a difference between someone who collects for science and one who collects for profit. Being a revived Big Man as well as a filwoka for his area, Herna’s views are clearly informed by VKS policy and guidelines. As a consequence, it is not much of a surprise that he prefers collecting for science over collecting for profit. As Herna put it, all local people know that collectors can make huge profits when they go back to wherever they came from, referring to the art markets of Australia, Europe, and the United States: “They make huge profits from another man’s kastom.” On the other hand, Herna seemed to regret having donated the two masks to Geismar and the Cambridge Museum. While, as a filwoka, he fully supports the idea that a donation to a museum equals safeguarding cultural history for the future, he also realizes that neither he nor anybody else in Lamap will ever see or possess these masks again, masks that were important enough to be remade a er a hundred years of absence of their original area. While the twin gulong and Nalawan Luan Veuv were regained only to be lost again to a museum immediately a er, their significance and the sense of cultural pride invested in them remains in Lamap, together with the photographs of the old masks in Paris and the new ones now in Cambridge. Photographs of objects that embody ritual and social power, such as clan symbols and religious paraphernalia, can be of great interest and emotional significance to a community (Barlow 1990). Kirk Huffman has pointed out that people in Vanuatu are more interested in owning images of objects than the original, because they want to remake the objects (Geismar et al. 2010). The fact that Jacky Tubuvi has a photograph of his much-valued stone, or that Justin Ramel has one of the Quai Branly slitdrum bearing his family’s design, or the Lamap men of their old and new masks in Paris and Cambridge at the same time illustrates that just visual repatriation does not do these men and their communities justice. They feel frustrated, their items, the items of their kastom and identity, now being worth thousands of dollars (or millions, or of incalculable worth, or priceless, e.g., lengnangulong). Herna’s remark that “not too many spirits should go anymore” engages with revival and the remaking of things that are sometimes meant to be kept instead of transient but also with monetary value and a sense of frustration because of being le out of the profits that are made on the global level. Anita Herle, Oceania curator at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has termed the relationships between the museum and its source communities as “ongoing” (e.g., 2005), but to what degree are they really ongoing? On the local level, possessing a photograph of an item that rightfully belongs to you does not always mean much when that item is deliberately kept away from you. Herna’s donation of the twin gu-

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long and Nalawan Luan Veuv to Geismar and on to the Cambridge Museum once again starts up processes of contested ownership claims and of gaining value in museum showcases, vaults, and basements.

The National Museum of Vanuatu The National Museum at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre is another kind of exhibition space. As an indigenously owned and run museum, its role as a place and space for showcasing artifacts is of minor importance. As Ralph Regenvanu repeatedly pointed out, what is more important is its function as a platform for ni-Vanuatu people (e.g., Regenvanu 2005).3 The museum space serves as a meeting place where workshops are held and as a site for cultural performance. Its tabu room, what is known in Western museum contexts as the reserve collection, is where the material culture items are kept. This tabu room, however, is special, in the sense that permission to enter has to be granted by knowledgeable people. These can be museum personnel or those holding the copyright over the items inside: people in the islands, individuals, or families. As Herna told me in Lamap in 2009, “The best place to keep things now is in the tabu room at the VKS.” As in history, uninitiated eyes (uninitiated men, women, and children) are not meant to view certain items of culture, which is why the carved stones that were exhibited during the Vanuatu version of Arts of Vanuatu were not only enclosed but also guarded by male doorkeepers.4 From the local perspective, moreover, the National Photo, Film, and Sound Archive is important, keeping audio and visual recordings of ritual performances of the past and present and a collection of comparative data for Melanesia and the wider Pacific. “Tribal museums,” a notion developed by James Clifford, perform heritage for both “insiders” and “outsiders,” in different ways (2000: 67). They provide “specific linkages of old and new, ours and theirs, secret and public, partial connections between complex socio-cultural wholes” (ibid.). Visitors to the VKS and National Museum are locals as well as tourists. The la er can visit the museum on their own or they can visit as part of a tour, being picked up by a tour bus in front of their hotel or resort. Inside the museum, artifacts are exhibited, DVD’s of immaterial cultural heritage such as sand drawing play on a TV screen, sand-drawing workshops and music demonstrations are regularly held, and museum staff and filwokas are o en present in the public space to discuss ma ers with visitors. The artifacts that are on view originate mostly from Malakula and Ambrym. One beautifully cra ed Banks Islands tamate mask is also on show.

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This is the kind of “cultural highlights” exhibit one sees all around the world. Unlike in many Western museum contexts, however, at the National Museum of Vanuatu a space is dedicated to textiles from Ambae and Maewo and painted bark cloth from Erromango. Like sand drawing, mat making is now a popular revived art form, promoted by the Cultural Centre in the islands. Labels at the museum are in English, French, and Bislama and illustrate the difference in approach between cosmopolitan and indigenous museum approaches. The label of the copy lengnangulong stone at VKS, for example, mentions pig magic but not the original stone’s history, as it does in the Pavillon des Sessions (tracing the stone from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century). Both labels keep quiet about the stone’s recent history and about repatriation claims. A dramatic section of the permanent exhibition at the National Museum is positioned against the back wall of the exhibition hall. It consists of a reconstruction of a tambu house in combination with a group of slit-drums and tree fern figures originating from Fanla, North Ambrym. These are the paraphernalia of Magekon and Bongmeleun’s now disputed mage ne hiwir grade-taking of 1982 that I discussed in Chapter Five. Back in 1982, the two brothers sold their items to the museum, at around the same time that their half-brother Tofor sold his last drum to the museum. The VKS bought that drum precisely to prevent Tofor from selling it to a collector or a dealer abroad, thus keeping the drum in Vanuatu instead of le ing it be shipped off again to the Metropolitan Museum in New York or any other place. More recently, Norbert Nabong of BTMR tried to sell a rom mask to the National Museum to replace an old one that is exhibited in the museum. The colors on the exhibited rom mask have faded, and thus Norbert is of the opinion that the mask should be replaced by a new one, with bright colors, “shining, strong, and real,” but the museum declined his offer. Nonetheless, this is where the National Museum could be radically different from, for example, the Quai Branly or the Pavillon at the Louvre, where the dominant discourse about art is that it is ancient. At the Cultural Centre and National Museum, the remade objects of cultural revival are valuable to communities, a logical consequence in a context from which historical art pieces le to the West a long time ago.

Repatriation The question of repatriation is complex and depends on the context of the object in question. Skulls, for example, formerly study material for anthropologists and much-desired collectibles, are in the first place the remains

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of people’s ancestors. But they can also be “grotesque” or “dramatic” art pieces. In the United States, the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) was installed in the 1990s; it was designed to specifically assist in the repatriation of human remains and valued objects from museums back to their original communities. Since the 1990s, because of NAGPRA’s involvement, thousands of human bones and skulls have been reburied. Present-day Iroquois are asking for the return of their so-called false face masks and are appealing to museums to not exhibit them anymore or distribute the knowledge a ached to them. According to the Iroquois, only papier maché replicas of the original wooden masks can be shown. The Zuni have been requesting the return of their war god sculptures in order to destroy them (see, among others, Merrill et al. 1993). A native group’s voice, however, does not always correspond with the voice of each and every individual who is a member of that group, and disagreements about whether things should be returned or not are widespread. An example is that of the current debates among contemporary Native Americans about whether all the artifacts of their forefathers should be returned from museums or not. At least some Native American community members seem to disagree and would prefer to see their ancestors and their heritage remain preserved in museums (Moore 2010). In an article in Museum Anthropology titled “Propatriation: Possibilities for Art a er NAGPRA,” Emily Moore (2010) proposed a solution to the manifold problem of repatriation. What she calls “propatriation” means that the art that was repatriated to its original communities is replaced with newly made things in those museums that returned them. As Moore writes, this has occurred in a couple of specific moments and institutions in the United States, where “the new” now replaces “the old.” At Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, for example, a new totem pole carved by Tlingit master carver Nathan Jackson now replaces a Teikweidi pole that stood in the Peabody for nearly a century. The pole was stolen in 1899 from the Saanya Kwaan village of Gaash, near Cape Fox, Alaska, during the Edward H. Harriman Expedition (Moore 2010: 125). Other poles have also been propatriated in this way: from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, and from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, poles were replaced in the Tlingit area of Cape Fox (Moore 2010: 125). Propatriation, of course, cannot be a cure-all. In the abovementioned cases, it “does not undo the damage that was caused by colonial missions like the Harriman Expedition” (ibid.). Also, the propatriated, new poles cannot “—and pur-

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posefully do not—equalize the repatriated poles” (ibid.: 134). To Moore, “propatriation offers one small but important means of advancing the goals of NAGPRA, fostering collaborative relationships between museums and native peoples and indigenizing the museum space to actively represent native worldviews” (ibid.). Next to the United States, se ler nations such as Australia and New Zealand have made considerable efforts to return human remains to their indigenous inhabitants. Outside of se ler nations, exceptionally, there is a repatriation case by the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Brussels, which returned over a hundred objects to the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire in Congo in three waves, from 1976 to 1982 (Wastiau 2000). In France, as I have shown, the repatriation context is extremely difficult. Because all that is inside a museum in France is French property, and thus by law inaliénable (cf. Price 2007b), repatriation of anything is virtually impossible. Cultural property and its protection is becoming a global political issue, with indigenous peoples becoming increasingly aware that what is rightfully theirs, from medicinal plant knowledge to rights to reproduce certain kinds of objects and designs, is easily misappropriated by others. In Vanuatu, people are very aware that items of property that were alienated from them and placed in different markets (over which they have no further control) o en produce vast wealth for others over time when they change hands—wealth to which they themselves have no access.

Illicit Trade George Stocking said of museum anthropologists that they need to treat the objects of others “with serious consideration of the ma er of their rightful ownership or the circumstances of their acquisition,” adding that in the colonial past these “were o en questionable” (1985: 11). Early materials taken from Vanuatu include those collected by Captain Cook (during his second voyage in 1774) and other discoverers, adventurers, whalers, traders and missionaries. People sometimes sold and still sell their neighbors’ or family members’ valued items, if they can get their hands on them. This is the problem with the lengnangulong: Guiart is alleged to have bought it from the wrong people, those who were not its kastom owners. A statement of witness, reported to the police on 21 March 2005 by Ralph Regenvanu, mentions the confiscation of a set of stone artifacts from Northeast Malakula on their way to Port Vila for illegal export. Another one, of 24 September 2007 by Marcellin Abong, mentions another set of what was specifically described as tambu stones, also from Northeast

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Malakula. Regenvanu’s statement read that the stones were “stolen from nasara’s in N.E. Malakula” and that the confiscated shipment, in Santo, was the second of its kind in a short time. It had been sent to a man from Neuiha, North Ambrym, who lives in Vila and operates as an intermediary in these transactions, a man known by the Cultural Centre to have been illegally transporting objects for some time. Addressing the problem, Abong’s statement of 2007 to then minister of internal affairs Joe Natuman stressed the ineffectiveness of the Preservation of Sites and Artifacts Law: I could confirm you that those stones, if they go through the world market of art, only one stone could cost 15 million vatu. So how could you imagine 10 stones in world market of arts?—It would cost 150 million vatu. . . . So my le er is to raise concern about the increase of that particular kind of illicit traffic of artifacts. (Abong 2007)

An article in the Vanuatu Independent of Sunday, 11 May 2008 titled “Yapatun Takes Back His Land from America” deals with the case of the navat nambo namalo stone from Botnakal nasara on Vao, a 150-kilogram carved sacred stone for preparing kava that was stolen by an “unspecified North Ambrym man” from the nasara in 2006 and sold to an American collector. The police managed to stop the the at the main wharf in Port Vila, where the American was at the point of exporting it. The Vanuatu Independent reported the testimony of Vianey Yapatun, a VKS filwoka for Vao, who said that his fellow Vao islanders had buried the stone for months on the beach before they shipped it to Santo, where it was transhipped to the North Ambrym contact and then on to Port Vila. Summarizing issues about property, copyright, land, and identity, Vianey Yapatun explained: “The Navat Nambo Namalo is my identity and represents my land. The thieves stole my land to sell it to America, but now I am happy that I have got back my land from the big US” (Vanuatu Independent 11 May 2008). Vianey concluded by saying that, upon his return to Vao with the stone, he was going to hold a kastom meeting with the people of his village who were involved in the deal, in order to “punish them” (Vanuatu Independent 11 May 2008).

Subsistence Carving In Vanuatu, objects made in contexts of revived ritual performance are valued on several levels. One way out of the tensions between the old, the used, and the copy, in fact, is by the production of new objects. As I have shown in previous chapters, these include handicra s as well as recra ed ritual artifacts. In the processes of commoditization of culture and art that

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take place, this is a phenomenon that can be referred to as “subsistence carving.” This is a term derived from “subsistence digging,” used in archaeology to refer to the excavation of archaeological materials for commercial markets (e.g., Staley 1993; Matsuda 1998; Hollowell 2005, 2006). Subsistence digging, however, is not looting, which is the more common definition archaeologists give to such practices. Julie Hollowell, who works on Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait, points out that Saint Lawrence Islanders these days even refer to themselves as subsistence diggers, digging to find archaeological goods to sell—in this case, old ivories—and using the proceeds to support a subsistence lifestyle. For the Bering Strait, it has been estimated that over 1,000,000 American dollars’ worth of archaeological materials are sold each year (Hollowell 2005, 2006). For Vanuatu, such a focus takes us back to Sawan Lensi’s slit-drum on Ambrym and Franklin Woleg’s wooden statue on Mota Lava, objects that were produced without having much use value. Like many objects currently made in Vanuatu, they were made for sale, to provide the owner an income in order to subsist. As Hollowell shows, Saint Lawrence subsistence diggers in fact have received far more benefit from marketing the pieces of their past than they have from archaeology itself (2006: 82). For Vanuatu, in relation to carving, a parallel can be drawn. Herna Abong donated the remade twin gulong and Nalawan Luan Veuv masks to Cambridge through anthropologist Haidy Geismar in 2003, to be lost from his area again, for the second time in a time span of a hundred years. Herna now has the knowledge, however, to remake the masks whenever he wants to. All carving is subsistence carving, or at least an a empt toward it. As in Saint Lawrence, where diggers now have access to estimates in Sotheby’s catalogs (Hollowell 2005), in Vanuatu, men like Herna Abong, but also Chief Sekor and Norbert Nabong on Ambrym, are well-informed and do not sell for a low price, taking ma ers into their own hands. Subsistence carving is fundamentally different from subsistence digging in the sense that, with each and every piece that is removed from the ground and sold to collectors or dealers, it is gone, whereas subsistence carving can replace the loss of continually disputed pieces, those that result in repatriation claims as well as ongoing illicit trade. The past cannot really be lost or saved (Zimmerman 2001: 178). Selling objects is not necessarily equivalent to selling one’s heritage. In spite of their alienability, objects can be seen as a way of inheritance from the past into the future, given that this future is increasingly self-governed. It means giving up objects that, in the carving case, can be recra ed to meet economic needs. In Vanuatu, objects continue to be recra ed by memory by consulting anthropological literature or by techniques of visual repatriation.

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The sale of objects can and should benefit the local communities that produce them. Ideally, the carving of an object for sale in itself poses no problem. Problems start with local a ributions of (in)authenticity, whether things are truly used, danced, or walked or worn for sale, and with disputes over ownership (copyright) and the nature of kastom. The sale of a copy item is a way out of disputes and mistakes, except among those who feel that nothing should go anymore. Carving for subsistence can be a way out of illegal trade, of things being removed without the permission of the owner by neighbors who need the cash, or by friends or family members.

Notes  1. James Clifford referred to the Primitivism exhibition of 1984 at the New York Museum of Modern Art, where works of avant-garde artists such as Picasso, Giacome i, Brancusi, Derain, and Henri Moore were confronted with the “tribal art” pieces that had inspired them (cf. Danto 1984 for a particularly articulate review of Primitivism). The European counterpart of this exhibition opened a few years later, in 1989, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, under the title Magiciens de la Terre.  2. Relating to Gregory Bateson’s collection techniques during his fieldwork among the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea, Andrew Moutu (2007) gives an example of such a moment. As Moutu wrote, a er Bateson’s purchase of two flutes considered valuable by the Iatmul men, a “moment of gloom” set in: “A concern about loss became apparent.” (Moutu 2007: 105). When Bateson queried their worried faces, they asked, “What are you going to do with the flutes? Are you going to take them with you when you go? Will they sing anymore? . . . Will women see them? Who will play them in your country? Can white men play the flutes?” (Bateson 1936: 161–62, in Moutu 2007: 105).  3. Cultural centers and museums in the Pacific have been a proliferating movement for some time and range from the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta and Museum and the Tjibaou Cultural Centre and Museum in New Caledonia to the Polynesian Cultural Center set up specifically for tourists on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i (see Stanton 1989; for a general overview of indigenous museums in the Southwest Pacific, see Stanley 2007).  4. Emmanuel Kaserherou, former director of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre and Museum in Nouméa, has elaborated on this aspect of exhibiting objects and why it is different in a regional museum. As he wrote: “We o en explain why there should be a museum in New Caledonia, but there is some conflict with traditional a itudes. Some of the objects exhibited are very strong and sacred. In traditional society it is a mark of disrespect to show sacred objects to everyone . . . Kanaks are reluctant to visit the museum out of fear of entering a place where artifacts of the past are displayed: visitors ‘feel as if they were entering a cemetery where devils live’” (Kaserherou 1991: 165).

Conclusion

 Artifak The Value of Art in Vanuatu During my stay in Lamap, Southeast Malakula, in 2009, while Herna Abong and I were talking about the heritage of colonialism and white men’s presence, he told me that drugs, muskets, and artifak were the three things of the waetman. What he meant was that, in reverse chronology, drugs and muskets were brought by white people, and artifak were what they took. Drugs were the latest addition, triggered by the influence of tourism. These days, for example, local people refer to Tomman Island as Smol Jamaica, Tomman being a place where people now grow marijuana for export to the urban centers as a new alternative to pay for their children’s and grandchildren’s school fees. Muskets and artifak are older things that were of interest to the waetman. Muskets were introduced in colonial times via planters and traders. They soon replaced weapons of tribal warfare, such as the bow and arrow. Artifak were what mostly interested the waetman at all stages of his presence. They were dragged out of the country in big quantities for over a hundred years. Herna reflected critically on his role in these transactions, most recently as the donator of the remade twin gulong and Nalawan Luan Veuv masks now kept at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As Christopher Steiner has pointed out in relation to aspects of such things-in-motion: Definitions of art, artifact, and commodity typically occur at such interstitial nodes, which act as sites of negotiation and transaction where things must continually be reassessed according to national or regional criteria and local

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definitions. . . . At each point in its movement through space and time, an object has the potential to shi from one category to another and, in doing so, to slide along the slippery line that divides art from artifact from commodity. (2001: 224)

In this book, I have discussed the role of artifak as commodities in Vanuatu, a ributing a central role to people as active agents in transactions. The book has focused on art in a context of tourism development, embedded within a frame of historical collecting, collectors, and former and current local ethnopreneurs. The data collected for this book show that a gap has been closed between what used to be interpreted as tourist art by all (visitors as well as locals) and recra ed artworks that resemble museum pieces in contexts of cultural revitalization as well as tourism. Formerly defined tribal or ethnic arts, such things are now termed customary arts, referring to their roles in cultural revitalization. The making of authenticity at festivals as well as the selling of authenticity have proven to be important markers within these processes. Agents range from tourists and local middlemen to the rare art collector who still comes in, now increasingly using tourist trails. Authenticity entwines with commoditization as well as museums and with value that is a ributed in the local place as well as on the global level. The two main themes of the book consist of the authenticity of people and their performances and the authenticity of the product: the artifak, the art object. The book explored art and commodity, critiquing narrow approaches to these issues and aiming to offer a nuanced view of the ways in which objects are valued in complex and ambivalent ways, both in and out of Vanuatu.

Selling Culture without Selling Out? “Sharing culture” is a term used by Alexis Bunten in her work on tourism in Alaska, a term used by Native American tour guides, who use it to describe their work. What they are in fact doing, she writes, is transforming their culture and identities into alienable products commoditized for outside consumption (2008: 380). As I have shown in my discussion of the various festivals in Vanuatu, participation in the tourism industry can be a powerful catalyst for cultural revival, inside as well as outside of the tourist realm. However, this also poses a danger in relation to the reproduction of those aspects of culture that are consciously protected from appropriation and commoditization. The commoditization of the self is a dual process. It is a politically motivated expression of identity by local people as well as an economic response to the global expansion of the tourism industry, what Bunten refers to as the commodified persona (2008: 380).

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I use the term “selling culture” to refer to two aspects of commoditization: that of the commoditized art object and, related, of the commoditized self. In Vanuatu, he, and as we have seen increasingly also she, does this in a context of cultural revitalization that goes far beyond that of commoditization. As I outline in the book, Damian Skinner and Lissant Bolton see revitalization as an important element in what they term “customary arts,” repeating the factors that stimulate its production. These can be the desire for continuity by local people but also tourism, anthropological intervention, political considerations, or demand in the art world (Skinner and Bolton 2012: 473). Revival is a tool, they write, representing the ongoing relevance of the past in the present by linking contemporary art practices with ideas of the past, while reclaiming the value and meaning of old objects in the present (ibid.: 467). In this book, authenticity is the lens adopted to understand processes of commoditization of self and object in all its varied forms and conceptualized by locals as well as outsiders in parallel ways. When local people become aware of their authenticity as a form of symbolic capital, they can use it to assert new kinds of power (Lindholm 2008: 91). In Vanuatu, this means that people are eager to revive the performative and material aspects of kastom to authenticate their connections to a strong and powerful past that was denied to them for a long time. It also means, however, that they wish to support their lives by providing the experience of authenticity to their tourist audiences and others for profit. Festivals are vehicles for commoditization. They are an example of the authenticity trade, aimed at providing an authentic experience for onlookers. People in Vanuatu authenticate their kastom and validate their access to ancient kalja, while the tourist consumes the experience. To producers as well as consumers of the performed kind of kastom, the authenticity that is most useful is that of “performing the native.” This is why extraneous, “modern” additions are excluded from performance. The commoditization of otherness requires all others to look other. “The authenticity of the native” equals “cannibals” and “savages,” and as a trope this sells in a Western market. People exoticize themselves (Stanley 2007; Lindholm 2008) in order to satisfy demand for “the authentic other.” They offer their culture-as-artifact (Kirshenbla -Gimble 1998: 62) and their wares in created back scenes that serve as authenticators for the occasion. On the local level, this generates disputes on rights and the right or wrong execution of performance and artifacts. Questions of authenticity are important in relation to revival and reproduction, kopiraet, and repatriation. As we have seen, kopiraet is an indigenous authenticating process. To those who seek repatriation, it is important to prove their ancestry in order to claim the ownership of an

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old and valued thing. Lindholm has pointed to the “increased importance placed on blood” in assigning authenticity to art. As he wrote: Marginalized groups seeking to control valuable artistic production now o en claim that only those people proven to be genealogical members of the group . . . have the right and the innate capacity to produce its characteristic art forms. . . . The major issue for determining the authenticity of an art object then becomes the legal and moral question of whether the maker can prove his or her kinship with the group: authenticity equals ancestry. (2008: 21)

In Vanuatu, there is a broadening of the hereditary aspect in gradetaking and the a ached rights of performance and artifacts. The local a ribution “from an important kastom family” is an important one, but it is stretchable. The sale of a copy item, for example, requires copyright (the right to sell the copy). This once more broadens the hereditary aspect of grade-taking and its paraphernalia. Someone who has no grades because he was born and raised as a Christian but who has a father or a grandfather or even a more remote ancestor with links to male power in the graded system can claim rights to access to grades and all that goes with that status (the rights to the regalia, the rights to sell). People recra their old and valued art forms and charge admission to their sacred sites and things, but not without repercussion. In kastom, there is “penalty,” as Herna Abong put it. If prescriptions are not respected, it is o en said, the power of kastom can even kill.

The Value of Art The canoe is made for a certain use, and with a definitive purpose; it is a means to an end, and we, who study native life, must not reverse this relationship, and make a fetish of the object itself. —B. Malinowski, Argnonauts of the Western Pacific

At its origins, anthropology dealt with objects and human remains, what is now o en termed “material culture.” It was centered on the museum, its keeper. From the mid-nineteenth until the early twentieth century, objects were a leitmotif for deducing information about cultures. Then, the discipline matured and turned away from objects and from earlier museum anthropology, via the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. As Jean Guiart put it, the study of what he called “primitive art” was “despised” by anthropologists for a long time (1969: 84). Art moved from center stage to the periphery of the discipline, where it remained until the 1980s–1990s. Since then, objects have been granted new a ention, not merely as signs and symbols of colonial acts and disruptions

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but in more dialectical and positive ways. Art historians, on the other hand, never ceased to study “primitive” or “tribal” art, be it in radically different frameworks—as aesthetically valued and pleasing artworks set in dark backgrounds to make them more dramatic to the viewer—or in white gallery cubes—to strip them of their context and modernize them. Also, art dealers and collectors never ceased to deal or collect. On the contrary, when local trade declined in most parts of the world by the 1980s, auction prices started to reach unseen heights (see Steiner 1994). Tribal art is captured in glossy coffee table books and magazines and catalogues. But, what to make of art history’s basic surveys and textbooks, such as Ernst Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art, where Oceanic, African and Native American art features in the first chapter alongside cave art as “strange beginnings,” not to appear again? What narrative pa erns and preconceptions do these books establish? (Brunt 2012: 498)

“Selling culture” is related to authentication and commoditization. Authenticity itself is a commodity: the authenticity of people, places, and things. But it is also a type of valuation. There is value that is a ributed by local people to their revitalization of culture and material culture, and there are things imbued with value for outsiders. Visitors can massively consume (see, for example, The Golden Hordes by Turner and Ash 1976). They can also consume on a smaller scale, staying in a local bungalow in a remote island location. Local people know that they receive far less for what they offer than they could in distant markets. Their desire and their aim, however, is that they will receive a “good price” (as high as possible), for example for an artwork. Equally, art dealers and collectors also want a “good price” (as low as possible). At the intersection are tourists, art collectors, and middlemen, negotiating different kinds of authentication and valuation. Global processes take place later, once the object is in the auction room or the museum. Locally, use authenticates the object, real or perceived, for all those who are present. Such objects are not intended to be commodities, but they are o en sold. Not to sell makes a thing special; it gives it an “aura.” Selling it makes it mundane. Or as Igor Kopytoff put it, “To be saleable or widely exchangeable is to be ‘common’—the opposite being uncommon, incomparable, unique, singular, and therefore not exchangeable for anything else” (1986: 69). On the other hand, items destined for the market can be termed “the really real” even a er sale. “The real,” most ni-Vanuatu would agree, vanished from the scene by the 1960s–1970s. For North Ambrym, Mary Pa erson witnessed the mage still in operation in the 1960s–1970s, albeit only by a few Big Men. William Rodman documented the Ambae huqe, still in practice at the time of his

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fieldwork in 1970–1971 (see Rodman 1973). By 1991–1992, Lissant Bolton remarked that she had a ended only one huqe grade-taking during her fieldwork (2003c: 100). But while “the last of the real” was disappearing, it was coming back, in different forms. Kastom modified. It had adjusted to new conditions. In those years, Tofor of Fanla was among those who marketed his artifacts, the regalia of his grade-takings, nationally and internationally. As one of the last undisputed Big Men, he legitimized his transactions by selling to galleries and museums and by the production of “imitation ritual objects” (Gourguechon 1977: 273). As Gourguechon illustrated, the “true custom” was not compromised if “imitation ritual objects” were “fabricated and palmed off to unsuspecting foreigners” (ibid.). Tree fern figures, characteristic of all of North and North-Central Vanuatu, are the most representative objects in relation to the occurrence, in the past, of male-graded societies such as the mage on Ambrym, the nimangki and maki on Malakula, and the suqe in the Banks Islands. But it is the collection history of one particular kind of object, the North Ambrym atingting, that best illustrates the commoditization of art in the archipelago. North Ambrym slit-drums are represented in museums worldwide. This is also why, during my fieldwork, several people in the islands told me that “museums do not need anything anymore,” that “they already have everything,” and that “this is the main reason why the artifak market dropped.” As they put it, “The market is spoiled.” In this book, I aimed to critically rethink the term “tourist art.” Distinguishing between handicra s and high art pieces remade in contexts of cultural revival and tourism simply does not work. Throughout Chapters Three and Four, I showed that handicra s for the tourist market are sometimes bought by those who consider themselves knowledgeable and vice versa, that tourists buy masterfully cra ed art pieces. Moreover, handicra s sometimes become highly desired art pieces on the art market. In Chapter Three, I gave the example of the reproduced knives from the Banks Islands. North Ambrymese tree fern figures or bwerang can be painted to be authentic or le unpainted in order to look authentic. They are unpainted to resemble old museum pieces. Most buyers want their sculptures to look like this, old, bearing signs of the wear and tear of time, while the indigenous authenticator is paint. Well-informed tourists and collectors sometimes know this, and prefer painted figures. As a result, painted bwerang, considered truly authentic by local people, can now also be made for sale. While tourist art used to be only the recognizable handicra item that was offered for sale on a local market, nowadays it embraces all kinds of items: they look authentic, are made authentic, or are considered truly authentic by their makers, and all are offered for sale. This infuses disputes about the nature of kastom and its objects. What ob-

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jects are for sale? And is simply anything for sale? Throughout this book, I have shown that there are regional differences. I have a ached importance to the local term artifak, used by some to refer to all these things together. Artifak are all of the above: they can be sold, they can be kept, they are increasingly important and increasingly imbued with values. At the forefront of issues of authentication and commoditization, on a global level, are museums in the West. They are at the intersection of contexts of ownership and repatriation and of ongoing commoditization and things incessantly leaving the country, in both legal and illegal ways. They are at the intersection of production and consumption of things, many of which were never intended to be preserved in the first place. The lengangulong sacred stone of North Ambrym, which became an icon of Vanuatu art over time, is at exactly such an intersection. As we saw in Chapter Five, its collector Jean Guiart claims that the putative owners, as Christians, are not authentic enough to take repossession of their alienated property, while local people are disputing the same kinds of issues among themselves. It is the authenticity of a “real person” of a place or a descendant of an ancestor that gives credence to one’s claims to ownership and copyright, and to the right to sell. Guiart’s authenticity as a collector is also debated. He is now being blamed by the North Ambrymese for having stolen the stone in 1949. This is an ongoing problem, a friction that goes with collecting and trade. According to Herna Abong in Lamap, objects should neither be collected nor destroyed anymore but kept in the tabu room at the Cultural Centre, implying that he would rather have his two remade masks there, where he would be able to access them whenever he wanted, than in Cambridge. Museums have a balancing act to play. As arbiters of the authentic work of art, they not only shape the market and create supply and demand but are also at the forefront of negotiations with the source communities of which they hold the materials. They can be platforms for reproduction and revitalization, for political debate, and for legal claims such as those for the repatriation of highly valued goods and human remains. The unhappy marriage between anthropology and art history meant that all sorts of practices flourished for a long time, from the to the widespread production of forgeries. In North America, NAGPRA and the more recent phenomenon of propatriation (Moore 2010) resulted in thousands of repatriations of objects and bones. Propatriation presupposes the replacement of an old object with a newly made one in the museum that returns the old piece to its original community. Subsistence carving, like digging, presupposes not that the carver/digger is looting his heritage but rather that he sees this work and

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his business as a resource and as an investment for the future. Instead of the anthropologist or the archaeologist or the tourist or the art collector coming in to collect or to excavate the land, the subsistence carver is a proactive agent, selling what he thinks is appropriate and se ing his price. Propatriation and subsistence carving can be ways out of mistakes and disputes over ownership in Vanuatu, copyright, the second kind of copyright, and disputes over the nature of kastom. With supply exceeding demand, however, they are vague aspirations by only a few people who will not sell for prices that they consider too low. Producers and consumers compete against each other and among themselves. As David Graeber has noted, a market-based ideology presents us with a set of propositions: “We are unique individuals who have unlimited desires; since there is no natural cutoff point at which anyone will have enough power, or money, or pleasure, or material possessions, and since resources are scarce, this means we will always be in at least tacit competition” (2001: 257). The way to win is by money, which, unlike the object, does not have a pedigree: it does not cling to its former owner (ibid.: 214). When high arts or, in contemporary se ings of revival, customary arts become commercial, they shi meaning and value: from the island to the auction room, and onwards. Ni-Vanuatu evaluations of objects are situated in between their local interpretations and the art world engagement that is becoming increasingly familiar to them. There is a continuity between the old museum piece and the customary art item. A problem is that ni-Vanuatu are at the start of the long chain of distribution: of transit, transition, and the marketing of their culture and artifacts. The local artist knows what the value of his artwork is in a Paris art market, not just its price but also its aesthetic value to Westerners, as a beautiful or a grotesque thing in circles of connoisseurs and art lovers. On the other hand, a museum visit is a form of consuming culture, even if transported into the West. In museums, the search for pristine, authentic culture continues. A museum visitor, however, does not need to be a tourist in order to experience the “authentic exotic,” that which all of these alien visitors assume they have lost. Artifak produced by contemporary ni-Vanuatu people are valued objects. They are subject to much debate over their authenticity and their aesthetic and cultural value. These issues are negotiated through transactions between ni-Vanuatu, tourists, and art collectors and dealers. When those involved do not evaluate in the same ways, creative solutions are sought. One particularly successful strategy is that of copy use: the wearing of objects to make them saleable. To local people, however, even a copy item for sale has intrinsic value. Wearing the paraphernalia that were once signs of status and prestige gives pride to the wearer and, in the right

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circumstances, renewed status and prestige. While the sale of art objects is an important source of income and prestige for ni-Vanuatu, these objects also generate ambivalence. Underlying the positive material benefits made through sale to tourists and collectors is a concern that these transactions form part of issues of appropriation and cultural loss.

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 Index Akhamb, 114 Amok, 7, 115, 132, 140, 170 anthropologist(s), 19, 22, 23, 29, 32, 34, 39, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 80, 82, 95, 101, 103, 121, 124, 137, 142, 178, 207, 209, 211, 216, 220 archaeologist(s), 38, 39, 121, 163, 211, 220 artefacts, 41, 68, 112, 199 artifak, 4, 54, 55, 87, 130, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220 Atchin, 32, 73, 172 atingting, 1, 3, 24, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 84, 87, 95, 99, 130, 139, 146, 147, 159, 168, 170, 188, 218 Avok, 21, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 130, 133, 140, 152, 153 Back to My Roots (BTMR), 19, 20, 21, 25, 73, 88, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 138, 139, 140, 145, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 163, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 207 Bangim, 72, 73, 182 Banks Islands, 4, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 33, 34, 37, 47, 48, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 113, 130, 134, 147,

148, 149, 159, 161, 166, 183, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 206, 218 Banks Group, 20, 55, 78, 137, 191 Banks Inseln, 56 batù, 34, 64, 84, 153 Big Man/Men, 5, 7, 8, 21, 45, 49, 51, 55, 65, 67, 72, 80, 81, 83, 96, 100, 101, 112, 121, 142, 165, 174, 176, 176, 205, 217, 218 big nambas, 7, 104, 114, 122, 140, 150, 151, 159, 170, 178 blackbirding, 109, 132 blak palm, 55, 73 Bong, 7, 142, 143, 170 Bongmeleun, 103, 176, 207 Bunlap, 7, 141, 142, 143, 144, 170 Bwehaltalam, 71, 72, 93 Bwerang, 1, 2, 3, 18, 24, 34, 55, 64, 65, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 84, 87, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 107, 130, 153, 184, 185, 187, 191, 199, 218 bwerang ver, 105, 106, 107 bwerang yanyan, 34, 73, 84 Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), 36, 37, 51, 68, 81, 84, 202, 204 carver(s), 28, 43, 71, 72, 75, 93, 99, 100, 101, 135, 139, 156, 158, 159,

262

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Index

163, 166, 167, 191, 192, 208, 219, 220 Chefs d’Oeuvres/Masterpieces exhibition, 63, 100, 178 collector(s), 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 37, 38, 43, 55, 59, 62, 70, 71, 72, 76, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 109, 112, 121, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 174, 175, 178, 182, 186, 188, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221 Commerce, 19, 25, 34, 44, 66, 101, 104 commissioner(s), 71, 135, 156, 157, 158, 162 connoisseur(s)/connoisseurship, 11, 12, 15, 17, 28, 90, 129, 135, 158, 164, 165, 167, 173, 220 copyright, 5, 17, 24, 25, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 55, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 87, 102, 108, 119, 161, 162, 163, 167, 174, 192, 204, 206, 210, 212, 216, 219, 220 curator(s), 37, 39, 55, 56, 62, 81, 89, 147, 157, 158, 161, 165, 180, 186, 191, 195, 200, 205 customary art(s), 12, 17, 95, 96, 97, 130, 134, 144, 145, 147, 214, 215, 220 dealer(s), 9, 11, 12, 43, 61, 67, 68, 83, 86, 95, 98, 101, 109, 156, 158, 165, 172, 186, 187, 188, 191, 197, 207, 211, 217, 220 Dravail, 80, 82, 114, 120, 121, 156 Efate, 7, 37, 55, 65, 84, 103, 124, 136, 143, 161, 162, 163 Fanchiwiri, 140 Fanla, 7, 49, 51, 55, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 103, 104, 105, 132, 139, 140, 153, 154, 159, 163, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176, 193, 207, 218 Fansar, 73, 182 Farun, 114, 115, 118, 119, 125, 127

fenbi, 34, 73, 84 Field Museum, 36, 37, 56, 57, 61, 208 Filwoka(s), 20, 21, 24, 40, 43, 55, 99, 115, 118, 120, 124, 175, 176, 191, 193, 200, 205, 206, 210 Fona, 1, 3, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 42, 55, 70, 71, 72, 87, 91, 92, 96, 105, 110, 122, 132, 140, 144, 145, 146, 149, 163, 168, 187, 188, 193 fraet, 43, 177 funerary effigies, 5, 6, 24, 39, 65, 80 Gaua, 104, 113, 137, 191, 192 gulong, 37, 81, 114, 115, 117, 202, 205, 211, 213 ngulong, 64 twin gulong, 37, 81, 202, 205, 211, 213 har, 1, 69, 77, 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 132, 139, 143, 147, 149, 152, 154, 155, 160, 179, 182 Hemta, 72 hiwir, 176, 177, 207 illicit trade, 209, 211 Kali, 7, 115, 140 kastom coaches, 115, 121 kastom disputes, 25, 112, 162, 174, 175, 176 kastom mistakes, 25, 112, 162, 174, 175 kiaman kastom, 175, 176 (kastom) kopiraet, 44, 45, 167, 176, 215 kwetie tamat, 77, 78, 79, 100, 134 Lamap, 7, 21, 24, 37, 38, 45, 46, 51, 55, 56, 66, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 140, 148, 152, 153, 156, 159, 175, 177, 188, 203, 204, 205, 206, 213, 219 lengnangulong, 25, 63, 64, 65, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 193, 198, 199, 201, 205, 207, 209 Leviamp, 104, 122, 159, 161

Index •

Likon, 72, 172 Lilonbu, 72 Louvre (museum), 63, 65, 76, 78, 79, 100, 178, 180, 181, 184, 193, 194, 199, 202, 207 luan, 34, 37, 64, 81, 84, 119, 163, 202, 204, 205, 206, 211, 213 Luganville, 23, 70, 98, 103, 114, 136, 143, 148, 161, 174, 188 Magam, 21, 25, 75, 76, 110, 157, 159, 178, 179, 180, 184, 193, 200 mage, 33, 34, 35, 52, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 126, 130, 139, 145, 153, 162, 163, 174, 176, 177, 185, 193, 199, 207, 217, 218 Magekon, 176, 207 mage ne bul, 75, 76, 145 mage ne bwerang ver, 105, 106, 107 mage ne hiwir, 176, 177, 207 mage ne meleun gatlam, 193 mage lon bul, 193 mage ne sagaran, 77, 106, 107, 111, 126, 130, 145, 163 maki, 33, 34, 35, 52, 73, 218 Malakula Festival, 19, 21, 25, 45, 88, 104, 113, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 126, 131, 140, 148, 152, 153, 157, 177 Reef Island Life, 88, 104, 113 male-graded ritual, 43, 64, 77, 80 male ritual, 34, 37, 174 male-graded societies, 33, 34, 78, 101, 102, 107, 175, 218 malmal, 48, 177 Mal Meleun, 103 Mal Meurt, 72 masterpiece(s), 1, 12, 24, 29, 62, 63, 64, 65, 76, 87, 88, 98, 99, 100, 135, 145, 157, 165, 166, 178, 188, 189, 198 Melanesia, 5, 12, 26, 30, 32, 37, 40, 42, 52, 56, 57, 68, 83, 102, 124, 132, 141, 168, 170, 179, 206 Melanesians, 26, 33, 39, 81, 96, 168, 196 meleun, 21, 81, 120, 121, 176, 193 Melvar, 72, 103, 132, 139, 176

263

Metamli, 72, 132, 140 Metropolitan Museum, 54, 68, 84, 158, 207 middlemen, 19, 21, 59, 60, 70, 71, 127, 131, 134, 156, 157, 158, 162, 214, 217 middle-women, 55, 68, 157, 158 Mota, 49, 64 Mota Lava, 20, 21, 48, 63, 78, 80, 97, 98, 99, 100, 137, 159, 211 Museum der Kulturen, 5, 7, 36, 158 nagol, 4, 40, 131, 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 162, 168, 178 nakamal, 22, 26, 108, 116, 155, 168, 201 Nalawan, 34, 35, 36, 37, 81, 104, 114, 184, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 211, 213 Nalawan luan veuv, 37, 81, 202, 204, 205, 206, 211, 213 Nalawan Mbalmbal, 34 nalnal, 87, 122, 152, 157, 166 nambas, 7, 8, 43, 46, 47, 49, 104, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 140, 150, 151, 159, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178 nasara(s), 45, 55, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 101, 103, 118, 120, 121, 139, 145, 146, 156, 186, 173, 175, 184, 204, 210 National Festival, 19, 21, 102, 112, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 145, 148, 153, 159, 160, 163, 174, 177 National Arts Festival, 19, 25, 88, 102, 103, 104, 120, 123 nenna, 74, 191 nertum, 98, 134, 191, 192 Neuiha, 21, 71, 72, 103, 105, 106, 112, 157, 159, 210 Nevinbumbaau, 35, 36 Nevinbur, 35, 36, 65, 87, 88, 152, 168, 188 New Caledonia, 32, 37, 59, 61, 67, 102, 116, 121, 137, 150, 158, 200, 212 New Hebrides, 4, 7, 32, 47, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 142, 166, 170, 191, 199 Neuen Hebriden, 56 nimangki, 34, 73, 80, 81, 82, 114, 121, 133, 159, 175, 186, 218 (Ni)Mangki, 33, 34, 35, 52

264

•

Index

ni-Vanuatu, 37, 39, 40, 43, 49, 55, 115, 124, 130, 137, 161, 162, 193, 201, 206, 217, 220, 221 Nobul, 1, 103, 140, 147, 149, 156 Olal, 21, 84, 123, 157, 159 painters, 158 Parcours des Mondes, 9, 25, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Paris, 1, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 25, 28, 35, 36, 37, 54, 62, 65, 68, 70, 76, 81, 97, 98, 99, 112, 162, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 212, 220 Pavillon des Sessions, 4, 63, 65, 76, 100, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 193, 194, 207 Port Vila, 7, 8, 18, 19, 20, 23, 30, 38, 44, 48, 49, 55, 67, 68, 73, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 99, 102, 103, 104, 106, 112, 113, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 136, 145, 146, 148, 149, 160, 162, 178, 180, 183, 209, 210 protagonists (objects), 24, 55, 63, 64, 65, 84, 165

129, 132, 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 163, 173, 177, 184, 185, 207 rom tatatoro, 108, 132, 153 Rowa, 78 Ruan, 34

Quai Branly (museum), 8, 9, 28, 35, 36, 54, 65, 68, 81, 132, 163, 178, 180, 182, 187, 188, 200, 202, 205, 207

sagaran, 77, 106, 107, 111, 126, 130, 145, 163, 176 Saint Andrews Festival, 19, 48 Santo, 34, 37, 60, 61, 63, 98, 103, 124, 136, 143, 149, 161, 210 secret societies, 4, 34, 35, 65, 96, 114, 119, 158, 175, 185 slit-drum(s), 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 18, 20, 24, 35, 36, 38, 43, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 84, 87, 92, 93, 118, 135, 144, 145, 146, 149, 157, 159, 160, 174, 184, 187, 200, 202, 203, 207, 211, 218 small nambas, 8, 150, 151 Sola, 78, 156 Southwest Bay, 7, 8, 32, 52, 62, 104, 114, 126, 137 specimens, 5, 56, 61, 195, 196 Spirit Blong Bubu i Kam Bak, 37, 180, 202 stret kastom, 115, 116, 118, 121, 174, 175, 176, 177, 204 subsistence carving, 210, 211, 212, 219, 220 Suqe, 33, 34, 35, 63, 73, 78, 185, 218

Ra, 19, 20, 21, 22, 48, 49, 55, 78, 79, 80, 98, 99, 100, 104, 134, 159 rambaramp, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 24, 35, 39, 55, 56, 64, 65, 80, 82, 83, 88, 156, 158, 164, 165, 168, 175, 186, 188, 190, 200 Ranhor, 72, 103 repatriation, 8, 10, 25, 38, 39, 55, 98, 99, 100, 162, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 215, 219 respect, 24, 49, 50, 51, 175, 199 rispek, 49, 50, 51, 120, 177 rom, 4, 34, 48, 64, 84, 87, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 126, 127, 128,

Tain Mal, 7, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 103, 118, 132, 159, 163, 170, 176, 177, 201 tamate, 34, 49, 64, 65, 96, 159, 166, 185, 188, 206 tambu fae, 74, 96, 118, 163 Tanna, 30, 33, 63, 84, 104, 136, 137, 151, 161 temes nevinbur, 35 Tin Meleun, 68 Tjibaou Cultural Centre, 212 Tofor, 7, 49, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 159, 163, 168, 169, 170, 176, 177, 193, 201, 207, 218 tok haed, 51

Index •

Tomman, 102, 159, 160, 161, 174, 213 Torres Islands, 4, 33, 34, 37, 58, 63, 66, 73, 76, 78, 84, 185, 132 tourist(s), 5, 6, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 30, 31, 38, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 63, 67, 70, 78, 81, 86, 87, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 164, 172, 174, 176, 177, 185, 186, 193, 201, 204, 206, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221 tourist art(s), 12, 16, 25, 29, 31, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 96, 134, 151, 164, 165, 214, 218 trade, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 23, 25, 26, 29, 44, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 89, 132, 137, 139, 151, 183, 186, 194, 209, 211, 212, 215, 217, 219 traffic, 66, 210 tree fern figure(s), 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 20, 24, 35, 55, 57, 61, 63, 65, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 87, 98, 134, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 157, 175, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 200, 201, 202, 207, 218 tree fern sculptures, 38, 75 trrou körrou, 63, 64, 65, 182, 183, 184, 200 “the blue man,” 182, 183, 184, 194 tu kaen kopiraet, 45, 46, 123, 152, 161

265

Turmalau, 21, 24, 91, 97, 113, 191, 192 Vureas Bay, 20, 21, 24, 104, 191 Uliveo, 19, 21, 45, 46, 88, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 131, 140, 148, 152, 153, 157, 177 Unmet, 114, 116, 122, 126 Ureparapara, 103, 149, 159 Uripiv, 114 Vanua Lava, 20, 21, 24, 76, 78, 91, 97, 98, 99, 104, 113, 137, 156, 191, 192 Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC, Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta), 2, 8, 18, 21, 24, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 82, 99, 103, 114, 115, 120, 123, 124, 143, 144, 175, 176, 179, 180, 186, 191, 193, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 212 Vanuatu Stael, 37, 81, 202 Vao, 7, 32, 47, 52, 73, 125, 139, 183, 210 Vatu kastom, 46, 83, 116, 118, 173, 175, 176, 204 vatu kranky, 82, 83 Vien, 114 Virembat, 7, 115, 170 Wala, 18, 32, 94, 140, 149, 150, 151, 172 Warsangul, 33, 35, 52, 73 yachtie(s), 19, 45, 46, 47, 87, 104, 116, 118, 124, 126, 135, 137, 139, 146, 147, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 163, 167, 174, 175, 182