Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu 9781800734654

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FIRE ON THE ISLAND

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology General Editor: Rupert Stasch, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations. Recent volumes: Volume 13

Volume 8

Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu Tom Bratrud

Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann

Volume 12

In Memory of Times to Come: Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea Melissa Demian Volume 11

Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft Volume 10

Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town Anthony J. Pickles Volume 9

Dreams Made Small: The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia Jenny Munro

Volume 7

Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Communities in Pacific Modernities Edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman Volume 6

Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands Debra McDougall Volume 5

The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power Jeffrey Sissons Volume 4

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora Ping-Ann Addo

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/asao

Fire on the Island Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu

• Tom Bratrud

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2022 Tom Bratrud

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 written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2022004816

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

ISBN 978-1-80073-464-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-465-4 ebook

For my family in Norway and Vanuatu

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Notes on Text Chronology: The Revival Process Introduction. Fear, Hope and Social Movements

•

viii x xv xviii xxi 1

Chapter 1. Life and Death

15

Chapter 2. Love and Land

40

Chapter 3. The Revival Begins

65

Chapter 4. Gender and Integrity

87

Chapter 5. Spiritual War

108

Chapter 6. Crises and Reconciliations

130

Chapter 7. Hope, Blame and New Possibilities

153

Conclusion

175

Appendix: ‘Jesus, You Are My Helper’

183

Glossary

184

References

189

Index

206

Illustrations

•

Figures

0.1. Phelix on mainland Malekula with Ahamb Island in the back. Photo by the author. 0.2. Women and children during a revival event in the Ahamb Presbyterian community church. Photo by the author.

xxvi 5

1.1. The sorcery trial that took place on 23 June 2014 following the sudden and surprising death of the four-year-old boy, Eliot. Photo by the author.

25

1.2. The opening ceremony of the revival convention for all Presbyterian Churches in Malekula, Farun village, September 2014. Photo by the author.

26

2.1. Eilen performing love (soemaot lav) when giving out freshly baked bread during a fundraiser to prepare a relative’s wedding. Photo by the author.

44

2.2. Custom ceremony to appoint the new hae jif on Chiefs’ Day, 5 March 2014, two weeks before the revival was initiated. Photo by the author.

61

2.3. A sculpture in front of the Ahamb community church. Photo by the author.

62

3.1. Ahamb people following the revival introductory programme. Photo by the author.

77

4.1. South Malekulan societies follow a patrilocal residence practice. Women ‘marry out’ and live in different nasara, but often meet to do collaborative work. Here, Lena (left), has gathered a group of women to cook and chat in her natal village of Merirau. Photo by the author.

90

4.2. Isacky initiating a kava ceremony to express gratitude and respect to Jakon, who had been successful in treating his mother’s sickness with herbal medicine (lif ). Photo by the author.

91

Illustrations

ix

4.3. Two young men are stopped in the screening for having tu tingting. Here, the men are praying for forgiveness with the visionary children after instructions from the latter. Photo by the author.

103

5.1. Visionaries saw that a group of sorcerers were flying in by su towards Ahamb. A group here is praying against the flying sorcerers, holding up a Bible in their direction. Photo by the author.

118

5.2. Children working in the house of Parker and Jane. Photo by the author.

119

5.3. Children and adults mobilise after visionaries reported that flying sorcerers had landed in a tree nearby. Photo by the author.

120

5.4. After a long day of chasing invisible sorcerers who had allegedly landed on Ahamb to try to kill someone, the visionaries declared that the sorcerers had flown away. Photo by the author.

121

6.1. The grand reconciliation ceremony between the community and Eneton on 9 November 2017. Photo by the author.

146

7.1. A number of visionary children are lining up to convey their revelations to the congregation. Children and women are laying slen on the floor after being filled with the Holy Spirit. Photo by the author.

163

Maps

0.1. Vanuatu in the Southwest Pacific. Map produced with the permission of CartoGIS Services, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

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0.2. Malekula, also spelled Malakula, in Vanuatu. Map produced with the permission of CartoGIS Services, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

xxiv

0.3. South Malekula with Ahamb Island in the centre. Map by Tine Bratrud.

xxv

Preface

•

‘What’s that?’, Jelen suddenly exclaimed. She froze and a worried look appeared on her face. Then I heard it too: the loud noise of crying, howling and screaming. The overwhelming sound was accompanied by a choir of voices intensely singing a prayer, as if trying to repel the distress that was causing the crying: Hiling han blong Jisas hemi tambu tumas! Sapos yu nidim bae i save hilim yu! Han blong hem i fulap long ol meresin Hiling han blong Jisas hemi tambu tumas!

The healing hand of Jesus is very Holy! If you need it He can heal you! His hand is filled with medicine The healing hand of Jesus is very Holy indeed!

The scene took place one afternoon in late May 2014 on the small island of Ahamb, just off the south coast of Malekula in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. It was five months into my second fieldwork on the island, and I was sitting outside the house of my Ahamb adoptive parents, Jelen and Herold, with a group of neighbours. As we often had done over the past few months, we had taken a break from our daily routines to chat about recent happenings that seemed to be turning life on the island upside down: little children had become trusted religious leaders and focal points of the community; inveterate land claimers were voluntarily giving away land to political opponents in public ceremonies; women, who normally have no position from which they can address men in public, were reprimanding male community leaders on a daily basis; and sorcerers, who normally operate in secret, were handing over their remedies to the community. These happenings were all part of a startling Christian revival movement that had dominated much of island life over the past two months. A main characteristic of the revival was that it was led by about thirty children with spiritual gifts who, for a total of nine months, were offering daily messages from the Holy Spirit to the community about who was blessed, who was cursed and what evil needed to be defeated so that people could receive salvation as the Last Days were drawing near. The revival was frequently talked about as ‘cleaning the island’ (klinim aelen), as it developed in the wake of enduring political disputes and division in the community. The visionary children proclaimed that if people opened their hearts to the Holy Spirit, its presence would be able to change the very fabric of life on the island, including the

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pressing disputes, the division they caused and the sorcery attacks that often follow on from such disputes. The crying we heard from the village made us uneasy for a specific reason. Emily, a visionary girl of eight years old, had suddenly fallen sick and fainted in church the night before. While sitting seemingly unconscious on the lap of her worried father, she had been shaking and turning restlessly around. Her sudden and inexplicable condition was attributed to sorcery, which was believed to have had a dramatic upsurge in the past week. The upturn of sorcery had begun when a group of visionary children found a stone they claimed was infused with sorcery (baho or posen) outside the island’s community hall. The children stated that the stone was placed there by ill-meaning sorcerers, who were normally political opponents to some Ahamb leaders, in order to create division in the community. Sorcery is a highly concealed endeavour in Vanuatu and is perhaps what Ahamb people fear most in their everyday lives as it is used to secretly injure and kill. The finding of the stone marked the beginning of an intense period where the community, after instructions from the visionaries, started removing supposed sorcery objects meant to hurt the islanders. In response, the visionaries conveyed that a grand network of furious sorcerers mobilised to attack people on Ahamb, particularly the children who were responsible for taking away the sorcerers’ powers. The fear of the sorcerers mobilised the community in a range of activities to protect the children and one another. As I will discuss in this book, people’s fear of sorcery, alongside their hopes of making an end to the insecurity it was causing, became a potent driving force of the revival movement for several months. It also led to the tragic murder of two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for many of the island community’s problems. At Jelen and Herold’s, my relatives and I feared that the sudden crying, screaming and praying meant we had lost Emily to her condition, whatever its cause. We agreed that I should go and find out what was going on. Following the enduring sounds, I ended up in the yard of Sebastian and Lena, a couple in their late thirties. The yard was packed with people. Behind their house was a busy and lively scene with rows of onlookers standing around a big tree. The tree had been climbed by two men who held torches in their mouths and looked restlessly around. On the ground were around fifteen visionary children who were crying, shaking and conveying visions and messages – supposedly from the Holy Spirit – to the crowd and the men in the tree. Occasionally, some of the children fainted and fell to the ground, indicating that they were ‘slain in the Spirit’, meaning to be struck and overcome by the powers of the Holy Spirit. In several places in this book, I refer to Vanuatu people’s own verb to slen to describe this reaction. In Chapter 1, I also describe how I came to slen myself during a ceremony, which shows how my own psyche as an ethnographer was not left untouched by taking part in the startling revival events.

xii Preface

While watching the scene unfold in Sebastian and Lena’s yard, fellow onlookers explained to me that the visionary children had seen, through their spiritual vision, four men in the yard who wanted to kill Sebastian. The men were using sorcery and had taken the form of a cat in order to enter the yard without raising neighbours’ suspicions. However, at the moment, the men seemed to have made themselves invisible, which is yet another ability ascribed to sorcerers. People speculated if the men wanted to kill Sebastian because of his prominent position as a councillor in the provincial government, to which he had been appointed a few months earlier. Holding a prestigious position is often found risky in Vanuatu because it can be weaved into previous status rivalries and political conflicts. It can also cause resentment in kin and others to whom one engages in reciprocal commitments if they feel overlooked in allocations of resources and opportunity. Sorcery can then be used to bring down an opponent and level out difference. During the revival, the visionaries were attacking sorcery as a destructive symptom of such rivalry and inequality, but also the principles on which such rivalry and inequality rested, mainly disputes over land rights and leadership, which I will discuss in Chapter 2. According to the visionaries, two of the four sorcerers who planned to kill Sebastian were now up in the tree, but had taken the form of lizards. That is why the two men with torches had climbed the tree – they were looking for the sorcerers in lizard form. The crying and shaking children on the ground were occasionally conveying visions about the whereabouts of the sorcerers to the men in the tree and people on the ground shining their torches frantically around in response. Suddenly, a big lizard fell down from the tree. People jumped to all sides and the lizard ran and disappeared into a bush. Men and boys ran after with machetes, cutting the plants around them in the direction it had run. An intense hunt for the lizard ensued, supported by loud and energetic prayers from the crowd to make the Holy Spirit’s powers stop it from getting away. After some intense minutes, a group of men eventually managed to kill the lizard. The killing brought a sigh of relief after what had, for most participants, been a quite obscure situation forced upon them that afternoon. However, after a few minutes’ break, the visionaries were again crying desperately, screaming and shaking. They were pointing towards something that was seemingly moving quickly on the ground towards Sebastian and Lena’s house. Amanda, a visionary girl aged thirteen, suddenly jumped in the air while wriggling and shouting that her body was itching. The itching, we had learned, was a reaction of the visionaries after coming into contact with a sorcerer, a sorcery object or a spirit used for sorcery. The visionary children shouted and pointed to the ground, indicating that the sorcerer who had struck Amanda was about to escape. The men with machetes immediately started pulling up plants by their roots, cutting them down and digging into the ground after directions from the visionaries, but without any luck. Following the unsuccessful

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search for this sorcerer, some men suddenly started cutting down a big tree in Sebastian and Lena’s yard. The children had stated that it was used as a landing place for sorcerers coming to the island by su, the sorcery of flying, commonly used by sorcerer assassins. The tree had to be removed in order to reduce the risk of future sorcery attacks on the island. After a few hours in Sebastian and Lena’s yard, most of us continued to Ahamb’s Presbyterian community church for the evening’s revival worship service. The revival services were a nightly event held to nurture the presence of the Holy Spirit and get the latest updates from the visionaries. After prayers and singing of worship songs, a number of visionary children conveyed messages and visions from the Holy Spirit about the events in the yard. John, one of my good friends and interlocutors – and Sebastian and Lena’s neighbour – also rose to explain how it all started when some visionary girls had seen a cat by Sebastian and Lena’s house, claiming that it contained one or more sorcerers in disguise. John had grabbed his Bible and joined the visionaries in praying to neutralise the sorcerers’ powers and chase them away, upon which the cat had disappeared, but all of a sudden, in invisible form, he claimed, jumped on his chest. He had felt the weight of it. Other onlookers then shared their experiences. Many reported that the revival was making them simultaneously cheerful, amazed and afraid. It showed them things, and brought them into situations, that they had never experienced before. After the worship service, a thirteen-year-old visionary girl I call Sophie became distracted and suddenly started to scream and cry out loud. Her father came to hold her and calm her down. Other people were also gathering around her to see what was wrong. While crying and turning to her father’s chest, Sophie explained that one of the sorcerers preying upon the children was standing outside the church, waving his hand to call for her because he wanted to kill her. We who were present turned our heads to see what was outside. There stood Ahamb’s long-time sorcery suspect, a man in his sixties I call Orwell. During the revival, the visionaries pointed him out as responsible for many of the district’s unexplainable deaths and troubles over the past two decades. Visionaries also conveyed that he was a leading figure in the sorcerers’ raids to kill the island’s children during the revival. In Chapter 1, I will show how Orwell was eventually targeted and killed by a furious mob for allegedly having caused more than thirty deaths and numerous instances of sickness and misfortune on Ahamb and elsewhere in South Malekula over the past few decades. Since Orwell appeared to be pivotal to the community’s crisis, something about his critical behaviour had to be changed in order to improve the community’s situation. In context of the existential panic that arose, his murder took the form of a sacrifice that, in René Girard’s (2013) terms, was necessary to transform people’s dread and to heal the community (see also Rio 2014a).

xiv Preface

As I will show in the forthcoming chapters, the revival raised many existential questions and answers during its course. It took the community to the point of its collapse, but also to its point of renewal. In the spectacle of the revival, everything seemed to be at stake. It revealed the whole spectrum of cosmic forces and all truths. There was no distinction between symbol and reality, ‘each realising the existential, apocalyptic potency of the other’ (Kapferer 2015b: 94). Trying to understand the revival, including the circumstances under which it emerged and gained so much impact, raises several intriguing questions: how can social upheavals like the Ahamb revival emerge? How can children, who are usually on the lowest level in a social hierarchy, become a renewal movement’s leaders? How can violence be performed in the name of love by people who normally insist that violence is the antithesis of love? How may social movements become a venue in which social problems can be addressed and possibly resolved, while simultaneously carrying the risk of exacerbating the same problems they aim to address? These are some of the questions I will try to answer in this book.

Acknowledgements

•

To make this book possible, I have benefited over the years from the help of so many people, many more than I will be able to mention by name. On Ahamb I have met some of the finest human beings I have ever known, and I will begin with them. I want to thank all Ahamb people for inviting me to live with them during my three periods of fieldwork in 2010, 2014 and 2017. It would require several pages to mention all the individuals who helped me in their different ways, so I will only specify those who became my closest families and helpers. Chief Herold and Jelen, Felix and Lestiny, Kelly, Kathy, Alfred, Marie and Jeremiah. Abel and Espel, Rehap, Bethy and Nixon. The late tötöt Vanny, tötöt Tomsen and kakaf Leto. Tötöt Morvel, tötöt Peter and kakaf Lena. Markai and Merisan. The late Elder Colin and Manatu. Albert and Elise. The late Dickson and Erlyn and all my remaining family in Turak. Graham and Neto. Chief Hedrick and Niely, Tina, Tavina, Jim, Lita and everyone in Meliambor. Pastor Herbert and Gracy. Javet and Erin. Jameson and Markina. Fedrick, Cleta, Jakon, Skepson and everyone in Robanias. Elder Joe, Mirekel, Kalmase and Maryan in Lamburbagor. Chief Kaltau and Vivian with family in Lijongjong. David, Morlin, Unel and everyone in Merirau. The late Lennart in Barmbismur. Jim Knox in Luwoimalngei. Elder John Silik and everyone in Renaur. Chief Johnlamb, Keith, John Kenson and everyone in Rembue. Elder Charlie, Chief Redely, Elder Welken and everyone in Barmar. A big thank you to everyone else I have engaged with in South Malekula for your hospitality and collaboration. In Port Vila, I must thank Col and Anita, Kelvin, Michael, Lydia and everyone in Freswota. John and Vilen in Platiniere. Chief Harry, Rosine and Rolynne in Agathis. MP John Sala, John Graham and their families. Thomas and his family in Manples. Osbourne and the squad. Dorin, Kency and everyone I met from South West Bay. Thank you to Elder Bernard, Elder Roy, Elder Gideon Paul and Pastor Sivi. Hildur Thorarensen, Kristine Sunde Fauske, Michael Franjieh and Daniela Kraemer, thank you for the company and discussions in Vila. Thank you to the former directors at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Ralph Regenvanu and Marcellin Abong, as well as Brian Phillips at the Department of Meteorology, for making the research possible. Thorgeir Storesund Kolshus and Signe Howell have been my long-time mentors and I am deeply thankful for their intellectual encouragement, constructive critique and support over the years. I have benefited greatly from the interest and support of Joel Robbins and I thank him for our good conversations and his encouragement and valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Nils

xvi Acknowledgements

Bubandt and Arndt Schneider for their critical reading of the material in this book and their suggestions on how it could be improved. I thank the editor of the ASAO book series, Rupert Stasch, whose enthusiasm has been key in moving this manuscript forward. I would also like to thank the staff at Berghahn Books, especially Tom Bonnington, Elizabeth Martinez and Keara Hagerty for their engagement in making the book a reality and Jan Rensel for her copyediting and excellent cooperation. I also thank my anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and insights. Their input has without doubt helped to improve the manuscript. I am grateful to the whole academic and administrative staff at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. I would have liked to mention all their names, but will limit myself to those who have been directly engaged with my work over the years: Cato Berg, Kathrine Blindheimsvik, Cecilie Fagerlid, Rune Flikke, Paul Wenzel Geissler, Kirsten I. Greiner, Maria Guzman-Gallegos, Christian Krohn Hansen, Ingjerd Hoëm, Gyro Anna Holen, Marianne E. Lien, Nefissa Naguib, Knut Nustad, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, Nina Rundgren, Mette K. Stenberg, Arve Sørum, Elisabeth Vik, Halvard Vike and Unni Wikan. Matt Tomlinson and Keir Martin have been particularly generous in reading and discussing parts of the book with me. A big thank you to my peers during the doctoral period for the fellowship and for all our discussions: Mónica Amador, Eirik B.R. Anfinsen, Aleksandra Bartoszko, Ola Gunhildsrud Berta, Tuva Broch, Jonas Kuer Buer, Lotte Danielsen, Rune Espeland, Martine Greek, Lena Gross, Nina Alnes Haslie, Kaja Berg Hjukse, Tone Høgblad, Samira Marty, Sara Alejandra M. Monter, Anita Nordeide, Robert Pijipers, Cecilia Salinas, Mikkel Vindegg, Ståle Wig and Kimberly Wynne. I have benefited from several visits and discussions with the people at the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Bergen over the years. Thank you to everyone there, particularly Eilin Holtan Torgersen and Edvard Hviding at the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group. A special thanks to Annelin Eriksen and Knut M. Rio for all your generosity, encouragement, and intellectual and practical guidance over the years since I started preparing for my initial fieldwork in Vanuatu. I have also benefited from the encouragement of other fine scholars whom I have been fortunate to discuss my work with, among them Ruy Blanes, Matthew Engelke, Carlos Fausto, Miranda Forsyth, Naomi Haynes, Susanne Kuehling, Lamont Lindstrom, Michelle MacCarthy, Birgit Meyer, Carlos Mondragon, Michael Scott, Rachel Smith, Marc Tabani, Howard van Trease and Aparecida Vilaça. Thank you all. I am indebted to linguist Tihomir Rangelov who helped me prepare the section on the Ahamb language. Tihomir and I met in Port Vila during my 2014 fieldwork and we quickly started discussing the possibility of him documenting the Ahamb language. Our ideas became a reality, and Tihomir started his fieldwork on Ahamb in 2017. His dissertation on Ahamb grammar was

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successfully defended in 2021. He has also provided me with updates from the island and been a helpful discussion partner. Thank you Halfdan Gimle, Mari Nythun Utheim, Åsmund Sveinsson, Jake Leyland, Jasmin Bubric, Susanne Roald, P.K-folket, Uglelaget and Eirin Breie for all your support, in various ways, during my work on this book. Thanks to my wonderful family Tage, Tine, Bjørg and Terje Bratrud for constant encouragement and support, and for always being there for me. The research in this book would not have been possible without the funding from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Signe Howell’s Fieldwork Scholarship for Master Students, the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture and the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund. It goes without saying that I am tremendously grateful to these institutions for giving me the opportunity to carry out this research. Kerstin Bornholdt and Thor Christian Bjørnstad gave me time to work on the book manuscript while I was employed at the Department of Culture, Religion and Social Studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway. I thank them both for their generosity and understanding. Thanks also to Marianne E. Lien for giving me time to complete the book manuscript after I started as Postdoctoral Fellow in the project ‘Private Lives: Embedding Sociality at Digital “Kitchen-Tables”’ at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Valdres Museum has provided me with office space during several periods of writing, and I thank director Ole Aastad Bråten and the rest of the staff for their hospitality. Earlier versions of some arguments and passages have appeared in other published forms. Parts of Chapter 2 appear in ‘What is Love? The Complex Relation between Values and Practice in Vanuatu’, published in 2021 in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(3): 461–77 (DOI: 10.1111/14679655.13546) and in ‘Asserting Land, Estranging Kin: On Competing Relations of Dependence’ published in 2021 in Oceania 91(2): 280–95 (DOI: 10.1002/ ocea.5305). Parts of Chapter 4 appear in ‘Ambiguities in a Charismatic Revival: Inverting Gender, Age and Power Relations in Vanuatu’, published in 2019 in Ethnos (DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1696855). Parts of Chapter 5 appear in ‘Fear and Hope in Vanuatu Pentecostalism’, published in 2019 in Paideuma 65(1): 111–32 and in ‘Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophecies and a Battle over Sorcery in Vanuatu’ in Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes (eds), Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia, published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-319-56068-7_9) (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Parts of Chapter 7 appear in ‘Paradoxes of (In)Security in Vanuatu and Beyond’, published in 2020 in Journal of Extreme Anthropology 4(1): 177–97 (DOI: https:// doi.org/10.5617/jea.7395). I thank the publishers of these works for making it possible to reproduce or rework elements of them for inclusion in this book.

Notes on Text

•

Language

Ahamb islanders have their own vernacular, referred to by its speakers as naujin sdrato (our language) or as ‘the Ahamb language’ in the linguistic literature (Glottolog code: axam1237, ISO 639-3 code: ahb). The language is one of over thirty Malekulan languages spoken today, and one of over 120 vernacular languages spoken in Vanuatu, the most linguistically diverse country in the world in terms of number of languages per capita (Lynch 1994). Ahamb is a member of the Oceanic sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. Oceanic languages are further subdivided into a number of branches, and Ahamb is in one subgroup with most other languages of central Vanuatu. The Ahamb language has around 950 speakers, most of whom live on Ahamb island (Rangelov, Bratrud and Barbour 2019). Smaller pockets of speakers live on the adjacent mainland of Malekula and in the urban centres, mostly in Port Vila, but also some in Luganville. All members of the Ahamb community also speak Vanuatu’s national language, Bislama, which is widely used, especially among young people, in church, in meetings and in households where one spouse is from another ethnolinguistic group. While Ahamb is the most common language of communication at home, code switching with Bislama is very common. Most Ahamb people today also speak some English, and English is the language of instruction in school from Grade 3 onwards (Bislama is used as the medium of instruction in the first three years of primary education). The Ahamb language borrows heavily from both Bislama and English. My fieldwork was conducted mainly in Bislama, supplemented with words and phrases in the vernacular. I set out to learn the vernacular properly during my second fieldwork, but the revival events compromised my own and my interlocutors’ time and attention to do proper language sessions. In meetings where the vernacular was used, I was for the most part able to follow what was going on, but depended on having the details explained to me afterwards. In the book, terms in Bislama are given in italics and underlined, while terms in the Ahamb language are given in plain italics. Ahamb is rarely written; however, work on standardising an orthography for Ahamb has been going on since 2017, when linguist Tihomir Rangelov started a Ph.D. project to document the Ahamb language. Tihomir has since published a comprehensive grammatical description of Ahamb (Rangelov

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2020a) based on a corpus of annotated Ahamb speech from different genres and other Ahamb texts. The corpus is openly available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) (Rangelov 2020b). A draft Ahamb-BislamaEnglish dictionary is in development and Tihomir has also been working with the community on creating literacy materials in order to boost the status of the Ahamb language and contribute to its maintenance and revitalisation. Tihomir and I have been communicating closely since we first met in Port Vila during my fieldwork in 2014, and his work has been very helpful in clarifying my own uncertainties regarding the Ahamb language. The basic grammatical structure of Ahamb is mostly typical of Oceanic languages (see Lynch et al. 2002). Nouns lack inflection for number or case, but they usually feature a noun marker (historically an article). Possessive constructions are complex and depend on a semantical distinction between inalienable (e.g. body parts or kinship terms) and alienable (all other possessions) nouns. Alienable nouns are further divided into ingestible items (food and drink) and other nouns. This means that the phrases ‘my eye’, ‘my water (for drinking)’ and ‘my water (for bathing)’ are expressed by different constructions. Verbs in Ahamb can take prefixes for person (including inclusive and exclusive first-person nonsingular), number (singular, dual and plural), and a number of tense-aspect-modality markers. As in most other Oceanic languages, adjectives and numerals are structurally the same as verbs. Verb serialisation is common. What sets Ahamb apart from most other related languages is its relatively large vowels inventory and a set of two phonemic bilabial trill sounds (made with vibrations produced by the upper and lower lip), which are typologically very rare (Rangelov 2019). Another unusual feature of Ahamb is a set of special verbal markers that encode events occurring in sequence (Rangelov and Barbour 2020).

Ethics

This book engages with some sensitive material, and I would like to add these notes on ethics. The aim of the book is to present ethnographic material in a way that is as useful as possible to give insight into social phenomena, but without compromising the security and wellbeing of the participants in the study. To protect my interlocutors, I have used pseudonyms in almost all cases. As the ethnography deals to a significant extent with children, I have taken special care to make the visionary children unidentifiable by leaving out or changing details that could identify them. To give the reader a better impression of the startling revival events, I have included some photos in which visionary children appear. To protect their identities, I have in those cases blurred their

xx Notes on Text

faces and other distinguishing features. While anonymisation makes people unrecognisable for those not familiar with the person and place, some characters may inevitably be identifiable by people who know Ahamb well. However, I believe that it is the events themselves and not the individuals involved in them that will be of most interest for the reader. Since the tragic murder of the two men suspected of being sorcerers, I have discussed with their family members, Ahamb chiefs and other affected islanders to what extent I should include this incident in my writings. They have all encouraged me to write about the case to get their stories out. I thank my Ahamb friends and interlocutors, good colleagues, and representatives of the Norwegian Centre for Research Data, the National Committee for Research in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH), and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre for their help with the ethical decisions I have made in producing this book.

Chronology

•

The Revival Process

The Ahamb revival was a complex process consisting of many events, both small and large. In my attempt to understand the revival process, I include in the book what I consider to be significant happenings occurring during the period from 2009 to 2017. Here I present an overview of these happenings with the intention of making it easier to follow the revival process as I present it in the book: – June 2009: Lonour Island near Ahamb is leased to an expatriate. – 31 May 2010: The autochthonous leaders take over the Ahamb Council of Chiefs. – 30 October 2012: General election, in which the autochthonous leaders’ candidate for Member of Parliament (MP) loses to the nonautochthonous leaders’ candidate. – 16 June 2013: Father’s Day, when children performed ‘The Unity Song’ and skit. – November 2013: The revival breaks out in South West Bay, Malekula. – 5 March 2014: Initiation of the hae jif (high chief) on Ahamb. – 25 March 2014: Community forum meeting hosted by the Ahamb Council of Chiefs. – 28–29 March 2014: Revival introductory programme on Ahamb. – 23 May 2014: The first sorcery findings on Ahamb. – 5 June 2014: Lincoln gives away his sorcery herbs (lif). – 21 June 2014: The death of a four-year-old boy, Eliot. – 24 June 2014: Sorcery trial following the death of Eliot. – 14–19 September 2014: Revival convention for the Malekula Presbyterian Church in Farun village, during which Levi confesses to have killed Eliot and others by using sorcery. – 29 October–19 November 2014: Sorcery trial during which five men confess to having killed four people by sorcery. The trial ends with the two suspected sorcerers Orwell and Hantor being hanged.

xxii Chronology

– 22 January 2016: General election, during which Ahamb islanders reunite around a common MP. – February 2017: Reconciliation between an Eneton leader and the Ahamb community’s diaspora chief in Port Vila. – 6–10 November 2017: Community transformation on Ahamb, during which the great community reconciliation takes place on 9 November.

Map 0.1. Vanuatu in the Southwest Pacific. Map produced with the permission of CartoGIS Services, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Map 0.2. Malekula, also spelled Malakula, in Vanuatu. Map produced with the permission of CartoGIS Services, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Map 0.3. South Malekula with Ahamb Island in the centre. South West Bay, where the Malekula revival started, is to the left. Map by Tine Bratrud.

Figure 0.1. Phelix on mainland Malekula with Ahamb Island in the back. Photo by the author.

• Introduction Fear, Hope and Social Movements

The lively evening described in the preface was only one of many similar events that occurred during the revival, but it is not representative of normal everyday life on Ahamb. Ahamb islanders are mostly subsistence farmers and fishers whose daily lives rely on garden work on the hilly coastline of mainland Malekula. Here, people grow various root crops, breadfruit, bananas, fruits and leafy greens for food, while kava and to some extent coconuts for copra serve as cash crops used to pay school fees and the occasional cargo ship ticket to the capital, Port Vila. In addition to garden work and some fishing or shell collecting, daily life on the island typically includes spending time with kin, planning and carrying out little projects in one’s home or for relatives, and attending meetings in church and in community committees. Most Ahamb islanders live on Ahamb itself, and these count about 600. But since the late 1990s, a number of families – currently counting about 250 persons – have migrated to about a dozen new settlements on the Malekula mainland due to lack of space, land disputes, to stay closer to the gardens or to escape the environmental vulnerability of the small, flat island. About 100 islanders also live permanently or temporarily in Port Vila. The research for this book is based on a total of twenty months of fieldwork among Ahamb people – mostly on the island proper, but also among Ahamb families on the mainland and in Port Vila in 2010, 2014–15 and 2017.1 Contemporary Ahamb society consists of a mix of patrilineal clan groups who trace their origins to the island itself and to previous settlements on mainland Malekula. The clans were brought together by conversion processes of the Presbyterian Church starting in the late 1800s, and the present-day Ahamb community, composed of kin groups from various places in South Malekula, was formed in this process. Ahamb people are proud of their Christian history and how it is materialised in their community and way of being: the Ahamb community has a primary school, dispensary, committees for just about any activity, and a thriving congregation, which all came about with the formation of the Presbyterian community church. Like many other societies throughout the Pacific, Ahamb people also take great pride in living up to moral values of love and care that are based in the reciprocal duties of kinship, but have

2

Fire on the Island

been reinforced and magnified with Christianity – a religion that emphasises compassion for others (see Brison 2007; Hollan and Throop 2011; McDougall 2016; Robbins 2004a). The values of kinship and Christianity converge in islanders’ ideas and practice of ‘the Ahamb community’ (komuniti blong Ahamb). For Ahamb people, ‘the community’ refers to a togetherness in kinship, in the Church and in the discrete island being just big enough, and far enough away from surrounding villages, to form a cohesive society. As anthropologists have been careful to point out, the term ‘community’ can be problematic if it evokes functionalist or organic images of a bounded entity (Amit and Rapport 2002: 42). Like every other society, Ahamb is not a circumscribed social entity, and there are fractures and contradictions among its inhabitants, as I will show in this book. But the term and idea of ‘community’ is something that the people themselves are passionately concerned about and something they are constantly seeking to achieve. We can therefore say that, for Ahamb people, community is often the goal, if not the ground, of social life (see also Eriksen 2008; Lindstrom 2011; McDougall 2016; Rasmussen 2015). However, over the past two decades, the island has become particularly rife with disputes over land rights, leadership and questions about who should be eligible to live on the small island, particularly as space and resources are diminishing. The disputes have led to a persisting division in the community, which for many islanders is synonymous with failure to achieve good moral living. The divisions have sometimes led to a breakdown of vital community institutions, including the health committee that runs the dispensary, because committee members have been on different sides in disputes. Divisions have also kept people from participating in communal work and church activities. Moreover, there is a constant fear that disputes and rivalry could lead to sorcery activity whereby someone might hurt their opponent or their opponent’s family in surprising and incomprehensible ways. The divisions and sorcery fears make people anxious about visiting kin in other villages as freely as they would like and about participating in larger ceremonies that attract many people. The context of dispute and division is thus making it harder to realise what most islanders find to be the ideal way of living, which revolves around living together as a unified community of Christian kin. This ideal even seemed impossible – that is, until the revival arrived, offering a framework for transforming society’s maleficent elements into sacred beneficence. In 2014, during my second period of fieldwork, Ahamb became the scene of a startling Christian charismatic revival, which upended many aspects of social life on the island. The discourse of the revival was that ‘all of us must change’ (yumi evriwan mas jenis) and the direction was set by visionary children through messages and visions from the Holy Spirit. At this point, many islanders were longing for a radical change in society because of the disputes,

Introduction

3

divisions and spiritual insecurity related to sorcery fears. The revival became a collective therapy led by the Holy Spirit to move away from division and insecurity and into ‘the true will of God’ (stret rod blong God), which was a path of humility, reverence and unity. It resembled a collective sacrifice – in René Girard’s words (2013), ‘digesting’ society’s bad immanence so that it could be reborn in a new or renewed form. While the revival was a phenomenon that reached many Presbyterian villages in Malekula in 2014–15, it was regarded as having been particularly strong on Ahamb. The overarching argument of this book is that in contexts of insecurity and upheaval, fear and hope are powerful sentiments that work together to become a potent driving force for change. My argument is influenced by philosopher René Descartes, who – in his last published writing, The Passions of the Soul, completed in 1649 – proposes the complementarity of fear and hope, two feelings that are often seen as contradictory: Of hope and fear. Hope is a disposition of the soul to persuade itself that what it desires will come to pass . . . And fear is another disposition of the soul, which persuades it that the thing will not come to pass. And it is to be noted that, although these two passions are contrary, one may nonetheless have them both together . . . When hope is so strong that it altogether drives out fear, its nature changes and it becomes complacency or confidence. And when we are certain that what we desire will come to pass, even though we go on wanting it to come to pass, we nonetheless cease to be agitated by the passion of desire which caused us to look forward to the outcome with anxiety. Likewise, when fear is so extreme that it leaves no room at all for hope, it is transformed into despair; and this despair, representing the thing as impossible, extinguishes desire altogether, for desire bears only on possible things. (Descartes 2015: 264) Put simply, an excess of fear drives out hope and leaves us paralysed, without the capability of acting for change. Similarly, an excess of hope drives out uncertainty and makes us too confident that things will turn out for the good; therefore, there is no need to act for change at all. But fear and hope combined becomes a generator for change: if we fear that something bad may happen, but also hope we can avoid it, we usually work for the good to happen rather than the bad. Similarly, if we hope that something good may happen, but fear that it will not, we are motivated to act for the good to happen instead of the bad. I argue that the stronger the fear and hope, the higher the possibility that people will seek ritual events like the revival that allow them to ‘break free from the constraints or determinations of everyday life’ to possibly alter, change or transform them (Kapferer 2006b: 673). As Bruce Kapferer maintains, rituals imply a notion of temporary autonomy from one’s surround-

4

Fire on the Island

ings and can therefore become generative centres for creativity and change in which outcomes are relatively open and not confined to the limits of the current everyday world (Kapferer 2005: 46–49). Kapferer’s view resonates with that of Erika Summers-Effler (2002), who points out the importance of rituals in driving social movements forward. Drawing on Durkheim’s (2008) ideas of collective effervescence – that is, the extraordinary energy created when individuals come together in the same thoughts and participate in the same action – Summers-Effler argues that the moral solidarity generated by ongoing or repeated ritual is crucial for social movements because these depend so highly on the emotional energy of hope. Ritual experiences of solidarity and progress are necessary for social movements, she contends, because they have the power to transform participants’ feelings of depression, anger and shame into feelings of hope. It is this hope that generates participants’ willingness to take risks on behalf of the movement in order to work for creating change (Summers-Effler 2002: 54–55). However, because of the potential openness of rituals, they can also become an unpredictable space that generates a range of different unintended outcomes. As shown at several points in this book, rituals meant to drive participants in a certain direction towards certain goals may easily lead to new risk, uncertainty and problems. I argue that this is because although followers agree on the movement’s ideological project, they may have different desires, interests and interpretations, which are revealed when the movement’s ideas are turned into practice as it moves along. Attempts of participants to resolve such ambiguities will eventually feed back into the dynamics and practice of the movement and affect its forms, meanings and outcomes in ways that can be as disturbing as they are ordering. Pertinent to the Ahamb revival, Ernesto Laclau (2018) claims that those who unite in popular political movements often do so because of a shared frustration with current authorities and the status quo. The movement’s adherents are constituted as ‘the people’, which appear as a unified political force of opposition. However, Laclau argues that such movements are normally fragile constructs. The unity of the group is often based on participants identifying with one another by and through their common opposition to something or somebody. But this does not mean that the unity of the group is secured by common desires and demands. In reality, the demands of the followers are numerous and heterogeneous, and often even incompatible (see also Bennett 2012: 19). The movement itself, its rituals or its images – which have come to represent the totality of unsatisfied social demands – thus become an empty signifier. It merely points to a lack, an absent social fullness – a longed-for but unrealised possibility (Laclau 2018: 85). The revival on Ahamb shares many features with the movements characterised by Laclau. The revival was born out of experiences of lack and re-

Introduction

5

Figure 0.2. The revival was a deeply affective ritual process. In this photo from December 2014, the women and children sitting on the floor are just waking up, allegedly after being struck by the powers of the Holy Spirit during a revival event in the Ahamb Presbyterian community church. Photo by the author.

sentment, and it was also fragile, in that participants proved to have different interests and stakes that, in the end, did not ‘correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole’ (Laclau 2018: iv). However, I argue that the revival was not only based on empty signifiers; it was motivated by largely shared notions of what constitutes a good and bad social world, and largely shared hopes of realising people’s ideas of the former and escaping their fears of the latter.

Fear, Hope and the Good

When I speak of fear and hope in this book, I explore, in the deepest sense, how Ahamb people and others strive to create what they think of as good in their lives. When I say ‘good’ here, I refer to Joel Robbins’ use of the term as what people take to be desirable, all things considered (2013a). This book is thus part of the emerging field of the ‘anthropology of the good’, as articulated by Robbins and others (e.g. Fischer 2014; Haynes 2017; Knauft 2019; Malkki 2015; Ortner 2016; Venkatesan 2015; Walker and Kavedžija 2017). This field includes studies of value, morality, imagination, wellbeing, empathy and hope –

6

Fire on the Island

topics that foreground possibility and develop new models of temporality and social change. However, while studies of ‘the good’ enrich our understanding of how people strive for change and betterment crossculturally, there is a comparative lack of research situating fear, anxiety and violence within processes of constructing the good.2 By incorporating a focus on fear and crisis with recuperation and hope, I address in this book less-examined questions of the place of negative emotions in an attempt to fulfil positive visions of the future. While the anthropology of hope has had a ‘boom’ (Kleist and Jansen 2016: 373) at the start of the third millennium (see e.g. Appadurai 2013; Cox 2018; Crapanzano 2003; Kleist and Thorsen 2016; Miyazaki 2004; Pedersen 2012; Srinivas 2018), fear has not received much explicit attention in the discipline, although most studies of violence, conflict and oppression may be said to be about fear in one way or another.3 In my approach to fear, I find Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen’s efforts to couple feelings of fear and danger with (in)security useful. In their book Times of Security (2013), they insist on acknowledging that (in)security means different things to different people. This acknowledgement resonates with Robbins’ (2013a) reminder that different people have very different senses of what constitutes a good life. Similarly, people also have different perceptions of how their notions of a good life might be threatened. By combining ideas of the good (including hope) and of insecurity (including fear), I aim at an approach that is sensitive to the potentially multifaceted stakes people have in their everyday lives, which emphasises in(security) as culturally, socially, historically and situationally variable. The revival on Ahamb was a movement but also a startling ritual context and event that for the time being turned life on the island upside down. In this book, I build on Kapferer’s work and argue that rituals and events can give us particular insights into how new sociocultural realities are formed. To paraphrase Kapferer, the revival entailed a radical suspension of ordinary everyday life and offered a generative moment of innovative practice that reconfigured some existential and social structural matters in society. This realisation of new and as-yet unrealised possibility is typical for the uniqueness and creative potential inherent in rituals and events (Kapferer 2005, 2006b, 2015a). However, as both Kapferer (2015a: 18) and fellow event-theorists Marshall Sahlins (1980, 1985, 2005) and Michael Jackson (2005) argue, events first obtain their importance and effects through the meaning and significance that people attach to them. As shown in this book, the revival entailed battles over life and death, which are essential themes to most people. But I also suggest that the revival became so important because it addressed and actualised some of the most vital social values of Ahamb society – values that people hoped to realise and feared they would lose. In this way, we can see the revival as both ‘cultural’, as it draws on the past and the present, and going ‘beyond culture’, by virtue of realising potentials in a future that did not yet exist (see Robbins 2016: 707).

Introduction

7

From being a relatively understudied theme in anthropology, at least in an explicit and focused sense,4 the anthropology of morality, values, and ethics has recently been rapidly expanding. Signe Howell’s edited book The Ethnography of Moralities (1997a) became something of a landmark for a new generation of anthropological enquiries focused on values, morals and ethics. Howell’s volume was the first to acknowledge explicitly not only the centrality but also the complexity of these themes, stressing that societies are composed of a variety of moralities rather than one all-encompassing moral order. It also established an approach to morality and value that takes them as dynamic processes in which individuals are reinterpreting moralities, instead of simply conforming to a moral order. Several influential books, edited collections and special issues have emerged since then, all offering perspectives on how to understand and analyse morality, moral values and ethics in everyday lived experience (e.g. Fassin 2012; Faubion 2011; Heintz 2009; Hollan and Throop 2011; Kapferer and Gold 2018; Keane 2015; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2015; Otto and Willerslev 2013; Robbins 2004a; Sykes 2009; Zigon 2008). The following chapters explore different moral discourses operating on Ahamb. Each of the moralities is predicated upon a specific kind of sociality (such as male and female, lineage and community) and is made operational by different people according to context (such as in peace or dispute) (see Howell 1997b: 5, 11). I agree with Howell (1997a), Martin (2013), Robbins (2013b), Toren (1999b) and others on the importance of acknowledging that in any social milieu and social situation, a variety of moralities and equally important and antithetical values are at play. It is only reasonable to assume that differently positioned people, with different social and emotional experiences, would have different perspectives on morality and the good in different contexts. However, if everyone would impose his or her own unique set of values on the world, social life would be an even more chaotic place than it already is. This, Robbins (2015a) argues, is where culture comes in and where values, an intrinsic part of culture, offer ideas that motivate action and can create a relatively orderly world because certain values are shared between members of a society. However, because everyday life involves many different concerns, it is first in the social form of the ritual that these values are expressed in their ‘fullest form’ (Robbins 2015a: 21). From the outset, the revival appeared as a ritual that promised the realisation of the local value of love (napalongin or lav, comprising care, peace and unity) in its fullest form. I argue that the movement largely amassed the force it did because people were hoping to reinstate the central place of this value in society while simultaneously fearing it was going to get lost. But the revival was also constantly an ambiguous site for evaluating what values should entail in practice, the clearest example being that a murder was committed in the name of love by people who normally insist that murder is the most explicit

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Fire on the Island

antithesis of love. This illustrates how even religious values, which constitute the ultimate value spheres of society for value-theorists Louis Dumont (1980) and Talcott Parsons (1935), may become ambiguous when put into practice (see also Bratrud 2021a).

Grasping Social Movements in the Making

This book seeks to understand the ways in which the intersection of fear and hope may drive novel sociopolitical movements. However, as my ethnographic material of the revival and other accounts demonstrate, such movements often run the risk of exacerbating the very problems they seek to address. To grasp this complexity, I am inspired by the classic extended case study, or situational analysis, developed by Max Gluckman (1958[1940]) and the so-called Manchester School of Social Anthropology (see also Evens and Handelman 2016; Mitchell 1983). In a situational analysis, the researcher focuses on the ongoing process of social life, which is often complex and full of contradictions. By examining in detail situations of breaks and conflicts, the researcher seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying the development of these breaks and conflicts, which can then reveal the social and political tensions at the core of everyday living. The goal is then to develop theoretical insights from the ongoing process of social life rather than from selected illustrations of it. Victor Turner’s influential argument about the potential for change during liminality in ritual, and the universal dialectic relationship between structure and anti-structure, are examples of this approach (see Turner 1974: 272–93; 2008 [1969]). To utilise the potential of this method to identify the driving forces of social movements, in this book I give more prominence to the place of social values, ontological assumptions and future visions than has previously been done by scholars of this methodological perspective. An important aim of this book is to say something about contemporary sociocultural life on Ahamb by examining the revival. Here, I lean on Turner, who argues, following Sigmund Freud, that studying disturbances of the normal and regular often gives us greater insight into the normal than can be gained by direct study of it (1974: 34). Events, as an instance of liminality or anti-structure, ignore, reverse or cut across the normative order and may in this sense put the normative order into relief. Michel Foucault (1991) has a similar view, arguing that what we call events only reveal more dramatically that which is already simmering under the surface of things. Turner’s and Foucault’s views allow us to say more about the power dynamics at play that may hinder certain issues of conflict from emerging in the structures of everyday life, but may be expressed in the event. I suggest that this approach is particularly relevant when assessing how Ahamb women and youth, who normally lack a public arena in which

Introduction

9

they can speak to the male leaders of the community, could use the revival as a stage for expressing their criticism of community leaders. Radical Christian revival movements have also been the subject of previous studies. The most well known is Joel Robbins’ seminal book Becoming Sinners (2004a), which analyses the social changes brought about by a Christian charismatic revival movement among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. Other scholars have also examined the radical force of such movements that occurred in several places in Melanesia in the 1970s (Barr 1983; Burt 1994; Flannery 1983; Griffiths 1977; MacDonald 2019; Robin 1982; Tuzin 1997). The revival movements, sparked by new mission campaigns coinciding with the growth of political independence movements, can be seen as successors of the classic Melanesian social movements, often referred to as ‘cargo cults’, which have been widely discussed in the literature (e.g. Burridge 1960; Jebens 2004; Lawrence 1964; Lindstrom 1993; Otto 2009; Schwartz 1962; Tabani and Abong 2013; Worsley 1957). Underlying the ‘cargo cults’ was also desire for radical change – or, as Peter Lawrence puts it, the goal of ‘completely renewing the world order’ (1964: 222). But their ultimate aim, Lamont Lindstrom (2011) argues, was to create new unity among people who were variously oriented or divided. This desire, which I will discuss in Chapter 2, is rooted in the cultural notion that failure to achieve social cohesion not only threatens the social order, but also threatens the very constitution of persons themselves. Achieving unity therefore becomes an existential matter in relation to which many Melanesians direct considerable amounts of energy. From this perspective, the Ahamb revival is part of a continuum of social movements in Melanesia aimed at breaking free of a disintegrated problematic present by reimagining and changing it through ritual and religious means (see MacDonald 2019: 400). Since the 1970s, these attempts have mostly taken place within the Pentecostal-Christian charismatic framework, which promises a ‘break with the past’ (e.g. Eriksen 2009a, 2009b; Eves 2010; Jorgensen 2005; Robbins 2004a), but also through neotraditional nativistic movements, new political parties and other social innovations (see Hviding and Rio 2011; Lindstrom 2011; Schwartz and Smith 2021; Tabani and Abong 2013).

Doing Research on the Revival

Impactful charismatic revivals do not occur that often, and previous studies have been based on fieldwork carried out in their aftermath. Accounts of them are thus necessarily based on oral accounts and archival material. However, the study of this book is based on my full embeddedness in a revival community during the course of its advent and growth until its demise. This has allowed me to study the phenomenon in its broader context as well as from

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Fire on the Island

its centre, which has been both a rewarding and a difficult task. The revival was an event that brought surprise, wonder, hope and fear to most people on Ahamb, including myself as the ethnographer. I admit that I had many experiences that could not be easily represented based on my previous logic and anthropological toolkit. Martin Holbraad (2012) argues that ethnographically driven aporia – the state of puzzlement – is important for anthropologists as a condition for gaining new insights. Whenever an experience of alterity causes an anthropologist to marvel, Holbraad argues, one should resist the inclination to explain that alterity away as indicative of ignorance, metaphor or madness. Instead, we should allow this alterity to generate new insights that might destabilise what we think we know (see also Scott 2016: 478). I have followed Holbraad’s advice in this book and avoided quick conclusions and explanations to incidents that I could not readily understand. Instead, I have aimed at providing sufficiently detailed ethnography to make the event ‘speak for itself ’ and let the participants’ explanations come more to the foreground than my own attempts at understanding. In this way, I also try to avoid the habit that many anthropologists have, according to Roy Wagner, of confusing the ways in which we study phenomena, and the theories through which we understand them, with the phenomena themselves. Wagner says: ‘We talk about the world (quite understandably) in the ways we have come to know about it . . . conclusions are to a certain degree pre-determined’ (1974: 119). By using our own models of the world when trying to understand others, we are creators of the culture we believe we are studying no less than the people we study (1974: 120; see also Wagner 1981: 4, 12). In this book, I focus primarily on my interlocutors’ experiences during the revival and what the implications were, but I also include some of my own experiences to show how I was not left untouched myself. It became clear to me early on that I could not study the revival properly without taking part in the situations in which it manifested itself. To come as close as I could to understanding what the revival signified for different people, I allowed myself to be caught up in the events, observing and participating in prayer sessions of healing and the neutralisation of sorcery, including sessions to pray against and neutralise sorcery that was aimed at myself. Like many others in Malekula, I was granted spiritual gifts during the revival that gave me access to special prayer meetings and consultations.5 I think this gave me some access to the revival discourse and allowed me to join a fellowship with other community members who were caught up in it, like myself, both voluntarily and involuntarily (see Favret-Saada 1980: 15; Goulet 1994: 20). As a result, when talking with Ahamb people about the events, they still tell me: ‘You understand because you have experienced it.’ I should note here that even though I have not had a particularly religious upbringing and have

Introduction

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not participated in much organised religious activity, I have always believed in what I call ‘God’ in some form. Therefore, it was not so difficult for me to accept the transcendentality of the revival itself, even though some parts of it were very difficult to deal with and went far beyond my own register.

Outline of the Book

The title of this book, Fire on the Island,6 points to three themes in the book. First, it refers to the ‘overheated’ (Eriksen 2016) sociopolitical turbulence in which the revival emerged and that it was meant to overcome. Second, it reflects how the revival itself became an overheated site of hope and fear with unintended consequences. Third, it refers to how the Holy Spirit was described to burn ‘like a fire’ by the visionaries, who often conveyed that there was fire on the ground where healing sessions took place, and fire on the heads of people who were anointed with the Holy Spirit. The image of the Holy Spirit as fire is well known from the Bible. At Pentecost, for instance, which marks the coming of the Holy Spirit to dwell in Christian believers, the Bible says that tongues as of fire appeared over the heads of each of those who gathered together (Acts 2:3).7 The revival came to Ahamb as a fire, but also appeared before the visionaries as a windstorm, a white cloud, a thick fog and rain. Common for these forms was that they penetrated everything in sight. And, as out of a bush fire and nourishing rain, new things would grow. I start in Chapter 1 with a prominent climax in the revival – that is, the lynching of two men who were feared to be sorcerers and responsible for most of society’s problems. This happened nine months into the revival and after five months of ‘spiritual war’ with numerous sorcerers. I approach this event as an existential panic in which extraordinary collective action is needed to counter perceived threats to society’s wellbeing. I discuss the murder as a sacrifice, in Girard’s terms, when during a period of crisis, a victim takes the blame for all accumulated fear, anxiety and violence in the community. The victim is taken down – sacrificed – in order to purify the community from its problems and allow a new start. However, when the panic subsided and the implications of the act became clear, it was evident that the two men, who were family and community members, were not legitimate victims of sacrifice after all. This chapter sets the stage for my unpacking of the revival process in the succeeding chapters. Chapter 2 offers a background for understanding how the revival constituted a religious-political platform from which all kinds of social problems were addressed and attempts were made to solve them. I outline one of Ahamb people’s core social values, often summed up as love, and how it is rooted in two main domains that shape and inform choice and practice on the island

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Fire on the Island

today: kinship, with its duties and obligations of sharing and reciprocity, and Christianity, reflected in Jesus’ commandment to humankind that everyone shall love one’s neighbour as one loves oneself. I go on to discuss how disputes over land rights, triggered by postcolonial land reforms and a subsequent turning of custom land into tourism real estate, threaten Ahamb people’s realisation of these values. As a result, many islanders felt their society to be morally adrift, which made them long for new means and sources of power to deal with these challenges. Chapter 3 discusses the revival’s beginnings. As background, I explain how specific conflicts in the two years before the revival made community leaders try different strategies for changing society, although without success. People were resigned and angry about how division and leaders’ inability to create change led society into spiralling decay. I argue that the revival, which was introduced by visiting ‘born again’ youth with spiritual gifts, offered a new and different space in which the problems of society could be articulated. Already in the revival’s first week, local children and youth received spiritual gifts and visions from the Holy Spirit and made chiefs reconcile longstanding disputes in public. Many islanders experienced these reconciliations as miracles, which mobilised them around the visionary children and the revival. Building on the theoretical work of Robbins, Kapferer and Sahlins on values and events, I discuss how fear of losing important values, in combination with new hope that they may nevertheless be fulfilled, are key to understanding the mobilising power of stand-out events. Chapter 4 shows how mobilisation around shared values, hopes and fears does not necessarily create order. Drawing on ethnography of the revival’s first two months, I show how the social values promoted in the revival were ambiguous because differently positioned people interpreted unfolding events in diverse ways and expected conflicting kinds of appropriate action. I focus particularly on how the revival banned the popular intoxicating drink kava, which normally plays an important role in the everyday social life of men. For the men, the revival, which was a hopeful project based in fear and insecurity, was thus generative of new insecurity and risk. Further, I show how the revival ritually inverted gender- and age-based hierarchies on Ahamb because little children became society’s new leaders, and male chiefs and leaders were blamed for most of society’s problems. I discuss how this inversion created challenging ambiguities that had to be negotiated by the community. Chapter 5 presents the revival’s most intense periods of fear but also of hope. I describe how the revival’s importance exploded in May 2014 when a ‘spiritual war’ between Ahamb’s Christians and invisible sorcerers broke out. The visionary children started detecting sorcery objects on the island and identifying their owners – knowledge that is normally secret. The spiritual war engaged people intensely: everyone in the community, including myself,

Introduction

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was caught up in daily sessions to stop the influence of sorcery. I discuss how through the perceived availability of the Holy Spirit, who ‘sees everything’, the revival, like other charismatic-Pentecostal movements, offers a space through which harmful forces can be targeted. However, by articulating and targeting evil forces, their activities may also generate new experiences of risk, fear and insecurity as much as they offer relief from them. I therefore argue that in the Ahamb revival, as well as other movements that localise forces believed to be responsible for one’s misfortune, the cultivation of fear and hope as opposing forces may result in the two reinforcing rather than counteracting each other. Chapter 6 discusses the conflicts that emerged in the wake of the killing. These conflicts demonstrate that even though people mobilise around the same fears (e.g. sorcery) and hope (e.g. that sorcery can be evicted), they may not agree on the appropriate action to handle their shared fear and hope. However, common values, social obligations and political interests may bring people in crisis together in new ways. The chapter thus illustrates how shared ideas and values do not necessarily lead to uniform practice, yet senses of crisis can still create new common ground in surprising ways. The ethnographic focus of the chapter is the first six weeks after the killings (when I was still in the field), the next three years of negotiation about their meaning, and the circumstances around a major reconciliation ceremony organised in November 2017 during my third period of fieldwork on Ahamb. Chapter 7 draws together the ethnography of the previous chapters and argues that senses of fear and hope mutually constitute people’s strategies for managing complex contexts of insecurity and social change. I begin by discussing how the children, who from certain perspectives are the lowest in Ahamb’s social hierarchy, could amass the support and force they did. I go on to compare the Ahamb revival with similar renewal movements elsewhere where people have perceived their values and order to be under threat, which mobilised them in hope of change. Common to these movements, I argue, is that in contexts of insecurity, when people feel powerless and out of control of their lives, locating the source of misfortune in morally deviant persons or groups offers relief and hope for betterment and change. The blaming is often amplified by new charismatic actors of governance who present themselves, or are presented, as the solution to the crisis. An important part of the appeal of these actors is that they appear to take people’s concerns seriously in a way that established authorities do not. In contexts of uncertainty, they become an alternative, good ‘other’ to mobilise around, which symbolises a radical break with the problematic past. I make comparisons between the hope associated with Ahamb’s visionary children and the role of similar figures elsewhere, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who, like the Ahamb children, shows no regard for established hierarchies and has mobilised hundreds of thousands of climate activists demanding radical change. I also make com-

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parisons to former US President Donald Trump, whose ‘anti-political’ strategy turned him into a symbol of hope of a better future for fearful white Americans who felt alienated by the dominant political order. In the conclusion, I argue for the importance of a deep ethnographic approach to the multiple ways in which people experience the ‘good’ and how it may be threatened. I advocate for an emphasis on context not only in anthropologists’ attempts to understand diverse people’s real lived lives, but also in their detection of distant yet powerful forces that shape people’s fears and hopes and their responses to them. I argue that fear usually has its basis in complex problems, but that people, across cultures and history, often blame a deviant ‘other’ for their problems. In Vanuatu, for instance, postcolonial land reforms to attract foreign capital have resulted in land grabbing, which has put pressure on indigenous landowners and generated conflicts believed to create sorcerers. Still, it is the sorcerer who is blamed for the problem. Similarly, in a town in the United States, immigrants may be blamed for the lack of employment possibilities and rising crime rates. However, the main reason for job losses is likely to be the automation or outsourcing of unskilled positions to lower-cost countries by profit-seeking company owners. By engaging critically with context in this sense, I propose that there is hope for advancing our understanding of what is really at stake for different people in our fast-changing globalised world and the strategies they employ to realise a good life in the midst of it. Notes 1. My fieldwork periods were January to July 2010, January 2014 to January 2015 and November 2017. Some material also comes from my sporadic but continued contact with Ahamb people through phone, email and Facebook. 2. However, see Ortner’s (2016) and Knauft’s and others’ (2019) proposal for uniting ‘dark’ anthropology and an anthropology of the good. 3. For the few explicit works on fear, see Linda Green’s (1999) examination of Guatemalan women’s life of fear under state violence and Ruben Andersson’s work on how the politics of fear are creating global ‘danger zones’ (2019). 4. However, this is a contested claim, as many anthropologists may say they have been studying morality when studying religion, gift-exchange, gender, conflicts or kin relations. 5. My gifts were creativity, the ability to pray for miracles, and qualities associated with a pastor. The gifts were conveyed to me by at different times by various visionaries. 6. I owe the title idea to evangelist Alison Griffith’s book Fire in the Islands! The Act of the Holy Spirit in the Solomons (1977). 7. Fire also appears as a symbol of God’s presence in descriptions of God as a ‘consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:29), the burning bush on Mount Sinai from which God spoke to Moses (Exodus 3:2), Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 1:4), and descriptions of how the people of God were led by a pillar of fire at night during the Exodus (Exodus 13:21).

•1 Life and Death

Historian Bertel Nygaard (2014: 50–54) points to the paradoxical nature of the fear-hope nexus by arguing that many global events we condemn as cruelties can in fact be seen as expressions of hope for those behind them. The Nazis, for instance, hoped to resurrect Germany after its defeat in the First World War and the political and economic crises that haunted the republic for fifteen years until Hitler came to power in 1933. However, the Nazis’ hope of realising the Third Reich led to mass murders of all groups of people who did not fit into their ideal society: for example, Jews, people with disabilities and political opponents, particularly communists and social democrats. Similarly, the terror attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 were conducted by radical Islamists hoping to end the US presence in the Middle East, which they considered to be acting against Muslim interests. However, the attacks on 11 September alone killed 2,977 people in addition to causing new wars and suffering in the Middle East, counterterror attacks in European cities and increased instability in the world order. Many other terrible, violent events can also be viewed as resulting from hopes for a better-ordered world. However, as all acts of violence show, the realisation of one party’s hopes for a better world usually comes at a huge cost for others. The hope of one can easily become what the other should fear (Nygaard 2014: 50). In this chapter, I present perhaps the most prominent climax of the Ahamb revival’s fear-hope paradox – that is, the murder of two of the men accused of being sorcerers. In trying to understand this violence and give the reader an idea of how sorcery is experienced as a threat, I begin by presenting the basic assumptions about sorcery on Ahamb. I then jump three months into the revival to examine the death of the four-year-old boy Eliot, which was a significant moment in the process towards the murder of the two alleged sorcerers. I examine a grand revival event for the whole of Malekula, which gathered about 1,000 people and created a special emotional energy that gave new authority to the movement. This is the event during which a man in his twenties, whom I call Levi, admitted to having killed Eliot, but also when I, as the visiting ethnographer, experienced collapsing and being ‘slain in the Spirit’ (slen). I go on to consider the sorcery trial following Levi’s confession at which an existential panic arose and the two accused sorcerers were lynched. In the

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subsequent chapters, I examine the contexts in which a movement like the revival can emerge, and how different events and dynamics can lead to repercussions, of which murder represents one extreme.

Sorcery Today

What I refer to as sorcery is a general concept encompassing all spells and the conscious and deliberate manipulation of objects to achieve a desired outcome.1 Sorcery thus contrasts witchcraft, in Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) classic distinction of these terms, whereby the witch is possessed of an inborn and unconscious propensity to harm others. In the Vanuatu context, it is sometimes useful to divide sorcery into two categories: malevolent sorcery, whereby magical powers are used to cause harm to someone; and good sorcery, whereby magical powers are used for positive purposes, such as healing, running out disturbing spirits, controlling weather and finding lost items (Forsyth 2006: 1). However, any type of traditional sorcery is regarded as dangerous and unwanted today, for a few main reasons. First, most forms of sorcery employ some kind of spirit, whether it is an ancestor spirit, a nature spirit or a humanmade spirit. Engaging with them breaks the Christian God’s commandment that one shall have no other gods. This point is particularly important for those who argue that traditional spirits are simply Satan in disguise (see Meyer 2004). Second, sorcery is regarded by many as unnecessary because prayers to God do the same job. God is the ultimate provider and God grants requests if they are according to God’s divine will. Good sorcery is therefore largely replaced by Christian prayer on Ahamb. In addition, sorcery that was initially good, such as flying (su) and making oneself invisible (banban), is now talked about as being used mainly for bad purposes, such as transport and disguise relating to killing missions. When people talk of sorcery these days, it is generally synonymous with purposeful killing and causing harm. Therefore, the general terms that describe sorcery today – baho in the Ahamb vernacular, and posen, nakaemas and blak magik in Bislama – all carry negative connotations. Sorcery has been part of Vanuatu social life since long before colonialisation and Christianisation, which began in the early 1800s. At the time of the graded society (nakërkrohin in the vernacular, mange in Bislama), which was an institution of major importance in central and northern Vanuatu, sorcery was a legitimate and crucial means to maintain social order (Tonkinson 1981a, 1981b). It was an instrument to discipline those who misbehaved, but it also provided growth for gardens, a means to hide from an enemy, and opportunities to ‘fly’ to meetings and ceremonies. Friends also teased each other with magic tricks (see Layard 1930). Sorcery was taught to apprentices in the initi-

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ation rituals of the graded societies and was a part of the cultural knowledge that was transmitted from generation to generation (Deacon 1934; Layard 1942; Tonkinson 1981a). However, throughout the twentieth century, sorcery underwent a change of status due to the increasing influence of colonialism, education and particularly Christianity, which condemned sorcery as devilish, evil and antithetical to a Christian lifestyle (Keesing 1992; Knauft 2002; Tonkinson 1981a). While sorcery was earlier consigned to the realm of the premodern, contemporary sorcery practice is regarded by most anthropologists as a complex modern practice. Rather than a retreat to ‘tradition’, current sorcery practice should therefore be understood as a product of new forms of discontent with a modernity that has introduced new insecurity, socioeconomic inequality and declining solidarity (see e.g. Ashford 2000, 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Eves 2000; Geschiere 1997; LiPuma 2000; Meyer and Pels 2003; Rio 2011). A person may in these contexts develop what Munn (1986: 221) calls ‘jealous anger’ and turn to sorcery to level out difference, hurt an opponent or achieve certain ends for oneself. Even though sorcery has been around in Ahamb lifeworlds for a long time and cannot be understood only as a result of recent crises of ‘modernity’, this perspective is important for understanding the most potent context for sorcery on Ahamb and elsewhere in Vanuatu today, that is, disputes over land rights and leadership – domains in which the two murdered Ahamb sorcerers, Orwell and Hantor, had for many years played a part. There are many different forms of sorcery in South Malekula, each with its specific technique and distinct name. Well-known forms include flying in invisible form (su), making oneself invisible (banban), copying the body of another person (lavlav or prahnah), striking down someone’s mind (nawuswus), creating a spirit creature that can go off and steal (barbar), and rendering a victim unconscious and removing their internal organs (natshovin). Techniques may involve manipulating spirits, using herbs with magic properties, or adding poisonous plants and toxic substances (such as battery acid) to food or drinks. It is therefore important to note that when people generally refer to sorcery, or posen (a term to which will I return several times in this book), it not only employs the spiritual realm but can also include chemical poisoning (see Eves 2013). Posen is sometimes differentiated from a related but lighter version of sorcery that involves only the use of herbs, commonly referred to as lif (ndraun). The category lif includes both good types (those used for traditional medicine) and bad types (those used for poisoning). Many Ahamb people believe that God, the creator of everything, has made a variety of plants to help people in their living – for food, building materials and traditional medicine. The use of lif for good purposes like these is therefore generally undisputed.

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Fire on the Island

The most frightening category of sorcery, which is regarded as unambiguously bad in that it cannot be used for good, is a spirit that is itself referred to by the noun posen. The posen is usually a spirit creature created by the sorcerer using bones from dead people, blood, lif and sometimes chemical poison, and is kept inside a bottle or other object such as a stone. In some cases, it can even live inside a person. This posen is regarded as a living creature that must be fed, normally with meat. If it is not used or fed, the posen might attack its owner. This makes it extremely dangerous to have a posen. Because having a posen is only regarded as useful for one’s own selfish ends at the expense of others’ wellbeing, taking the risk of having such a creature reinforces the image of the sorcerer’s inhuman character. As shown in this chapter and in Chapter 5, the revival entailed several encounters with such posen creatures, which intensified people’s existential fear and perceptions of the necessity to take action. As Knut Rio (2019: 333) observes, in Melanesia, sorcery is always implemented in social life. And as Adam Ashford (2000, 2005) argues from South Africa, sorcery is not simply superstition, but a complex reaction to spiritual insecurity. In a social world where everyone depends on each other to some extent, it is comforting to know that people can be trusted. But on Ahamb, as elsewhere in the South Pacific, it is generally considered impossible to know what people are really thinking and feeling – what is really in their hearts and minds (see Robbins and Rumsey 2008). The uncertainty implies that there is always risk in the relations in which one engages. For Ahamb people, the heart (navindrmag or hat) is the centre of a person’s character. It is from one’s heart that one responds and acts within the world. Ideally, one can say about a person that ‘his heart is good’ (navindrmag sen ngavuy). But the heart is also hidden and autonomous and may not always be consistent with a person’s public presentation of self. Sorcery fears are often evoked when one suspects a gap between the public person one perceives (man) and that individual’s heart, or more private self (hem wan) – when there is a gap between the person’s ‘surface appearance’ and his or her ‘actual intention or reality’ (Munn 1986: 231). In this sense, other versions of individuals and the world exist that people cannot know about (Rio 2019: 338). In line with this uncertainty, sorcery is regarded as always being performed in secret and the sorcerer as living a secret double life: any person, even though he or she otherwise appear normal, may be engaged in sorcery (Forsyth 2006; Rio 2010; Taylor 2015; Tonkinson 1981a). The world associated with sorcery suspicion is typically articulated in situations of deviant moral behaviour from which the outcome is socially destructive. As described by Rio: If people are observed acting improperly or inhumanly – if they are selfish or greedy, if they sit alone in their houses and are observed to be angry or grumpy, accusing or demanding against others – this is

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already interpreted as a sign that other versions of the world has come into effect. The presence of such inhuman sentiments and practices already transports society to another version of itself. (2019: 338) However, the multiplicity of unknown worlds is not only confined to persons. In Vanuatu, as elsewhere in Melanesia, people perceive there to be a continuation between life forms – the living, the dead, humans and spirits (e.g. Malinowski 1992 [1948]; Mimica 2020; Munn 1986; Rio 2019). The sorcerer transgresses not only personhood but also these worlds in that they can fly, change shape, turn into an animal and become invisible. We may therefore say that the sorcerer is an expression of the generally insecure world between appearance and actual reality. Sorcery exposes the fears of relations and powers that lie beyond people’s control (Rio 2014b, 2019). In periods of heightened insecurity, sorcery fears also usually increase – and the more one thinks about it, the more anxious one tends to become (see Ashford 2000: 50).

The Death of Eliot

On the afternoon of 21 June 2014, the news reached my village that a small boy of only four years old, whom I call Eliot, had died. It was now three months since the revival had emerged on Ahamb, one month since the visionaries had started to remove objects and neutralise places they claimed were infused with sorcery, and one month since the sorcerers had started their alleged attacks on the Ahamb children. However, the attacks on the children had so far been unsuccessful because the visionaries’ powerful spiritual gifts, in combination with the community’s faith and prayers, allegedly provided near-complete protection from evil powers. Yet this security could not be taken for granted. The visionaries constantly reported that everyone in the community needed to support the revival and cooperate with ‘one mind’ (wan tingting) in order for the spiritual protection to prevail. If community consensus, or a unity of wills, failed, sorcerers and their destructive powers would come through and violence would break out (see also Munn 1986: 264). The sorcerers, known to be persistent and increasingly advanced in their techniques, were also reported to constantly be trying new methods to kill anyone they could get hold of on Ahamb. Even though Ahamb Island and the villages on mainland Malekula that supported the revival seemed safe from sorcerers at this point, this was not the case for every village of Ahamb people on the mainland. Eliot’s family had moved from Ahamb a few years earlier to form a new settlement on the mainland. Two days before his death, visionaries reported a grotesque image: they saw that a child had died and that its intestines were hanging from a tree in

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the bush. The child had been killed by natshovin, the most horrifying form of sorcery, whereby a sorcerer uses magic to render a victim unconscious and removes his or her internal organs. The intestines are then left in the bush or buried, and the sorcerer can take on the physical body of the victim. The sorcerer is believed to be able to walk around in the victim’s body for up to five days before the body drops dead. If a person who dies has seemed healthy during the days before one’s death but has been behaving differently from normal, it may raise suspicions of natshovin. During the struggles to keep sorcerers at bay, several of the visionaries reported visions of children in coffins, but these were only projections, they assured us, and could be avoided if we all just prayed strong enough. This time, however, the visionaries reported that it was too late; nothing could prevent the death of the child. This child was Eliot. Eliot had collapsed when he, like many others, was swallowing a vaccine tablet for the tropical infectious disease yaws,2 prescribed to the country’s population by the Vanuatu Ministry of Health. The vaccination took place at the dispensary on Ahamb Island. One visionary was overcome by the Holy Spirit (slen) while witnessing Eliot collapsing. Upon waking, he claimed he could see that the boy had been dead for several days. One sign was that Eliot’s body became cold and white immediately after he collapsed, as if no blood had run through it for days. His anus opening was also wide, suggesting that a twig had been let in to remove his intestines, in line with natshovin. It was suspected that the sorcerers had killed Eliot as a substitute for his cousin-sister (father’s brother’s daughter, FBD) who was a visionary, and whom sorcerers had attacked a couple of weeks earlier in a mainland village as part of their original plan to kill some of the visionaries. The girl had fallen severely ill, but was regarded as having been saved by the extensive prayers of about twenty youth over a whole night. Stories were told about how Eliot had behaved strangely in the days before his death. One story said that Eliot, or someone who looked like him, had been shaking his cousin-sister’s hand the day before he died and then laughed foolishly at her. This was not how Eliot normally behaved. A man who lived close to Eliot’s mainland village said that a few days prior to his death, Eliot had insisted on joining the village’s young men preparing kava, a mildly intoxicating drink made of the Western Pacific kava plant (Piper methysticum), which is enormously popular with men in Vanuatu (see Lebot et al. 1997; Taylor 2010). The men had let Eliot join and were surprised by how the little boy worked and prepared kava like a grown man the whole evening. Eliot was not acting like a child anymore. After his surprising death, people concluded that natshovin must have been involved. This could not have been Eliot himself; it had to be a sorcerer who had taken over Eliot’s already dead body and pretended to be him. Because the sorcerers had been unsuccessful in targeting anyone on Ahamb proper, they were believed to have searched out an Ahamb-related

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victim elsewhere. Because Eliot’s mainland village was not incorporated in the revival, and his family was not very involved in church and hence did not have God’s fullest protection, he was regarded to have been an easy victim for the sorcerers. The boy’s death brought grief and disbelief, not least because he was the only child of his ageing parents, who had tried for a child for many years. Some people also blamed the parents for the death: they had not been dedicated churchgoers and had been involved in affairs outside of marriage, and thus had not provided Eliot with a safe childhood. These moral flaws are serious enough to cause suspicion of sorcery elsewhere in Melanesia (Gibbs 2012; Steadman 1975; Strong 2017). However, the visionaries quickly saw, through their spiritual vision, that four men were responsible for the loss of the small boy’s life. There was Orwell, a man in his sixties from Ahamb; Hantor, another man in his sixties from Ahamb who had recently moved to the mainland; Levi, a man in his late twenties married to an Ahamb woman and living on the mainland; and Gavin, a man in his thirties who grew up on Ahamb, but was now living on the mainland.

Surprising Confessions and Suspicious Denials

A few days after Eliot’s death, a big meeting was arranged by the chiefs of Ahamb and the mainland village of Farun to make the four men give their statements. The chiefs, who were active revival supporters at this time, were not accepting the visionaries’ explanations right away, but wanted to have an open meeting where opinions, suspicions and thoughts could be shared. The four suspected men showed up at the meeting along with many observers. During the meeting, which took place in the common area of an Ahamb village, the visionary children who were not in school contributed prayers to make the Holy Spirit’s power reveal all of the secrets of the sorcerers. One of the visionaries’ revelations in advance of the meeting warned that the suspects could use a lif known as narmar (lif to make peace or silence) at the meeting to hypnotise the audience into forgetting the case (see Mitchell 2011: 46; Rio 2011: 59). The visionaries demanded that the suspects be examined thoroughly before the meeting started. A security group was further appointed to follow the suspects at all times, even to the bathroom, in case they had left any narmar there. At the meeting, different people shared stories of suspicious walkabouts by the suspects, suggesting that they could indeed be involved in sorcery. However, people were reluctant to make any clear accusations, as they were afraid of invoking the men’s wrath and risk becoming their future victims themselves (see also Tonkinson 1981b: 257). The atmosphere among the observers was tense and anxious. ‘This is World War III’ (Hemia wol wo tri ia), a young man

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sitting next to me whispered as we sat behind a tree listening to the proceedings of the meeting. Suddenly, Lincoln, an older man in the audience, rose. Lincoln had for many years been suspected of using sorcery, although not necessarily for killing people. During the revival, the visionaries had confirmed this suspicion by seeing, through their visions, sorcery events in which he had been involved and sorcery remedies he was keeping. After being pressured to admit his sorcery activity, during an event I will discuss in Chapter 5, he eventually announced that what the visionary children had seen was true. He gave away eleven different lif during a revival service a few weeks prior, including lif that enabled him to take the body of numerous animals to walk around unnoticed. Listening to the present claims of the children, Lincoln was now standing up to speak to the suspected sorcerers: I believe in these children! They said they saw me as a cat, a dog, a rat, a lizard, a pig and I have let go of these things. If you own such things [indicating sorcery], you will not go free. But look at me. I have given everything I had and now I am free. If the children had not revealed me, I would not have changed my life. If you do not believe the children, this meeting might as well close! Lincoln’s comment was followed by a big ovation from the audience. The goal of the revival’s anti-sorcery vigilantism was that people holding sorcery should give it to the community in order for it to be destroyed. The sorcerer would then be reintegrated into society as an ordinary human being, free of bonds to forces that were destructive of the moral and spiritual world, sometimes summed up as Satan. By giving away his sorcery, Lincoln was now ‘free’ in this sense. The meeting continued into the night. At one point during the meeting, one of the men, Levi, disclosed that his co-suspect Orwell owned the lif known as lavlav that could change him into a different person. Lavlav is used to trick a victim into believing that one is with a person one trusts, but who in reality is a sorcerer aiming at murder. Orwell refused to admit to owning this lavlav, but Levi insisted. He even explained that Orwell had given the lavlav to him and that it was now in his house on the mainland. Levi offered this as proof that he was right. However, at this point, none of the men admitted to having taken part in the killing of Eliot. The first confessions would come three weeks later, an event to which I will return later in this chapter. During this meeting, visionaries continued to convey the message that all four suspects had ‘the blood of Eliot on their hands’ (blad blong Eliot i stap long han blong olgeta). The chiefs eventually decided that the suspects should drink a special customary lif that had the effect of killing its consumer if they at any point entered and employed the spiritual world from which sorcerers

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derive their powers. All the chiefs drank the lif as a statement of their own innocence and to show the suspects that it was not poison. Then the suspects drank, except for Orwell, who refused for reasons that remained unknown. Although drinking would have symbolically freed Orwell from further accusations, his refusal to do so reinforced people’s suspicion of him as truly being a sorcerer. When I talked to Ahamb’s chiefs after the meeting ended, they were surprised that Levi had admitted to having a malevolent lif, as possession of sorcery is normally kept secret. They explained that the community had arranged meetings following sorcery accusations for decades, but that this was the first time a suspect had admitted having a malevolent lif. Levi’s confession was considered a miracle. It gave hope because the community had prayed for a miracle to happen at the meeting. What they got was more than they could have hoped for. As Chief Mallik, who led the meeting, told me: ‘People complained that we did not question the suspects enough, but we only wanted to follow the revival, the Holy Spirit. When the visionary children say we proceed, we proceed. We relied only on the guidance of their revelations.’ At this point, the chiefs were in most cases convinced that the visionaries were conveying true messages and visions. As a result, the chiefs had started to use visionaries as a resource in their work of maintaining peace and order in society. The revival was increasingly a domain where the spiritual world and the political world were explicitly entangled (see e.g. Bubandt 2014; Marshall 2009).

The Malekula Revival Convention

During the months since its inception in March 2014, the revival had spread to most Presbyterian Church parishes on Malekula. Those who had received gifts from the Holy Spirit were able to pass them on through prayer, making it easy for the revival to become established as long as people were willing to accept it. The revival phenomenon had astonished people as it swept over large parts of Malekula that year. ‘Revival’ was therefore chosen as the theme for the year’s annual evangelism convention of the Malekula Presbyterian Church. That year, in 2014, the convention was hosted by the community of Farun, just across the strait from Ahamb. The revival convention took place from 14 to 19 September 2014, which was ten months after the revival’s inception on Malekula, six months after it came to Ahamb and three weeks after Eliot’s death. In addition to Farun’s 500 or so villagers, 500–600 delegates from most of the Presbyterian parishes in Malekula and some from other islands participated in the convention. About 200 people from Ahamb participated in different parts of the programmes. About sixty of those who were most strongly engaged with the revival signed

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up for the entire convention, which included lectures, workshops and crusades led by local church leaders from various Presbyterian parishes in Malekula who had joined the revival. I joined this group. Participants from all over Malekula mingled during study sessions, common meals, prayer sessions and crusades, and stories about the revival’s miraculous events in their respective villagers were exchanged, and their meaning and significance discussed. The convention helped participants cope with the uncertainties and bewilderment they had experienced during the revival. A special mood of collective effervescence (Durkheim 2008) or emotional energy (Summers-Effler 2002) seemed to be created among participants, giving new energy and authority to the movement that was now covering the whole of Malekula. On the last night of the convention, a special crusade was arranged that was simply called ‘anointing night’ (anointing naet). At this event, those who wanted to be prayed for could receive the Holy Spirit. This was a highlight of the convention, to which much of the remaining programme was leading. On the day of the anointing night, I was not feeling well. Visionaries had conveyed the information that sorcerers had arrived at the convention and were looking for victims. A company of Ahamb girls had to move from the house where they were sleeping because the sorcerers were allegedly targeting them. A girl from another Malekula village was already affected and was now under treatment through prayer. The previous evening, some Ahamb people had come to see me during dinner. I was sitting on the community stage, eating and chatting with some fellow participants, when my good friend John suddenly arrived and hugged me, forehead to forehead, shed some tears and looked me in the eyes while holding his hands on my shoulders. ‘I am so sorry for you’, he said. He said he found it unfair that I had to go through this. John explained that visionaries had hastened to see him to let him know that someone had put posen on the floor where I was sleeping to cause me some kind of injury. This was the third time during the revival that I had been subject to a sorcery attack. In advance of the attacks, the visionaries had revealed that I, like many others, had been granted gifts by the Holy Spirit. The sorcerers had tried to reach me to test the power of the Holy Spirit, who supposedly worked in me. This was also the case with many others who had received gifts. In this way, many of us were drawn into the revival as part of the Holy Spirit’s divine plan and consequently as potential victims of sorcerers. Before John came to see me at dinner, he had passed by my sleeping mat and the effect of the posen had reached his leg. He was now in pain and limped when he was walking. The theory was that because John cared about me so much, and we were so close, the posen had been able to reach him, as the two of us ‘overlapped’ in spirit. At this time, some Ahamb visionaries had already received a revelation saying that a man had put a lif on my sleeping mat. When

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its effect hit John, the visionary girls were on their way to Elder Cyril, the Ahamb man who had become the movement’s leading figure, whom I will introduce in Chapter 3. They wanted to let him know so that he could find me. The girls had also received a revelation saying that I had to move out of the dormitory where I was sleeping and to the house of Elder Cyril and his company. When John came for me, we went straight to the dormitory to get my things. Elder Cyril, a group of people from Ahamb and some church elders from elsewhere were already there and talked about the incident. Elder Cyril sat down quietly and examined my sleeping mat. The others joined in a circle around him, said a prayer for me and asked God to neutralise the lif that was on the mat. Afterwards, we walked together to the house where Elder Cyril and some other Ahamb men were sleeping. I was feeling anxious and paranoid after the last few months’ experiences and asked Elder Cyril if they could pray for me and my gear again, just in case any powers from the lif or any other sorcery had stuck to me. Elder Cyril called for the others and sat down. The men formed a circle around me while holding hands. They prayed. After the prayer, Elder Cyril, who had received a similar gift of vision as the children at this point, confirmed that everything was OK. He looked at me, smiled and said: ‘You are walking around with a big light.’ I thought he meant that I had a big head-

Figure 1.1. The sorcery trial that took place on 23 June 2014 following the sudden and surprising death of the four-year-old boy, Eliot. Photo by the author.

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Figure 1.2. The opening ceremony of the revival convention for all Presbyterian Churches in Malekula, Farun village, September 2014. Photo by the author.

lamp and prepared for the worst: I asked if someone had put posen on my headlamp. Elder Cyril and the others burst into a vast roar of laughter. They then came over to give me a warm handshake. ‘No, you are walking around with a big light, but you don’t know?’, Elder Cyril asked rhetorically. I started laughing too, and then we all cracked up, joshing about my interpretation of Elder Cyril’s message. To walk with light in this context meant that the Holy Spirit was with me. Because of that, any evil powers would have a hard time coming through to cause me trouble. The group continued to cheer me up, and I felt calm and happy in the company of these men, all of whom I had gotten to know particularly well through the revival events over the last few months. It was now past sunset, and we made ourselves ready to go down to the big football field where the anointing night was going to take place.

The Great Anointing and the Ethnographer’s Collapse

Earlier that evening, Pastor Sivi and the other pastors present had prayed for the Holy Spirit to activate anointing powers in the different pastors. This meant that the pastors would be able to pray and channel the Holy Spirit to

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a person or area. I was later told that Pastor Sivi had asked the Holy Spirit to come to Farun that night with the same force as on the day of Pentecost, as described in the Bible (Acts 2)3 – that is, as wind, fire and rain all at the same time. After a regular worship programme, it was announced from the stage that all pastors who were taking part in the anointing should come to the front with their helpers. While the pastors were there to pray for people, the helpers would catch and carry away those who would slain in the Spirit (slen) during the programme. Not long after, a big crowd started to line up in front of the twelve praying pastors, who were now taking their places in front of the stage. Elder Edward and a group from South West Bay mounted the stage to play music, sing and praise God. The pastors were dressed in their best white shirts and dark trousers. They were holding their hands upright, above the people who were coming to them for prayer. From the stage flowed the lively tones of a keyboard and the voices of Elder Edward and his group singing. I had for weeks been encouraged by my Ahamb families and friends to see the pastors and be prayed for. Some of them had already experienced anointing at previous Evangelist conventions, and revival supporters argued that it should be compulsory to use this opportunity to personally experience the full power of the Holy Spirit. I was keen to give it a try, and I left my good friend Riley from Ahamb, who had to watch his little son, to find my place in a growing line of revivalists seeking anointing. Between the bodies massed around me, I could see people coming up to the pastors. Many of those who were prayed for fell down like heavy bags of potatoes before they were dragged away by the helpers. Some looked like they were shot by machine guns in an action movie: dead instantly, with such force in the bullets hitting them from the front that their heads leapt forward, while rest of their upper body was pushed back before they fell backwards, corpselike, to the ground. This happened every few seconds along the line of the twelve pastors. The helpers, who were all dressed in white, had a busy time collecting the fallen and carrying them away before the next in line fell down. This was the first time I had seen anything like this. While watching this spectacle, stunned and astonished, I suddenly found myself number three in line. Looking down, I saw twenty or twenty-five seemingly unconscious people lying around in front of me. Seeing the previously vital persons who had been before me in the line faint and fall lifeless to the ground as they came up to the pastors made me feel uncomfortable. I was filled with second thoughts. Did I really want to do this? What if it happened to me? Could I fall? I thought it was unlikely that I would feel anything, and that there had to be some psychological factor involved that I could control. How could the brain ‘short-circuit’ like this and make them all just fall? Could I trust that someone would catch me if I fell? If I was really filled by the Holy Spirit, would my ‘guardian angel’ take me somewhere, as the visionary chil-

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dren said they did? Would I see sorcerers and have to stand up in church every night to convey my visions? Oh, I hoped not! With all these thoughts going through my head, I finally decided to go ahead with it. After all, this could be my only opportunity in life to experience anything like it. As the line proceeded, we had to watch our feet as to not step on all the people lying on the ground with their arms and legs spread in all directions. Now I was first in line. The pastors were standing right in front of me with their hands lifted up. A pastor was available, but I felt scared. I was not ready. I tried to breathe and make myself open and mentally clean, as I had learned was a condition for the Holy Spirit to enter a person. I saw someone else walking up to the available pastor. Eventually, I started to feel ready to go up to the next one. Suddenly, I could see that Pastor Gideon was free. Pastor Gideon had been the previous pastor on Ahamb and I already knew him well from my first fieldwork in 2010. He still came to Ahamb occasionally to meet old friends, and earlier that year I had visited him a couple of times in Farun, where he now served as pastor. As I stepped into the area of the pastors, I felt a particular atmosphere that is hard to describe in words. I felt as though I was entering an electromagnetic field where the air was dense and vibrant. Pastor Gideon nodded to me. Around me, everyone was singing along with the worship songs from the stage. I joined in with a low voice to be more fully part of the experience. Pastor Gideon raised his arms up and above me. I tried to open myself up as much as I could and concentrate on what was going on. I remember only pieces of his prayer, which included the words ‘Brother Tom’, ‘his nation and country’ and ‘look after him in his life’, before ending with ‘anoint him with your Holy Spirit’. The moment he was done praying over me, it was like a valve opened and I was hit by a very powerful shock from above and the sides. It felt like something filled the whole of me and released the power of every joint and muscle in my body. I just remember mumbling ‘oh shit’ as my eyes shut and I fell backwards. The fall felt like it was in slow motion. Paralysed in my body and mind, I could hear the helpers shout ‘Ambat, ambat!’ (The white man, the white man!) as I fell. I am 179 centimetres tall, which is taller than most ni-Vanuatu, and I later heard that four helpers were needed to catch me as my body fell to the ground. Then, everything was quiet. I was knocked out. When the helpers had dragged me out, I could again hear the worship songs being sung in the background, albeit vaguely. My mind was clear, but I was very dazed and I could not move. As I lay on the ground, a thick tingling started going through my right arm, then my left arm, then my right leg and then my left leg. The tingling started moving from side to side in my body, following the rhythm of the keyboard on stage. I was paralysed and felt very much at peace. I was unable

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to do anything except lie there in that state. The next day I tried to describe the feeling in my field notes: a warm (?), powerful thing inside of my body. As a vibration, in a sense, without there being anything vibrating either. ‘Streams’ is perhaps a better word. I am wondering if this is the same feeling John felt, at the time they told him he had the gift of cursing back in May, when he felt something so strong in his hand that he became scared. [I describe John’s experience in Chapter 3.] After lying there for what I later worked out must have been an hour or two, I could suddenly hear the voice of my paternal uncle Colin, who came to me and said that the programme was over. It was time to get up, and he gave me his hand. I was still dizzy and felt lost as Colin helped me up. My body was weak. I could see Riley standing in the distance, waiting for me. He was grinning and said he was glad I had experienced this. Around us I could see others who appeared to be in a similar state as myself: half-asleep and wobbling around on the grass field. We met my friend John and Elina, Riley’s daughter. John had been a helper for one of the pastors. When Elina had come up to be prayed for by that pastor, John had fallen down himself and was unable to catch Elina as she fell. He explained to us in awe how the power of anointing had hit him too when the pastor prayed, and that all the power in his body was also wiped out. A visionary had seen this and had come to see John. He had touched John’s chest, asking the Holy Spirit to come out. Then John’s powers had come back. One can only speculate as to what caused me and others to slen in Farun that night. For most Christian Malekulans who were there, it was the power of the Holy Spirit that was poured out to those who opened their hearts and were receptive to it. Many outside observers, who perhaps speak from a secular point of view, may prefer an emotional and psychological explanation. For the latter group, the mass collapse may be interpreted as a typical case of mass hysteria. People who took part were most likely wanting to experience the power of the Holy Spirit. Expectancy, emotional receptiveness and wish fulfilment may have played a part in people’s (including my own) experience. As participants, we saw others who slen while waiting in line. This can also have made us suggestible to do the same. Had the appropriate behaviour of falling and fainting in anointing contexts perhaps become a learned cultural practice after several months of revival, so that we unconsciously knew how to respond when the pastors prayed for us? Sensory experiences, such as the music and singing of worship songs, may also have played a role; Kapferer (2005) argues that these are important in relation to ritual participants’ ability to break free from the constraints of everyday life. Others may suggest a third stance, whereby one combines psychological and cultural historic accounts of ecstatic experiences with an open-mindedness to the possibility that the spiritual may

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in fact speak to humans, but that such experiences are interpreted through some prelearned cultural scripts (whether they involve previous revival events or scientific explanations). I will not go further into this discussion, but will simply suggest, as do David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, editors of the anthology Being Changed by Cross-cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience, that one’s explanation will ultimately depend on the worldview to which one adheres, and the social and emotional perspective from which one experiences the event and later speaks (Young and Goulet 1994: 4). For the purposes of the discussion in this book, I continue to take the views of my interlocutors as a starting point, and keep my focus on the implications the events had for their individual and social lives. The day after the anointing night, I was relaxing with Riley and another Ahamb friend, William, outside the house where we were sleeping in Farun. We talked about our experiences of the night before. I had a wound on the bottom of my foot and was changing plasters as we talked. I was used to being careful about where I threw my plasters (like other personal leavings) as part of the daily precautions to protect myself from the sorcery known as bari. Bari is supposedly made by putting posen in contact with the victim’s personal leavings (such as hair, fingernails, excreta, saliva and food scraps) or an item that the victim has used or touched (such as a pen, cloth or soil from a footprint). The victim will then fall ill or die, depending on the intention of the sorcerer (see Patterson 1974: 141–42). While in Farun, I therefore used the outside toilet as a bin to hide my leavings from view. However, now Riley stopped me from going to the toilet to dispose of my plasters. He said: ‘Just throw it here. At the open garbage place over here. If you have faith in God it will not cause you any problems. Because you are walking around with the Holy Spirit now!’ Riley was smiling and referred to my experience the previous night. The Holy Spirit had come and settled in me and many others that night. There was no need to worry about sorcery. I threw my used plasters towards the garbage place, but hit a very visible spot on the top of a log. As a reflex, I got up to push my plasters in between some leaves that would at least cover them up. ‘No!’ Riley said. ‘This is even better. Leave them there. If you have faith nothing will happen to you. You are walking around with a power now.’ He was insistent. If I did not trust the power of God, it meant I was being disloyal to the greatest power of the universe, which was in fact on my side. ‘I am like this’, Riley explained. ‘If I stay at a place where there are posen man [sorcerers], I just throw my food scraps at their place. Because of my faith, there is nothing that can happen to me. Because God is protecting me.’ He smiled. ‘When you are anointed by the Holy Spirit, it means you have power. If God’s spirit is with you and lives inside of you . . . anything like a posen man or whatever it is . . . it does not have a power like that kind of power.’ Riley and William continued to tell me stories about

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how they had prayed for sick family members who had healed, and how trust in God meant there was nothing to fear. The experiences and manifestations many attributed to the presence of the Holy Spirit the previous day had reinforced their hope that sorcery was nothing to fear after all, because the power of God was stronger. When I returned to Ahamb after the convention, the anointing night was a main topic for conversations. Many Ahamb islanders had come to take part in the programme and talked about who had slen, who had not, and how they had felt the presence of the Spirit. Youth with mobile phones were showing photos they had taken of clouds that looked like biblical symbols, such as pigeons and sheep, sunsets that looked like the fire, and persons encircled by light. These were taken as signs that the Holy Spirit had been present. Most Ahamb women had participated at the convention in one way or another, while a number of men had stayed behind on Ahamb. ‘The women are good’, Rupert said during a family meeting I attended on Ahamb after the convention. ‘They went there and experienced something really special. But some men, like Hugo, did you see him? He was busy complaining to the women as they embarked the boats to go.’ Rupert shook his head and continued: Those who say that the children are not telling the truth. They . . . now it has been proved that it is really true. Sorry for them. They have lost. They need the revival to find life. All of us must do that. We must think about our lives. We must change. All rubbish fashion [fasen no gud] and not believing in the revival. It has to stop. In Chapter 4, I will discuss further how a number of men opposed the revival because it challenged their way of living to a significant extent, while it resonated closely with the concerns and social life of women. The convention in Farun had consolidated the importance of the movement for most islanders, but the difference between the genders was still prevalent. However, the opposition of most men was soon to be silenced with the unfolding of a new dramatic event.

Panic and Murder

A week after the revival convention in Farun, during a ceremony to mark the 100 days since the death of little Eliot, one of the Ahamb community chiefs came to announce that a man, Levi, had confessed taking part in the killing of the small boy. It was during a counselling session at the convention in Farun, where anyone could talk to an elder or a prayer group about their troubles, that the man had admitted his actions. As explained earlier in this chapter, Levi was one of the four whom the visionaries had already pointed out as being

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behind Eliot’s death. The chief announced that they would set up a community meeting during which the man was going to explain more. Not long after this, I had to leave the island to seek medical treatment in Port Vila for a dog bite. My knowledge of the meeting, which eventually led to the hanging of two men, Orwell and Hantor, is based on daily phone calls with people on the island, information from Ahamb people in Vila who had phone contact with the island, and accounts I received after my return five weeks later, two weeks after the hanging. The meeting began on 29 October 2014 and took place in the island’s community hall. Levi, who had confessed his part in the murder of Eliot, explained that he could no longer hide his story. He felt as if knives were twisting around in his heart and that he could barely breathe, feelings that revivalists explained were the Holy Spirit working in his mind and body. He had therefore sought out a prayer group at the convention to ease his growing grief for taking the small boy’s life. During the meeting, Levi supposedly put all his cards on the table and revealed horrifying details about his and his colleagues’ lives as sorcerers. Given the severity of the man’s confessions, the meeting turned into a public hearing and sorcery trial that lasted for nineteen days. During this time, a total of five men from the district, including Gavin, who was suspected of being one of Levi’s three co-murderers of Eliot, admitted to having been involved in at least four recent deaths by using sorcery. The five men explained how they had killed each and every victim, and how they had gathered to eat the heart of one of them – a diet believed to give sorcerers more strength and harden them further, as doing so detaches them from the emotional stress of killing. Various sorcery objects belonging to the suspects, including stones, twigs and old glass bottles containing blood, bones, sap (lif) and ashes, were handed over to the community, and their purposes and uses were explained by their owners. The suspects led fellow community members to various places where they had been hiding their posen and allowed the items to be removed and destroyed by burning or immersion into the sea. The five men pointed the figure at Orwell and Hantor as leaders of their sorcery group. According to the admitting sorcerers, Orwell had allegedly caused more than thirty deaths over the past few decades, in addition to numerous cases of sickness, ruined businesses and other types of misfortune on Ahamb and beyond. People were in shock. The five sorcerers articulated details about the sorcery domain that until then had been merely matters of suspicion. If materiality plays an important part as evidence for the immaterial (Keane 2008: 124), Ahamb people now had ‘evidence’ for the existence of the most destructive forms of sorcery that they had previously only imagined (see also Smith 2020). Right before them, there were physical bottles of bones and blood said by the sorcerers to contain potent posen creatures – spiritual monsters that lived their own life and could go off and kill on the order of the sorcerers. To put it in

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Lévi-Strauss’ words, with the sorcerers’ confession, sorcery and its associated ideas ‘ceased to exist as a diffuse complex of . . . sentiments and representations and [became] embodied in real experience’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 174). People’s worst fears became truth. During the nineteen days of the meeting, one would hear weeping at night from houses where families had lost their loved ones to the sorcerers – often in horrible ways, according to the sorcerers themselves. Particularly the supposed murder of a young man’s twenty-year-old spouse following his refusal to give Orwell a glass of kava one night caused rage and disbelief. People were discussing the potent threat of these sorcerers if one glass of kava was enough for them to murder someone. While few dared to confront the sorcerers, some young men could not control their fury. As the trial proceeded during daytime, these men occasionally entered the court to attack the sorcerers as stories of their murder of family members and friends were told. However, the visionaries were constantly reminding the community that no physical violence should be made against the sorcerers. During the trial, the visionaries and other revival supporters were stationed in the church about 100 metres away from the community hall. Here they were praying for the Holy Spirit to work and reveal the secrets of the sorcery suspects. The idea was that if prayer made the power of the Holy Spirit strong enough, it would affect the hearts and minds of the sorcerers to such an extent that they would give away their sorcery and submit their lives to the Holy Spirit. The visionaries were occasionally called in to the meeting to convey their visions and messages. Visionaries and revival supporters from villages on the mainland also came to Ahamb to offer support with prayer. The period of the trial brought a state of emergency to the island and also for the confessing sorcerers. As mentioned above, the identity of a sorcerer is extremely secret. If one first engages in sorcery, one accepts a pact with other sorcerers that one will not tell anyone else about it. The only ones to know are other sorcerers, with whom one engages in a brotherhood or network (netwok). Their secrets will be with you to the grave. If someone reveals the secrets, the others in the brotherhood will come to kill you. There is normally no way they will allow a betrayer to be left alive. Because the five sorcery suspects admitted their acts, who their co-sorcerers were and how their remedies worked, the sorcerers and visionaries alike reported that other sorcerers were flying in by su to Ahamb to try to kill them. According to accounts I received, the confessing sorcerers were scared to death because of this and refused to sleep alone at night. The community’s young men therefore took turns as guards, watching the house where the sorcerers were sleeping at night. On several nights, the guards reported that owls (hoknaet) were flying around the house of the sorcerers, which brought surprise and awe to everyone but the sorcery suspects who were expecting them.

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The owl is an important traditional symbol in Malekula and a typical form that sorcerers are believed to take while flying (see Geismar and Herle 2010; Layard 1942). There are usually no owls on Ahamb, and their sudden appearance added weight to the sorcery suspects’ and visionaries’ explanations of what was going on. The owls and fearful sorcerers underscored people’s notion that Ahamb was now a place of intense cosmological potency, where matters of life and death were potentially outside of people’s control. In Port Vila, my leg was healing after the dog bite. However, receiving accounts from the meeting, I felt reluctant to go back to the island any time soon. Some days into the court case, my adoptive sister Olivia, who was living in Port Vila, called to invite me to her house. She was shocked that I had been thinking about going back to the island at this point and wanted her view to be clear to me. As she said: It is not safe to go to the island. Everyone on the island are afraid now, and they are people who are used to getting around sorcerers and posen. But you don’t know anything about this, because you are from somewhere else where this does not exist or where you are not used to it. When I was talking to people in Port Vila about the ongoing meeting, some said they hoped the sorcerers would be executed, as was currently happening in Papua New Guinea (see Jorgensen 2014; Knauft 2002; Onagi 2015). These people were tired of sorcerers getting away with their cruelties and the police proving unable to prosecute them. Like most other Pacific countries, Vanuatu formally prohibits sorcery. Section 151 of the Vanuatu Penal Code states: ‘No Person shall practice witchcraft or sorcery with intent to cause harm or detriment to any other person.’ The penalty is two years’ imprisonment (Forsyth 2006: 12). But since sorcery operates in the spiritual realm, it is impossible to prove that sorcery has taken place before a state court using normal evidentiary principles (see Rio 2010). If a sorcery case is investigated in detail and considered in the context of the state legal system with its rules of procedure and evidence, it is therefore highly unlikely to ever result in a successful conviction (Forsyth 2006: 13). In the system of state law, the sorcerer can even potentially report those accusing him or her to the police for threatening behaviour and false accusations and win the case. The accuser might then run the risk of countercharges and fines being levelled against him or her. Since there is no legal way of dealing with sorcery issues, it seems that people fearing sorcery and witchcraft are led into taking matters in their own hands and sometimes take revenge against the suspects by attacking them (see Knauft 2002: 99). As in other cases around the world where official politics is detached from the lived reality of ordinary people, people seem to make their own ‘governments’, politics and laws (see Bertelsen and Zagato 2015: 7). This

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is eventually what happened on Ahamb during the sorcery trial. While the five confessing sorcerers were cooperating with the community by giving away their remedies and revealing their secrets, their two alleged leaders, Orwell and Hantor, did not admit or give away anything. However, most people believed beyond any doubt that Orwell and Hantor were guilty. To prove Orwell’s sorcery and free the community of his sorcery’s power, one of the confessing sorcerers prepared a special lif to make Orwell’s posen come out of its hiding place in his house. The house was then set on fire; after it ‘exploded’, as people told me, the posen disappeared. Several men who were near the house fainted as the posen was reported to have hit them following the explosion. On the body of one of those who fainted, tooth marks of everyone Orwell had allegedly killed appeared – thirty-two in total. People took photos with their mobile phones, which were later shown to islanders who were not there, including myself. The trial’s nineteen days of dreadful stories and shocking experiences led to a sense of panic on the island. As one Ahamb man I talked to on the phone expressed his view of the alleged sorcerers: ‘They have been fooling us all the time. They have been treating us as if we are stupid! We have though well of them, shared what we have of food and everything with them. But they have just been playing tricks back at us!’ With all that had happened during the trial, it was hard for the community chiefs to find an easy solution to end the case. The normal way of concluding a sorcery trial on Ahamb is to accept the suspect’s claim of innocence and seal the case by them making a pledge to God and the community that they will refrain from touching sorcery in the future. If the person breaks this pledge, God is believed to bring sickness or death to them as punishment (see Kolshus 2007: 1–4; Tonkinson 1981b: 253). The pledge is seen as a fairly safe vaccination against further use of sorcery, enough to let the accused go free. This time, however, the stories of the sorcerers were of such a severe character that a little group of men, driven by fury, fear and revenge, decided to bring a definite end to it all. Since it seemed evident that Orwell and Hantor possessed highly potent sorcery but were unwilling to give it up, the group were fearful about the risk of having them living around their children, families and the community. It did not seem safer following the violence some young men had caused the sorcerers during the trial, which they feared could result in revenge attacks of an unknown scale. After the official trial had ended and many had gone home, the group therefore took charge of the suspects and arranged for the hanging of Orwell and Hantor. Because the five confessing sorcerers ‘already had blood on their hands’, as it was said, they were set to do the execution. This would avoid the planners being contaminated with (Christian) sin. The hanging had the character of a sacrifice, in Girard’s sense, when in periods of great tension the victim gets drawn to their person all the accumu-

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lated fear, anxiety and bitterness in the community (2013: 315). From the perspective of the group who organised the hanging, the act was carried out to protect the community from more death and suffering.4 They performed one kind of violence in the hope of ending another kind of violence. Beneficial violence was distinguished from harmful violence, which is crucial for a sacrifice done well, according to Girard. However, the sacrifice was not a sacrifice done well. The hanging meant to purify the community instead turned into ‘a scandalous accomplice in the process of pollution, even a kind of catalyst in the propagation of further impurity’ (Girard 2013: 43–44). To conclude this chapter, I will dwell further on the motif of purification and Girard’s theory of violence and the sacred.

Violence in the Name of the Sacred

In Port Vila, I registered mixed responses to the hanging of Orwell and Hantor. There was much official criticism in the media and from the police for people taking the case into their own hands.5 But a number of commoners I met expressed sympathy with the need for the killings. Some people claimed it was good that someone ‘finally took action’ against sorcerers who kept terrorising people. Others argued that the group had no right to kill the two men, sometimes emphasising that it was up to God, not humans, to decide the fate of persons. People who knew Ahamb were particularly surprised that such a thing could happen there. My friend Matthew, who was from Ambrym Island but had gone to secondary school on Ahamb, was among them. As he put it when we met for lunch one day in Port Vila: ‘Because Ahamb is a place of peace, right? You don’t expect anything like this to happen there.’ A paradox of the killing is that it happened in the hope of re-establishing love and unity through an act that is normally unambiguously understood as antithetical to love and unity. To understand this paradox, I find it useful to go to Girard and his landmark study Violence and the Sacred (2013), which explores the ritual role of sacrifice. Girard holds that the role of sacrifice is to redirect the inner tensions in a community into proper channels, and in this way curb violence that would otherwise have overflowed the community. The sacrifice is itself a violent act, but aggression is here turned towards a ‘surrogate victim’ instead of members of one’s community. When the surrogate victim dies, the violence is thought to depart with the victim (2013: 303). The community, which was threatened by the same fate, can then be reborn in a new or renewed state. Paradoxically enough, death thus becomes ‘the ultimate source of life itself ’ (2013: 291). It is perhaps not so surprising that it was Orwell and Hantor who became the victims of the sacrifice. Like other Melanesian social movements, the re-

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vival was desperately and ambitiously totalitarian. Everything and everyone had to be ‘incorporated within its fence’ (see Lindstrom 2011: 260–62). Law and order could only be maintained if everyone observed the same moral code and obeyed in all things. Everyone had to sacrifice any self-interest that did not comply with the movement. Orwell and Hantor were potent deviants in this sense, since they refused to admit their alleged sorcery, which was the most basic requirement of this self-sacrifice. In contrast to others who were feared for being sorcerers, Orwell and Hantor did not confess anything, did not give away any remedies and did not promise to quit in order to start a new life aligned with the morals of the community. Their resistance to submitting themselves to this higher cause caused suspicion, which grew into panic as evidence of their supposed sorcery was unveiled. As islanders told me during the village court, Orwell and Hantor seemed to have immersed themselves so far into the sorcery world that they had become inseparable from it. They seemed to be half-spirit, half-human; they were no longer ordinary human beings. From this perspective, Orwell and Hantor represented an appropriate category for sacrifice, following Girard (2013: 12–13): they were similar enough to the object of trouble they represented – the evil forces that brought destruction to the community – in order to satisfy the perpetrators’ anger. And they were different enough from ordinary human beings, who are not ‘sacrificeable’ for Ahamb people, as the murder of a fellow human being – a child of God and brother or sister in Christ – is seen as the greatest of sins. Orwell and Hantor appeared as potent anomalies (Douglas 2002) – elements that not only did not fit in, but also threatened to destroy life itself. Sacrificing the supposed sorcerers was seen as the means of preventing the unleashing of further death and destruction, and taking back control over the very circumstances of life (Rio 2014a: 324). However, it is important to bear in mind that the murder of the two men was not an act of calculated ritual violence. It was a relatively spontaneous act taking place during an existential panic – a critical event during which questions of right and wrongful acts were felt to be matters of life and death. Akin to Kapferer’s theory of the event (2015a), this was a moment implying a temporary release from the ordinary structures of everyday life, including its values and norms. Outcomes were difficult to predict, but could be extreme, proportional to the panic experienced by those who took it upon themselves to save the community. Even if Orwell and Hantor seemed ‘sacrificeable’ from one perspective, Girard argues that any effective sacrifice requires that the victim (whether it is animal or human) not have a crucial social link with the community in which the sacrifice takes place. If it does not have such a link, the sacrifice will successfully divert violence from the community to the outside victim because the victim can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. However, if there is too close a social link between the community and its victim, the sacrifice will

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inaugurate a new crisis. For several community members, Orwell and Hantor were family members, political allies and human beings; they were not evil spirits and definitely not legitimate victims of sacrifice. The murder therefore led to strong reactions on Ahamb, as well as elsewhere in Vanuatu and beyond, and caused new crises and pain, as I discuss in Chapter 6. The revival was a movement, but also a ritual and event, which put people and society into an intensely liminal state. Its astonishing events, including children giving firm orders to community leaders and the dramatic sorcery hunts, all entailed an interruption of ordinary, everyday life. We may say that the revival became a generative moment with the potential to reconfigure some existential and social realities on the island. This realisation of potentiality is typical for the uniqueness and creative potential inherent in events, as they are described by Kapferer. But the revival was not just a novel event erupting from an absolute void; it was also an intensification of some central ongoing themes and struggles in society. Kapferer argues that in any discussion of events, it is vital to look at their occurrence in time and space. These factors are integral to what the event is and can become (Kapferer 2015a: 20). The emergence of the revival and its different phases, as well as people’s responses to it, comprised ‘a situation conditioned at a specific point in time of converging lines of complexity’ (Kapferer 2006a: 136). The revival arose at a time of land disputes, political problems, and low attendance in church and other community arenas. These were seen by many as instances of moral rupture that broke with the social harmony of kin relationships and community life. In order to return to good, peaceful life, many saw it as necessary to reconfigure community members as good Christian people, which is what the revival offered. Such reconfiguration, I argue, implied a ritual period in which people focused on realising a core value for being among Ahamb people, which is often summed up as love (napalongin or lav). In the next chapter, I discuss the social condition most Ahamb people tend to seek and how it is complicated by disputes over land rights and leadership. Orwell and Hantor were both active in these disputes, and I place them in this context without suggesting a clear causal relationship between their involvement in the disputes and their murder. I then examine the development of the revival as a movement, ritual process and sacrifice meant to rejuvenate a social situation that most islanders in one way or the other hope to realise. Notes 1. As Rio (2019: 334) and Eves (2013) remind us, it is important to keep in mind that terms like ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’ are generalised approximations of indigenous concepts that do not totally convey the complex ideas and relations surrounding these

Life and Death

2.

3.

4.

5.

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phenomena in the local context. However, for the purposes of this book, I have decided to refer mostly to the generalised English term ‘sorcery’. I hope that the ethnographic details and context provided are sufficient to give the reader an introduction to the multiple practices and meanings of the phenomenon in Ahamb people’s lives. Yaws is an infection caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidum. It mainly affects children in rural, tropical areas. The antibiotic azithromycin appears to have been the active ingredient in the vaccine (World Health Organization 2014). Some studies indicate an increased risk of cardiovascular death with azithromycin, while others find no difference in risk associated with azithromycin and other antibiotics. I have no basis to suggest whether the vaccine may have caused Eliot’s death, but mention it here as a possible contributing factor. As it says in Acts 2:1–4: ‘When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.’ Theories of witch-hunts have often drawn on theories of sacrifice, arguing that witch-killings were performed as a human sacrifice meant to purify communities (see La Fontaine 2016; Rio 2014a: 323). The case was a front-page story in the Vanuatu Daily Post (19 November and 22 November 2014) and the Vanuatu Times (21–27 November), and was discussed in a programme on Radio 107.

•2 Love and Land

In this chapter, I examine the general principles for living that Ahamb people take to be ‘good’ – that is, ‘what they take to be a better world’ (Robbins 2013a: 459). This is a world in which everyone respects and looks after one another, and where there is consensus and social unity. On Ahamb Island, these precepts are summed up as love (napalogin or lav), a core value for islanders’ living, rooted in both kinship and Christianity. I also examine what Ahamb people generally take to be the main obstacles to achieving this ideal social world. These are enduring disputes over land rights and leadership that threaten to tear the community apart. Orwell and Hantor, who were killed for being sorcerers, were active land claimants and participants in several disputes over land and leadership. As such, they represented a subversion of the sociability that many islanders seek. Orwell in particular was known for being a tough land claimant with a fearsome reputation for taking down his opponents by sorcery. Hantor also had a mixed reputation, especially after having organised the burning of a village on the mainland a few years before the revival, a village he claimed was built unjustly on his land. From this perspective, the two men had for several years sabotaged other people’s attempts to establish enduring harmony and unity in the community, actions that in Melanesia often spark suspicion of sorcery (see Lindstrom 2011: 256; Munn 1986: 264–65). I do not want to draw a simple causal relationship between Orwell’s and Hantor’s engagements in land disputes and their murders, which depended on a complex set of factors and significantly on the existential panic that developed during the revival and then climaxed during the sorcery trial. However, in trying to understand this violence, which ‘exceeded the wildest hopes of their planners and the worst fears of the victims’ (Appadurai 2013: 95), it is important to examine its relevant contextual causes. I argue that a crucial context in this sense is the disputes and the community’s futile battles to establish enduring unity and peace, for which Orwell and Hantor in the end ‘took the blame’ (see Girard 2013: 298). The present chapter provides an important context for understanding the significance many islanders ascribed to the radically hopeful, equalising, and unity-insisting revival. It also discusses one of Vanuatu’s greatest challenges

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after independence in 1980 – that is, its land politics and people’s attempts to navigate between the need for individualised land rights and duties towards kin. At its core, the chapter shows how ever-present hopes of community and unity often come into conflict with pursuits of power, control and status. To begin with, I will outline the history of Ahamb as a mission community with families moving in from various original homelands. This is a history that makes the community structurally prone to various conflicts regarding autochthony and seniority, especially as land and resources become scarce. The chapter’s main ethnographic case is a major dispute that took place during my 2010 fieldwork over the lease of Lonour Island, near Ahamb, to an expatriate. The implications of this dispute formed an important context for the tensions that gave rise to the revival in 2014.

Migrations, Kin and Nasara

One of the first mission stations in South Malekula was set up on Ahamb in 1899. Christianity had by that time been established for sixty years on the southern islands of Erromango, Aneityum and Tanna before slowly extending north from 1881, when the Anglican and Presbyterian missions, which had worked together in a cordial relationship in the south since 1848, decided to share the northern islands between them. However, as the Presbyterian Mission advanced northwest towards Malekula, there was always a lack of teachers (Miller 1985: 213). The Malekula missionaries had to hasten the training of their own converts as teachers if the mission work was not to collapse. A few Ahamb men had attended Sunday school classes of the Queensland Kanaka Mission while being indentured labourers in Australia around 1890. One of them, David Hailongbel, was approached by the missionaries and recruited as an Indigenous Christian teacher for South Malekula (see Miller 1985: 46; 1989: 241). More Ahamb men followed in Hailongbel’s footsteps, and the island provided the Presbyterian Mission with several Indigenous teachers who, in local narratives, were pivotal in bringing peace and ‘light’ (laet) to ‘dark’ (tudak) Malekula (de Lannnoy 2004; Miller 1989: 2, 512; see also Bratrud 2018). ‘Darkness’, a mission term used all over Melanesia to refer to practices of the heathen past (Lindstrom 2008), points here to Malekula being particularly rife with traditional spirit worship, sorcery and cannibalism (see Deacon 1934; Layard 1930). As the Adventist missionary Roy Brandstater ruthlessly states in his book Man-Eaters of Malekula, written as late as 1981 and published in 2017, ‘among the 80 some islands of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), Malekula was the most primitive, the most heathen, the most savage . . . There was apparently no human love, but in its place disaffection and malice (Brandstater 2017: 15). The notion of Malekula’s ‘darkness’ was reinforced in the turbulent

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context in which Christianity arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. The island was at this time ridden by sickness and death linked to the introduction of measles and influenza by European vessels, but attributed to sorcery by locals (de Lannoy 2004; Deacon 1934: 19–20). Sorcery accusations led to revenge killings, and European traders’ sale of alcohol and guns in exchange for plantation land made Indigenous conflicts a much deadlier occupation than they had been originally. During this period, the Christianised Ahamb people welcomed migrants from all over South Malekula to stay with them in a safe Christian environment with zero tolerance of sorcery and killing (de Lannoy 2004). The mainland migrants were baptised and allocated some land by the autochthonous islanders for houses and gardens. What we know today as the Ahamb community thus resembles a model we find in many places in Melanesia, where people of different lineages and origins are mixed together in new villages, established around a mission station (see Barker 1990; Eriksen 2008; Handman 2015; Knauft 2002; McDougall 2016; Rasmussen 2015; Scott 2007). Half of the current island population of about 600 consider themselves autochthonous Man Ahamb (‘Ahamb person’) by being descendants of the island’s first settlers who arrived twelve to fourteen generations ago, while the other half regard themselves as descendants of migrants who arrived following Christianisation in the first half of the twentieth century. However, all people on the island today are entangled in crisscrossing kin relations after generations of intermarriage and view one another as ‘nothing but family’ (famele nomo). In order to understand the land disputes and conflicts over leadership on Ahamb, it is important to dwell on a basic principle of Ahamb social organisation, namely, the patrilineal clan groups known as the nasara. Nasara is a two-dimensional concept referring to both a person’s patrilineage and his or her original place – that is, the geographical location from which the person’s first nasara ancestor is thought to have originated. While the nasara is related to a geographical location, it is first and foremost represented in persons; a person is not only from a place, he or she is the place (Eriksen 2008: 31–32). If a person can trace a genealogy to a nasara, for example, Marvar, he or she is a ‘Marvar person’ (hemi wan man Marvar). It does not matter if the person has never lived at Marvar; he or she will still be a Marvar person. In customary terms, a person who traces his or her patrilineal descent to a nasara on the mainland will therefore always be a ‘mainland person’, while a person with nasara on Ahamb will be an ‘Ahamb person’. The person on Ahamb is thus, as elsewhere in Vanuatu and many other places in Melanesia, a person and place at the same time (Bonnemaison 1984; Jolly 1994; Kraemer 2020; Rodman 1992; Scott 2007). On Ahamb, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, the close connection between person and place is most clearly expressed in the Bislama term manples, which trans-

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lates to ‘person of the place’.1 To be manples implies an authority to control the actions and pace of the place. It also implies having certain inalienable rights over those who are not manples in that place (Curtis 2002: 179). The emphasis laid on the person–place connection has been analysed by anthropologists of Melanesia in relation to the local cosmology, which emphasises an initial state of separation between lineages (e.g. Harrison 1993, 2005; Malinowski 1992 [1948]; Rio 2014b; Scott 2007; Stasch 2009). The traditional cosmology of Ahamb also suggests such an original state of separation. Every nasara has, for instance, an origin myth that explains its first ancestor’s coming into being, usually in social and physical isolation. Moreover, nasara membership comes with an exclusive relationship to spirits (narmaj nahmar or devel blong nasara) whose role is to protect and assist members of the patrilineage and their land. While sacrifice to any traditional spirit is now prohibited by the church, most Ahamb claim that their nasara spirit is still alive. It may, for instance, appear in dreams, where it brings news about troubled nasara members on other islands several days before the news arrives through other channels. The nasara spirits live in certain taboo areas, some of which are still held to be active today. These areas are exclusively for the members of a particular nasara, and intruders can fall sick if they enter these places without permission. Even though nasara spirits do not form part of any active worship today, these taboo areas are potent expressions of which people are really manples and in control of a territory. This gives a cosmological backing to the phrase ‘where is your place?’ (ples blong yu wea?), sometimes used on Ahamb and elsewhere in Vanuatu to remind others of who is in charge, who are outsiders and who should go back to their ‘true place’ (stret ples) if the landholder deems it right (Rodman 1987: 40). In normal, everyday living, the solid position of Christianity has for over a century contributed to a decline in the importance of many distinguishing features of the nasara. In daily life, it is first and foremost important to determine whom one can marry, where one has gardens and where one lives.2 While personhood within kinship is grounded in being from a particular place, the dominant Christian idea is that all people are created equal as children of God and are brothers and sisters in Christ; therefore, there is no need to distinguish between the self and other (see McDougall 2016: 31). However, in the context of current land disputes, the nasara distinctions and meaning of being manples gain new significance. This is because customary rights to land are claimed through one’s nasara. I argue that the emphasis on nasara belonging today is thus rooted not so much in notions of an initial state of separation as in its relevance in the context of the new meaning of land in Vanuatu since independence in 1980. Population growth and the new monetary value of land, prompted by national land reforms, encourage people to claim landownership for present and future security in terms of residence, food and monetary income. Landowners thus increasingly define themselves

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Figure 2.1. Eilen performing love (soemaot lav) when giving out freshly baked bread during a fundraiser to prepare a relative’s wedding. Photo by the author.

in terms of these genealogically bounded groups that exclude outsiders rather than as extended collectives that include them (see McDougall (2016: 188) for a similar dynamic in Solomon Islands). This process of excluding kin and neighbours from land – what Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania M. Li have called ‘intimate exclusion’ (2011: 145–66) – has over the past two decades caused increasing resentment among many Ahamb islanders. This resentment was of central importance to why so many islanders embraced the revival, which insisted on the restoration of mutual care and unity at the core of persons and society – principles that are often summed up as napalongin or lav (love).

The Loving Person

Ideas of establishing and maintaining emotionally positive ties to others, particularly kin, are widespread throughout the Pacific (see e.g. Brison 2007; Hollan and Throop 2011; McDougall 2016; Robbins 2004a). An important part of how Ahamb people perceive themselves and others is through a moral evaluation of the extent to which a person can be seen as ‘good’ (ngavuy or gud). A good person is someone who acts with love, who is humble and who luk

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save (sees and understands/recognises the needs of) others (see also Rasmussen 2015). The value placed on being good is related to the most prominent principle of Christianity in Ahamb daily living, namely, to have unconditional love for everyone. Because all humans have equal value as children of the same God, one is obliged to treat everyone the same and to provide care and compassion to anyone in need. A person who acknowledges these ideas and lives by them is regarded as humble, loving and Christian, and will be talked about as ‘he/she is good’ (nren iha ngavuy). As Rutha, a woman in her fifties, summed it up for me: ‘Those who only want their family and help only them are half-half or half-Christian.3 But those who have accepted Christ in one’s life want (to engage with) everyone (wantem evri man).’ The connection between the goodness of the person and the moral obligation towards others was repeated by my friend Abel, who claimed that ‘when you understand God’s ways you luk save your fellows’. Sharing and including others can thus be seen as ritualised behaviour that serves as a necessary means to realise the good person as also a good Christian person. Personhood on Ahamb thus resembles the classic model of the Melanesian person as ‘dividual’, ‘composite’, ‘distributed’ or ‘partible’, as formulated by Marilyn Strathern (1988), Roy Wagner (1991), Alfred Gell (1998) and others. Here, personhood arises from relations between people and the continuing relationships in which each person engages, rather than from persons being bounded, singular, individual selves, as proposed in much of Western social theory. 4 The dividual identity makes people in Melanesia multiply authored, as it were, because the person is a composite site of the substances and actions of others. As Strathern states in her seminal book The Gender of the Gift: Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produce them. The singular person can be imagined as a social microcosm. (1988: 13) Strathern’s model is useful for grasping the socially embedded person on Ahamb5 and why islanders care so much about unity and become so anxious over division. The person is here not distinguishable from the networks in which he or she is entangled. The person and others are inseparable. Unity becomes the foundation of both society and persons. Breakdowns of unity thus threaten not just the social order, but also the fundamental constitution of persons themselves (Lindstrom 2011: 258). As Strathern puts it: ‘Only under the condition of unity can the person or group then appear as a composite microcosm of social relations’ (1988: 275). If Strathern and Lindstrom are right, we may say that disunity dissolves the self, which makes it unsurprising that Ahamb people and other Melanesians invest so much energy into achieving

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new and innovative social unities whether they appear as cargo cults, nativistic movements or Christian revival movements.

The Selfish Person

The antithesis to the good person on Ahamb is typically one who is selfish (prenmbus), proud (haikem) and thinks more of himself or herself than of others. Many Melanesian societies have similar conceptions of selfishness, as a situation in which a person remains unpartible, refusing to give in to the pull of the relations in which he or she is entangled (Biersack 1991: 258, LiPuma 2000: 321; Munn 1986: 221–23). People who appear selfish and arrogant in these ways tend to be talked about as ‘different’ (difren) and may be commented about in phrases such as nren iha aven mnaj (he/she is a different person), nmaurin sen ngadrag (his/her life is not good) and ngapar napalongin (he/she does not have love). To use an ironic, sarcastic or derisive tone in gossip to devalue someone as a ‘not good’ person demonstrates that the person does not live up to the ideal of a good kinsman or community member (Martin 2013: 199). More than anything, I suggest that it reflects a fear that core values of being and living together are going to be lost. This may happen if people stop acknowledging kin and being Christians, and instead focus on other things such as their own wealth and wellbeing (see Martin 2013: 199). The relational form of personhood that we know from Strathern and others thus seems not only to have persisted since the introduction of Christianity, but also to have been reinforced by Christianity. The Bislama term hem wan nomo,6 which translates to ‘him/her alone’ and refers to self-sufficiency, is significant when decoding the danger associated with keeping to oneself and avoiding other people. The term points to the same qualities in a person as the often-used terms hae tingting (thinking highly of oneself), prenmbus (selfish) and haikem (proud) – all negative evaluations of a person that are frequently heard in gossip. A person who acts as hem wan nomo seems to be living for himself or herself only, does not seem interested in participating in activities with others and does not share or listen to others. Hem wan nomo is nearly always used negatively in complaints about someone’s greed or selfishness and works as a moral critique against the emergence of the ‘possessive individual’, a construct that has recently been the subject of much interest among Melanesian specialists (see Martin 2013; McDougall 2016; Rasmussen 2015; Sykes 2007; Taylor 2015). The concept of ‘possessive individualism’ was originally introduced by the philosopher C.B. Macpherson, who argued that the archetype of what we can call a possessive individual is ‘the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The indi-

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vidual . . . is seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself ’ (Macpherson 1962: 3). The person accused of being hem wan nomo or having attitudes of hae tingting reflects a self-contained individual who neglects responsibilities towards kin. He or she represents an individualisation that denies histories of reciprocal engagement. As everyone on Ahamb is deeply entangled in different relationships and can never really be a fully self-contained individual, the image of the ‘possessive individual’ should here be seen more as a moral critique than as a type to be observed in its pure form (see Rasmussen 2015: 116). While highly valued practices related to love presuppose relationships and devalue the possessive individual, the sorcerer, who is much feared everywhere in Vanuatu, devalues the social through often unprovoked attacks on other members of the social body. When explaining sorcery, Ahamb people tend to focus on the personhood of the sorcerer. Because sorcerers are aware of their actions, they are also morally accountable (see Strathern 1997). The sorcerer is a person who is overcome by envy and jealousy (aliklikor or jalus), anger and greed, and who often turns on one’s own close kin. The sorcerer does not come out in the open, but ‘hides oneself ’ from the comings and goings of everyday sociality. While a normal person with nothing to hide is transparent about one’s activities, the sorcerer moves silently to conceal one’s movements. Sorcery is selfishness carried to its most profane results (LiPuma 2000: 145).7 Orwell, who was killed for being a sorcerer, certainly seemed to fit the anti-social, anti-kin category of the selfish. Orwell was an active land claimant involved in several disputes against his kin and fellow community members. Because kin are generally expected to be generous and respectful to one another, Orwell’s disputes made him represent a different moral world. Moreover, Orwell was known for asking local trade store owners, kava bar holders and boat operators for credit and then not paying them back. When confronted with his debt or being refused further service, he sometimes became furious. As a result, islanders sometimes complained that Orwell did not understand that business owners too needed money to feed their families. He was gossiped about as jalus (envious or jealous) and lacking empathy (no save luk save wori blong narafala man) – characteristics typical of the sorcerer who lets his negative personal emotions override his compassion for others. Moreover, Orwell had keen interest in traditional knowledge (kastom), he rarely went to church and he lived alone in a house next to his nasara’s traditional graveyard. Most Ahamb people are uncomfortable around such graveyards because they are believed to house potent ancestral spirits that can also be used for sorcery. Orwell’s anti-social behaviour and choice of placement for his house, combined with his interest in kastom over church, made him suspiciously ‘different’. While most people in most contexts try to conform to a moral community with others, Orwell was, at least in part, running his own race. I will return to

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Orwell’s active and suspected role in Ahamb’s prerevival conflicts later on in this chapter. I now turn to the main context in which Ahamb people find love to be devalued, selfishness to flourish and sorcery to thrive – namely, disputes over land rights and leadership. Keir Martin’s notes that the concept of the possessive individual need not only comprise the individual person and that social groups can also act like a possessive individual are important for the following discussion (Martin 2013; see also Bolton 2003: 95; Rodman 1987). In the dispute about the lease of Lonour Island, men from Ahamb’s autochthonous nasara patrilineages formed a coalition to define their group as a discrete individual unit, the Man Ahamb (Ahamb persons), to strengthen their position vis-à-vis other groups, summed up as Man Aur (Mainland persons). Because a collective group here defined itself in terms of a self-contained individual unit with its own rights, rejecting its everyday obligations to a larger social group, the clear empirical distinction between individuality and relationality that we know so well from the Melanesian literature cannot be assumed in this case. A more fruitful ethnographic question, I argue, is to explore why the autochthonous leaders make the distinction between Man Ahamb and Man Aur in some contexts, while insisting on everyone’s equality and unity in others. This question leads us to the importance for Ahamb people to claim land rights, a concern that conflicts with expectations of acting with love, but that cannot be ignored if one wants to secure the material basis of one’s family’s life. Before turning to the concrete disputes that caused so much disruption on Ahamb in the years preceding the revival, I will first outline the politics of land in Vanuatu. The principles of land politics and changes that were made after independence in 1980 form a significant backdrop for why the island’s land claimers are currently emphasising the patrilineal nasara as the prime social units on the island at the expense of the wider community that most islanders normally care so much about.

Vanuatu Politics of Land

The relationship between Melanesians and their land is an intimate one and has been widely discussed in the literature (Crocombe 1971; de Coppet 1985; Fraenkel 2007; Hviding 1996; Leach 2003; Lindstrom 1990a; McDougall 2016; Rodman 1987; Tomlinson 2009; van Trease 1987). In Vanuatu, all land is traditionally owned by the kin groups of the place. Because its resources belong to those who are manples there, land is economically and politically important. For Ahamb people as for the remaining 75% of Vanuatu’s population who live in rural areas (Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2009), land is important perhaps above all for subsistence. Land provides food on the table, building

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materials for houses and cash crops to pay for education, boat transportation, and contributions to church and fundraisings. The importance of land as a source of subsistence is commonly reflected in the expression yumi kakae long graon nomo (‘we live only off the land’). From 1906 until independence in 1980, Vanuatu was a French-British Condominium known as the New Hebrides. During the French-British Condominium, land in Vanuatu was alienated from the Indigenous landowners and bought or occupied by traders in need of large areas to plant coconut trees for the production of copra. The expansion of European planters and the subsequent loss of land prompted the political consciousness that led to the rise of Vanuatu’s independence movements and finally independence on 30 July 1980 (van Trease 1987). The constitution created with independence stated that all lost or alienated land, which made up 36% of Vanuatu’s land mass, was to be returned to the Indigenous customary owners and their descendants (Rawlings 1999: 76). However, independence brought about not only a turn to Indigenous interests in land, but also a series of laws that protected European and foreign interests from the colonial times. Whilst some foreign planters were driven from the land they occupied, the majority were granted long-term leases (Daley 2009). The crux in the postcolonial land laws is the possibility of leasing land for seventy-five years for a single payment. Although these leases are easily renewed, if the customary owners wish to reclaim the land at the end of the lease, they are able to do so, but must compensate the leaseholder for any improvements on the land. The financial cost of this is beyond reach for most ni-Vanuatu. Whilst not technically or legally synonymous with selling land, a lease will thus in practice have the same implications as a sale for a ni-Vanuatu landowner (Jowitt 2004). On Ahamb and elsewhere in Vanuatu, salem aot graon (‘selling out land’) is also the term used most frequently about leases. In post-independence Vanuatu, the political-economic development of land law has thus taken on a somewhat ambiguous character. On the one hand, it favours Indigenous landowners through insisting by law that all land in Vanuatu shall belong to customary landowners. On the other hand, reforms were introduced to attract investors who could make Vanuatu develop economically. Even though independence meant the end of the British and French colony, new relations of dependence were established with private investors and businesses who, since the early 2000s, have leased more than 10% of all customary land in Vanuatu (McDonnell 2017: 285). Land grabbing has been particularly strong on the island of Efate, where the capital Port Vila is located. Here, statistics from 2010 suggest that 56.5% of all coastal land is under lease (Scott et al. 2012: 2). Land developers have also appeared in South Malekula, where they have been involved in leases mostly for tourism real estate. The lease of Bagatelle,

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an idyllic little island in eastern South Malekula, is a well-known local example that created confusion and discontent among villagers as the foreign buyer, who did not spend any time there, still prohibited trespassing on the property. In another example from the early 2000s, an Ahamb man of a migrant nasara residing in Port Vila succeeded in leasing out the small island of Varo a few kilometres east of Ahamb to a foreigner who wanted to build a holiday home. The lease was completed, I was told, even though a local Lands Tribunal had found that the lessor was not the true customary landowner; the proper landowner, they held, was an autochthonous Ahamb family. The lessor of Varo later told me that he had leased out the island to help kin with school fees and make the Ahamb community ‘develop’. However, few saw any fruits of the money, and the lease was a disaster for many Ahamb people and other South Malekulans who used the reef of Varo as a main place for fishing and for gathering mussels, octopus and firewood. The island was also a favourite place to go for picnics in weekends and holidays. Like other real estate sales across the Pacific, Varo was sold as a ‘virgin paradise’, obscuring the socially embedded landscapes of the Indigenous people living there (McDonnell 2018: 421). Disagreements about who owns land and what land should be used for, particularly in the context of the new material value of land after independence, are a main source of disputes on Ahamb and elsewhere in Vanuatu today. But cases of landownership are often hard to resolve because the land in question may have been uninhabited for generations. Few people (if any) have been able to keep track of the identity of the legitimate custom landowner, information that might not even have mattered before population pressures, investors, and the need and desire for money-generating projects became issues. Moreover, several leases in South Malekula illustrate another problem: to formally claim land after independence has involved going to court in town to register as customary landowner (see Jowitt 2004). This practice has allowed individuals to register land and lease it out even though ‘everyone’ in the rural village knows that they are not the legitimate customary owners. Once the lease is registered, the grounds for challenging the registration are very limited, and prior claims to the land by other groups are almost always ignored (McDonnell 2017: 290–91). The lease of Varo, and also that of Lonour (see the next section), are both examples of such registrations happening in town behind rural claimants’ backs. Current principles for land registration have made it even more important for rural islanders, like Ahamb people, to establish their land rights locally and prevent others from registering and grabbing their claimed land. The result is that landowners are increasingly defining themselves in terms of landowning nasara patrilineages rather than as members of extended kin networks within which everyone has mutual reciprocal obligations. For islanders who are not active land claimants, the disputes breed resentment as they challenge their

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relationships with valued kin of other nasara. The next section deals with a dispute over the lease of Lonour Island that developed during my first fieldwork in 2010, and how the consequences of that lease formed an important context for the resentment that gave rise to the revival four years later in 2014.

The Lonour Dispute

One of the most serious disputes I have encountered during my periods of fieldwork concerned the lease of the small island of Lonour, about five kilometres west of Ahamb, in 2010. The dispute that developed on Ahamb was between a group of autochthonous Ahamb men and a group of nonautochthonous Ahamb men – however, with the latter supported by Orwell, Hantor and other men of their autochthonous nasara Eneton. The customary title to Lonour was registered in court in 2007 by an Ahamb man of a migrant nasara living in Port Vila. With the customary title ensured, in 2009 the island was leased to a wealthy expatriate for 21 million Vatu (VUV) (approximately US$195,000) – a staggering sum by local standards.8 One problem with the lease was that at least ten other families claimed land rights on Lonour, several of them men from Ahamb. Another problem was that the lessor had received support from the Ahamb Council of Chiefs, the formal body of community leaders elected every four years, which at this time consisted of elected Ahamb men of nonautochthonous nasara. The chiefs’ support was particularly problematic because they had accepted the lease based on customary principles for landownership hailing from a neighbouring district. In South Malekula, landownership is normally based on scattered territories claimed by giving an account of one’s nasara’s connection to the land.9 However, in Southeast Malekula, landownership takes as its starting point the nasara as a place located in the interior and assumes its land rights from there to the sea. The latter principles would favour the lessor and the migrant nasara over most other claimants to Lonour. The main stake of the autochthonous men was that an implementation of the Southeast Malekulan principles for landownership would involve a total redrawing of traditional boundaries in the area, not least on Ahamb itself, which would deprive most autochthonous Ahamb families of their rights to land. The lease of Lonour outraged several autochthonous Ahamb men.10 In response, the group of opposing autochthonous men formed a political coalition based on autochthony to Ahamb, but excluding members of Orwell and Hantor’s nasara Eneton since they had supported the lessor. The coalition accused the nonautochthonous chiefs of working against the interests of the autochthonous, who were, after all, their ‘hosts’ on Ahamb. The autochthonous coalition used their traditional rights as landowners to call for a grand

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community meeting. In the meeting, they made the claim that as landowners and members of the original Ahamb nasara, they were the main holders of authority on the island and could expel nonautochthonous islanders at any time if they wanted to. They also declared a dismissal of the sitting chiefs, demanding that from now on, the island should only have community chiefs from the autochthonous Ahamb nasara. This declaration was against the democratic principles in force whereby chiefs were elected for a period of four years. However, as the island was ‘truly belonging’ to the autochthonous nasara, the coalition claimed, they saw it as their right (raet) to cut down this period if they were not happy. During the dispute, some of the autochthonous leaders expressed their frustration to me, saying that for many years they had been forced to fight against some nonautochthonous men who tried to claim and sell land belonging to autochthonous Ahamb islanders. This meant that the autochthonous had to defend themselves against people whom they had generously invited to stay in a safe environment when they had been struggling to survive on the mainland at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘We have shared the chiefly positions’, an elderly autochthonous man told me, ‘but they are just working against us when they are given these positions.’ When I asked this man whether this gave them the right to drive out the sitting community chiefs, he replied: ‘Yes! We brought them to the island. If they had been left in the bush, they would have been dead!’ From the perspective of the autochthonous coalition, accommodating the migrants was a ‘gift of life’ (Rio 2007: 176) – a powerful gift of love that in turn required recognition of the love that gave it (see Toren 1999a: 131). Acknowledging neither the autochthonous people’s rights as landowners nor their reciprocal duties was a clear breach of the coalition’s expectations of love and recognition. As the land case proceeded, the autochthonous coalition arranged private nightly meetings during which an alternative chiefs’ council was set up to replace the sitting one. They decided that all seats in the new council should be filled exclusively by chiefs from the autochthonous Ahamb nasara. There was no other solution: the control over Ahamb Island had to return to those who ‘come from Ahamb’ – ‘the true Man Ahamb’, as it was termed. As is typical for any event on Ahamb, the men in the group started and ended their meetings with a prayer, asking God for forgiveness and support if their claims were right. However, most of the people I talked to on the island felt uneasy about the whole dispute and how it had split the community into ‘islanders’ and ‘mainlanders’. People also worried what would happen as the autochthonous nasara Eneton was not included in the coalition – not least because Orwell, a reputed sorcerer, was an Eneton man. People feared that he would use sorcery to strike those affiliated with the autochthonous coalition. Church services the

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previous week had already included prayers addressing the challenges that the dispute was causing in the community. One day in church, an announcement was made stating that the autochthonous leaders were calling a public meeting. Even though the reason for the meeting had not been declared publicly, many knew that this would be when autochthonous leaders would raise their case and claim a takeover of the Council of Chiefs. On our way home from the morning service on the day of the meeting, my adoptive brother Phelix and I were chatting about the day’s events. Phelix complained, saying he was so tired of these kinds of meetings. There were only a few men who engaged in the disputes, he said, but still everyone was affected and had to go. Many did not even know what the present case was all about. When I arrived for the meeting at the community hall – a large building of bamboo, with a thatched roof – there were only a few men inside, while some youngsters were hanging around outside. Slowly people started to fill up the benches and the floor along the walls. Some were sitting with their necks bowed, and the atmosphere was quiet and tense. When the meeting begun, I estimated there to be 50–70 people present out of the total community population of about 600. Many more were walking around outside, occasionally looking in through the windows. Two elders from the church, one from an autochthonous nasara and another from a nonautochthonous nasara, announced that they would lead the meeting from a table at the front. On behalf of the autochthonous coalition, they began to present the points of the meeting, which were written on a blackboard. The first point considered the present Council of Chiefs’ failure to get an Ahamb Lands Tribunal up and running. A local lands tribunal, they held, would ease the community’s handling of landownership cases. Instead of securing such a local body, the sitting chiefs had turned to external land tribunals and land tenure systems. The second point was: ‘All strangers [strenja] who came to stay on our land do not recognise us, Man Ahamb, and they are also criticising us.’ The third point concerned people not respecting landownership settlements already made in court. Instead, parties continued to dispute the land and make counterclaims. This made the landowners worry because court cases cost money and they never felt free from accusations and claims. In addition to these three points, the elders announced that the autochthonous leaders demanded that the present Council of Chiefs resign and be replaced by chiefs from solely autochthonous nasara. Most in the audience seemed to agree on the first point concerning the failure to establish an Ahamb Lands Tribunal. However, the second point concerning ‘strangers’ who did not recognise the autochthonous Man Ahamb generated a series of loud arguments from different corners of the room. This was mainly due to a reference to the nonautochthonous as ‘strangers’. A man I will call Teo rose up and exclaimed, pointing a finger at the group of autoch-

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thonous leaders: ‘Are you calling me a stranger? I’m a part of Rotavu!’ Teo belonged to a mainland nasara, but his mother came from the autochthonous nasara Rotavu. This made Teo a so-called navjon to Rotavu, meaning that he was part of Rotavu through the mother’s brother–nephew (MB–ZS) relation, which has high value in Vanuatu as elsewhere in Melanesia (see e.g. Eriksen 2008; Kolshus 2008; Malinowski 2010 [1922]; Munn 1986; Rio 2007). Moreover, Teo had lived his whole life on the island – as had his patrilineal ancestors for four generations. Ahamb was his only home. The school headmaster Joses, who had a similar navjon relation to an autochthonous nasara, stood up and argued that terming half of Ahamb’s population ‘strangers’ was nothing less than discrimination (diskriminesen). Heated opinions continued to be voiced in the community hall. One of the elders chairing the meeting commented that he did not support the procedure in which the sitting chiefs were now being removed from their positions. He argued that the dismissal of the chiefs had been decided by a small group only. ‘Since Vanuatu is a democratic country and Ahamb a democratic community, the decision has to be approved by a majority’, he claimed. It was decided that a vote be held on whether the sitting chiefs should resign. A total of 125 people voted, and the results were 106 for and 15 against, with four neutral votes. Two-thirds of the island’s adult population did not vote. The atmosphere in the community hall calmed down during the voting. Several nonautochthonous islanders expressed their uncertainty about whether they were going to be expelled from the island, which previous disputes had also suggested (see Bratrud 2021b). The use of the term ‘strangers’ at the current meeting helped to intensify this worry. Robert, the new autochthonous chairman of the chiefs, apologised for how the term ‘stranger’ had been used. He assured everyone that no one was a stranger on Ahamb. The term ‘stranger’, he argued, used by some autochthonous people in previous disputes, had been declared abandoned years ago and was not supposed to resurface. Another autochthonous leader followed this up, assuring the audience that no one would have to leave the island and that everyone would be allowed to stay for as long as they wanted. Moreover, the new autochthonous chiefs announced that they wanted to have vice chiefs from the nonautochthonous nasara to make everyone happy and have proper representation in the community. They had also invited members of Eneton to take part in the new Council of Chiefs, but Eneton’s leaders refused on the basis of other disputes with parties in the coalition. At this point, when control was again in the hands of the coalition, the autochthonous’ need to differentiate between groups lapsed. The distinction between Man Ahamb and Man Aur had been made solely to demonstrate the autochthonous’ right to land and control in a context in which they feared it could be lost. The acts of the autochthonous thus resembled what Thomas Ernst (1999) calls ‘entification’ – the process whereby distinct entities are situ-

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ationally made from what have previously been contingent categories in order to achieve certain political ends. At the end of the meeting, the autochthonous coalition announced that they wanted to revive the neotraditional position of hae jif (high chief) in the community. The original Ahamb hae jif was installed by the mission in the early 1900s in exchange for a plot of land to build the community’s church, school and dispensary. Since then, other hae jifs had been appointed irregularly, with the last one dying in the early 2000s. The hae jif would stand above the Council of Chiefs and would have the last word in all cases regarding the community. ‘When something is not working, we need to revive what our ancestors [ol olfalla] did before’, one of the coalition’s men explained. ‘This is how it is on every island in Vanuatu now. One is reviving things from kastom.’ The man referred to the postcolonial revival of kastom, a pidgin English word used in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea that is usually glossed as ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’. When people refer to kastom today, it is usually because they want to emphasise that something is grounded in local rather than foreign ways of doing things (see Akin 2013; Hviding and Rio 2011; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Lindstrom and White 1994).11 However, like other categories of ‘chief ’ in the Pacific, the hae jif was a relatively recent construct devised by the mission and did not correspond directly to any of the diverse systems of leadership in the region (see Bolton 2003: 19; Lindstrom and White 1997; Smith 2017: 333). It is nevertheless framed in terms of custom, which illustrates the crosscultural tendency to use ‘old’ culture to meet present and future needs, sometimes framed as the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). After the meeting, one of the chiefs told me that they would wait to appoint the hae jif until the current unrest had calmed down, as there was already enough confusion and gossip. As it turned out, it took almost four years and another serious dispute before the hae jif was finally appointed, as will be explained later in this chapter. The autochthonous leaders’ coup of the Council of Chiefs received mixed responses from the rest of the community. Most of the people I talked to felt uneasy about the whole dispute and how it divided the community into two categories, Man Ahamb and Man Aur, depending on their patrilineal nasara belonging – an aspect of a person’s identity downplayed in most everyday contexts. Some nonautochthonous islanders were nervous about getting expelled from the island for being a Man Aur. After all, the autochthonous leaders had made it clear that they had the right to expel people of the nonautochthonous nasara if they wanted to. Evoking this anxiety was heavily criticised in gossip around the island. On Ahamb, everyone is related in crisscrossing kin relations and has clear obligations to acknowledge one another through sharing and compassion. From the perspective of most islanders, the autochthonous coalition violated this obligation and were thus responsible for failing to real-

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ise expectations of love in this context. However, from the perspective of the coalition, who feared they would lose their land, the most important violation of love was the migrants’ failure to acknowledge their hospitality and authority. In this particular situation, the same value – love – thus had different and incompatible senses for the parties depending on what they considered to be at stake for them (see Bratrud 2021a). Most of the islanders I talked to, regardless of their nasara, did not oppose the legal right of the autochthonous coalition to affirm their authority; rather, their concern was their moral right to do so. Several raised the question of whether it was right for a few nasara to have so much power over others in the Christian community that Ahamb was today, dominated by a view that all are equal as children of God. In a discussion that evolved in a village a few days after the meeting, a man expressed his discontent by exclaiming: ‘All people on Ahamb are the children of God. We are semak nomo [just the same]. All land in the world is created by God to give a helping hand to people during our lives. Not for us to be selfish about!’ The critique was aimed at the coalition but also at others who engaged in the island’s enduring land disputes. The man’s outburst received much support. This derisive tone of gossip demonstrated that, from the perspective of the majority, the disputants did not live up to the ideal of being good kinsmen, community members and Christians who act with love, are humble and recognise the needs of others. The dispute is an example of how claiming land and authority on Ahamb becomes an ambiguous site for moral evaluation: both the autochthonous coalition and the indignant community members expected the other to conform to principles of love in their actions. However, precisely because the value of love was thought to be shared, and the kind of action to be derived from it unambiguous, the situation spurred frustration and destabilised relationships rather than reinforcing them.

Dividing Land Disputes, Unification in Church

The ethnography presented thus far suggests that Christianity often emerges as a context through which the ideal unifying morality of Ahamb islanders is expressed. This morality contrasts the individualised, differentiating logic that characterises most land disputes and that the disputes, often based on the idea of individual property rights, necessitate. As certain clans start asserting exclusive landownership that bars nonmembers, it becomes even more important for nonmembers to assert their individualised property rights where they claim to have land (McDougall 2016: 163). Because they might no longer expect to share the land of others, they must therefore secure land areas for themselves. As a result, lineage leaders who want to secure land for themselves

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and their close kin increasingly define themselves in terms of bounded nasara groups that exclude outsiders, rather than the extended kin and community-based collectives that include them. The autochthonous people who staged a coup of the Council of Chiefs and reminded everyone of their status as manples provide a potent example of this dynamic. As the weeks passed, people on Ahamb slowly seemed to recapture the rhythms of daily life. The new chiefs were prayed for in church and received the pastor’s blessing, as is customary when chiefs and other leaders are installed. An outreach trip of the Sunday School that took place right after the dispute also helped draw people together around common activities. Ahead of the trip, the outreach group, consisting of sixty-eight children and fourteen adults, spent a week together at Ahamb primary school, where they practised plays, songs and dances to be performed on the trip. Everyone on the island was engaged in these preparations in one way or another. Every nasara patrilineage represented on the island was assigned to provide food for the group at different days of the week, there were dress rehearsals to watch, and people were catching up with relatives and friends from mainland Malekula who came to contribute. Even though the timing was not planned, the eventful week seemed to have come at the very right moment. At a time when attention was otherwise on division and conflict, the communal activities proposed that unity and a common interest in precisely children and church take prominence. The outreach trip itself was a success. The group had been well received in all the villages and there had been high attendance in the programmes. My adoptive brother Phelix, who had earlier expressed his annoyance with the recurring disputes, was part of the outreach delegation. When we met again after the trip, he contrasted the children with their fathers who were disputing at home: If I was a man who was comfortable about speaking up in public, I would say in a community meeting: ‘During the Sunday school outreach there was no division among the children as it is among you adult men. Children from all the different nasara were together and were happy together. In [the mainland villages of] Bonvor and Malvakal people were crying when they heard the children’s message about Jesus. But here their fathers are disputing. People should not even be here [on Ahamb] in the first place. But they came because Jesus called for them to settle on this island.’ The discussion of the revival in the next chapter returns to the experienced contrast in morality between the innocent children and the disputing men. This was manifested in the Holy Spirit’s deciding that it was the children, not the men who normally hold authority positions, who were most suitable for

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mediating divine powers on the island and leading the community through a social and moral renewal.

New Tensions and Appointing the Hae jif

When I came back to Ahamb in early 2014, most islanders seemed to have come to accept the lease of Lonour Island five years earlier.12 The lessor was a wealthy expatriate who, according to local rumours, planned to build a fivestar luxury resort on Lonour. People hoped that this could bring work opportunities and that the lessor would buy local crops and fruits. He had visited several times and people had a good impression of him as both friendly and generous. However, the vision of a five-star hotel eventually faded away, as it became clear that the man only wanted Lonour as a holiday retreat for his family, with perhaps a few simple bungalows for visitors. Yet, the autochthonous leaders’ fear of losing political control vis-à-vis the nonautochthonous group was still the same, and the 2012 general election in Vanuatu spurred another serious dispute along the same dividing lines as in 2010. The autochthonous coalition that took over the Council of Chiefs two years earlier were now supporting and recruiting voters to one political party that would result in a particular candidate being elected as Member of Parliament (MP). Another group of leaders, associated with the nonautochthonous and Orwell and Hantor’s Eneton, supported and recruited voters to another party. For ordinary people in Vanuatu, national and regional politics is more than anything about the distribution of resources to communities. To support a successful MP means you can expect to be reciprocated in different ways, from individual monetary help to support in bigger community projects. To get an MP after this election would mean a better chance of receiving some needed development for the community, such as a trained nurse at the dispensary and money to maintain the primary school. When the counting of votes was completed, it became clear that the candidate of the nonautochthonous group had won. This outraged some of the men in the autochthonous coalition, who feared that their political opponents would now receive powerful support from Port Vila. The threat of evicting the nonautochthonous was again put on the agenda. In order to demonstrate and formalise their authority more emphatically, the autochthonous coalition decided it was time to bring back the position of the hae jif as they had planned to do when they took over the Council of Chiefs in 2010. The hae jif should be a ‘paramount chief ’, members told me, and have a final veto in all major decisions regarding the community. The hae jif would be appointed through a proper customary grade-taking ceremony, a

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nakërkrohin, like the big men of the past. In the nakërkrohin, like many other traditional graded societies in Melanesia, men acquired titles by paying off titleholders above them with sacrificed pigs, mats and food; the higher the rank, the higher the prestige (see Blackwood 1981; Codrington 1891; Deacon 1934; Eriksen 2008; Jolly 1991; Layard 1942; Lindstrom 1997; Patterson 1981; Rio 2007). The nakërkrohin was abandoned with the introduction of Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century. The initiation of the hae jif was therefore going to be the first grade-taking ceremony held in decades, if not a century. It was decided that the new hae jif should come from the nasara of the original hae jif, a nasara I call Ronan. This had been the practice of all irregular holders of the position. However, Ronan was in enduring disputes with Orwell and Hantor’s Eneton about land rights and authority, and members of Eneton repeatedly protested against Ronan’s claim that only they should possess the powerful hae jif position. Because the past two hae jifs died under mysterious circumstances at the turn of the millennium, it is suspected that someone from Eneton, most likely Orwell, had killed the two previous holders of the position by sorcery. After the last hae jif died in the early 2000s, no one had therefore dared take up the position again. However, the autochthonous coalition was insistent that a new hae jif should be inaugurated, and their candidate for the position was committed to take office. To undertake a proper custom grade-taking ceremony is a serious task. Only those with the appropriate customary rights can be involved. The proper customary objects must be in place and a strict order must be followed. All preparation must happen in a taboo area, closed off from women and others who are not initiated into the men’s graded society. To ensure that the customary ceremony was done properly, the autochthonous men made a taboo area in the bush some weeks ahead of the actual ceremony. The ceremony was prepared by a few senior men who were relatively familiar with traditional matters, including the procedures of a nakërkrohin ceremony.13 The time for the hae jif ’s appointment ceremony was set to Chiefs’ Day 2014, a national memorable day held in Vanuatu on 5 March. The ceremony had been planned in secrecy. Many were therefore taken by surprise when the official Chiefs’ Day programme was over and a large pig was led into the field outside the community hall by serious-looking, bare-chested men. The announcer revealed that there would be a programme led by the chiefs, but did not specify exactly what was going to happen. Six drummers took their places by traditional slit drums that had been prepared for the ceremony, and a dancer, painted in black and white and wearing only a nambas, the traditional penis sheath from Malekula, came dancing in. The autochthonous coalition regarded the dancer and drummers to be eligible to take part in the ceremony, as they were descendants of the Maur, the highest-ranking man in the history of Ahamb’s graded society.

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The ceremony received a mixed response from the crowd. Some autochthonous men were excited and moved as they witnessed the revival of this long-lost tradition. Others were ambivalent and critical. Some women I talked to were confused and frustrated. They did not understand the point of going back to these old ceremonies. Many people consider kastom ceremonies to be dangerous because they were originally made to evoke powerful traditional spirits. This is still regarded as an intrinsic element of a properly executed kastom dance. As a consequence, there is usually at least one death at a kastom ceremony, my friend Riley claimed while we watched the dance. However, evoking traditional spirits was not intended by the organisers of the current ceremony, as they were all devoted Christians. Their aim was solely political. But some observers of the ceremony were upset because they saw it primarily as a demonstration of power from one political group on the island who had appointed one of their own as a hae jif without the consent of the rest of the community. Moreover, one autochthonous nasara, Eneton, had been left out of the process. The initiation, many complained, was therefore doomed to only intensify the tensions in the community and spur more division in the time to come. Many also feared that the hae jif ’s family were living dangerously, given the deaths of the previous chiefs of this position. A sorcery attack could be expected at any time.

The Unstable Relationship between Ideals and Political Realities

In disputes such as those I have presented, the dominant narratives of Christianity as a break with the dark and dangerous past and an introduction of the present ethos of undifferentiated love and amenity seems for the time being to be undermined by a nostalgia for a more unambiguous kastom past when people had respect, were obedient and knew their place in the hierarchical social order (McDougall 2016: 124; see also Tomlinson 2009). In the heat of these disputes, the autochthonous leaders expressed to me that unity on the island might first be achieved when everyone knows their customary rights and positions vis-à-vis one another and the customary relational and hierarchical cosmology is settled (see Eriksen 2014b: 144). But if the autochthonous group advocates for traditional hierarchy and differentiation based on the status of their patrilineal nasara, they are simultaneously violating the value of inclusive egalitarianism practiced in everyday Christian living. These ambiguous moments give rise to negotiations over different forms of value and notions about the person that coexist on Ahamb. As will be shown the next chapter, the new chiefs were struggling to gain support in the community, not least after the controversial decision to appoint

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the hae jif. The chiefs’ authority was challenged further when the revival began, barely three weeks after the initiation of the hae jif. During the revival, the Holy Spirit granted the nasara patrilineages and traditional position holders little of their previous authority. They too, like everyone else, had to ‘open up’ and follow the directions of the Spirit in order to receive blessings and protection from lurking sorcerers. Moreover, their re-establishment of hierarchy based on customary distinctions was not relevant for order and unity. They too had to sacrifice any self-interest that conflicted with the Holy Spirit and succumb to the movement if peace and unity were to be accomplished. The tensions presented in this chapter set the scene for the profound importance many islanders ascribed to the revival. The Holy Spirit revealed in startling ways the secrets of the universe and people’s place in it. It dealt with the plain and unvarnished realities of good and evil, life and death, the limits of the world, and what lay beyond them. It therefore subverted the relevance of land rights and leadership, at least for the time being, and brought people together at the highest level of integration – that is, in their common commitment to God as the creator of everything who has total control over all aspects of this life and the afterlife. With the disputes discussed in this chapter as the backdrop, the revival constituted hope for many Ahamb islanders who were longing for radical change.

Figure 2.2. Custom ceremony to appoint the new hae jif on Chiefs’ Day, 5 March 2014, two weeks before the revival was initiated. Photo by the author.

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Figure 2.3. A sculpture in front of the Ahamb community church, built in 1998. The big stone in the middle is painted yellow and represents the light of Christianity that is supposed to unify the island’s nasara, marked by smaller stones around painted in blue. The writing next to the sculpture says: ‘This foundation stone was laid on December 19th by Ps. Josaiah Bahavus. Laid to mark the arrival of the Gospel represented by the large stone and the nine nasara of the island of Ahamb who struggle to let the light shine in the darkness. May it always be remembered.’ Photo by the author.

Notes This chapter is derived in part from the article ‘What Is Love? The Complex Relation between Values and Practice in Vanuatu’ published in 2021 in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(3): 461–477 (DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.13546) and the article ‘Asserting Land, Estranging Kin: On Competing Relations of Dependence’ published in 2021 in Oceania 91(2): 280–295 (DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5305). 1. Most profoundly, a person is manples at one’s patrilineal nasara’s original territory. A person can also claim to be manples at territories achieved by way of land inheritance through the female line. This happens when there are no more men in a family line. The land is then passed on to the sons of the woman. 2. Ahamb follows a three-generational exogenous marriage practice. This involves a woman of nasara X having three generations of female descendants who marry out to other nasara before the matriline is allowed (and often encouraged) to marry back

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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to her original nasara. South Malekulan societies also follow a patrilocal residence practice in which married couples usually live at the nasara of the husband. This Vanuatu expression indicates that someone is ‘half-sane, half-mad’. It is important to note that Strathern’s model of the dividual person was never meant to act as an empirical description of how all Melanesians think at all times (see Schram 2015: 319). Ahamb people do not embody only one model of subjectivity, although they lean towards a mode of being that emphasises the person’s dependence on a wide range of relations. Strathern’s model is probably applicable in most places where kinship shapes and constrains persons’ agency, as Lindstrom (2011: 257) points out. Anders Emil Rasmussen (2015) also discusses this concept from Manus in Papua New Guinea. See Bratrud (2021c) for a discussion on how the sorcerer becomes the perfect moral deviant in Melanesia and is blamed for all kinds of social problems. Lonour Island was again advertised for lease in February 2017 through the Canadian real estate company Private Islands Inc. The asking price in 2017 was around VUV 70 million (approximately US$630,000), whereas it had been leased out for VUV 21 million in 2009 (Cullwick 2017). In comparison, in July 2017, the annual salary for a director in a government department was VUV 2.5 million (US$23,000) and for the average civil servant VUV 720,000 (US$ 6,800) (John Sala and Gaute Eielsen, personal communication, 3 August 2017). Doing business with land can obviously be a lucrative source of cash. In South Malekula, land is claimed through accounting for one’s genealogical connection to the land, the nasara spirit of the place (narmaj nahmar), the totem of the lineage (haindram), the stone traditionally used for pig killing sacrifices and the traditional boundaries of the piece of land. The lease also outraged other land claimants. The controversies were featured in an article in the Vanuatu Daily Post after Lonour was again advertised for lease in 2017 (Cullwick 2017). The Ahamb man’s title to the land was eventually cancelled by the Director of Lands on 13 August 2020 after the Supreme Court found another claimant to be the customary landowner (Vanuatu Daily Post, 11 September 2020). However, as several scholars of the Pacific have pointed out, it can be misleading to think of kastom formations as ‘traditional’. The customary may be as much a product of the expansion of state and capital formations as foreign or external to it (McDougall 2011: 134). The kastom discourse itself emerged during the struggle for independence and the restitution of alienated land in the 1970s (see Keesing and Tonkinson 1982). Moreover, perhaps the most potent context for employing the concept of kastom on Ahamb today is in asserting who is a kastom landowner. To claim land after independence required locals to go to court to register as ‘kastom landowners’. The term ‘kastom landowner’ itself is thus understood through the lens of the state court system that formally asserts property rights, which is one reason why the concept of kastom has become so significant in recent years (see Jowitt 2004). It is also important to note that kastom ‘evokes not so much the totality of ancestral practices as a particular selection of such practices for the present’ (Jolly 1996: 176). The lease was already completed and the lessor had the title to the land. Who the kastom landowner was, however, was still a matter of dispute, but people reckoned that the case would come up before the Supreme Court in due course.

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13. Almost a decade earlier, in advance of a national arts festival that was to be held on Ahamb in 2006, the men had offered a pig to a kastom chief on mainland Malekula who had been appointed to deal with traditional cultural matters there. The chief had the traditional knowledge that could help the Ahamb men revive the long-lost Ahamb kastom dance for the arts festival. The dance had allegedly not been performed for about a century because it had been abandoned after the introduction of Christianity. Only men from the autochthonous nasara were allowed to dance, as it was argued to be their kastom.

•3 The Revival Begins

When I returned to my Ahamb for my second period of fieldwork in January 2014, I was struck by how much my male interlocutors occupied themselves with talk about island politics and land rights. Others were upset about the focus on these matters and its effect on people’s relationships. The initiation of the hae jif was only one of many indicators of the social tensions on Ahamb at the beginning of 2014. In addition, a major land dispute had been stirred up and disrupted any notion of unity on the island, church attendance was low among men and the youth, few community leaders had support because they were entangled in disputes, and sorcery was seen as being on the rise nationwide. Locally, the upsurge in sorcery was manifested in the frequent spotting of flying sorcerers (su), visible as lights travelling in the air, and in women who woke up suspecting they had unknowingly been taken advantage of by ‘people walking around at night’ via magical means (olgeta we oli stap wokbaot long naet). There were also several cases where married men had gone after young girls or other women in the past few years, and there had been two serious adultery cases in the previous year. A man had even attempted to rape someone on a Sunday while others were in church. Looking at the processes leading up to the revival, I argue that the phenomenon was generally so well received because it shed new light on the key problems and fears in the community. Moreover, it offered unique, almost irreproachable ways of addressing them. The orders concerning the revival did not come from chiefs or anyone else who could be accused of having self-serving political agendas. Nor did they come from women, who had no proper position from which they could confront the male community leaders. They did not even come from those who were preaching in church, the male church leaders, several of whom were entangled in community disputes at the time themselves. The revival seemed to come from beyond this (see Bloch 1974: 78); it seemed to be God alone at work, speaking through the community’s children, who occupy a relatively untainted and innocent position in the Ahamb social structure, as I will discuss in more depth in Chapter 7. The revival promoted the most profound of values in Ahamb society, relating to unity, humility and having a truthful relationship with God – the values often summed up as love. Through the children, the revival promised to realise

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these values in their purest form. At least in the beginning, the effectuation of these values seemed to follow a form that everyone would benefit from. This made the community almost single-mindedly supportive of the revival, which allowed it to quickly take root in the structure of everyday island life. In this chapter, I present the outbreak of the Malekula revival and its spreading and first developments on Ahamb. I discuss the astonishment and relief many felt as the Holy Spirit came to reside in people’s minds and practices, and how this sparked hope that community life could indeed change. Before embarking on the events on Ahamb, I give a summary of the Malekula revival’s origins in South West Bay on the Malekula mainland (see Map 0.3), a three- to five-hour boat ride east of Ahamb, as it was presented to me by various villagers who experienced it. The Beginning in South West Bay

The outbreak of the Malekula revival took place in the village of Lawa in South West Bay in November 2013. The Lawa parish’s child ministry was closing for the semester and about eighty children and some adults, including the local church elder Dan, were gathered in the small village of Mahabo outside of Lawa to prepare a show for the community. During a worship service in Mahabo, a child suddenly fainted (slen) and started rolling around on the ground, seemingly unconscious. In the words of Elder Dan: On Sunday afternoon we were preparing to go down to Lawa. We had a worship service at nine in the morning and we were ready to go down to Lawa at around twelve midday. That’s when anointing fell down.1 We were together, praised and worshipped and shortly afterwards, a child fell down and slen. It was the first time this had happened here in South West Bay and in the lives of any of us. The children saw it and they thought: ‘What is this?’ The child laid there on the ground and was rolling around. At around the same time, Elder Edward, another church elder from South West Bay known for his spiritual gifts, called Elder Dan on his mobile phone to tell him that ‘anointing was about to overflow’ and that they had to take the children down to Lawa immediately. Elder Edward was in Port Vila at the time, but had seen a vision appearing as a ‘video playing before his eyes’, as he told me: ‘The Heavens opened up and hundreds of angels were traveling up and down between South West Bay and the Heavens.’ Elder Edward had received the spiritual gift of vision during a convention of the Malekula Presbyterian Evangelists in 2007 after being prayed for by Pastor Sivi, who is regarded as having been the initiator of the Malekula re-

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vival. Pastor Sivi was a mythical Presbyterian pastor in Vanuatu who worked for a spiritual renewal in Christianity.2 The pastor was himself known to possess exceptional spiritual powers and was celebrated as well as feared and opposed for his views and capacities. People often told me that they were afraid of coming close to him if they had done something wrong, as he was so close to God that he could see all your secrets – what you were ‘hiding’. Prior to the events in South West Bay, Pastor Sivi and a group of Presbyterian Church leaders had been praying for a decade for a revival to come to Malekula. Malekula was one of the last areas in Vanuatu to be Christianised, and even though Christianity now held a strong position in most places, the island was still feared for its sorcery and worship of traditional spirits. A successful Christian revival, they believed, would provide a deep spiritual cleansing of Malekula and complete the Christianisation process that had begun more than a century ago. Pastor Sivi and Elder Edward had become good friends and partners over the years, and Elder Edward was often referred to as Pastor Sivi’s student. Many had as much respect for him as for Pastor Sivi, and I heard many stories about Elder Edward’s capacities as well. At a church meeting in Malekula some years before the revival, for example, I was told by a participant how Elder Edward had detected flying sorcerers (su) coming from the neighbouring island of Ambrym. The elder had immediately assembled a group to pray against the power of the sorcerers. Not long after, some men from Ambrym had come swimming ashore from the sea, apparently because they had fallen down after their flying magic stopped working because of the prayers. It was also rumoured that Elder Edward had become so angry at an Ahamb boy selling marijuana to students at a Malekula secondary school that he had placed some kind of curse on him. The effect of the curse was that the boy never succeeded in finding a girlfriend. After the first South West Bay child slen in Mahabo village, the children were told to change to wearing white clothes, often used to symbolise purity in church contexts in Vanuatu and elsewhere (e.g. Engelke 2010: 186), to await the anointing that was reportedly coming. The group had made a Covenant box, resembling the mighty Ark of the Covenant known from the Bible’s Old Testament,3 which they were going to use for their show in Lawa. They were supposed to carry this on their walk down to the village when the forecasted anointing hit. As Elder Dan explained it to me: We kneeled down on the grass to pray when a heavy rain came [mama blong ren i foldaon] and washed all of us. The children were still kneeling down and rain was falling down on their knees. When they opened their eyes, there was smok [fog or smoke] everywhere. The smok was everywhere and the children could not see clearly. Not

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long after, the smok covered the children and anointing fell. The children slen. They had started to walk with the Covenant box but they just fell down on the road. The box also fell down. After the slen children woke up, the group walked down to the church in Lawa where many of the villagers were gathered. The approximately eighty children of the child ministry walked around the church seven times.4 While they were taking the seventh round, lightning struck: When the lightning struck the sky opened. The children saw it. They all fell down. All the children were tossed to the ground because they saw directly into the glory of God. While walking the seventh round they opened the door to the church and anointing struck [jokem] everyone. The anointing flowed inside and many cried and many slen. This was the first time people had seen anyone slen in the power of the Holy Spirit. They might have seen it in other churches but this was the first time in the Presbyterian Church. This was the first time the Lawa parish experienced the power of the Holy Spirit. Many slen. Many cried. People who had cameras took photos. You could see smok inside the church. Flames of fire too. Anointing and being ‘slain in the Spirit’ is common in charismatic-Pentecostal churches, but not in the Presbyterian churches that are dominant in South West Bay, Ahamb and elsewhere in Malekula where church activities normally follow a relatively strict order. When the church service was finished, the villagers returned to their houses. The incidents in church became a major topic of conversation. On the next day, a Monday, the children went to school as usual, but in the morning the headmaster sent a call for Elder Dan because six children had slen inside the classroom. The elder and some other church leaders came for the children and took them to church. While in church, two youth who had joined them also slen. In the words of Elder Dan: It was like an electric shock that struck them and they fell down. They slept for three hours. It was eight of them all together. They ‘travelled’. We were there. It was like we were staying with dead bodies. They slen and they just lay there as if they were dead. They didn’t move. They woke up three hours later. Some of them woke up and sang songs to us. These are the songs that the children are now singing in the revival, like ‘Jesus, You Are My Helper’.5 Many came with messages from Heaven and Hell. They had travelled and visited these places while they were slen and received messages to bring back to tell us. Many of those who came back were blind. They couldn’t see properly because they had seen the glory of God. They could walk but they couldn’t see properly. We had to hold them. They said they couldn’t see because

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the glory of God was shining so strongly [glori blong God i saen we i saen]. It took half an hour before they could see normally again. It made it necessary for many youth to come stay with them. Many of them sang the songs of the angels. This was the Monday. After these incidents, the church leaders and others in Lawa started to pray with the children and youth. They also started up a youth group to focus on the continuation of the revival and for spiritual gifts to be released in other persons as well. Eight of the youngsters who had slen in the Lawa church went to other churches in South West Bay not long afterwards to testify about what had happened. During these visits, anointing also fell on children and youth there. They started to slen and convey visions and messages to their communities. The revival had now spread to the whole of South West Bay. Realising the significance and impact of the incidents in South West Bay, the administrative offices of the Presbyterian Church in Malekula declared that the South West Bay group of youth and children, led by Elder Edward, should tour all of the eighteen church parishes in Malekula to spread the revival. A group of church leaders from Ahamb was among the first to request that the group come in hope that it could help restore the position of Christian values and living and solve some ongoing problems in the community.

Meanwhile on Ahamb: The Forum Meeting and the Chiefs’ Attempt to Right Wrongs

In early 2014, to address the prevailing problems and schisms discussed in the previous chapter, the Ahamb chiefs started planning a big public meeting. ‘This is not going to be an ordinary public meeting’, the chiefs proclaimed to me with anticipation several times. ‘It will be the very first forum meeting in the history of Ahamb!’ Here, the community would discuss and solve ‘every topic’ (evri topik) of island life today. The meeting agenda included sections for most areas of community life, represented by their respective organisations: the health clinic, the women’s church organisation; the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union (PWMU),6 the chiefs, the primary school, the secondary school, the kindergarten, the youth, politics, business, church, kastom and the local football team Varus. I was asked by the chiefs to help as a minute-taker and was joining David (the secretary of the chiefs), Karen (a leader within the PWMU) and Liren (the kindergarten teacher) on this task. When I arrived before the meeting, I sat down with Liren, who told me it was good we were having this meeting to right the wrongs of the community. At the core of the problem, she argued, is that the lifestyle of the ancestors had been lost (fasen blong ol olfala i lus).

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As is customary on the island, in order to inform people that the community meeting was about to begin, the chiefs blew a big conch shell that functions as a horn and can be heard over most places on the island, providing that the wind is blowing in the right direction. People were exceptionally slow to arrive, as they were for the meeting I described in the previous chapter. The chiefs blew the shell several times and we waited for hours for people to come. The chiefs eventually had to announce to the few of us who were present that we had to start. At this point, there were about thirty people present out of the island’s population of around 600, and that included the ten of us engaged as staff. ‘This is the first forum we have decided to make here on the island and I think we are also the first island to host a forum’, Chief Robert, the chairman of the chiefs, began. ‘We have waited long enough and have to start. It is a fashion we have here in the community . . . to come late’, he proclaimed. It was not difficult to see that he was disappointed with the low turnout. ‘We welcome all of you in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit’, he announced, opening the meeting in the same way as a church service, as is also usual on the island. Following the procedure for all meetings and gatherings on Ahamb, the meeting started with a welcome speech by one of the church elders. We sang a chorus and there was a Bible reading followed by a sermon. ‘Our big theme today is good governance’, the church elder summed up. ‘This is something that can help the church and our community. But as Jesus says: I am the core [stamba], regardless of what government we have’. The church elder thus emphasised that Christian values and principles should underpin all community themes and activities on Ahamb. ‘In the name of the chairman of chiefs and God the Father, I declare that the forum is now open’. We clapped and Robert thanked everyone before announcing the first speaker. It was the newly initiated hae jif, who had his inauguration barely three weeks prior, as noted in the previous chapter. The hae jif took the microphone and also expressed his disappointment with the low attendance: My heart is crying [hat blong mi i krae] because we don’t respect the leaders of our community anymore. We don’t have respect. If we don’t have respect for our leaders, how can we then have good governance in the community and follow the fashion that God wants? I’m crying for our community. If more people had come, I think we could come up with something really good . . . for the kind of life that Jesus wants. The main reason why so few showed up at the meeting was either that they did not support the chiefs or that they were afraid to give the impression that they did support them and thus upset the many who did not. The chiefs had come to power in a coup and had appointed a hae jif without the approval of the rest of the community. The chiefs had done this based on their claim of being manples. However, as we have seen, one of the autochthonous nasara, Orwell

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and Hantor’s Eneton, was neither part of the autochthonous Council of Chiefs nor had a say when the hae jif was appointed. Many therefore questioned the moral legitimacy of the sitting chiefs and protested by not coming to their meetings or participating in their activities. While the community leaders gave their speeches, more people started entering the community hall. Many more had arrived in the area, but were mainly walking around outside or sitting down and chatting on the outskirts of the community hall field. Inside the hall, the leaders of the organisations introduced their respective problems. The health committee, who run the dispensary, had fallen apart and the nurse informed the group about their problems. The kindergarten teachers complained that parents were notoriously late in paying kindergarten fees, which resulted in the teachers not getting paid. The chairman of the school committee reported that the primary school’s funds were critically low after serious fraud by the previous headmaster before he had run off, leaving the school without money and without a leader. Regular villagers complained about children and youth trespassing in private yards to take fruit and accused them of having lost respect for other people. The women of the PWMU raised their concerns about men, young and old, and their extensive kava drinking. Kava is drunk predominantly by men, who enjoy it in many social contexts, primarily in the evenings. Kava sessions often go on late into the night, and the especially heavy drinkers sleep late, feel tired and get less work done the next day (see Aporosa and Tomlinson 2014). The men who came home drunk every night were also not good role models for their children and younger siblings. Many women had been annoyed with men’s kava habits for a long time, but were now finally raising their concerns in public. The women were also annoyed because the kava drinking kept their husbands and sons from attending church services. The previous night’s drinking, the women claimed, seemed to make them too tired and apathetic in the mornings to join activities in church. The church leaders raised the issue of the low attendance of men in church. The Men’s Fellowship group, in which all adult men are inscribed as members, had only had a bare minimum of attendants lately, and the youth group had not been active for several months. The women claimed that kava was a key contributor to this development. Heavy kava drinking was seen as another sign of the ongoing demoralisation of society, personified in young people who were losing respect for their elders and who were lazy, sexually uninhibited and seemed to have greater interest in money and commodities than their families (see Rio 2011: 58). As will be discussed in Chapter 4, the men’s kava drinking also became one of the first social problems addressed by the visionaries in the revival, to mixed responses from the men. The night before the meeting, I was sitting outside the house of my adoptive parents, Herold and Jelen. Jelen had boiled some hot water, and the two of

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us were drinking a cup of tea and talking. We talked about the women’s agenda items for the forum meeting, which consisted of the men’s kava drinking and the low attendance of men in church. Jelen told me that before, people felt shame (namhanin or sem) if they did not go to church. She told me that if she did not go one day, she would hide inside her house when the final chorus was sung in order to make sure no one saw her and reproved her when they came out from the service. But now, she complained, things had changed: ‘We go to church but many are just sitting around, chatting, and hanging out as if they do not care. They feel no shame [oli no sem].’ Jelen had been appointed to present the women’s concerns about the men and kava at the meeting, but she felt uncomfortable about the task. So did the other women. As in other places in Melanesia, women on Ahamb rarely criticise men in public, as they have not traditionally had rights to contribute to meetings except through a male spokesman (see Brison 1992; Lederman 1980; Lindstrom 1990b). This has changed to some extent with the women’s church organisation (PWMU), which was established in 1950, being recognised as a legitimate voice in community. But most women are still reluctant to speak in public, especially if it is against men, as in this case. The women had eventually agreed that the most experienced public speaker among them, and one of the toughest persons I know, the unwed Nancy, should raise their case at the meeting. When it was the PWMU’s turn to speak at the meeting, Nancy rose and stated: Some men don’t want to come to church on Sundays. They are walking around or are only sitting down when others are going to church. Before it was not like this. This is disturbing our youth and making them drink kava all the time. It makes them stop caring about their future. They don’t want to go to youth meetings and Men’s Fellowship to straighten their lives before the return of Jesus Christ. The men don’t want to look after their children and they are not going to the mainland gardens to look for food.7 We, all the women, are worried about this. While Nancy was speaking, some men started talking to each other and others were giggling. She went on to talk about how the use of kava, as well as other ‘drugs’ (drag) like alcohol, home brew (drae pam) and marijuana that also concerned the women. She excused herself, asking the listeners to forgive her if she had said something that was not right in front of them, before she continued talking about the women’s concerns about the behaviour of the men. Afterwards, it was time for discussion. The first comment after Nancy’s appeal was from a senior man who was now retired from a leadership position in the community. He regularly enjoyed both kava and smoking. He said: ‘I hear your comment is different

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[difren]. Is everything so good among you, the women, then?’ The listeners in the community hall now awoke and many responses were exchanged. A number of men rose and spoke to support the senior man. But several men, and a few women, also rose to support the women in their complaints. One man, Terry, admitted that ‘we should be happy for the women. When seeing that the church bell rings for church, none of them hangs around all about. But we, the men, are sitting along the beach and are busy chatting when the bell rings’. Another man, Ron, added: ‘But how shall we come together? It is easy for you women. It is harder for us men to come together.’ In the previous chapter, we saw how most major disputes in the community are between men. Men are representatives of families and lineages in land disputes and other political matters. Ron referred in part to the disputes in the community, which made it distressing for many men who were entangled in the disputes to meet. The hae jif responded: This is the kind of life we have come together at this meeting to fix. It is just the women who are afraid of spelling it out. Men are going to the beach to chat instead of going to church. Sometimes they are gossiping and talking behind each other’s backs. It is the right of anyone to not go to church. It is a human right. I don’t want to force anyone to go. But it is good we talk about this issue. By the time the sun suddenly set and the darkness of night came upon us, we had barely completed four of the twelve topics on the meeting agenda. There had been around 100 people at the meeting at the most, which was a disappointment for the chiefs, as it was not even half of the island’s adult population. Nevertheless, participants agreed that there had been some good discussions, and it was decided to continue with the remaining topics in a new forum meeting the following week. However, the community was never to reach that second meeting. The revival was on its way and was introduced just a few days after the meeting. As it turned out, the revival was going to become a much more successful space for dealing with many of the problems and disagreements addressed by the chiefs in the forum meeting.

Introducing the Revival to Ahamb

Ahamb church leaders obtained a confirmation that Elder Edward and his group would come and run a revival introductory programme during the weekend of 28–29 March 2014. The plan was to invite the Holy Spirit to come and reside on the island, and hopefully change people and society on Ahamb for the better. Expectations were also high that the visit would have an effect on the sorcery. Rumour had it that sorcerers and other troublemakers had

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now surrendered in South West Bay and were instead joining the community in worshiping the Holy Spirit. There was hope for the same effect on Ahamb. The revival work on Ahamb was to be led by the local church elder Cyril. He had already received the spiritual gift of healing at a church convention a few years back, after a prayer session organised by Elder Edward from South West Bay and Pastor Sivi. Elder Cyril already knew Elder Edward from various church meetings and he was familiar with the spiritual work a revival entailed. Prior to the revival group’s arrival, Elder Cyril led a one-week preparation programme of nightly church services. One of the nights he had a spiritual vision in which he saw a bold man with a braided pony tail (rasta). Praying for the Holy Spirit to reveal the meaning of his vision, he received the answer: the bold man represented Ahamb’s chance. If we wanted to receive the Holy Spirit, we had to grab the ponytail now. If we did not, we would lose our chance. The preparation services were filled with many children and some adults. The strong singing of children in church could be heard over most of the island. Expectations for the revival introductory weekend were high among church supporters, and talk around the island promised that we would experience entirely new things. As a church elder proclaimed to a group of us who were chatting one night: We will see things we have never seen before. People falling to the ground, speaking in tongues with different voices when the Holy Spirit touches them and enters them. And those who are practising posen [sorcery] will be found. On Saturday, everyone on the island and those belonging to the Ahamb parish on the mainland will line up by the church and the children in the revival group will pass us. They will see if you have sickness and they will see if anyone is practising posen. If anyone is practising posen they will tell it out right away. Because they are led by the Holy Spirit. They can see it. And if any are practising posen, God will take their life. On the day of the South West Bay revivalists’ arrival, I was helping to prepare their welcome meal in the community hall. As there were more than enough people for the task, I took a break with Arthur, a senior man who was both a kastom expert and a retired deacon in church. Arthur told me he was looking forward to the arrival of the visitors. He claimed that the young people from South West Bay were not, like the older generation, afraid to spell it out if they knew anyone was practising sorcery. He continued: Nobody will be able to keep it secret anymore. Some people are nervous [sek] now, when they hear that the group is coming. It is because they are hiding something. The group from South West Bay has come to help us. Because when we die, we must enter the kingdom of God.

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That is why those who have posen must let go of it. The life of posen has become too strong. This means that the life of church must become equally strong to meet that challenge. Arthur thus called for mobilisation around the ‘good’ to meet the presence of what is considered ‘bad’, a dynamic that I argue is the driving force of social movements. Ben, a man in his forties, joined our company and added that we were lucky to have such a group in Malekula. They could pinpoint bad things that people were hiding: If you go to worship with them and you feel that you cannot breathe or that your body is ‘not right’, it is because you are hiding something that is ‘not good’. This feeling is the Holy Spirit working in you. You cannot hide anything that is ‘not good’ anymore, whether it is fighting with your wife, being cross with your children, practising posen, or anything else.8 In revealing the hidden, one would be able to close off other versions of the world that people did not know about and that made them anxious. Ben’s comment reflected a hope that the Holy Spirit could make people visible for one another again and bring relief from the fear that one’s significant others were hiding perilous intentions, behaviour that is typically associated with sorcery. Elder Edward and fifty-two youths of his revival group arrived on Friday and ran two introductory worship services in a crammed church before their main event the following day. The two first services were lively events with praise, worship and prayers led by Elder Edward and his team of youths. They were all dressed in white and had taken their places at the top of the stage in the front of the church. During the programmes, Elder Edward called those who had felt anything extraordinary to come to the front and share their experience. Some women came up and announced that they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit during the worship services. During the first service, Joanna, who had a reputation for extramarital affairs, came to the front with a bowed head, sobbing and crying. She had seen a vision that had depicted her life, she said, and it showed that she was not following God’s plan for her. Elder Edward announced that we should pray for Joanna and her life. The fifty-two youths at the top of the stage raised their hands in the air and called out prayers for Joanna together with the congregation sitting down on the church stools. More women came up that night. Rebecca, also sobbing, told us that we all knew her and how she struggled with her many children. But she had met the Holy Spirit that day. Now she wanted to take up work as an evangelist. Elder Edward replied, saying ‘Thank you Holy Spirit’ into the mic and the congregation joined in a big ovation. Elder Colin, a long-time elder in the Ahamb church, came to the front and said he had received a message from the Holy

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Spirit to continue his work for God, even though he planned to retire by the end of the year. Others came up crying because they said they had met Jesus or the Holy Spirit during the service and that they wanted to change their lives. Ben, one of the few men who came up to the front, did so with shaking arms. He explained that he had received a gift from the Holy Spirit at a church convention some years ago. Those who had not believed him should see him now. He held up his shaking arms. At this point, no children or youth had come up to talk about any feelings or reactions from the worship services. However, after the first service, I joined a group of youth who were chatting. Several said they ‘had felt something’ but were too embarrassed (sem) to rise and convey it in public. Emma, a twentyone-year-old, said her body had shaken so much during the worship that she could barely stand up. This had frightened her. Twenty-two-year-old Grace commented that she had been crying during the whole worship service. Mike, Daniel and Lucas, who were all in their mid-twenties, talked about how they had also ‘felt something’, but it was difficult to explain what it was. The main event of the weekend was held outside the church on Saturday night (29 March). The area was packed with just about everyone in the community and many Ahamb islanders living on mainland Malekula. At the centre of the area was an impressive tent-like construction of white and red textiles. It was a tabernacle, known from the Bible’s Old Testament as a portable dwelling place for the presence of God.9 The original tabernacle of the Bible was built to specifications revealed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Similarly, the specifications of this tabernacle had been revealed by the Holy Spirit to some of the visionaries from South West Bay in advance of the programme. As in the original from the Old Testament, God was announced to be present with full power inside this tabernacle. The programme this night involved singalongs and prayers to ask the Holy Spirit to come and take its place inside the tabernacle, on Ahamb Island, and in us who were present. The most enthralling part of the programme was the section dealing with sorcery and sorcerers. Talk around the island had it that sorcerers would have no choice but to surrender during the programme because the South West Bay visionaries would be able to point them out. After a regular worship service of singing, Bible readings, prayers and a sermon, Elder Edward spoke: ‘If anyone accuses you of doing posen, if you are a woman or man who has a bad reputation for these things, you must go inside the tabernacle now.’ The message was clear. If you were a sorcerer, this was your chance to get forgiveness from God, once and for all. If you had a false reputation for sorcery, no one would be able to accuse you again because you had made a powerful pledge with God that guaranteed your absence from sorcery practice. If you went inside the tabernacle but continued practising sorcery at any time, God would cause you serious sickness or death for breaking your pact.

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Figure 3.1. Ahamb people following the revival introductory programme. The tabernacle is at the back. Photo by the author.

There was gravity and anticipation in the air. Who would come inside? Because sorcerers operate in secrecy, there could be surprises that night. Orwell, who had been feared for sorcery for two decades, was the first to enter the tabernacle. Another man, Lincoln, who also had a questionable reputation, entered next. A third man, Kevin, also entered. Nobody accused Kevin of sorcery, but he was popular for his traditional herbal medicine (lif), which is associated with good sorcery. Similar to other places where good and bad sorcery is practised, in Vanuatu it is believed that if you know the good side of these plants, you are also likely to know the bad side (e.g. Munn 1986: 217; Siegel 2006: 142). Kevin went inside in order to clear up any doubt. Elder Edward then called for others who had done something wrong (no gud) to come inside. A special appeal went out to those who had stolen the big battery of the community hall’s solar system three weeks earlier. If they came, they would receive their forgiveness from God and the community. We waited in silence, looking curiously around to see if anyone moved. No one came. Meanwhile, the reputed sorcerers knelt down inside the tabernacle. Everyone present was asked to join in prayer for the three men and to ask God to work in their lives and fulfil the conditions of entering the tabernacle.

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The concluding part of the programme involved a big communal meal that functioned as a Holy Communion with food and water prepared by the team from South West Bay inside the tabernacle. Consuming this holy meal would wash us with Jesus’ blood and make God forgive our sins. The worship services the past two days had already laid the foundation for Ahamb people to receive the Holy Spirit. But consuming the meal would take us one step further; it would cleanse us spiritually and allow the Holy Spirit to enter us. When the Spirit resided in our bodies, God’s work would finally begin, and spiritual gifts would be granted to the people of Ahamb as well. While we were either eating or waiting for food, the programme of the South West Bay group continued. Elder Edward appealed to anyone who had felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, had received any revelations or had seen any visions during the past two days to come up and share their experience with the rest of us. The elder said we must not be afraid. He had talked to several youths yesterday who explained that they had experienced something, but were too afraid to come up and say it out loud. A woman was the first to get up. She took the microphone and said she felt like her feet were no longer on the ground. She felt as if she was flying. A young man was next. He told us about a vision he just had concerning Jesus and a light. In a prayer group he joined the previous night, he said the South West Bay visionaries told him he had spiritual gifts. He told us he had experienced these gifts already. Now he wanted to use them more. Every comment or story was followed by an ovation from the audience and Elder Edward commenting ‘Thank you Holy Spirit’, ‘That’s the Holy Spirit’ or ‘Give a big hand to the Holy Spirit!’. Many more came up and conveyed their feelings and visions. Some had seen Jesus by the church. One explained that he saw all of us who were present being lit by fire. A few came to say that the Holy Spirit had been moving them emotionally to the point that their tears were now falling. A businessman who did not attend church very often said he had felt the Holy Spirit on his way to the worship service that night. It had reminded him of God and that he should work for God now that the Last Days were drawing near. A few young girls came up with shaking arms and talked about similar experiences. The programme ended with a session of confession and reconciliation. This was the time for any of those who were in unsettled disputes to come up in public to explain their issues, make reconciliation and obtain forgiveness from God and all parties involved because ‘disputes are not the way of God’ (raorao i no fasen blong God ia), as it was phrased. Elder Edward encouraged disputing parties to end their disputes on the spot, with God alone as witness. Different groups of people involved in disputes came up to present their case. An old man came up wanting to apologise to a younger relative about a piece of land over which they had been in dispute. The old man said he could no longer stand to see how they were avoiding each other when they met on the

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road. He now wanted to give the piece of land to the younger man. A young woman came up crying. She was intended to marry a young man who was present, but she had later withdrawn from the agreement. Now she wanted to end her current relationship with a seasonal worker who was in New Zealand and accept the marriage with her initial fiancé. The person who got most attention during this session was a young man who had been stealing kava from another young family’s garden for several months. Kava is the most important cash crop in this part of Malekula and was the main source of income for this family. However, the reason for the theft was that the perpetrator claimed that the victim was growing kava on his land. The young kava thief came up with his family to ask the offended family and God for forgiveness. They had sought resolution for the kava-stealing situation in village meetings, a community meeting and with the police, without any luck. During this dispute, the offended family had been afraid to walk around on the island due to threats from this man. However, after this night, I saw them walking around again and even visiting relatives in the kava thief ’s village for the first time in months. It was late at night when everyone had finished their holy meal and the programme came to an end. In the calm and quiet air, Elder Edward announced ceremonially that ‘the island is now clean’. He declared that the Holy Spirit was present on the island, that Jesus had arrived and that there was no longer anyone on Ahamb who was living in darkness. The sky was full of shining stars and the grass field outside of the church was packed with people who sat quietly listening to the elder. Now it was only up to the Ahamb community to make room for the Spirit to prosper by continuing to pray.

The Revival Settles in

After the South West Bay group left, Ahamb’s Elder Cyril started up nightly revival worship services in the community church to reinforce the Holy Spirit’s presence and to provide opportunities for Ahamb people to receive spiritual gifts. A few days after the introductory programme, I left Ahamb for some errands in town, but started hearing about the revival’s progress through conversations with islanders on the phone. One evening, my friend John called me, telling about children who had started conveying messages from the Holy Spirit. John’s eight-year-old son was one of them, and during the revival worship that evening, he had seen Elder Cyril appear as Jesus in church. His arm had started to shake and tears had fallen down his cheeks, John said. ‘It was the Holy Spirit who came to him’, John and his mother Mamu insisted as we talked on the phone. ‘Tom, this power is strong!’, he burst out. ‘In no long time, these children will travel to other villages and witness about the Holy Spirit’. John’s

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wife, Agnes, replied jokingly saying that soon we would go to the children for prayers, not to the church elders. Agnes’ comment was meant as a joke; however, a month later, her forecast had become the daily routine. Two weeks after the introductory programme, Ahamb children started to slen and convey more extensive revelations during the revival worship services. After a month, the number of children who slen was around ten to fifteen every night. About twenty-five in total were seeing visions and receiving revelations. These were regarded as ‘having gifts’ (gat gift). At most around thirty children, youth and women would slen during a revival programme. The locus of the revival was the designated worship services organised every night at 7 PM and often lasting several hours. The nightly services were popular, especially among children and women, who were present every night. However, the attendance of men varied, as the services interfered with their popular kava drinking sessions – a conflict I will discuss at length in Chapter 4. The worship services did not have a fixed programme, but were arranged after directions from the Holy Spirit given to the visionaries or to Elder Cyril. This is akin to the charismatic-Pentecostal insistence on spontaneity and authenticity, as opposed to the typical routine and ‘set-apartness’ scholars often associate with ritual (Robbins 2010: 58). The Holy Spirit was often seen as a big white cloud coming towards the island by the visionaries. Before they slen, visionaries or Elder Cyril could report that ‘there is a thick white cloud is coming’. Often, the last thing the visionaries saw before they slen was the cloud over them, sometimes accompanied by a wind.10 The services ended with the visionaries and others lining up one by one to convey any revelations or visions they might have had to the congregation. Some had several messages to share, while others had just one, and they varied in terms of their length and detail. Visions often involved parables, where the simplest ones could be seeing one light and one dark house, wherein the light symbolised those who had faith and a clean heart, and the dark those who lived in sin and disbelief (tu tingting). Elder Cyril, who led most of the revival worship services, emphasised that the messages were ‘fresh news from Heaven’, messages given directly from the Holy Spirit to the children and other visionaries. They did not come from any human being; therefore, we had to take them seriously. Central to the revival was the need to ‘prepare one’s life’ (preperem laef blong yu) to meet God in this life and in the afterlife. In order to be aligned with God, it was important to fight ‘the life of this world’ (laef blong wol ia) – the deceptive worldly enjoyments that kept people away from a holy lifestyle. This included everything ‘not good’ (nogud), such as stealing, adultery, extramarital affairs, envy, anger, swearing, fighting, selfishness, being obsessed with money and material things, kava drinking, not going to church, not participating in community work, doubting God and practising sorcery. The actions

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and values that were encouraged as ‘good’ (gud) and representative of ‘the life of Heaven’ (laef blong Heven) included humility, generosity, kindness, helping people, moderation, faithfulness, going to church and a full devotion to God. The revival was, in short, recruiting people to a more pious, empathetic and ascetic lifestyle. It warned against the corrupting temptations of this world and directed people’s attention to the rewards of the next (Hefner 2013: 20). The revival therefore did not promote the form of charismatic Christianity known as ‘prosperity gospel’ or ‘health and wealth gospel’, widely discussed in the literature, in which the message is that it is God’s will for believers to be rich, healthy and successful (see e.g. Coleman 2000; Hefner 2013). This revival’s aim was for individuals to achieve a state of inner purity, which would further lead to a restructuring of society. Attention to money and material prosperity was seen only as an obstacle to this process. Five to six weeks after the revival was introduced, its services had become a daily go-to event for many Ahamb people. The many children who slen and thereafter conveyed accurate messages and complex parables were seen by many as proof that God really acted on the island. Many were amazed by this, and it gave rise to hope, inspiration and a demand for change, both at the individual and societal levels. An enduring major land dispute on the island had reached a new climax before the revival and was scheduled to be heard by a final community court around the time that the revival broke out. However, because the revival events occupied people’s time and attention to such large extent, the court case was postponed indefinitely after an agreement between the parties and the chiefs who were going to judge the case.

Breaking New Ground: The First Posen Findings

Events in late May, two months after the revival was introduced, reinforced everyone’s impression that the movement was going to be of central importance. News reached my village around lunchtime one day that a group of visionary children had found an active posen stone – that is, a stone infused with destructive magical powers – outside the island’s community hall. John and I were on our way there to find out more when we met two young men who told us what had happened in dramatic terms. The men had been playing football at the nearby field when a group of children passing by suddenly slen next to the community hall. When the children woke up, they were crying, claiming there was a posen stone buried in the area that had to be found and removed. The football players had collected spades and dug out a stone after directions from the children. The men were still dressed in their football gear and looked distressed as they told us the story. To conclude, one of them said, determinedly: ‘Tonight, everyone . . . [pointing towards the church] . . . must go to church.’

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John and I continued towards the community hall, where we met a group of people, including a chief, his son and some children. The chief told us that the stone had the shape of a human face. It was clear that this was no ordinary stone. The Holy Spirit had revealed to the visionaries that the stone was placed there by some men who were in dispute with Ahamb leaders. Now they wanted to damage the community. The stone was infused with bari, the form of sorcery whereby remedies are applied to an object to cause laziness, sickness or even death. The chief ’s son explained that the effect was evident: ‘You see, the grass keeps growing here [around the community hall] . . . and it is only cut on special occasions. The place has become like a ruin . . . people are tired of doing [communal] work!’ One of the boys who had slen and conveyed the message about posen was still standing calmly by the community hall with shaking arms and staring into space. The shaking arms signified that the Holy Spirit was still working in him. ‘What’s that?’, one of the children suddenly shouted, pointing towards the bush opposite the community hall. Someone shone a torch. Its light hit a white-and-orange cat, whose eyes reflected back at us. The cat looked at us, turned away and ran into the bush. Some of the children were afraid. It is a well-known fact that a sorcerer can take the form of a cat or other animal to walk around unnoticed. The notion that sorcerers can take the form of animals or other objects illustrates the openness between different worlds that the sorcerer can exploit (Kapferer 2003; Munn 1986: 229–32; Rio 2014a, 2019). However, notions of sorcery normally arise from suspicions. One can never really say for certain that sorcery is at work. Now, however, the sorcery threat suddenly seemed direct and pressing. ‘If you see the cat again, stone it and kill it’, one of the adults said. Someone else commented that there would be prayers in church until dusk that night to fight this evil power, and that those who did not believe in the visionary children would finally see that it was true. As expected, the church was full that night. When I arrived, seven children had already slen. After a few rounds of singing and prayers, Elder Cyril announced that a prayer group would be put together on one of the next few days to walk around the island and pray against posen. If there was more posen lying around, it had to be found before it did more damage than it had already done. Nineteen-year-old Lisa, who had a strong gift of vision, suddenly rose and said: ‘The Holy Spirit just revealed to me that we have to go out and search for posen already tonight. If not, it might be too late. When the Holy Spirit says something we have to do it. We cannot wait.’ Elder Cyril agreed and announced that we were organising a group of twelve visionary children and a group of adult men to go with them. ‘Tonight we will remove [karemaot] these things’, he confirmed in his distinctively firm but gentle manner. The children had, through their spiritual vision, already identified the sorcerers responsible for the posen stone at the community hall. Now, they saw through their vision

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that the sorcerers were furious at them for removing the stone. A few of the visionaries rose during the worship and revealed what they were seeing: the furious sorcerers were planning to come and kill the children who were removing and revealing the secrets of their posen. Therefore, we had to be careful. About thirty people took part in the mission to locate and remove posen that night. Led by the visionaries, the group stopped at places where they saw that old or new posen was hidden. They placed Bibles on affected trees, paths and houses, before everyone joined in loud communal prayers to neutralise or chase away the evil powers. Using Bibles and prayers against dangerous spirits was not new on Ahamb. Ahamb evangelists had worked with similar tools for decades in traditional taboo areas and in the homes of suspected sorcery victims. Many of the old evangelists had joined the group that was now pulling out or cutting down plants that the Holy Spirit revealed had evil spirits in them. The group chased away some traditional spirits, and they found the skeleton of a dead cat buried outside the house of a newly deceased sorcery suspect. The dead cat made sense, as a special cat bone is believed to be used for su, the sorcery of flying. It is also believed that the sorcerer can enter the body of a dead cat and use it to walk around unnoticed. The location of the dead cat confirmed the suspicion that the man had indeed been a sorcerer and that his death was caused either by failed posen that had ricocheted or as punishment from God for his crimes. Existing suspicions and fears of sorcery thus became ‘really real’ through such material expressions (see Siegel 2006: 219). After the sorcery findings, it was evident that the revival had now stepped up in terms of its seriousness. Twenty to twenty-five children slen in church that night. Children as young as six years old, with shaking hands and big eyes, were speaking about sorcerers who were staring at them and wanted to do them harm. The sorcerers were invisible to the commoners, but could be seen by the visionaries through their spiritual vision. Many of the visionaries were wriggling and crying loudly while lying slen on the ground. When walking home from church that night, those who had taken part in the prayer operation against posen talked about their experiences in dramatic terms. ‘The Holy Spirit came inside the children . . . but the dark powers fought with them making the children shake, shout, and cry!’, one man reported in enthusiastic disbelief. These dramatic scenes were a result of fights between the Holy Spirit, who possessed the children, and the evil spirits that the group encountered on their way. The children were particularly strongly affected, people argued, because they had such small and weak bodies, while the powers they were mediating were very powerful. From that night on, the ‘spiritual war’, as it was regularly called, between the community and sorcerers increased in terms of its strength and scope. The scenes witnessed during this first prayer mission would become a regular sight

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both in the church and around the villages over the next few months. The visionary children were finding more and more sorcery, and they would see people and places who were suffering from their effects. The faces and names of sorcerers from the whole district appeared before the children as ‘on a screen’, as they described it, and they could see who the sorcerers were planning to attack next. The visionaries were thus possessing magical power themselves, in a sense, by making what was hidden appear. They had a performative power to make true the powers that people suspected were at play in society by giving them expression (see Siegel 2006: 46–47). Locating the sorcery and sorcerers confirmed islanders’ suspicion that powers were at work in society that one could not readily grasp. Akin to James Siegel’s demonstration of how people in East Java, Indonesia, strive to name their unnameable fears in Naming the Witch (2006, the visionaries gave fear a name by placing the responsibility on sorcerers. It made it possible to identify the inexplicable, potent powers that people fear, and by identifying them, it also activated hope that change was possible. But this hope rested on people’s fear because without it, the need for radical change would not be that pressing. However, the discernment of sorcery was a fragile project, which demanded that the objects and people identified were really associated with sorcery. If the identification failed, the threat would remain unknown and the basis for fear would persist (see Siegel 2006: 26). The ethnography recounted in this chapter provides some clues to understanding how the revival developed as a ritual event with its own force (Kapferer 2005, 2015a) that challenged the status quo. This ritual event was something many islanders sought because they wanted to break free from some of the defining structures of their everyday life in order to possibly change them. People’s experiences in the space of the revival brought astonishment and awe, hope and fear, particularly after the first sorcery was discovered. People’s novel desires for a pious and peaceful community free from fear and mistrust seemed possible during the Holy Spirit’s possession of the children and the sensational disclosure of the sorcery. Potentials that had previously only been imagined or, in Kapferer’s words, ‘virtual’ (2005, 2006b) could now be realised. Revival worship services became for many a collective therapy to move people and society away from capriciousness and sin and towards the divine pathways of God. As will be seen in the following chapters, even though the nightly revival worship services could be conceived of as generally repeatable or unchanging in their form, they continuously conveyed an image of ‘stable innovation’ (Engelke 2006: 69). Every day, there was something new – a new step to take to come closer to God, a new step to protect oneself and one’s family from sorcerers. In contrast to regular church services, the spiritual guidance did not come from the one who was preaching anymore, but from beyond this

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person. It seemed to be God alone who was speaking, through the children, ‘live and direct’ (see Engelke 2004). However, because people are always differently positioned in processes of change (Eriksen 2014b: 147), the revival and its messages were experienced and interpreted differently by different people with different social positions. In the next chapter, I will show how different people with different stakes responded differently to the movement, which unavoidably affected its further proceedings. Notes 1. The term ‘anointing’ refers to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit from God to its people. According to the Bible, Jesus was anointed by God with the Holy Spirit to spread the Word and free those who were held captive by sin (see Luke 4:18–19; Acts 10:38). In the present and the following chapters, there are several examples of how regular people were anointed to receive the Holy Spirit during the revival. 2. Pastor Sivi died in 2014 after the revival convention that I describe in Chapter 1, supposedly after being attacked by sorcerers. 3. In the Book of Exodus, the Covenant box is described a gold-covered wooden chest described as containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Covenant box was a part of the biblical tabernacle that, as discussed later in this chapter, became an important symbol of the Malekula and Ahamb revival. 4. The number seven is seen as a foundation of God’s word and the number of ‘completeness’ and ‘perfection’. The first use of the number seven in the Bible relates to the creation week in Genesis. From then on, the association continues in the number being found in other contexts involving completeness or divine perfection. 5. This song became a theme song, almost like a mantra, for the Malekula revival that year. I have included the song’s lyrics in the Appendix. 6. The PWMU is often referred to as ‘Ol mama’ (‘the mothers’ or ‘the adult women’). Most Presbyterian churches in Vanuatu have a PWMU. The Ahamb PWMU draws more or less every woman on the island to meetings and services every Friday. They also arrange ‘combined meetings’ every month for women on Ahamb and villages on the mainland that are included in the Ahamb parish. The PWMU not only meets frequently but is also continuously engaged in different social projects to help others in need. During my second period of fieldwork, they facilitated biweekly ‘women’s markets’ (maket blong ol mama) in all of the island’s villages where green and cooked foods were bought and sold to help the women of the villages gain a little income. They regularly arrange fundraisings events for the church and other communal purposes, and through consistent saving, they managed to build the only proper guesthouse on Ahamb, known as the ‘House of the women’ (Haos blong ol mama). This house is used when the island receives outside visitors such as government officials or regional or national church leaders, and it generates a welcome income for the organisation that is redistributed to their other projects. 7. Ahamb people have most of their gardens on the mainland of Malekula, a distance of 20–30 minutes of canoe paddling or 5–10 minutes by motor boat. 8 See Rachel Smith’s (2020) discussions of how the spiritual is often sensed through the body in Vanuatu.

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9. In the Old Testament, God shows His presence to the Israelites by overspreading the tabernacle with fire (Numbers 9:14–15). This fiery presence provides light and guidance (Numbers 9:17–23). 10. In the Bible, the cloud is used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit because clouds provide life-giving water. In the Old Testament, God often leads His people with a cloud or appears to them in a cloud (see Exodus 16:10).

•4 Gender and Integrity

After a few weeks, the revival had started to discipline the islanders into a new social order. This was more than welcome for many, as they were weary with the current state of their society. But the revival entailed some ‘webs of mystification as well as signification’ that ‘empowered some and subordinated others’ (Keesing 1987: 161). It was predominantly children, but also some youth and women, who were chosen by the Holy Spirit to be its mediums. The children were chosen because they had ‘soft hearts’, the visionaries themselves and revival supporters announced, and this enabled them to more easily ‘open up’ and submit themselves to the guidance of the Spirit. That the Holy Spirit chose children illustrated the biblical maxim of humility, exemplified by the innocence and purity of children that we find in texts like Matthew 18:1–5, which was frequently quoted by Malekula revivalists: At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’ (See also Luke 18:15–17; Mark 10:14–16) On Ahamb, this divine elevation of the seemingly inferior and degradation of the seemingly high worked as a criticism of the men who from certain perspectives cultivated their own interests in land claims and political strife without thinking of others. In contrast, the children exemplified the values of humility, obedience and love. They were key to becoming more like God.1 Children were not only lifted up as a theological focal point of the revival, but also seemed, along with women, to adjust best to its practical demands as they, unlike men, had the soft hearts that enabled them to submissively ‘let go’ (lego) and fully subordinate their wills to the Spirit. Such submission seemed to conflict with the masculine values central to being a sturdy and reliable leader who could take control in every situation. To comply with the revival, many men would have to change their way of being in the world to an extent that was difficult and even undesirable.

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In this chapter, I discuss how the revival ritually inverted age- and genderbased hierarchies on Ahamb and how this inversion created frictions that shaped the movement’s further progress. As in Kenelm Burridge’s classic studies of cargo cults in Madang, Papua New Guinea, I argue that the revival’s significance can only be understood if we take into consideration how ‘conservativism prevented it from realizing its full potential’ (1960 224). This is because the movement demanded radical change of a kind that departed significantly from people’s everyday life concerns, particularly those of the men. If the men were to abide fully by the revival, it would mean accepting their identity and social forms as errors. This would threaten their integrity as persons and leaders of their family, village and community. We can therefore say that the revival, similar to other revitalisation movements, started out in a utopian direction with impossible goals (see Lawrence 1964; Lindstrom 2011; Robbins 2004b; Worsley 1957). For the revival to continue, it had to make men resume their integrity and respect. For change to take place, some things had to stay the same.

The Significance of Male and Female Social Forms

In Chapters 2 and 3, we have seen how gender played an important role in the revival as well as in community life during the years leading up to it. In order to understand the further development of the revival, it is crucial that we examine gender roles and relations in Ahamb society. I argue that a useful starting point for this task is what Annelin Eriksen calls ‘gendered social forms’, which are based on qualities or values associated with the genders (2008, 2012, 2014a). When arguing for a difference in gender qualities or values, it rests on an assumption that masculinity and femininity are moral ideals that most women and men seek to achieve (Eriksen 2012: 104; see also McDougall 2016; Munn 1986; Strathern 1988). Before continuing to examine the gendered ambiguities of the revival, I will now present a typical example of how the diverging morality and social dynamics of the genders have been portrayed on Ahamb during my periods of fieldwork there. On a Friday morning at the beginning of my 2014 fieldwork, I was chatting and boiling bananas for breakfast with my adoptive father Herold. There were no women to be seen in the village, which was normal since it was ‘the day of the PWMU’ (dei blong ol mama) – the meeting day of the women. This is the day when almost all women in the community are in church, holding a service, planning upcoming activities, organising fundraisings, and reaching out to widows and other community members in need. However, it was still very early in the morning, and I asked Herold if the women had really gone to church already. ‘Yes, every mama is there’, Herold confirmed. ‘They are good,

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right? But us men . . . we are failing. Only a few of us go to Men’s Fellowship’, he argued, referring to the men’s church group. He stretched to get more firewood to put under the pot of boiling bananas. I asked why there was such a difference between women and men. Herold explained: The women are organised. They agree on things and can make agendas and plans. But we, the men, we fail in this because men think too highly about themselves [ol man oli gat tumas hae tingting]. Every man wants to be a leader, whether it is a chief, chairman of a committee, or what-not. If they cannot be a leader, they do not want to come to any communal gathering like that. It is not good. This male quest for leadership and the contrast Herold described in terms of how women worked together deserve some more explanation. Traditional maleness and traditional authority have typically been described as two sides of the same coin in Melanesia and linked to the so-called graded male societies. In graded societies, men acquired titles by paying off titleholders above them with sacrificed pigs, mats and food – the higher the rank, the higher the prestige. On Ahamb, the ceremonial institution by which one acquired rank was known as the nakërkrohin. It consisted of ten named grades into which one could be initiated after paying for the rights to these grades and the names that accompanied them. Every grade-taking involved a number of men: the person who wanted to buy the rights to a grade, the person who already had the right and who would receive payment from the buyer in the form of pigs, and the men who had helped the grade-taker assemble these pigs. In return, the pig-givers could receive political support, a daughter to marry or a piece of land. Each new grade that one acquired offered new knowledge of the cosmological realm, including how to utilise ancestral spirits. Taking rank therefore implied an enormous social capacity, as those of high rank could hold considerable power over those with lower rank (Eriksen 2008: 85). Initiation into the graded society entailed access to the secret men’s house, known as the nalhor (nakamal), where the secret knowledge of high-ranking men was transferred and male matters were discussed. Eriksen (2008, 2009c) shows from nearby Ambrym Island how the basic egalitarian structure of the Presbyterian churches has to some extent downplayed the relevance of the gender differentiation of earlier times and contributed to a process whereby traditional masculinity has become marginalised. This is because the church has emphasised egalitarian cooperation, congregationalism and community, and has discouraged the hierarchical relations and competition of men located in the graded male societies. The Christian theorem is that there is a single, omnipresent God for all humanity. All humans are created equal in the image of this God. Therefore, every person, regardless of gender and social status, is an equal member of the community. By developing

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this view, the church minimised opportunities for foregrounding individuals while supporting and facilitating new forms of collectivities (see also McDougall 2009: 7). Even though Christianity has drawn up an ontology in which every individual is equal, gender groups are still rather segregated on Ahamb and have their distinct social dynamics. In the times of the nakërkrohin, achieving followers, respect and influence implied a way of being and a form of sociality in which the male person stands out as the prime representation of relationships (Eriksen 2012: 105). Although the nakërkrohin system was abandoned in the first half of the twentieth century, we can still recognise this tendency in relation to how many men on Ahamb (as elsewhere in Vanuatu) take pride in making arrangements for others and offer gifts on behalf of their families. Some men are known for being very explicit about their decisive role in creating a successful person or event, often resulting in long speeches in which their own actions are highlighted. This performance is a way of ‘showing off ’ a man’s capacity to achieve great things, and he thus takes the role as ‘manager’ of his social world, as Burridge (1975) terms it. He is showing others that he is

Figure 4.1. South Malekulan societies follow a patrilocal residence practice. Women ‘marry out’ and live in different nasara, but often meet to do collaborative work. Here, Lena (left), has gathered a group of women to cook and chat in her natal village of Merirau. Photo by the author.

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a ‘big man’, as discussed by Sahlins (1963) and others. This behaviour is often teasingly referred to as ‘Mister Me’ on Ahamb and is typical of what Strathern calls ‘mediated exchanges’, in which relations are based on a gift through which the giver takes it upon himself to represent the relationship (Strathern 1988; see also Eriksen 2012). This notion of status and prestige, which we can trace to the social form of the nakërkrohin, has to some extent also continued within the context of the church, the Council of Chiefs, community committees, ceremonies and everyday life, in which men continue to make themselves representations of relationships and events more than women do. It is important for many men’s notions of integrity and self-worth to comply with these values, but it can also make observers see them as selfish (prenmbus) and proud (haikem) in contexts where their self-will can have compromising effects on others, such as in the disputes discussed in Chapter 2. While the male social form is closely related to the hierarchical ritual sphere of the nakërkrohin, the female social form is to a larger extent associated with the opposite of hierarchy and competition, such as cooperative work and the role of connecting kin groups through marriage (see Eriksen 2012: 106). According to many islanders, a woman’s key role is in fact to marry out of

Figure 4.2. Isacky initiating a kava ceremony to express gratitude and respect to Jakon, who had been successful in treating his mother’s sickness with herbal medicine (lif ). Photo by the author.

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the village and create social connections for her nasara. This is an expression of ‘unmediated relationships’, Eriksen argues, or relations where no particular person is foregrounded (see also Strathern 1988: 194). This contrasts with the typical role and character of the male ‘manager’ or ‘big man’. To set up an ideal type in order to understand the different orientations of the genders on Ahamb, we can therefore say that there are two different forms of valued relationships on Ahamb. One is male-gendered, hierarchical and expressed by making oneself a representation of relationships, while the other is female-gendered, egalitarian and downplays the individual person (Eriksen 2008, 2009c, 2012, 2014a). The social form of the Ahamb church is akin to this female-gendered, egalitarian, cooperative form of everyday life. In church contexts, it is the product of relationships that is far more important than the personifications of them. We can recognise this in the church’s emphasis on the community model consisting of equal individuals, the attention to values of unconditional sharing and caring, and the cooperative work on the island that is usually organised through the church. As I show in this chapter, the revival exaggerated these female-gendered qualities, which made many men feel marginalised.

Challenging Men and Kava

As we saw in Chapter 3, the visionaries were daily conveying revelations about what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’, distinctions everyone had to take seriously in the looming Last Days. The visionaries implicitly criticised the male social form by proclaiming that pride and stubbornness had to end. An explicit criticism of the men was that kava drinking had to stop. On Ahamb, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, kava drinking is an almost daily activity, which offers a relaxing and friendly end to the day (Taylor 2010: 280). It is also important for initiating and maintaining relationships among men. Gathering for kava is an equalising practice in which men relax together and talk about matters that concern them. Drinking kava together is also a signifier of mutual relationships that one can rely on in many different contexts. For example, those who have received help from other men in collaborative tasks like crop planting or building a house typically express their thanks by providing kava for their helpers afterwards and relaxing with them while the drink takes effect. Many political decisions and relationships are also formed or reinforced during kava sessions – gatherings that appear to serve as the island’s current nalhor (secret men’s house in the graded societies). Because of its social centrality, normally the only good excuse to refrain from kava drinking is if one is a church leader or has health problems.2 However, with visionaries dominating the community discourse, kava was seen as a danger.

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The visionaries objected to four aspects of kava drinking: the timing of kava sessions often conflicted with that of the revival services, the drink encouraged laziness and idleness, drunkenness set a bad example for young people, and intoxication blocked one’s capabilities for communicating with the Holy Spirit, which required a clear mind and alert perception. In sum, men’s kava drinking implied less influence of the Holy Spirit and less power for changing the island. Disapproving of kava was an important way in which the visionary children tested the men as holders of privileged positions. One example is when my adoptive brothers Edison, Harry and Clinton were on their way to drink kava in a neighbouring village one evening. Midway through their journey, they were stopped by three classificatory daughters (narbaruh), who stood before them on the path. The girls were all visionaries during the revival. Following custom, the classificatory daughters are normally obliged to follow the decisions of the men as their classificatory fathers (ita). However, during the revival, the roles had changed. As the men approached them, one of the girls, Ashley, commanded: ‘Today I want to see you guys in church!’ The second, Tua, added: ‘You should not drink kava!’ To this Edison replied: ‘But girls, we pray for the kava before we drink it. It is fine!’ But Tua responded: ‘It is not enough that you only pray for it. The Holy Spirit said you have the gift of leadership. You cannot drink kava. If you drink kava, the gifts will go away!’ Tua was referring to how the men had recently been granted the spiritual gifts of leadership by the Holy Spirit. Because the men were chosen by the Holy Spirit, it was important that they obeyed its rules. But Edison was eager to drink kava and tried to justify his plan for the night to the girls: ‘But Tua, everything has its time. There will be a time when we become elders and stand up to speak God’s word . . .’ ‘But if you die tomorrow, what will you say?’, Tua replied, before Edison finished his sentence. She thus pulled the ultimate argument that stopped many objections during the revival: denying the Holy Spirit meant risking ending up in Hell rather than Heaven when life on Earth was over. ‘Then we had nothing more to say!’ ( faea i ded!), Edison laughed when he told me the story later that night. All three men ended up in church instead of at the kava session. The story shows how the revival may be viewed as a liminal moment in a rite of passage: each community member was stripped of their previous role and status in order to be reborn with a new identity (Turner 2008 [1969]: 108). None of the markers that previously distinguished people were relevant; what mattered was to become pure and humble like a little child who submitted to the Holy Spirit (see Bratrud 2019a). While Edison, Harry and Clinton often submitted to the visionaries’ messages, this was not the case for all men. Wayne, for instance, was an outspoken kava-loving man in his early thirties. He drank kava every night and had never attended a revival service. Wayne had an ambivalent relationship with the revival because of its rules against

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kava. On a day when I visited him, we talked about the revival and its issues with kava. Wayne reminded me that not only was the drink socially important, but that kava had also been Ahamb people’s most important source of income for two decades: The tithe and thanksgiving we give to the church and our chance to drink tea with sugar and so on is all thanks to kava. Kava is our main income. When the [visionary] children are talking about kava like that . . . they forget that the church house is also built from kava!3 Kava means money and the social life of us men. We have made it into a kastom [custom]. When we do a ceremony there is also kava. It means that they [the revivalists] are addressing the wrong side of things. This is why men do not want to go to church at night. The children say men have tu tingting [swaying, doubting]. This is also making men not go to church anymore but are instead bangem [pouring down] kava. The revival is good, but it is the kava that separates us. At one point, the revival’s hostile attitude to kava made a number of men declare they would leave the Presbyterian community church to start a new church where kava was permitted. As other anthropologists of Melanesia have shown, churches typically define a community in this region, and disputes sometimes make groups break away from their community and its church to form a new social unit with a new church (e.g. Eriksen 2008; Handman 2015; Kolshus 2016). While no one withdrew membership from the Presbyterian Church during the revival, the warning of the kava drinkers was taken seriously: the movement was intervening in a valued social domain for the men. It also threatened their integrity, because men often work hard to plant, harvest and organise the sale of kava to secure their families’ financial security and the community’s economy. The men had gone from having a clear identity and pride as managers of their family and community to becoming a menace to them (see also Tuzin 1997).

Charismatic Challenging of Masculinity

The Christian charismatic search for inner purity, so important in the revival, typically prompts a withdrawal from an array of ‘worldly’ rituals and commensalities that are seen as moral dangers threatening to drag the born-again believer back into preconversion sin (Hefner 2013: 10). Prominent anthropologists of charismatic Christianity such as Matthew Engelke (2010), Birgit Meyer (1995) and Joel Robbins (2004b) have all emphasised that converts may seek to minimise these threats by engaging in ‘deliverance rituals’ or ‘rituals of rupture’ that stigmatise preconversion relationships and erect high moral walls

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between believers and unbelievers (Hefner 2013: 10, 25). As Robert Hefner (2013) reminds us, some of these most subjectively demanding prohibitions take aim at men. Their privileges before conversion are often represented as sins and misdeeds indulged in at the expense of their female partners and children. In the revival context, kava drinking, smoking, competition and pride – typical ‘masculine diets’ on Ahamb – were the targets for special moral disciplining. Similar to what Pfeiffer, Gimbel-Sherr and Augusto (2007) show from a charismatic-Pentecostal context in Mozambique, many Ahamb men found this moral policing problematic, as it implied a fuller reorientation of their life than it did for the women. As a result, many women found themselves alone with their children in church at night, dreaming of ways to bring their ‘errant husbands back into their church’ (Pfeiffer, Gimbel-Sherr and Augusto 2007: 696). The portrayal of the men as threats to their community was not well received among many of them. Such characterisations were in stark contrast to how men usually want to be seen: as honest and respected leaders of their social world. From the outset, everyone was equal in the eyes of the Holy Spirit and everyone had equal access to its spiritual gifts. But as Elizabeth Brusco (2010) argues, the cultural ‘playing ground’ for men and women in charismatic Christian contexts is usually not equal in practice, but favours women. For instance, the Holy Spirit demands receptivity and submission, which are uncharacteristic for men. As she argues: ‘The image of male converts with their arms and faces upraised, inviting in the Holy Spirit . . . stands in stark contrast to the impenetrable pose of machismo’ (Brusco 2010: 81). Brusco’s point is useful for understanding how many Ahamb men, whose masculinity is based on being a robust, self-controlled head of the family and community, failed in meeting the revival’s demand that participants be open, receptive and submitting. The failure of most men to connect with the Spirit was frequently gossiped about by women. A group of women I talked to complained about the self-assertive attitude of men in these terms: A man thinks he knows everything. That he is the boss. They do not listen so much to what is being said in church. They do not want anyone to come before them or be better than them. They are putting themselves over everyone else [puttum olgeta antap]. However, my friend Riley, a man in his thirties, claimed that the revival made many men afraid (fraet) because it demanded that they behave in new ways that challenged their authority. As he explained to me: The men are afraid to fall down in public and of what others might think of them. It is easier for young people who do not yet have that kind of stubborn thinking [strong tingting]. But for the adult man . . .

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it is hard! It is because the man is afraid . . . it is the anxiety . . . because he is afraid to ‘step down’, right? One does not want to step down to the level of the children. Men do not know how to ‘go down’. But if you want to go to Heaven you must make yourself like a child. Because the children’s attitude is ‘down’. Women’s attitude is also ‘down’. A man does not want another man to see that he is ‘down’. For example, if you are a pastor, an elder, or a father and you see your child praying and then falling down . . . What can he say!? A man does not want to see himself as on the same level [stret mo semak] as his wife and children. Riley also told me that children and women challenged men’s notion of respect when telling them how to live. This made many men object to the revival. However, Agnes and Mary, both women in their forties, argued that the revival’s point was not intended to jeopardise the men’s authority. Yet the revival did not readily fit into men’s view of themselves in relation to women and children. As Agnes put it: Women are not afraid to be ‘down’, but men are. But the men must remember that the revelations have come to help you. To help you in your life. It is not to take away the fathers’ authority [otoriti blong ol papa]. A man does not like that his woman knows more than he does. If this happens, he might be cross and hit his wife. To have peace in the house the woman must ‘go down’ and put the man ‘on top’ again. For this reason, the man’s thinking becomes not good [tingting blong man i no gud nao] when women and children receive revelations. It makes them stay away from church and talk negatively about the revival. It is simply because the man must be boss. They have to be ‘over’ us women. Later on, I will come back to how the revival’s challenging of men’s ways had implications for the movement’s further development. First, however, I give some examples of how the revival’s demands challenged the everyday social precepts of both women and men, which demonstrates the difficulty of realising the revival’s radical transformative goals for everyone.

The Ambivalent Granting of Spiritual Gifts

When large parts of the community ‘opened up’ and took part in revival worship services, men and women of all ages were rewarded with different spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit. The gifts could be anything from vision, prophecy and healing to creativity, bookkeeping and the ability to give encouragement. Spiritual gifts were usually announced by the visionaries in revival

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worship services at night, and an announcement could typically be ‘The Holy Spirit revealed to me tonight that Jessica’s mother has the gift of giving encouragement’ and ‘I see that Jesus has painted Kenny’s father’s hands red’. Having a red hand meant that the gifted person had Jesus’ blood on his or her hands and thus could heal the sick and troubled. The announcements were often followed by a specific instruction on how the gift should be used. The gifts were always granted so that the receiver could ‘glorify God’ (blong glorifaem God), as it was phrased, which meant acknowledging God’s greatness by fulfilling His command of loving one’s neighbour and thus using the gift to help others. If the gift was misused, the Spirit would take it away. Contrary to being relationally corrosive and atomising, as Pentecostal movements are sometimes characterised (e.g. Obadare 2016), the revival thus followed the ordinary pattern of Christianity on Ahamb: it required those more (spiritually) wealthy than others to use their powers in ways that reached across difference to form relationships that promoted others’ wellbeing (see Haynes 2012). The granting of individual spiritual gifts was nonetheless problematic. The granting of gifts to the faithful and righteous promoted a more prominent position of the individual than many felt comfortable with. At one revival worship service, it was announced that my friend John had been granted the very special and powerful gift of cursing evil. God had chosen only him to have this responsibility on the island. The gift should be used to curse a variety of destructive powers, from sickness to evil spirits and sorcery. John and I were talking about his new gift after the worship service when it was announced. He explained that a numbness he had felt in his hands recently now made sense. ‘As always, God has a plan with everything’, he concluded. John was nevertheless reluctant to expose his new gift in the community. ‘We don’t want to show off, right?’ (Yumi no save tok flas, ah?), he said. ‘Because it is not my power, it is God’s.’ He said he was worried that showing off his new ability would create envy or give the impression of him as having hae tingting – that is, having lofty thoughts about himself. Therefore, he would use the gift when the visionaries called for it, but otherwise he would leave it with us within the four walls of the house. A few weeks later, visionaries announced that Agnes, John’s wife, had also received spiritual gifts. Her gifts were announced in revival services three nights in a row and were those of bookkeeping and ‘giving encouragement’. Agnes is a faithful woman and was at first enthusiastic about being endowed with spiritual gifts. However, she was reluctant to follow the normal procedure for those who were granted gifts, which was to walk to the front in church during a revival service, take the microphone, acknowledge one’s gift to everyone and confirm one’s dedication to God’s ways – sometimes with a personal testimony about the positive ways in which God has worked in one’s life. All three nights at which her gifts were announced, she sat quietly on the church

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bench and did nothing. However, every night after the service was over, she promised herself and us in the family that she would pull herself together: if the visionaries announced her gifts once more, she would step to the front. She had already prepared a written speech for the purpose, in which she explained the multiple ways in which she felt God had helped her in her life and how important it was that we follow the Holy Spirit’s messages. But when the gifts were announced again the next night, she sat quietly on the church bench, seemingly unaffected. However, this did not mean that Agnes refused her gifts. She was enthusiastic and grateful and insisted that we thank God for her gifts in our own prayers, but she was also afraid of ‘showing off ’. She was well aware of her own tendency to gossip about others who put themselves above others. This made it particularly embarrassing if she were to highlight her gifts and indicate that she was any better than those who had not received gifts. Like John, she therefore kept a low profile and talked about her gifts only with close family – this despite the visionaries emphasising that gifts should be used widely and with pride, for if not, the Spirit could take the gifts away. Even though many islanders were happy for being considered worthy of spiritual gifts, the individuality of the gifts was problematic. That the Holy Spirit had chosen someone as worthy of a gift revealed something about the heart of the person who received it, but also, and equally importantly, about those who did not. Many were afraid of publicly accepting a characteristic of oneself as better than others, as it could cause envy and other mixed feelings in people. Those with gifts were, in Eriksen’s terms, not only mediating God’s powers but were also ‘individualised’ as God’s chosen ones (Eriksen 2014a: 268). To display a gift could signal that the owner accepted the portrayal of himself or herself as morally superior to those who were without gifts. This seemed particularly problematic for many men who are afraid of the envy that such special abilities can trigger in other men who potentially compete for recognition and respect. Such envy can, in the worst-case scenario, even lead to sorcery attacks. To ‘hide’ (haedem) the spiritual gift, such as John and Agnes did, offered therapeutic relief to the potential of creating a new hierarchy and confirmed the value Ahamb people place on a relational egalitarianism (see Rio 2014b). Even though John continued to be a faithful participant in the nightly worship services, other men were embarrassed by their spiritual gifts and of being fully involved in the revival programmes. The spiritual gifts, the criticism of kava and the discouragement of traditional masculinity all contributed to this ambiguity. In the next section I will try to explain why after a month so many men stopped coming to revival programmes, even though many of them supported the movement itself. I will do so by introducing the vernacular concepts husürmarni and paloghusür.

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The Morality of Following Others

Husürmarni is an Ahamb concept meaning to ‘just follow’ instead of sticking to one’s own original intention. The concept is deeply embedded in the Ahamb social ethos of prioritising others over oneself – often summarised as love. If one does not attend to others, one often feels guilt or shame for potentially evoking embarrassment (sem) in the other person, as that person may consider himself or herself unworthy of attention, care or relationships. Evoking such notions in others can make observers judge one as selfish and without concern for others – in short, that one lacks love (no gat lav). Islanders are therefore usually careful to observe other people’s observation of themselves and sticking to these expectations. Toby, a friend in his mid-thirties, once explained the effects of this expectation to me this way: ‘You just do the same as others, because you are afraid that they will be against you. You just husürmarni.’ When several men started protesting against the revival and its kava policies, it did not take long before most men started staying out of the revival programmes. The absence of men was clear given that all twenty bench rows on the women’s side of the church were usually full during programmes, while the men only filled two or three. Toby explained the reason for the men’s collective withdrawal from the revival in these terms: Men are ashamed to join the revival programme. They are ashamed to do it in front of the faces of others. Because if someone says, ‘The revival is not true’, it is hard to say, ‘Yes it is!’ If you are with a group of people you are afraid that someone will say, ‘Oh, let’s not get close to Toby because he has joined the [revival] group’. These things will destroy my mind now! And I won’t go to church. The men’s acts of husürmarni should here be conjoined with another local concept, paloghusür – meaning to ‘listen/feel/hear/sense’ (palog) and ‘follow’ (husür) – a term used for respect in the Ahamb vernacular. When a man was reprimanded by the revival and chose to stay at home, his male relatives, friends and neighbours often chose to stay at home too in order to show respect for the man and their relationships with him. Similarly, if a relative invited someone to kava during the revival, most men seemed to accept the invitation even though they initially planned to go to a revival programme. My friend Edison, for instance, liked going to revival programmes, but also liked to drink kava. If he was invited to kava by someone, he usually felt obliged to accept in order to show respect for that person and express the value of their relationship. As he summed up an almost daily dilemma to me: ‘If you stay at your house and a friend comes saying, “Let’s go, Frank has prepared a bucket of kava!”, it’s hard

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to say no. You just paloghusür [listen and follow] now because you respect your friend and don’t want to spolem [offend] him.’ A key to showing respect on Ahamb is to accept what the other person has to offer. For Ahamb men, an invitation to kava is thus what Chris Gregory calls a ‘value question’, which demands that one responds positively to the invitation if one wants to express a positive valuation of their relationship (1997: 7–8). Men’s and women’s responses to the conformity implied in husürmarni and paloghusür during the revival were almost diametrically opposed. This difference, I argue, illustrates the relatively distinct social dynamics of the genders on Ahamb as well as their different stakes in the revival process: many men had problems accepting the revival’s rules and demands, not least its prohibition of kava. As a result, many men followed the disgraced men who refrained from revival activities in order to show support for them. Together, they gathered around the kava bowl instead, which is normally the main ritual context for reinforcing male social relationships. However, women were showing up in church in large numbers every night. This was also expected by the other women. The church was already before the revival the main ritual context for reinforcing female social relationships, through the weekly programmes of the women’s church organisation, the PWMU. Moreover, the revival created a space for women to address some social and moral concerns that they experienced more strongly than many men. Participating in the revival thus signified that the women were supporting each other and wanted to maintain their close relationships, while the men, in refraining from revival programmes, signified that they were supporting each other and wanted to maintain their close relationships. In his theorising of value, David Graeber argues that ‘society’ simply consists of the potential audience of one’s actions – ‘of everyone whose opinion of you matters in some way, as opposed to those whose opinion of you, you would never think about at all’ (Graeber 2001: 76– 77). Given the relative separateness of the genders of Ahamb, and the duty to ‘follow others’, it is not surprising how the different genders ended up following their ‘significant others’ of the same gender in this sense.

Community Screening

To make sure that people committed fully to the work of the revival, the visionaries started receiving messages from the Holy Spirit saying they should do a ‘spiritual screening’ of all community members. The purpose of the screening was for the Holy Spirit to be clear to each individual if one was engaged in anything that was disruptive to one’s spiritual life. If the visionaries saw a sin in someone, they would consult him or her and pray with them. If people could learn something about themselves and change, it meant that they would

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get closer to God. Screenings of a similar kind have previously been possible through traditional clairvoyants (kleva) from around Vanuatu. If a person was involved in something ‘wrong’, particularly sorcery, the clairvoyant could see it and give the person a lif that blocked the person’s ability to conduct sorcery in the future. However, klevas are very rare in South Malekula these days because of Christianity, which has discouraged the employment of traditional spiritual practices. A church elder named Adam cherished the opportunity of doing the screening: The Holy Spirit can see people’s inside. We humans can’t do that. We only see the outside. Someone can smile and be happy and a good person on the outside, but can hide something else inside. The Holy Spirit can help us with this matter because the children can see directly if something is not good in you, if you are hiding something. Elder Adam thus expressed the uneasiness related to the potential gap between people’s surface appearance and their actual thoughts or intention – a gap that is epitomised in sorcerers, as we saw in Chapter 1. Revealing this gap was important in the revival because lack of consensus threatened the movement’s path towards social unity. But it was also important to make everyone ‘come out clear’ (kam aot klea), as it was phrased, to know if anyone was practising sorcery or damaging themselves, others or the community in other ways. A full spiritual examination of each individual to reveal their true character was therefore crucial for restoring society as a ‘clean’, safe place and bring about a new start. The actual screening event was the subject of much debate and took some weeks to organise. The screening was celebrated by many, such as Adam, for revealing what people were hiding inside. But it was also making very explicit the moral classification of each person as ‘good’ (those who surrendered to the Holy Spirit) or ‘bad’ (the sceptical or less committed). These distinctions were generally problematic in the largely egalitarian Ahamb society and were especially so for those who suspected they would be declared ‘bad’ from the viewpoint of the visionaries. The inner sincerity that the screening required made it much more demanding to be part of the island’s Christian life. It was now ‘all or nothing. No being half Christian’ (Engelke 2007: 8). My Ahamb cousin brothers Harry and Will, two young men in their late teens, did not want to go to the screening. They knew that they had what the visionaries called tu tingting (doubt or being spiritually unfocused). Therefore, they knew they would be stopped and reprimanded by the children. The men liked going to revival worship services, and they told me they believed in the children’s revelations, even though they had doubts that all of them were true. But they also liked drinking kava and other things outside of church, such as courting girls. Harry and Will were not the only ones reluctant to go to

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the screening. Many others, particularly men, knew they would be stopped because they had expressed criticism of the revival. Some were anxious about what the children would say about them. Others were happy and grateful, and saw the screening as an opportunity to improve their lives and consolidate a strong relationship with God. The screening was held before a regular morning service one Sunday in July 2014. Prior to the event, Elder Cyril had asked everyone to pray for forgiveness for their sins. Before leaving for the screening, Herold, the father of my household, asked us in the family to come together and pray. He asked us to mention everything we could think of that we needed forgiveness for. He spoke of how special this was: ‘This is historic. It is the first time of the history of Ahamb that we go through such a screening.’ He reminded us that there had been screenings for posen done by traditional clairvoyants previously, but this was the first time that visionaries working with God would do a full check-up in the community. As we started walking towards the church, men, women and children in their best clothes joined us on the road from the different villages. However, some men who stayed out of revival programmes were still wearing their everyday clothes and occupying themselves with other things, clearly having no plans to go to church that day. ‘Sorry for them’, the senior woman Luida in our company commented, while raising her head as we passed them and continued ahead. Inside the gates of the church area, we saw a total of eighteen visionary children (thirteen girls and five boys) lined up in two rows. Between them was the path leading into the church. The children were dressed in their usual white clothes and each was holding a little Bible. They were the ones performing the screening. Some were closing their eyes as people passed through. I was a bit nervous as I bowed my head and walked past the visionaries. None of the children said anything. I was surprised. Was my life really OK? Herold and Jelen passed through and were also cleared. Two young men were next, and they were stopped. The children said they could see the men had tu tingting. The two bowed their heads and were prayed for. The children looked committed and consistent in their work. They reminded me more of adults than of children. In the church service following the screening, Elder Cyril explained its reason again. He repeated that it was organised after instructions from the Holy Spirit and assured us that its goal was not to ‘put anyone in prison . . . but we do not know when we will die. For this reason, we have to always be ready to meet God by constantly confessing and cleansing ourselves of sin. If we are clean, then the road to Heaven will be open’. After church, I walked home with a group of people, including Fischer, a man in his early twenties. Fischer had also been stopped by the children for having tu tingting and he was strongly annoyed by this. ‘God knows my heart! I am clean!’, he proclaimed while raising his hands and looking up, as if

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asking God how He could judge him like this. Fischer had been president of the church’s youth group twice and was known as someone who had united the island’s young people. As we were walking, he complained about how the children had been unfocused, joking with and teasing each other during the service. ‘Do they receive revelations when they are doing that too?’, he asked us rhetorically. ‘It is true! They do not have respect, right?’, a young woman, Joselyn, replied. She went to revival worship services every night, but agreed that the children did not always behave well. ‘From now on I will not go to church at night anymore!’, Fischer announced loudly. ‘Only on Sundays!’, he added with his characteristic touch of humour, as he kicked an empty can blocking his road and switched onto the path leading to his house. The disagreements during the course of the revival over what was and was not acceptable action, and what it meant to be a good Christian, were related to how the church subtly shifted its accents and meaning in the process. The otherwise so-centripetal church had become an ambiguous place during the revival. Some experienced the revival as a God-given revelation about the truths of the universe and would not miss a day of it. For others, it became a demanding space where it was difficult to simply be good enough.

Figure 4.3. Two young men are stopped in the screening for having tu tingting. Here, the men are praying for forgiveness with the visionary children after instructions from the latter. Photo by the author.

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Adjusting the Revival to Accommodate ‘Everyone’

As seen above in the discussion of hüsurmarni and paloghusür, Ahamb people often direct their actions towards maintaining conformity with others. A person who is ‘good’ (ngavuy) acts with love, is humble and luk save (acknowledges) the needs of others. On Ahamb, where people are entangled in multiple crisscrossing kin relations, these qualities are at the core of island morality and signal that people take loyalty and obligation towards kin and community seriously. To better incorporate the community’s men in the revival, Ahamb church leaders eventually decided to put less weight on the kava issue, despite the visionaries’ continuing messages that drinking had to stop. This meant that the church stopped dwelling so much on the errors of the men and demanding that they change their lives dramatically. The importance of a more lenient attitude towards kava and other ‘mistakes’ of the men was expressed by Wayne, the kava enthusiast mentioned earlier in this chapter, when we spoke the day after a group of revivalists had visited his kava bar at night: Someone thought the group came to pray at the kava bar to stop kava. If they did that there would be a fight. It would have created disunity. It would separate us into two groups, the gud [good] people who have no objections to the revival and the nogud [not good] who have tu tingting [doubt]. The second group would not have come to church anymore then. Oh, really, it would not be good. It would have created disunity. Revival supporters hoped there would be unity if the revival could run its course, but they had realised that it could also create new disunity if allowed to continue in its current form. The acknowledgement that kava was important for many men allowed the movement to continue with new support from most community members. As Wayne put it when commenting on the revivalists’ visit to his kava bar: Elder Cyril explained in a good way that they came to pray to protect us against sorcerers. After he explained that to us in a good manner, we don’t hold grudges against the revival anymore. And neither does the church hold any grudges against kava. In the hope of integrating the men even better in the movement, ordinary adult men without spiritual gifts were also offered significant roles in revival activities – roles that had previously been reserved for visionaries. The men were asked to support the children in their prayer missions and sorcery discernments, and they were asked to lead revival worship services. The Men’s Fellowship, Ahamb’s church group for men, was also engaged to go on an outreach trip around South Malekula to spread the revival message. The number of men participating exceeded the expectations of the organisers and consisted

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of active revivalists as well as newcomers to the programmes. With the new ‘male-friendly’ policies, most men were allowed to live a normal social life during the revival. Many men therefore started coming back to the revival programmes – although mainly on Saturdays and Sundays, when kava drinking was also prohibited before the revival. Following the insights offered by Burridge (1975), Eriksen (2008, 2012, 2014a), and Strathern (1988), the shift in policy could be seen as allowing men to appropriate the revival as a product of themselves and allowing them to continue being managers doing great things. One of those great things was helping to eliminate sorcery from the island – a process I will examine in more depth in the next chapter and that in the end took Orwell’s and Hantor’s lives. Bernice Martin (2001, 2013) points out that research on Pentecostal Christianity in the Global South has repeatedly found that women and young people are advantaged in new and important ways by these movements. The paradox, she holds, is that while Pentecostal churches tend to reinforce a traditional view of the relationship between the genders, it is radically transforming them at the same time: while it is women who come in greatest numbers to the churches and are most active in praying, speaking in tongues, Bible groups and so on, the authority of the church still lies with men (Martin 2001: 52–66). She calls this paradox the ‘Pentecostal gender paradox’, which is useful for shedding light on the Ahamb church’s strategy for men to rejoin the revival. By giving genders roles within the movement that correspond to traditional gender roles, Martin argues, Pentecostal movements’ focus on radical equality does not challenge ‘gender integrity’ – that is, the possibility of experiencing oneself as a ‘good man’ or a ‘good woman’ (2001: 55). On Ahamb, this gender paradox was also an age paradox. This is because it was not only women, but primarily children who participated most actively in the revival and were ascribed the role of spearheads who could change the community. Both women and children were accepted as having this prominent role by the men as long as men could also assume important roles in the process. Giving men the opportunity to regain leadership positions and restore their integrity was important for incorporating the revival into the everyday order of the community.4 As we have seen so far, the revival demonstrates Kapferer’s point that events can become a generative centre for creativity, unpredictability and change. They not only ‘illustrate principles at work – they indicate new dynamics in formation’ (Kapferer 2006a: 136). The revival’s internal dynamics, especially the children’s visions and messages, are key to this openness. But we have also seen how established social principles located outside the event – gender roles, hierarchies and values – contributed to shaping the revival’s winding way forward. The revival was largely driven by participants’ fears of forces eroding their safety and wellbeing, and hopes of eradicating these forces to regain safety and unity. However, although most shared these hopes and fears, we have seen how

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difficult it was to agree on what they should entail in practice. This is because people experienced different things as being at stake for them in different situations. Therefore, even if participants in a movement agree on a set goal, it does not necessarily create unity. It may even create new conflicts because people expect others to share their own concerns and interpretations. Attempts to resolve such conflicts will eventually feed back into the movement’s practice in ways that were not planned by its authors. The next chapter explores how the revival developed into an enduring critical moment in which vital matters were experienced as being at play and at risk for everyone. This happened as the spiritual war on sorcerers increased in strength. The revival became an existential event and movement in which questions of right and wrongful conduct were truly felt to be matters of life and death (see Jackson 2005: xxix). These experiences, which coupled fear and hope in intense ways, fuelled the movement’s force in new and surprising directions. Notes This chapter is derived in part from the article ‘Ambiguities in a Charismatic Revival: Inverting Gender, Age and Power Relations in Vanuatu’ published in Ethnos in 2019 (DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1696855). Copyright Taylor & Francis. Available online: https:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2019.1696855 (retrieved 5 November 2021). 1. It was often proclaimed by the visionaries and others that the revival had come to fulfil the biblical prophecies of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Last Days, which were coming soon. The prophecies of Prophet Joel (Joel 2:28), repeated in Acts (2:17–21), were important here: ‘In the last days . . . your sons and daughters will prophecy, your young men will see visions . . . Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ This passage served as an explanation for why the revival had come at this particular moment and also placed the children’s roles as visionaries within it. The imminence of the last days, when God chooses who will be saved and granted eternal life in Heaven and who will be condemned, reinforced the notion that it was time to change one’s life to ‘live well and [be] Godly’ (Eriksen, Blanes and MacCarthy 2019: 148). Notions of the moral good gained a temporal dimension that coupled fear and hope relating to one’s death, which, it was repeated, could come at any time. 2. Because kava is intoxicating, the church has decided that church leaders, who should be exemplary spiritual leaders, are not allowed to drink. As one reviewer of this book pointed out, many places in Vanuatu people communed with ancestral spirits while intoxicated with kava. Christian missionaries therefore quickly established kava bans to redirect people’s spiritual connections to God and Jesus.

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3. The current Presbyterian Church building on Ahamb was completed in 1998 and financed through donations of one bag of kava per household. The kava was then sold in the capital Port Vila. 4. Similarly, Robbins (2001) describes how the revival that hit the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in 1977 was not only an intense movement with an end, as accounts of such movements often portray them. Rather, the revival has been integrated as an ongoing part of their ‘church’ or ‘religion’.

•5 Spiritual War

In this chapter, I explore the ‘spiritual war’ or ‘spiritual battle’, as it was often called, that developed between the Holy Spirit and the visionaries on one side, and what were referred to as ‘the evil powers’ (ol ivil paoa), including sorcerers and dangerous spirits, on the other. 1 The sorcerers who came to Ahamb operated in networks (netwok) from all over South Malekula and beyond. From late May 2014 onwards, after the first sorcery stone was found outside the community hall, sorcerers were allegedly coming to Ahamb in groups by su (the sorcery of flying) every day, mainly to try to attack the visionaries. One of the outcomes of the spiritual war was that in October 2014, five months after the first posen findings, five men from the district admitted to have taken part in four recent deaths by using sorcery. As we saw in Chapter 1, the uncovering of the sorcerers’ stories during a 19-day-long sorcery trial eventually led to the murder of the two suspects, Orwell and Hantor. As described in Chapter 1, I was in Port Vila when the sorcery trial and murders took place. When I came back to Ahamb two weeks later, the trial and the murders were the main topics of conversation. One day, I was sitting down with two men, Bruce and George, who were both in their fifties. George commented that the news of the hangings had already gone around the world. Now everyone knew about Ahamb. The events had reached the national media and people had been calling islanders from different parts of the country, even abroad, to talk about the case. We agreed that it was sad if people started to associate the island with the hangings. After a period of silence, Bruce suddenly said: Yes, but people must know that it happened for a reason. People might think we kill people for no reason, but it is not like that. That’s only ‘one side of the story’. That’s the story people in Port Vila have heard and that waetman [foreigners] and others have heard. They believe we are cranky here on Ahamb. Like Bruce, many Ahamb people referred to the hangings as merely ‘one side of the story’. The ‘other side of the story’ included the accounts of the five confessing sorcerers in the sorcery trial and the five months of spiritual war preceding it. The hangings were the tip of the iceberg for Ahamb people; in this chapter, I will attempt to uncover the rest of it.

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In order for me as an anthropologist to understand the revival properly, I had to attempt to understand sorcery as well. I therefore participated not only in revival worship services but also (voluntarily and involuntarily) in prayer and sorcery-chasing missions. I was both granted spiritual gifts by the Holy Spirit and targeted by sorcerers myself. Instead of starting with the assertion that witchcraft and sorcery do not exist – following, for instance, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1937) – I do as Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980, 2015) does and take a more neutral or open position towards the ontological status of sorcery and witchcraft. This is to enable myself to understand the spiritual war as closely as possible from the perspectives of my own research subjects, which I hope can bring us closer to understanding how the revival became so important for people. This chapter also includes some of my own experiences as a participant observer during the revival. These experiences serve to illustrate that, as so for many others, my psyche was not left untouched as a result of participating in the revival events. In order to give the reader an impression of the density of events and the astonishment, fear and hope that was felt during the months of May to July 2014, when the spiritual war was at its most intense, I will now present a condensed account of three situations. These descriptions, which represent fragments of the ‘other side of the story’ that Bruce talked about and that led to the sorcery hangings, will hopefully make it easier for the reader to envision what differently positioned people felt was at stake in this process. They also give some examples of how the community’s fear of Orwell, who had already been feared for sorcery for two decades, grew steadily over the months preceding the hangings.

Back to the Search for Posen

At the end of Chapter 3, we saw that two months into the revival, from May 2014, the visionary children started to locate sorcery objects and to ‘see’, through their spiritual vision, which individuals were sorcerers. Sorcery is a highly secret activity in Vanuatu, and detailed knowledge of it is generally believed to be confined to members of secret sorcery brotherhoods. However, the visionaries were suddenly revealing the entire world of the sorcerers – not only who they were, but also what their movements, techniques and remedies were, and who were on their lists to become the next victims. As was shown in Chapter 3, to protect people of Ahamb and the district of South Malekula as such, the visionaries started leading prayer missions to neutralise the sorcerers’ powers. Many Ahamb islanders joined the visionaries on their missions in the hope that they could secure the island from these potent, dangerous forces. During a revival worship service in late May, a few days after the first sorcery findings, several visionaries conveyed revelations that someone had to go

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to the house of Orwell. As mentioned earlier, there were several factors that made people suspect Orwell of sorcery, and many were related to his character and acts that were seen as improper, even inhumane. First, he rarely attended church, which is the main context for the community to demonstrate its existence as a group and for persons to be visible to others and socially approachable. Second, he lived alone by his nasara Eneton’s graveyard, which was suspicious because graveyards are believed to host potent ancestral spirits. These spirits can be employed for sorcery. Third, Orwell could easily be envious and angry against others. Fourth, he was known as an eager land claimant whose disputes made life difficult for others. Fifth, he was one of the most knowledgeable people on the island about kastom matters, which raised suspicions that he knew both the good and bad sides of kastom – the latter meaning sorcery. All of these were signs that Orwell was ‘different’ and that his behaviour made other versions of the world come into effect (see Rio 2019: 338). People also told me how Orwell’s wife had left him and fled to Port Vila because he could not stop practising posen. Orwell’s land disputes, envy of others and preoccupation with kastom were regarded to have caused several deaths, instances of sickness and ruined businesses on the island over the past two decades. Shortly after the message came that we had to go to Orwell’s house, a group of visionary children with adult support left to see him. At first, I stayed behind in church, where there was prayer and singing meant to nurture the presence of the Holy Spirit. After two hours in church, at around 10 PM, I went outside with two other men to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. After chatting for a bit, we eventually decided to go to Orwell’s house to see what was going on. At Orwell’s house, which, like the majority of houses on Ahamb, was made out of woven bamboo walls and a thatched roof, we came upon a spectacular scene. The first thing we saw was two men who had climbed a big grapefruit tree. The men both had torches, shining them around; one of them was carrying the torch in his mouth. A crowd of about thirty people was standing on the ground looking up on the tree. Some of them were pointing and talking with each other while watching. I went to see some young men at the back of the crowd to ask what was happening. ‘They are searching for a spirit that the old man is using when he is making magic [magik]’, one of them explained. ‘The Holy Spirit has conveyed that the spirit is hiding up there’, another added, without moving his eyes from the tree. Loud common prayers were frequently initiated among the people standing on the ground. The prayers were usually started by men and women who had volunteered to look after the visionary children. In the prayers, they were asking God to neutralise the evil powers at play and to reveal to the visionaries how to catch the malevolent spirit.

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After several prayers had been said, the place went quiet. The only noise I noticed was from the two men in the tree who were searching around with their torches while sporadically communicating with us on the ground. Then, all of a sudden, several visionaries started crying and shouting. The place erupted in chaos; the visionaries’ bodies were shaking as they howled, shouted and cried out in desperation. People came to hold the shaking visionaries, who were unable to stand up. A few of the visionaries conveyed that they had seen the spirit take the body of a rat up into the tree. Some men found wooden sticks and promptly started hitting down the tree’s grapefruits. Fruits and branches were falling as the visionaries jumped frantically away, shouting and crying. Suddenly, several of them jumped aside as if to escape something the rest of us could not see. The spirit had moved through the crowd and up on to the thatched roof of Orwell’s house. Two teenage boys then immediately climbed the roof, shining their torches around rapidly. The visionaries continued their howling and jumping as they pointed hysterically towards seemingly empty spaces, while the boys, who did not see any spirit, shone their torches restlessly around. Some people I talked to, who had been at Orwell’s house the whole evening, explained to me that the visionaries had said that the man was hiding several sorcery items in his house. With the help of prayer, the visionaries had managed to get the main spirit powering Orwell’s sorcery out in the open. What we were witnessing, they explained, was the spirit trying to escape the crowd and the power of their prayers. Orwell himself was also present. People confronted him about the spirit and asked him to call for it and destroy it. Orwell denied any knowledge of the spirit and any involvement in sorcery as such. At one point, Michael, a man who had followed the visionaries closely over the past few weeks, confronted Orwell saying that the revelations were clear: the children had seen that he possessed sorcery. Margareth, a woman in her thirties with spiritual vision, then came forward to confront Orwell. He was her mother’s brother (papa or angkel) – a relationship that, as we have seen, carries high value and implies mutual obligations in Vanuatu as elsewhere in Melanesia. Margareth knelt down in front of him, folded her hands as in prayer, and said: Papa, I can see that you have something [holem samting] [indicating sorcery]. It is inside a box in your house. I can see it. I can also see two white corn seeds. I wonder why rats have not eaten them when you have so much garbage [doti] inside your house? Please, you must give up these things now. That the two seeds had not been eaten by rats indicated to Margareth that they were not normal seeds after all; they were sorcery remedies transformed by

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Orwell into another form to be concealed from others. In the hope of making Orwell tell the truth about his alleged sorcery, a group of people surrounded him and placed Bibles on his head and around his body. They prayed for him and for the Holy Spirit to work in his heart and mind so that he would reveal his harmful secrets. Despite the prayers, Orwell continued to deny any affiliation with sorcery. Because the spirit seemed to have escaped and Orwell did not admit anything, it was decided that everyone should go back to church to close the night’s revival worship service. Walking back to church, people shared many speculations about Orwell and his recent wanderings. A group of young men I joined discussed how Orwell had recently been seen in two different places simultaneously. This, they held, was indicative of him using lavlav – the sorcery of duplicating oneself – typically used to direct attention to the version of the self who is engaged in normal activities while another version of one’s self can perform sorcery behind people’s backs. Lavlav exemplifies the social insecurity associated with sorcery: there is a gap between the presentation and the true self, which makes it difficult to trust a person. While a person with nothing to hide is transparent about their activities, sorcerers can copy themselves into two persons: one version is the surface appearance and the other their true self who is walking around behind people’s backs aiming to destroy them. However, the revival was currently regarded to reveal all secrets and bridge the anxious gap between appearance and anything hidden in the community, bringing everything out into the open to be dealt with and transformed. While we walked, a woman from Orwell’s village said suspiciously that she had seen the light in his house turned on the whole previous night. In the morning, she explained, Orwell had carried his mattress to the beach, claiming it was so hot in his house that he could not sleep. The woman concluded that it must have been the Holy Spirit who filled his house and worked in him, making him unable to sleep ‘because he was hiding something’ (from hemi stap haedem samting ia). Orwell had for two decades been said to be the main sorcerer on Ahamb, and the recent observations and the night’s events strengthened people’s suspicions. That night, several people argued that if they could only eradicate the spirit they had chased outside his house, they might be able to eradicate all sorcery on the island once and for all. Experiences like this enhanced people’s mobilisation around the revival.

Confirming Suspicions

Most days during the spiritual war, which was at its most intense in June and July 2014, visionaries would see visions and receive revelations about places they needed to go or people they needed to visit in order to pray for healing or

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safeguarding from sorcery, as in the case of Orwell’s house. During one of several prayer missions in which I participated, the Holy Spirit directed the visionaries to the house of my friend Howard and his wife Martha. After dedicating the house with a Bible, the group stood up around the house, holding hands, and prayed. When the prayer was finished, a message came to a visionary that a man, later identified as Orwell, had done posen on Howard and Martha’s son who had died eight years earlier at only four years of age. The same man had done posen on their teenage daughter Lilly, who was often sick with cough and stomach problems. When she was away from home, Lilly had told me, she usually felt better, but got sick again when she came back to their house. The visionaries told Howard and Martha that the sorcerer had buried a malevolent lif (herb) in the cement foundation of their house. It was the lif that was causing Lilly’s problems. However, their revelations also said that since prayer life was generally so strong in the house, Lilly had not become sicker than she already was. The power of their prayers had reduced the powers of the lif. The group of visionaries formed a new circle around Howard, Martha and their house to pray against the lif ’s damaging powers. After the prayer, some of the visionaries confirmed that the spirit of the lif, which caused the problem, was now gone. One of them had seen it fleeing towards the sea and then disappearing. Howard and Martha thanked the group, and Howard admitted, with a tear coming down his cheek, that he knew this was the true reason for their son’s passing. It was not malaria, as they usually told people. He also knew who the hitherto unnamed sorcerer was and why he had taken his son’s life: it was Orwell, he argued, his own angkel (mother’s brother), who was causing his family problems. Not long before Howard and Martha’s son died, Orwell’s brother and Howard’s other angkel, Frank, was sick and dying. Howard had taken care of Frank during this period and had even paid for Frank’s plane ticket to get home from the hospital in Port Vila. To show his gratitude, Frank had given Howard a piece of land on the mainland. This had made Orwell furious because the land was family land that would normally have been passed on to him after his brother’s death. Orwell’s fury had kept Howard from using the piece of land very much, until a few years before the revival. The story illustrates how land disputes are seen as a potent reason for the corrosion and destruction of kin relationships on Ahamb, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, as discussed in Chapter 2. It also serves as another example of the ruthlessness and inhumanity associated with sorcerers who do not think twice about causing the worst of suffering to even their closest kin. They are repeatedly proven to assert their own desires and greed over and against the desires of all others (see Munn 1986: 227). The explanation of Orwell’s involvement confirmed people’s fear that intimate relations can indeed be betrayed, reflecting the seemingly constant worry expressed by people around Melanesia about the risks of the relations they engage in (Rio 2019: 339).

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The naming of Orwell and other sorcerers by the visionaries helped people feel they had both a better understanding and a sense of control over what had been a vague threat of sorcery. It also helped people ‘name’ the cause of their suffering and assert that it had an approachable source (Siegel 2006). It made people’s anxieties more manageable because they knew what was behind them. From one perspective, the identification of the cause of one’s suffering raised new fears. However, it also gave people hope because, with the help of the visionaries, they were now in a state to tackle the source of their fears (see Siegel 2006: 84; see also Rio, MacCarthy and Blanes 2017b: 4–5). The identification of sorcerers thus brought about new anxiety and fear at the same time as it brought about hope and relief from the anxieties and fears. This conjunction of fear and hope was reinforced as a potent driving force for the revival after incidents like the one at Howard and Martha’s house.

Relief at Mrensaras

Every day, people had experiences and heard the visionaries convey revelations that were hard to explain, but that resonated with their suspicions of how sorcerers operated. When visionaries confirmed these suspicions, it reinforced people’s fear of them, which Siegel (2006: 48) argues is one paradox of sorcery: someone confirms one’s suspicions and therefore one’s suspicions become real. One day in June, I was walking around with John when we met seven crying children standing by Ahamb’s primary school and pointing towards a grapefruit tree. Two female teachers from Ahamb were holding them, and they seemed unsure how to respond. The children occasionally screamed and turned away from the tree while embracing the two teachers. More children started arriving, and so did Marcus. Marcus had many years of experience as a Sunday school teacher and knew the children well. If the children received a revelation saying that they had to go somewhere to pray, Marcus would run with them. He had now become an informal revival leader, alongside other adult revival supporters, helping to coordinate revival programmes and taking extra responsibility when the visionaries asked for something. As Marcus noticed John and me by the school, he shouted: ‘You must run to Mrensaras! Hurry, hurry! Six to nine men have already “come down” there! Bring your Bibles!’ We started running towards John’s house to get his Bible, which could be used as a spiritual shield and weapon against the forces of the sorcerers. He found one for himself and one for me. John had taken off his slippers to run faster, and I had trouble following him on the narrow path leading towards Mrensaras. Adults rarely run in Vanuatu, but the spiritual war made both men and women sprint to all corners of the island. On the path, we met Agnes, John’s wife, who was in her garden cutting bananas for dinner.

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She was used to John and me joking around and pranking each other, and she laughed out loud when she saw us racing through the bush towards her. But John shouted: ‘Come to Mrensaras and be quick!’ After weeks of messages about sorcerers arriving to attack, Agnes understood what was going on. She quickly put down her knife and came running after us. However, she never had time to pick up the knife again that evening, as the battle with sorcerers was going to last far into the night. When John and I drew near to the edge of the thick bush at Mrensaras, we saw that a number of people had already arrived. There were grown men with bush knives, women with Bibles, and children who were screaming and crying while men and women were holding them. Loud common prayers were initiated to ask the Holy Spirit to help and to reveal messages about the state of the children.2 One visionary then conveyed, shakily, that a group of sorcerers had already landed and gone into the nearby village of Meliambor. Some men immediately responded by running towards Meliambor with bush knives and Bibles. Another visionary conveyed that two other men had come flying by su and were still in the tree in which they had landed – not far from us. A group of people ran over there, surrounded the tree, held hands and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come and chase the sorcerers away. After the prayer, a message came to a visionary that the sorcerers had fled while they prayed. The power of the Holy Spirit had pushed them off the island. The crowd at Mrensaras made a general prayer that the Holy Spirit should make the area safe, that nobody should be able to come down by su or any other evil powers and that God had to defeat the sorcerers’ powers, should they come. Ralph, a shy visionary boy of six, had been so scared during the turmoil on the beach that he had come to take my hand. He was now hanging on to me, shaking and occasionally falling down. He was filled with the Holy Spirit and I was busy trying to hold him up. After the prayer, the adult revival leader Marcus asked if there were any revelations. While two visionary girls conveyed their visions and messages, Ralph tapped me on the shoulder and I bent down to hear him say: ‘I see two swords surrounding us in this place. The swords of God’s angels. Nothing can touch us. God’s angels are protecting us.’ His own voice was too weak to carry through the crowd. I therefore announced that Ralph had a revelation and repeated what he had just said. Around me I could hear a sigh of relief as many nodded towards us. I could also hear people whispering ‘Thank you, Jesus’ and ‘Thank you, Holy Spirit’. The fear of the persistent sorcerers caused a sense of panic and was structuring the everyday lives of many people on Ahamb. During the most intensive periods of sorcerer activity, women did not go to gardens because they were so afraid of being attacked in the bush. As a result, the stock of food was getting low in many homes. Some sturdy bachelors I knew, who otherwise lived in their own houses, were so afraid that they came to sleep at their par-

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ents’ homes during these periods. The messages from the visionary children were clear: we all had to be careful. We should not go anywhere alone in the bush; we had to keep an eye on our children and generally look after ourselves. The sorcerers were continuously trying out new techniques to come through to the island, but the visionaries were continuously receiving revelations from the Holy Spirit about their positions and plans, and could bring in the necessary measures to protect us. Following the visionaries’ messages appeared to be a matter of life and death. The number of sorcerers who came to Ahamb was at one point so high that it seemed impossible to stop them. One evening, visionaries conveyed that more than twenty sorcerers from around the region had mobilised and landed on the island to do away with the children. If the sorcerers did not succeed in killing any of the visionaries, they were placing new posen on the island and searching for other victims. Many people were coming to church at night to receive updates on the situation and to pray. The revival worship services were not only an opportunity for people to pray and hear the latest revelations of the visionaries; they were also a space in which people came to seek support and ease their worries. During the intense periods of sorcery, people would get up during revival worship services simply to let others know how afraid they were and that they could not sleep at night. Others would come with emotional confessions about their personal lives. They said they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit and felt the urge to free themselves from their troubles of the past to start anew. Several intense weeks of spiritual war was wearying for many. Some were exhausted and losing motivation to continue to act. Was it possible to stop the sorcerers at all? However, as people continued to meet in church ritually, where they revealed their anxieties and fears to one another, but also comforted one another. Moreover, the optimistic kept reminding the demotivated about their previous accomplishments. These factors combined seemed to reinforce the solidarity of the revivalists and build up enough ‘emotional energy’ (Summers-Effler 2002: 54) to frame new hope of overcoming the threats and motivate most people to continue ahead.

Fear of Fear?

Despite the precariousness of the situation as many experienced it, some individuals, particularly men, again expressed doubt and resistance towards the visionaries and their revelations. According to the visionaries, these men constituted a serious risk to the community because their doubt created cracks in the Holy Spirit’s protection of the island. This allowed the persistent sorcerers to come through to the island. If everyone had supported the revival and cooperated, the spiritual and physical protection of the Holy Spirit, which fed on

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people’s commitment to it, would be absolute. But if people were not all open, receptive and supportive, the Holy Spirit could not work strongly enough to keep the increasingly aggressive sorcerers away. As with magic among the Tswana in Southern Africa, as described by Jean and John Comaroff (2008), the Holy Spirit would only work if the Ahamb community was in a state of moral balance. This implied avoiding improper conflict among humans and between humans and the nonhuman – in our case, the Holy Spirit. On Ahamb, this consensus was summed up as having ‘one mind’ (wan tingting), a state, as we have seen, that was deemed necessary for other Melanesian renewal movements as well. A breach of this balance would ‘pollute the cosmic order’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2008: 469) and create cracks in the Holy Spirit’s protection of the island. Disunity thus not only imperilled social life, but also threatened life itself (Lindstrom 2011: 258). As Elder Cyril reminded the congregation during the spiritual war: ‘Prayer is our shield, it is our protector. As long as we are under the shelter of the Holy Spirit, we are safe.’ It was not only ordinary men who were sceptical about the revival. Some of the church leaders were also ambivalent. One of them was Elder Ken, a man in his late forties. Ken is among the most dedicated Christians I know, but he rarely came to revival worship services. He was criticised for this by revival supporters, who said he was jealous (jalus) and could not accept that the children were leading the church. ‘If the church elders are not coming to church, how can we expect that ordinary people do so?’, people complained. Ken claimed that he was happy for the revival to take place, but was unsure of whether or not the visionaries’ revelations were always interpreted in the right way. He did not like that there was so much talk of posen and devel (evil spirits) in church. It went against his belief (bilif blong mi), he said, before continuing: If we talk about posen and devel, it makes people afraid. That gives Satan power. When we believe and pray, we must trust that God is protecting us. If the sorcerers are really as threatening as the visionaries claim, have the decades of prayer against sorcery on the island been in vain? Have they not worked? Ken found the theology of the revival ambiguous: ‘We teach belief but we also teach fear. That makes people confused.’ His concern resonates with a point made by anthropologists working on Pentecostalism and witchcraft in Africa, who say that Pentecostal Christianity has taken on the very logic of witchcraft and made the church as much a part of the witchcraft problem as it is a solution to it (Meyer 1999; Newell 2007). Sasha Newell, for example, reports from the Ivory Coast on the elaborate belief in witchcraft and a simultaneous assertion of the ability of the church to transcend it. But by recognising the efficacy

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and reality of witchcraft as part of the category of the evil Satan, he argues, witchcraft discourse is let into the heart of the Christian ritual. Sorcery has been part of the Christian discourse on Ahamb since the conversion process began in the early 1900s, but it is only addressed explicitly when there is need to do so, such as when someone claims to have seen a sorcerer. However, the intensity of sorcery in the revival brought the threat of evil powers into the church and community in new and more explicit ways. With the explicit reporting of ‘evil’ powers (sorcerers, evil spirits, Satan), it became more important that the Christian ‘good’ be strong and present in order to combat this power. But as the evil also became a part of the revival discourse as an opposition to the desired good, the evil was constantly reproduced and reinforced as an idea and phenomenon (see also Bratrud 2017). The existence of good and evil, and hope and fear were in this sense mutually reinforcing and can be argued to be reproduced as relevant ideas by the existence and cultivation of the other (see de Boeck and Plissart 2006; Meyer 1999; Newell 2007; Eriksen and Rio 2017). This point resonates with Radcliffe-Brown’s critique of Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1992 [1948]) view of ritual as a relief in situations of uncertainty and anxiety (see also Bratrud 2019b). Radcliffe-Brown argues that it is the rit-

Figure 5.1. Visionaries saw that a group of sorcerers were flying in by su towards Ahamb. A group here is praying against the flying sorcerers, holding up a Bible in their direction. Photo by the author.

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ual itself that produces uncertainty and anxiety. As he phrases it with respect to the Andaman Islands: If it were not for the existence of the rite and the beliefs associated with it the individual would feel no anxiety . . . [T]he psychological effect of the rite is to create in him a sense of insecurity or danger. It seems very unlikely that an Andaman Islander would think that it is dangerous to eat dugong or pork or turtle meat if it were not for the existence of a specific body of ritual the ostensible purpose of which is to protect him from those dangers. (Radcliffe-Brown 1933: 39, also quoted in Homans 1941: 169). In this vein, like Siegel (2006: 14) in his analysis of sorcery in Indonesia, we may ask: ‘Can there be an institution established on the basis of fear which is not merely the defense against that fear but also the assertion, and many would

Figure 5.2. Children working in the house of Parker and Jane. The Holy Spirit revealed that their house was built on a former ancestral taboo area. The spirits residing here were causing problems for their family and were the reason why their son was deaf. Clothes and bedding had to be taken out to allow them to dig a hole in the cement foundation to remove the ancestral bones that contained the spirits. Eventually, visionaries conveyed that it was enough to place Bibles on the floor and pray to neutralise the power of the spirits. However, Parker and Jane’s son did not get better after the event. Photo by the author.

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Figure 5.3. Children and adults mobilise after visionaries reported that flying sorcerers had landed in a tree nearby. An hour earlier, visionaries said that two other sorcerers had landed in the tree to the right in the photo. In addition to intense prayers to lessen the power of the sorcerers, some men built a fire of branches from the tree narör (known as melek tri blong solwota [milk tree of the sea] some places in Vanuatu) whose smoke has the effect of paralysing sorcerers, according to customary knowledge (kastom). Photo by the author.

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Figure 5.4. After a long day of chasing invisible sorcerers who had allegedly landed on Ahamb to try to kill someone, the visionaries declared that the sorcerers had flown away. While we sat around to catch our breath, visionaries pointed towards a branch in a tree; they were bewildered because they saw the Archangel Gabriel sitting there. He had allegedly helped us during the mission. Photo by the author.

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say, the production of it?’ If Newell, Radcliffe-Brown and Siegel are right, it may be useful to be reminded here of former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous phrase in his inauguration speech in 1933 that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself ’.3 However, for most of my interlocutors, the revival was a fast-changing affective process that did not allow critical assessments of the kind offered by Siegel, Radcliffe-Brown and Newell. In the space of hope for renewal and safety that was emerging alongside the fear of the confirmed forces of destruction, the revival conveyed an image of stable innovation. New steps towards social renewal, safety and reconciliation were taken every day as the Spirit revealed its messages to the visionaries. Many were surprised at what they experienced, forcing them to think and act in new ways (see Scott 2016; Zigon 2008). Leaders had to respond to the visionaries’ revelations and more often than not incorporated them into their subsequent decisions and practices. Even though the nightly revival worship services could be conceived of as generally repetitious or unchanging in their form, they seemed to continually generate new vitality for the people who attended them day after day. Dedicated participants claimed that even if they went to church every day, they would ‘not get tired of it’ (no save taed). The themes that were addressed and the experiences people had seemed to have the capacity to regenerate the participants and their realities in new ways (see Kapferer 2005: 40). This continued to drive the movement forward.

Lincoln Surrenders

If the revival took on a life of its own, it also illuminated and made clearer some dominant values at the core of what many islanders find to be good and that they hope to realise in their life. A striking feature of the war against sorcery was that no matter how afraid people were and no matter how much misery they assumed the sorcerers had caused, few wanted the sorcerers dead. The sorcery hunts on Ahamb thus seemed, for the time being, to be a contrast to sorcery vengeance described elsewhere, where death is perceived to be a necessity.4 People on Ahamb believe in sorcery, but they also believe that they have no right to kill anyone. ‘God loves us equally no matter if it is a good person or a posen man’ was a comment I often heard when people prayed for the attacking sorcerers to surrender. They also emphasised the possibility, and importance, of changing ( jenisem) the sorcerers so they could return (kambak) to the fellowship of the community. The sorcerer in Vanuatu is aware of his actions and may choose to stop practising it, unlike witches in Papua New Guinea and other places who are unaware that they are witches and unconsciously harm

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others (see e.g. Bubandt 2014; Gibbs 2012). This notion was reflected in the instruction from the Holy Spirit to the visionaries: if the Spirit could do its work, the sorcerers would give up their practice voluntarily, change their lives and return to being regular members of society. Some people on Ahamb, as elsewhere (see e.g. Meyer 2004), argue that the spirits engaged by sorcerers are just Satan in disguise. If the sorcerers are overcome by Satan, it means they will end up in Hell. But if the sorcerers surrender and re-align themselves with God, they will be saved. Most people on Ahamb want the best for one another, even if someone is performing sorcery. A senior man, Markai, explained this point to me in the following terms one night, after the visionaries had been crying to make the accused sorcerer Orwell surrender his posen: He doesn’t want to confess. Everything like this he has to tell out to God. Life on the island is like this now. The work of the [Holy] Spirit is strong. If he doesn’t let go of what he has, they [the visionaries] will cry until daylight. They are crying for his life! If he doesn’t leave these kinds of things [sorcery] he cannot enter Heaven. They don’t want him to end up in the ‘hole’ right? In the ‘fire’. If he tells out everything he has done from before and until today, and let go of these things, God will forget it and people will forget it. And then he will go to Paradise. During the revival, one of the names that kept coming up in relation to sorcery, in addition to Orwell and Hantor, was another senior man, Lincoln. Like Orwell, Lincoln had been suspected of sorcery for many years. One night he was taken to church because the visionaries’ revelations said he owned a malevolent lif. When he was confronted by the children, he took them and a group of followers to the bush. There he showed them a plant he knew about that had a hypnotising effect and could lead a victim to sorcerers. This lif, known as haindram, he said, must be the lif they saw in their revelations. The visionaries claimed that Lincoln had used this lif to hand over to sorcerers the life of a young man named Jimmy, who had tragically died in mysterious circumstances a decade earlier. Jimmy’s death was still remembered as a great tragedy. Many were fond of him, and he was the only child of his ageing parents. Since his unexpected death, the community had tried to find out what had caused his passing. During the revival, which seemed to reveal everything unknown about the past, present and future, Jimmy had appeared to the visionaries who explained the whole story of his death: Lincoln had used haindram to give Jimmy’s life to sorcerers who had killed him with posen. Jimmy had even showed the visionaries a tree under which the posen used to kill him had been buried. He had given instructions to the visionaries to burn down the tree in order to get rid

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of the posen, which was still active and could be reused to harm others. When the children agreed to this, Jimmy had waved goodbye and gone to his grave by his parents’ house. With the help of neighbours, the tree was burned down that night. The story made a big emotional impact on Jimmy’s family and friends, who already suspected that he had been killed by sorcerers. Sid, a childhood friend of Jimmy’s, became so furious at Lincoln when he heard the visionaries’ story that he grabbed his knife and started running towards the old man’s house, threatening to stab him. However, Sid was stopped by other men who went sprinting after him. While Lincoln denied his involvement in the death of Jimmy, the visionaries’ stories mobilised people in getting to the bottom of Lincoln’s case and whatever he could be hiding. Two days later, Lincoln was at the centre of the night’s revival worship service. I was walking to church with some relatives that night and from a distance could already hear a chorus of weeping and howling from the church building. When we came closer, we could see through the church windows that Lincoln was standing up in the middle of the room with visionary children moving around him, weeping out loud. Some visionary women and youth were also standing around the old man, praying or shouting at him. After the noise caused by the visionaries abated, Elder Cyril explained to the congregation that they saw that Lincoln was ‘still hiding something’ (stap haedem sam samting yet). He had allegedly not admitted everything when he told them about the haindram lif. Martin, a man in his early twenties, had recently been granted the gift of vision. He was not a regular churchgoer before the revival, but was now active in the revival group. He stood up next to old Lincoln and held his arm around him. Lincoln looked elderly and weak next to the energetic and wellbuilt Martin with his pointed beard and vigorous use of the microphone. ‘God is good!’, Martin stated into the microphone, with the congregation replying staunchly: ‘All the time!’ ‘And all the time. . .’, ‘. . .God is good!’ the exchange between Martin and the congregation continued. Martin was talking loudly and intensely into the microphone: ‘You see this old man? He is my friend. But today he has to surrender.’ He continued, saying to Lincoln: ‘We don’t want to kill you. We don’t want to fight you. We want to save your life. You must come back. You must come back to church.’ An elderly woman named Maria, who was also a visionary, came up to Lincoln and talked vigorously, not holding back. ‘What are you really doing when you are walking around on the mainland?’, insinuating that he was hiding sorcery there. ‘From now on, I want to see you stay quiet at your house!’ Maria also recalled that many of the visionary children said that his face looked like a cat to them when they saw him. Maria said she was seeing the same thing, indicating that Lincoln had a lif that enabled him to change into a cat. As noted above, these lif are dangerous

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and feared because they can be used to walk around unnoticed in order to kill and injure. The performance of Maria, as a woman, during the service was no longer surprising. Women who felt empowered by the Holy Spirit had by this point found a platform from which they could openly express their opinions to the community, concerning everything from male-dominated politics to sorcerers, to the moral life of their family and in the community. Another man was next to come up to give his comment: ‘The eyes of the children are open with the Holy Spirit. Where will you hide? You have to give up whatever you are hiding. We will stay here and praise [God] until daylight until it happens.’ Elder Cyril came up and said: We are not doing this work for nothing. We are doing a ‘clean upcampaign’. Our island shall be clean so that we can walk around, be free, and eat well without being afraid. We want to walk around here and be safe, and get Satan away from this place. The congregation did not achieve any more with Lincoln that night. But when the revival service begun the next day, Elder Cyril announced that ‘a man has come to tell us something’. ‘Here is what he has been hiding at different places – on the island, on the mainland, and other places’, the elder said, before Lincoln, who was sitting on the bench in front of me, suddenly rose, grabbed a little bag and a cardboard box he had brought, and walked to the front. He put on his glasses and spoke with a clear voice: ‘OK, yesterday at night, the children were crying, saying they saw my face as a cat. Here it is: the cat, the rat and the snake.’ He pointed down to the cardboard box. Everyone in church stretched their necks to see what was there. He then took up eleven different wraps of banana leaves, which contained plant leaves, a bamboo stick and a twig that all served magic purposes. Lincoln announced that he was going to tell us about each and every one. He opened up each leaf bundle one by one and gave a short explanation before he wrapped them up again. Two elderly men I was sitting next to were amazed. One of them told me that Lincoln was a completely different man today from the one he had been the day before: he had been hesitating and pondering when the visionaries were confronting him; now, however, he was clear and unambiguous. Several commented that it was as if he was letting go of something he had been ‘hiding’ for a long time. When Lincoln was done presenting all his lif, there was a big ovation in the church. Some men who had rebuked him in church two days earlier came up to apologise. Sid, Jimmy’s friend who had threatened to stab Lincoln some days earlier, came to give a speech of apology (sori toktok). An old man, Marvin, also came up, to apologise to Lincoln, who was his tawi (brother-in-law), and with whom he should have a respectful relationship. He apologised because he and his fellow nasara members had come to Lincoln some years earlier to ask him for a traditional lif to heal the sickness of his daughter-in-law.

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By asking for the lif, he had made Lincoln to do a ceremony involving traditional spirits, which concerns the realm of sorcery. Many children slen during this revival service and many had revelations from the Holy Spirit. Many of them were about Lincoln. Some saw that his house was shining bright (saen we i saen) because he had given away his lif, and others saw that he had a big bright light in his hand and over his head. One said that Jesus was very happy that Lincoln had now given away his ‘things’ (ol samting blong hem) and that he was now clean. ‘This is a happy day of forgiveness’, someone came up and proclaimed into the microphone, because Lincoln had ‘come back’ to the people and to the church. Someone told me that Lincoln had worked as a contact person for sorcerers who wanted to come to Ahamb, but now that he had given away his lif that connected him with the world of sorcerers, there was hope that the sorcerers would stop coming. People were thanking and praising Lincoln for cooperating with and being loyal to the community instead of the sorcery world. He had thus freed the community from one source of sorcery, but had also freed himself by becoming clean before God and thus becoming eligible for entering God’s kingdom and receiving eternal life. Unfortunately, I did not get to talk to Lincoln about his confession. However, it was clear that it had an effect. With the confession, the threat of sorcery that everyone fears got a name (Siegel 2006). It confirmed that the hard work of the community to ‘clean the island’ was effective. It also worked to reintegrate Lincoln, whom many had feared and therefore avoided, into the community. He himself was now ‘free’, as he later proclaimed in his speech to other sorcery suspects, as we saw in Chapter 1. He did not ‘hide’ any longer and had thus regained his position as an approachable, social person. However, as Siegel (2006: 229) argues, only agreement can establish the ‘reality’ of the existence of something truly unknowable, such as sorcery. From certain perspectives, Lincoln’s surrender thus legitimised the need for more sorcery hunts as his confession proved that sorcerers really were out there, that the visionaries’ revelations were really true and that although accused sorcerers determinedly denied any sorcery activity, they would eventually surrender if people were patient and persistent and let the Holy Spirit work through them.

New Hope

After Lincoln’s confession, the visionaries were still conveying messages that sorcerers were trying to attack the island. However, because of people’s prayers and commitment to the revival, we learned that the Holy Spirit’s power was so strong that the sorcerers could not come through. The focus of the revival programmes thus turned away from sorcery and back to personal transforma-

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tion through a closer relationship to God. An increasing number of people – including men – started coming to the front during revival services to testify about their experiences and share problems they wanted the visionaries and congregation to pray for. During a lunch I attended one day, after several days of people reconciling and testifying in church, a community chief dropped by and joined in a conversation about the latest happenings in the revival. He explained how he had been following the children around, engaged in their prayers, and held them when they were shaking and hysterical because they saw sorcerers coming. He had even had a revelation himself one day, he proclaimed. The revelation came when he was sleeping. He had woken up because the church bell rang for the night’s revival worship service, but he was not able to get up and just fell back to sleep. He started dreaming that all the people on the island were in church and ‘that we were all shining’. Then he had seen an enormous wind coming, so strong that it ripped the roofing iron (kapa) off the primary school building. And that roof was strong, bolted to the building’s concrete walls, he emphasised. Still, the roof had just flown away. The chief said that he took it as a sign that the Holy Spirit, who is commonly represented as a sudden wind in the Bible,5 was currently ‘working on a very strong programme’ in the revival. It was like a hurricane washing everything away. Nothing should be left of the idiocy (rabis samting) in the community. Even though its problems seemed solidly rooted, the Holy Spirit had come to pull them out. My adoptive father Herold was also present, and he built upon the chief ’s enthusiasm by telling the story of old James, who had not been able to carry food from the garden for two or three years because of some pain in his legs. Some weeks ago, the visionaries had found some posen-infused stones by his house. After they were removed and he was prayed for by the visionaries, he had felt strength in his legs again. On one of the previous days, Herold told us, James had been in his garden and carried a full bag of manioc, a bundle of bananas and more to take home. James and Herold were old football mates, and one day they had met by the island’s football field. James had then asked enthusiastically if they should go and play football again, as he was ‘feeling young and healthy as if he was twenty’. People’s experiences during the revival again suggested that there was the hope and possibility of an alternate reality – a better future more conducive to comfort, care and joy (see Srinivas 2018: 213) – and that this version of the world was imminent as opposed to the one where problems reigned. However, after a month of relative stability on the island, two people fell sick and died unexpectedly. The visionaries declared that sorcerers had killed them. A new anxiety grew in the community. Had the headstrong sorcerers come up with new techniques to break through the island’s protective ‘fence’? Had islanders become too slack in following the Holy Spirit, reducing its pro-

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tection? Many started investing their hope in the great revival convention to be held in Farun a few weeks later, which I described in Chapter 1. Here, there would be revival supporters, leaders and visionaries from all over Malekula – including the revival’s initiator, Pastor Sivi, who was regarded to have a particularly strong connection to God. There was hope that this assemblage could mobilise the spiritual forces needed to up the game against the sorcerers. As we saw in Chapter 1, one outcome of the convention was that a man in his twenties, Levi, confessed to having killed four people, among them the two who had just died. In total, five people confessed to having taken part in the killing of these four people. The five confessing sorcerers claimed that there were actually seven people behind the murders. The last two were Orwell and Hantor, who had allegedly been leading the group’s murder missions. However, Orwell and Hantor did not admit anything, and for this reason they were eventually murdered. By refusing to succumb to the confessing sorcerers’ claims, it was as if Orwell and Hantor were the last ones to obstruct the community’s goal of ‘cleaning the island’. This cleansing could only be achieved if everyone took part in a self-sacrifice – sacrificing their self-interests that conflicted with this common goal. In ensuring any ritual’s effectiveness, Girard argues, those whose presence hinders its success must remove themselves from the premises. If they do not, the road to punishment can be short (Girard 2013: 10). At this moment, there had been accounts of much brutal violence taking place in the community, and sorcerers were to blame. In Girard’s terms, the hangings of Orwell and Hantor, as the last unsurrendered sorcerers, channelled this violence into victims who were deemed sacrificeable: the two sorcerers who insisted on keeping the channel of more destructive violence open. By killing them, people could put the destructive forces back into place and regain control over the very circumstances of life (see Rio 2014a: 323–24). However, as we saw in Chapter 1, not everyone considered Orwell and Hantor to be sacrificeable. In the next chapter, I will examine the new crises that arose following the hangings and how the community was struck by new violence, in a sense, when failing to redirect the initial violence into legitimate channels. Notes This chapter is derived in part from the article ‘Fear and Hope in Vanuatu Pentecostalism’, published in 2019 in Paideuma 65(1): 111–32, and the book chapter ‘Spiritual War: Revival, Child Prophecies and a Battle over Sorcery in Vanuatu’ in Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes (eds), Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia, published in 2017 in Cham by Palgrave MacMillan (DOI: https://doi .org/10.1007/978-3-319-56068-7_9) (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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1. The term ‘spiritual war’ is quite widespread in Pentecostal Christianity globally (Jorgensen 2005, 2014). Rio, MacCarthy and Blanes’ edited book Pentecostalism and Witchcraft (2017a) discusses this concept in contemporary convergences between Pentecostalism and witchcraft in Melanesia and Africa. 2. As in many other communal prayers on Ahamb, the prayer began with someone saying: ‘We are quoting Jesus in John 14:14, where he says. . .’ and the rest of the crowd responding, ‘If you ask anything in my name, I will do it!’ 3. I am grateful to Keir Martin for suggesting the relevance of Roosevelt’s quote. 4. See e.g. Ashford (2005: 131) for South Africa, Boyer and Nissenbaum (1974: 7) for Salem, Massachusetts, United States, and Siegel (2006) for Indonesia. 5. Acts 2:2, for instance, says: ‘And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.’ John 3:8, John 20:22 and Ezekiel 37:9–14 also present the Holy Spirit as a wind. The visionaries regularly conveyed visions and parables of ‘a wind coming’, which was the Holy Spirit.

•6 Crises and Reconciliations

In the previous chapters, we have seen that the revival can be understood as an effort to transform some unwanted structures and tendencies in Ahamb society. Many people submitted to the movement as it offered a promise of safety from sorcery and an opportunity to actualise some core social values. The sorcery trial was a momentous event that caused many sceptics to drop their doubts about the importance of the revival. Many claimed that the complete surrender of the sorcerers was nothing less than a miracle. It proved that the Holy Spirit worked in the hearts and minds of everyone, even cold-hearted sorcerers. But, as I will show in this chapter, the hangings also caused new crises in the community. In late November 2014, two weeks after the hangings, Agnes and her then nineteen-year-old daughter Esther reflected on the eight months of the revival process up to that time: People who did not come much to church before are now coming. We, the women, are not grouping together to gossip and talk about others as we did before. We used to gossip a lot! But now the women are quiet in their houses and do their little [smolsmol] work there. The revival has also made us find out about the posen men, and the posen is removed. This has made people less afraid, even though the network of sorcerers are trying to come back and hurt [spolem] us again. They scare us. Land disputes too – there was much talk about land before the revival. But now we have not heard any talk about land since the revival came. All talk about politics and land has declined [go daon]. People are more quiet. The life of young people is changed. Boys and girls do not go [have sex] with each other anymore because all the girls are in the revival programme. All of them have received anointing. But the boys haven’t changed that much. Some, but not all. They are mostly thinking about kava. Kava is destroying them. They might want to go to church, but their mind is too fragmented [tingting blong olgeta stap go olbaot tumas]. The girls’ hearts are soft now, while the boys’ are strong. We were coming together, we prayed together, people started to know the work of the Holy Spirit, but the killings have made disunity come back.

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While the revival had the potential of being an ordering device that could bring about unity and security, it also generated new uncertainties and problems. We can say that while the movement seemed to serve as a transition rite, it may be better viewed as a social drama (Turner 1957, 1974), or a series of social dramas, in which at times conflicting interests, principles and values were at play. The hangings of the two men, I argue, was the main reason why the envisioned social transformation of the island failed and the revival turned into an unmasked social drama. From certain perspectives, the most potent period of fear and hope, which constituted the revival’s liminal character, ended with the hangings. That is because most of the visionary children, who initially triggered people’s radical hope for change, lost their spiritual gifts. Similarly, the threat of sorcery, which evoked the most intense fear, was perceived to be over when Orwell and Hantor were gone and their partners surrendered and were imprisoned.1 However, the aftermath of the hangings also became a highly liminal period marked by the conjunction of fear and hope, uncertainty and comfort, which drove people seeking change forward. Like the spiritual war preceding it, this became a suspenseful time of disorientation and ambiguity – a true threshold between what came before and what would come after. By examining the aftermath of the killings, this chapter demonstrates how sorcery and witchcraft constitute a tragedy and a harsh reality for everyone involved: the victims, the accused and those who kill the accused (see Forsyth and Eves 2015). This discussion also shows how notions of the morally good are contextually dependent, and that questions of right and wrong in situations in which people fear for their lives often bring parties into an ambiguous space where it is difficult to assert who is victim and who is assailant. By focusing on key moments in the three years after the hangings, from November 2014 to December 2017, I show that even though people mobilise around the same fears and hopes, they may not agree on the appropriate action to handle them. However, by examining those key moments, I also demonstrate how shared values, social obligations and political interests may bring people in crises together in new and surprising ways.2

Freedom or Trap?

‘You see now, the sun is shining, the place is light!’ A senior man, Patrick, came smiling towards me on the beach. I had just arrived on Ahamb after a month in Port Vila while the sorcery trial had been going on. We sat down under the shadow of a banyan tree and started talking. Patrick continued: ‘But during the trial in the community hall it was not like this. It was rain, sun, rain, sun

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. . . it was changing all the time.’ Patrick told me these occasional showers were of a ‘not good’ kind (ren ia i no gud). It was rain sent by the sorcerers to sabotage the meeting and have the magical effect of silencing people (narmar). Similar to the lif known as narmar, which people feared could be used during the first sorcery hearing described in Chapter 1, the narmar sent with rain was supposed to make the community forget about the case and abandon it altogether. The ability of sorcerers to magically subdue the public is considered to be one reason why sorcery cases are rarely resolved. During the hearings, one of the sorcery suspects confirmed that he had operated as the weather maker in the group. ‘But the revival found the sorcerers nevertheless!’, Patrick said triumphantly. He was one of many who now announced that their bodies were feeling ‘light’ (yumi harem bodi blong yumi i laet) and that they were finally ‘free’ ( fri) because the power of the sorcerers was gone. It was as if the two hanged men had become the embodiment of the islanders’ generalised fear of evil forces at work in the world (see Ashford 2005: 64). Now that they were gone, the source of numerous risks and problems seemed to be eradicated and everyone else could start anew. After the sorcery trial, practical living returned to normal for most. But things were also different. Everyone seemed convinced that the cosmological forces working in the community, both the Holy Spirit and sorcerers, were real. For most, the events of the last few weeks had resulted in a reintegration of community members who previously held diverging positions vis-à-vis the revival. Their common extreme experiences during the trial constituted a liminal space that erased previous differences and created a stronger and more unified community that adhered more unanimously to the revival. It could be said that the sorcery trial brought about a new sense of ‘communitas’ based on new notions of equality and solidarity (Turner 1974: 34). Even though most of the visionary children lost their gifts after the hangings and did not slen in big numbers anymore, seven of the visionary youth girls still had their gifts intact. These girls had been the visionaries with the strongest spiritual gifts during the revival. Also, five women and the revival leader Elder Cyril still had their gifts. This meant that the revival programmes continued as before, with fewer visionaries but wider and more unanimous support in the community. After the trial, people from around Vanuatu started phoning Ahamb people to ask the visionaries to pray for them. The rumours of their sorcery discernments had spread – and in a country where the reality of sorcery is almost universally accepted, the persuasive power of the confessors’ accounts and submission of sorcery remedies was great. However, the fact that murder had taken place in the community troubled most islanders. First, everyone had at least some positive memories of their relationship to Orwell and Hantor. It was not only characterised by angst and insecurity. Second, for most Ahamb people, murder is regarded the greatest of sins, and for people who

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normally emphasise kindness and care as being at the core of their lives, it was unthinkable that a public lynching could take place in their community. In addition, twenty-three Ahamb men had been arrested after the hangings, which reinforced the worries of many. Among those arrested were the breadwinners of many families and all the community chiefs. After the hangings, relatives and friends in Port Vila reported home about the different responses to the events in the capital. The case was on the front pages of Vanuatu’s newspapers, and articles suggested that chiefs and church leaders were behind the executions (Binihi 2014). The events also reached Facebook and news outlets in Australia and New Zealand. On Facebook, and in comments sections online, one could read responses from foreigners such as: ‘Claimed to have found out from praying!!! Seriously?’, ‘Great way for the rest of the world to think Vanuatu is 200 years behind everyone else if they let them get away with this!!!’, ‘Just changed my holiday from there to Fiji’ and ‘So much for god lovers, BLOODY RELIGION!’. A Vanuatu Member of Parliament (MP) appeared in the media during these heated discussions, supporting the Ahamb people and suggesting that there should be the death penalty for sorcery (Garae 2014). The MP’s proposal added fuel to the fire in the debate, both nationally and internationally. If shared experiences from the revival and the sorcery trial in particular drew the community together in a sense of communitas, the experience of having the whole world against them reinforced this sense of community. The police and media criticised the community for taking the case into their own hands, but what was the alternative? Ahamb people felt that they knew better than anyone, and especially foreigners, what this case was all about. Leo, a man in his thirties, regretted that the men had been murdered. However, he argued that the state system, foreigners or any human being, for that matter, were unable to handle sorcery cases: When it comes to sorcery you cannot deal with it with your own power. Even if you have a master’s degree, a diploma or an education from a university or anything like that, you cannot understand it. The only way to deal with it is through prayer, and prayer only. That’s the only way. There is no other way we can resolve it. Not through a white man’s ‘machine’ [masin blong waetman] or anything like that. Only God’s ‘machine’ can deal with it [masin blong Bigman nomo i save dil wetem]. It is hard to believe, right?! If you do not know how sorcery works. If we pass this in the court, those who understand the work of sorcery will understand. But those who do not will not be able to pass a sentence on it [jajem]. The notion of the secular system’s failure to address sorcery properly only reinforced the notion of the revival’s importance. The Ahamb case thus echoes

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other cases in Melanesia and elsewhere where sorcery killings take place in the vacuum between local belief systems and a secular juridical system with its rules of procedure and evidence (e.g. Forsyth 2006; Knauft 2002; Onagi 2015). The power of God, through the Holy Spirit, seemed to be the only proper adversary to the threat of sorcery. Moreover, the confessions of the men in the sorcery hearing had revealed how new forms of advanced sorcery had been emerging, which made it hard for people to keep up, even for those who thought they knew a thing or two about the domain (see Geschiere and Fisiy 1994: 333–35). This reinforced the impression that one could not rely on one’s own knowledge in this case. Only God, who operates in the same spiritual domain as sorcerers but with paramount spiritual power, was regarded as capable. To avoid having any individual persons prosecuted for the hangings, the community leaders and the twenty-three who were arrested had agreed to state that it was ‘the community’ as a whole that was behind the murder. The leaders grounded the decision in the argument that no matter how terrible the hangings had been, the action had been taken in good faith and for the wellbeing of the community. They therefore found it wrong that the police should imprison individuals who had acted on behalf of this greater whole. To address the criticisms in the public debate, some community leaders contacted the national Vanuatu Daily Post newspaper to explain the situation from their perspective. On 22 November 2014, the Vanuatu Daily Post published an article presenting the leaders’ views: A representative of chiefs and leaders of the island telephones from Akam to inform [the] Daily Post that the leaders of the community that are behind the killing of the two men are prepared to file a counter claim against the seven people over four deaths. The Akam leader representative said the killing of the two men was the decision of the village court that took a total of 9 days before the men were hanged. The Akam man who wishes to remain anonymous said before the 9 days court, they witnessed a revival prayer group praying for 5 months which resulted in the revelation of the names of the two men. ‘The group [accused] admitted during the village court that they have used witchcraft to kill four different people’, he said. ‘They admitted to be involved in practicing witchcraft, and the materials that they use were removed from their homes and showed to the public.’ He also alleged that the families of the two men also agreed for them to receive the punishment they faced after they admitted to practicing witchcraft. Meanwhile the Akam men said the situation of the Island has returned to normal and Police continue their investigations. ‘The chiefs and leaders of the community are also confident and ready to defend themselves in court.’ In response to Malekula leaders who

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have criticized the Akam leaders for their decision and action, he says the decision was made for the interest of the community and for the better future of the people of Akam. ‘We are surprised that some people are criticizing the action of the leaders who are doing their best to try to clean up the Island of Akam’, he said. (Marango 2014) The leaders’ claim that they were only doing ‘their best to try to clean up the island’ is in line with Girard’s theory of sacrifice, in which ‘good violence’ is employed to overcome ‘bad violence’ (2013: 40). By sacrificing a victim who resembles the dangers one wants to expel (here the potent forces of destructive sorcery) but that is sufficiently distant from community members’ social and emotional ties, society’s angst can be diverted onto the victim to achieve new stability and fecundity. Similar to the ‘breach’ that induces a social drama for Turner (1974: 38), the killings were performed as altruistic acts, whereby those involved acted, or believed they acted, on behalf of other parties in addition to themselves. However, Orwell’s and Hantor’s families and political allies did not agree that their murders constituted a legitimate sacrifice or act of good. The hangings therefore led to new crisis in the community.

Exacting Revenge or Coming Back to Core Values

After the hangings, Orwell and Hantor’s nasara Eneton withdrew from the rest of the community on the basis that the latter had accepted the killing of their family members. Eneton members stopped going to church, participating in community activities and visiting relatives in other villages. Nor did they let visitors into their own village. This ‘curfew’ was declared by indignant Eneton leaders who found it inappropriate that any of their members should engage with the rest of the community at this stage. Some of the Eneton men that I talked to blamed the community leaders for not intervening during the court case to prevent the murders. When I visited a month after the hangings, Elijah, a senior man who was clearly frustrated, told me: ‘We all have sin, but only God can judge people. Even those two.’ Some of the Eneton leaders suspected that Orwell and Hantor had been killed for political reasons. Several of the chiefs who hosted the sorcery trial were from the autochthonous coalition described in Chapter 2 – Eneton’s political opponents. Orwell and Hantor were Eneton’s main land claimants. Because of the two men’s centrality in securing Eneton members’ land rights, an Eneton man named Nico told me: ‘We lost hope [lusum hop] when the two men died.’ While several Eneton members also believed that Orwell and Hantor were sorcerers, others claimed it was the two men’s unorthodox behaviour that

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made people suspect them of sorcery. ‘Hantor, for instance’, Nico said, ‘was not so good at communicating with people in a nice manner. He would attack people verbally in public meetings.’ As mentioned in Chapter 1, a few years before the revival, Hantor had, for instance, organised the burning of a village on the mainland, which was built on land he claimed was his. ‘Such behaviour makes it easier for people to associate them with negative and suspicious lifestyles, such as sorcery’, Nico explained with reference to that event. As noted by Rio, the men’s behaviour resembled a parallel moral society with its own values and logics. This is a space that people fear because it represents ‘a change in the state of relations and thereby change in the entire fabric of society’ (Rio 2019: 339). It represents the presence of an alternative world where humanity is absent and where the anti-social logic of the sorcerer reigns. For the people of Eneton, the suspicion of political motives for the killing added another layer to the conflict. However, people from the community denied that politics was a motive for the murders. They argued that it was solely fear and the hope of cleansing the community of dangerous powers that caused the hangings. Yet, as with other sacrifices gone wrong, those whom the sacrifice was designed to protect also, in a sense, became its victims (Girard 2013: 45). From the hangings onwards, people of the community were working actively for Eneton to ‘return to the community’ (oli mas kambak long komuniti), as the appeal was phrased. The schism was addressed as a main prayer topic in church services during which church leaders and the visionaries announced that ‘we must pray for our families at Eneton, whose hearts are still strong. We pray that they will return to us in the community’ (Yumi mas prea tingbaot ol famili blong yumi long Eneton we hat blong olgeta i strong yet, se oli mas kambak long yumi long komuniti). Many wanted the dispute to be resolved through traditional (kastom) mediation, as had been the case with sorcery, which is regarded to be a kastom matter. A kastom reconciliation ceremony would normally include an exchange of pigs, mats and foodstuffs. According to kastom practice, this would allow the parties to forget the case and move on once the retribution was made (Forsyth 2009: 81). However, at this stage, a traditional reconciliation was not sufficient for Eneton. During a day I spent in Eneton six weeks after the hangings, I talked to Stewart, who was one of the main opponents of a reconciliation. Like Elijah, Stewart also blamed the chiefs and church leaders for not preventing the murder. He also complained about Dennis, a man who during the sorcery court hearing advocated revenge against the sorcerers, whom he claimed had killed his only son a decade earlier: They must get to learn the law to understand that this was wrong. Therefore, it must be up to the police now if they want them to come

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back here or if they want them to stay there [in prison]. They lost the way of God [rod blong God] when they did this. And when Dennis claimed to have a revelation saying that there shall be revenge against spilled blood, one takes God’s points and turn them around. Because God does not want us to kill anyone. I agree with the visionary children who said that they should not kill and that we would face a big punishment if we did. But it is that revelation that Dennis mentioned in court that I am against. It was something that came from his own mind, not from God. Because this is not how God is. Therefore, we will not have a reconciliation with the community yet. They must understand that they have done something wrong and feel the power of the law. It is out of the question that we will have a reconciliation now and forget the case, to say that everything is ok and that they will go free. Stewart was shocked that killings of this kind could happen on Ahamb in 2014: ‘People should know that we are already in the light [yumi stap long laet finis]. But the hangings have made people think Ahamb is still in darkness [stap long tudak yet].’ As we have seen, ‘darkness’ is associated with thinking and behaviour from the heathen past, while ‘light’ is a term for behaviour and a mode of thinking associated with Christianity. Ahamb identity is closely associated with light, not darkness. While Eneton people were criticising the community using rhetorical statements about lightness and darkness, the same light/dark dichotomy was being discussed among their opponents in the community, but here in favour of themselves as opposed to Eneton. During one revival service I attended after the killing, one of the visionaries conveyed a vision of himself standing by the house of an Eneton leader. On his right-hand side, the visionary said he saw a dirty river with black ducks swimming. On his left-hand side, he saw a clean river with white ducks. He explained that the vision illustrated the situation on the island: one part of the society was in ‘the light’ (stap long laet), while another part was in ‘the dark’ (stap long tudak). The visionary followed this up by explaining that those in ‘darkness’ were those who were stubborn, who could not forgive and who would not humble themselves (no save mekem tingting blong olgeta go daon). Those ‘in darkness’ were affected by Satan and had to ‘come back’ to the ‘light’ and the Holy Spirit. It was clear to everyone that the vision referred to the Eneton leaders who refused to reconcile. The need for an imminent reconciliation was reinforced in daily revelations conveyed by the visionaries, saying how the Holy Spirit wanted forgiveness, peace and cooperation among its people, and that Ahamb was overdue in terms of coming back to these values. The different uses of the light/dark dichotomy by different parties with different interests to describe the same situation reveal

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that the terms, and the values they point to, are not unambiguously defined in every situation; rather, the divergent uses and interpretations reveal something of the different interests and stakes of people in these situations (see Martin 2013: 138). However, it was not that the Eneton men did not want peace. In a conversation I had with one of the lineage leaders, Elijah, he claimed that Eneton also wanted to reconcile with everyone ‘to make peace come back’. But before this could happen, he argued, the chiefs and everyone who had been involved in the sorcery meeting had to return from prison in order to find those responsible for the murder and arrange for a proper response: ‘We must try to make people live a good life, that’s all. A clean [klin] life.’ Both sides in the conflict thus seemed to be striving for the same goal of unity and peace – values often summed up as love on Ahamb. However, the questions of who was to blame for the community’s failure in achieving this goal, how the road towards reconciliation should look and when it could take place were viewed differently by the different parties, depending on their social and emotional vantage points in the situation.

Disappointments, Resistance and New Fear

Days and weeks passed by during which the main concern of many Ahamb people was to digest the events of the last few weeks and hear news about their loved ones in prison. The prisoners were allowed to call their families at home every once in a while, and receiving a phone call was the highlight of the day. Those who owned a mobile phone made sure they were carrying a charged phone at all times, and people grouped together when they thought someone might call. Many on the island were complaining about the police at this point. The community had welcomed the police with great hospitality, as they would any other guest. People had fished for them, given them grilled fish, gone diving for lobsters for them at night and prepared meals for them to eat. Nobody could say that the police had not both slept well and eaten well while they were on Ahamb. When the police left with the twenty-three arrested men, they promised the community that they would look after them well and that there was no need to worry. ‘But they were lying!’ (be oli giaman nomo ia!), Sarah exclaimed when the topic was brought up after a dinner at her house. She shook her head. ‘If they continue like this, their behaviour will take them nowhere else than to the eternal fire’, she continued, clearly frustrated. Some in the police force were distant relatives of Ahamb people and the arrested men’s families therefore expected some degree of goodwill. Not being acknowledged as kin reinforced many people’s impression of the police’s handling of the case as

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deeply immoral, alien and unpredictable. As a visiting mainland man shouted to a police officer who came to Ahamb to take additional statements: ‘Is this how you treat your family? They were only trying to clean their island!’ The present case is only one example of how people in Vanuatu and elsewhere in Melanesia have gradually started to fear and conceive of the police as an alien and uncontrollable institution, working within its own separate rationality and associated with corruption and sudden, unexpected arrests (Rio 2011: 54–55; Lattas and Rio 2011; Mitchell 2011). However, one can only imagine the difficult task that the police had when dealing with this case. They had to navigate within a complex landscape of state laws, kin relations and sorcery, which many police officers, as well as judges, fear themselves (see Rio 2010: 185). They had to resolve a case that depended on oral confessions, mysterious physical objects and stories about the supernatural. Therefore, the case could only partially comply with a modern state court’s rules of procedure and evidence (Auka, Gore and Koralyo 2015). As the weeks passed, the visionaries conveyed more insistent messages that the community had to forgive and reconcile. God wanted forgiveness, peace and cooperation among its people, and Ahamb was overdue in coming back to these values. If they did not, the Holy Spirit’s protection of the island would again decline and the island would again be vulnerable to sorcery attacks. One day, totally unexpectedly, Rose, a middle-aged woman who was married to Ted of Eneton, died after what seemed to be a heart attack on her way out of their bathroom. People were shocked and saddened by this news. Rose was a loved woman known for her gentleness and persistence in helping others. The community had already faced so many challenges this year; now they had to handle yet another one. The day after Rose’s death, the visionaries brought news that she was killed by sorcery. The sorcerers had been hiding in a tree and puffed posen shots on her on her way out of the bathroom. Some of the visionaries claimed to have seen the sorcerers, who were affiliated with the network of Orwell and Hantor. During the sorcery trial, Rose and Ted’s son had helped set fire to Orwell’s house, after which it exploded and his posen disappeared, as I described in Chapter 1. Ted believed that his wife’s death was to avenge their son’s participation in this incident, but because the son himself was in prison, the sorcerers attacked his parents instead. Around the island, people were discussing how the attack on Rose would have been prevented had Eneton forgiven the community and accepted a reconciliation. Because of their failure to do so, they were now suffering the Holy Spirit’s wrath. Ted had been present at the sorcery trial every day and the experience had left a deep imprint on him. As a result, he had disagreed with his clansmen’s opposition to the community from the beginning. Even though he could not agree to murder, he was also afraid of Orwell and Hantor. Because

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of the stubbornness of his clansmen, his son was now in prison and his wife was dead. Who was to blame for his misery? Ted was at his wit’s end. He went straight to one of the Eneton leaders, claiming it was their fault that his wife was dead: ‘I do not want to be with you anymore!’, he stated. ‘I will not worship here in your shelter. I will go back to worship in my Mother Church!’, he concluded before walking away. To reunite with the ‘Mother Church’, as the community church is sometimes referred to, was a statement from Ted that he was now officially moving his loyalty from Eneton to the community.

Many Small Steps towards Reconciliation

Eneton men kept out of most community activities for the whole first year after the killings. It was a ‘cold war’, Nico said, when we talked about the process three years after the hangings in November 2017: We did not have a lawyer, so we did not know so much about how the process was going in court. We heard rumours that national leaders and church leaders were giving the community advice in the case, which made us feel even worse. This time was very difficult. There was no chance that we could have a reconciliation that year. We had many nasara meetings during this period with a bit of arguing. Some meant we should go back to the community while others found it not right. There were a lot of different opinions. It was the children who made things change. We emphasise education a lot, so the children were in school during the “cold war”. The school and teachers had nothing to do with the case, so that was fine. The children were the first who came back to the community by going to school and Sunday School. The children’s return to church made women go to church too, because they are under their care. The men, however, found the situation hard. Nico thus emphasised men’s and women’s relatively distinct social worlds, which I discussed in Chapter 4, when pointing to how Eneton’s relationship to the community developed after the hangings. The return of women and children to church, which is the island’s most central communal arena, started about three weeks after the hangings. At a wedding I attended four weeks after the hangings, the Eneton men who were resistant to a reconciliation did not show up in person, but sent bread, tea, and money with their wives to help out. The same thing happened when an old man in my village was sick: people came from every corner of the island with food and other things to help his family with their needs. Eneton and the community thus seemed to slowly find a way back to each other through care and obligations for mutual kin,

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and it was again the extension and abstraction of women, signifying the wider community, that encompassed and pervaded the structure of the nasara (see Eriksen 2008, 2012; see also Turner 2008 [1969]: 117). Small signs like these gave people hope for a reintegration at least on some level, even though a formal reconciliation had yet to be made. However, shared political interests and a continued emphasis on the children’s future also slowly helped unite the island’s men. As we saw at the end of Chapter 2, national and regional politics in Vanuatu is above all about the distribution of resources to communities. It is therefore important to support a candidate who can make it to the position of MP because it means you can expect your efforts to be reciprocated in different ways. Prior to the revival, different political fractions on Ahamb had for several periods supported different candidates for MP, which caused dispute and division, as we also saw in Chapter 2. However, with the Vanuatu general election of 2016 approaching, the Ahamb community managed to agree on one candidate whom everyone admired – an Ahamb man named John Sala who had lived in Port Vila for many years, but who maintained close relations with his home island. It was at this point twelve years since Ahamb last had an MP, and the community was in dire need of upgrading the school building and getting a nurse to operate the dispensary. With the help of many local voters, Sala was successfully elected as MP in 2016 and quickly started including Ahamb and South Malekula in his political work. Following the election of Ahamb’s own MP, ceremonies and kinship ties continued to bring people back together in new ways. In February 2017, a big reconciliation ceremony related to the hangings was arranged by the Ahamb diaspora in Port Vila. The reconciliation was between an important townresiding Eneton senior man and the Ahamb diaspora’s chief in Port Vila. The two had met in a ceremony to mourn the death of an Ahamb woman living in town. The two leaders had talked and agreed that it was time for the Ahamb community to reconcile. In the reconciliation ceremony, which was organised outside the house of the MP, the diaspora chief and other diaspora leaders gave the Eneton senior man a mat, food and a large pig, which is the ultimate sign of something reciprocated and settled in kastom (Rio 2007: 189). The ceremony was celebrated by Ahamb people in Port Vila and on the island as a major accomplishment on the road to long-desired peace. The reconciliation in the capital demonstrates how intertwined and connected the rural island communities and their diaspora in Port Vila in Vanuatu can be (Petrou 2020). As Craig Lind (2014: 80) shows, the island and diasporic community are, in many respects, even perceived to be the same place. However, the worlds and concerns of kin who dwell in towns and in rural areas can also be very different, which causes ambiguity when engaging in, or failing to engage in, the reality of one another’s lives (Kraemer 2020).

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The reconciliation in Port Vila was supposed to be followed by a grand reconciliation between Eneton and the community on Ahamb. The ceremony was originally scheduled for April 2017, and the parties who reconciled in Vila and central leaders from the Presbyterian Church in Malekula were to take part. However, it was the Ahamb leaders in Port Vila, not the island, who tried to convince the Eneton islanders to accept a reconciliation. The former were not necessarily in sync with what was at stake for their kin on the island, as explained to me by Eneton’s Nico, who was living on Ahamb: Those in town talked to us on a very general level, just asking us to reconcile. They approached us in Eneton as a single group. But there are different groups within Eneton too. So if we resolved the case in one way for the whole nasara, there would be disputes again, inside of Eneton. Those in town did not talk so much about the benefits of a reconciliation for each family, as we saw was necessary. To convince people to reconcile, there was a need to grab the roots of the problem for the families affected. There was a need to go deep to find out what the families felt, what was in their hearts and minds – and that was land. The leaders from Port Vila did not touch on the issue of land at all. But land is our basis for living. Orwell’s and Hantor’s families had lost hope in terms of land issues when they were killed. That was the main issue that held Christopher [an Eneton chief] and them back from reconciliation because Orwell was their spokesman in land matters. Orwell’s survivors did not know their history [histri] that well and were uncertain about how to make claims to their land. A reconciliation was therefore not only about the moral conviction that an end to the dispute was right and good; also at stake was the material basis of Eneton leaders’ lives – clan-owned land on which one can live and have gardens for subsistence and cash crops. As predicted by Nico, securing land rights therefore had to be a concern if the long-awaited community reconciliation would be possible.

Community Transformation

Because of the revival’s impact on Malekula in 2014, the Presbyterian Church of Malekula decided during its annual synod that year that the work of the revival had to continue. As part of this work, it was decided that each of the ninety-two communities in Malekula should go through a so-called community transformation. The aim of these transformations was that every individual, the community as whole and the land itself should be cleansed of sin and curses. If a community was successfully cleansed, then blessings would ‘over-

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flow’, as it was phrased. To achieve transformation, every person had to bring forward and confess all unsettled sins – whether they were disputes, theft, extramarital affairs or sorcery. The transformation framework became significant for the Ahamb community’s further attempts to achieve reconciliation. To make the community transformations as successful as possible, the Presbyterian Church of Malekula decided that from 2016 onwards, only one community would arrange a transformation event each year. In return, the event would be grand, span an entire week, and have church leaders and supporters from the whole of Malekula come to participate. Ahamb was chosen as the place for a community transformation in 2017. The main reason for choosing Ahamb, Malekula church leaders told me, was to help the community reconcile after the sorcery hangings. The transformation was to take place on 6–10 November 2017, and it was with great curiosity that I returned to Ahamb in late October to follow this process for one month. The transformation programme was coordinated by a ministry called Healing the Land (HTL), which had organised community transformations in Vanuatu since 2006 (Waugh 2012: 175). It was started by Pastors Vuniani Nakauyaka from Fiji and Walo Ani from Papua New Guinea, whose background was in Assemblies of God, a grouping of churches forming the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. The two pastors began doing their first community transformations in Fiji in 2003 to reconcile village divisions, eradicate sorcery, and obtain forgiveness for cannibalism and the killing of missionaries – sins they thought were still haunting their local communities (Waugh 2012: 190– 91). HTL later extended to Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, demonstrating the transnational flow that characterises Pentecostal Christianity whereby the nonterritorial Holy Spirit can be accessed at any time, from anywhere (Eriksen, Blanes and MacCarthy 2019). HTL’s expansion also demonstrates the need to view charismatic-Pentecostal movements not as solely independent developments or local eruptions of a global phenomenon, but as part of a regional process of exchanges of discourses and practices based on shared political and cultural histories (for West Africa, see Osinulu [2017]). The HTL leaders in Vanuatu were from various Pentecostal denominations and had close relations with Presbyterian Church leaders in Malekula – both through kinship and participation in the same Christian events around the country. Seeing the coinciding foci of the Malekula Presbyterian communities and HTL, the two bodies started cooperating and thus reinforced the ‘Pentecostalisation’ of the Presbyterian churches in Vanuatu that the revival boosted – a process whereby charismatic forms of Christianity not only grow in numbers but also influence other religions and have an impact on the rest of society, including its politics (Gooren 2010: 1). In July 2017, four months before the transformation week on Ahamb, a two-day-long community meeting was arranged to prepare people for the

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great transformation. As ‘homework’, people took home a list of questions prepared by HTL that concerned the most fundamental issues of dispute on Ahamb in the past few decades. These had to be resolved before the community transformation could take place. The questions were phrased in English as follows: Transformation awareness How did the community start? Who were the first inhabitants? Who were the migrants and why did they come? Was the migration voluntary or a result of conflicts? How many clans are there? Who are the chiefs and community leaders? What is the community structure? What were the feasts and festivals of the past and what are they today? What are [the kin] relationships and who are the ones who care for others? These questions made the transformation not only a spiritual event but also a highly political one. As we saw in Chapter 2, the question of who are autochthonous to Ahamb is a main cause of the island’s disputes and division. Eneton leaders are certain that they are descendants of the island’s original settlers and thus autochthonous to Ahamb. But with Orwell and Hantor gone, Eneton leaders worried about their abilities to prove their autochthony should the question come up in court. However, in the last few months leading up to the transformation, leaders of another autochthonous nasara on the island, whom I call Mansan, announced that they knew the parts of Eneton’s history that confirmed their autochthonous position. Stories had at this point started circulating amongst Eneton that Orwell and Hantor, their trusted representatives in land matters, had in fact concealed parts of their nasara’s history for their own benefit, at the expense of other members. The new information on their land right issues made Eneton leaders look for alternative ways forward. In the words of Eneton’s Nico: We understood that we had to engage with the other nasara on the island to get support for our concerns with land. In order to succeed with the land rights, we had to get a reconciliation with the others. We got into dialogue with Mansan about who were autochthonous to the island and so on. We understood that we needed to get into an alliance with the rest of the community [of which Mansan was part], to get through with our land claims. We might say that it was both the Eneton leaders’ fear of being rendered landless and their hope of getting their land rights secured that drove them to take

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action in order to move beyond the anxious status quo and improve their situation. In October, a month before the transformation, Eneton and Mansan agreed to have a meeting. They both had stakes in the political matters that were listed by the transformation organisers, and they knew they could help each other: Eneton needed to confirm their autochthony to Ahamb, which Mansan seniors could confirm. Mansan needed support for claiming the island’s ‘first chief ’, a claim that Eneton seniors would support. Mansan claimed this title on the basis of having the highest-ranked person in the pre-Christian graded society (nakërkrohin). However, another nasara, Ronan, also claimed to have the ‘first chief ’. But their claim was based on having the first hae jif (high chief) - the first ‘community chief ’, a colonial position assigned by the mission in the early 1900s, as discussed in Chapter 2. Mansan leaders were part of the autochthonous coalition that supported Ronan’s reappointment of the hae jif in 2014 because at that time they felt challenged by the political offensive of the nonautochthonous nasara. However, almost four years later, at the time of the transformation, other political matters were more pressing. The former allies Ronan and Mansan were therefore now pursuing their own interests against each other. In Eneton and Mansan’s meeting, Eneton leaders confirmed that they supported Mansan in their claim to the first ‘chief ’ in the community. In return, Mansan confirmed that they supported Eneton in their story about autochthony and land rights. ‘It became a treaty’, Nico explained. ‘I am helping you, and you are helping me. This is how politics work. When we came to an agreement, we decided it was good we came together to do a reconciliation.’ The alliance between Mansan and Eneton was informed not only by their shared political interests but also by their close kin ties, which had been ignored in other disputes over the past decade or so. As Nico reported to me: ‘We agreed that kinship is important and must be kept strong. It is not good if everything that has happened recently destroys our relationship.’ However, members of Mansan were also close kin with members of Ronan, with whom they now competed for the ‘first chief ’ title. This shows that which relations are emphasised in a particular situation may be contextually shifting, possibly incompatible and dependent on what the evaluator experiences to be most at stake in the given situation, all things considered (see Martin 2013). At this particular moment, the prospects of being the head of the community and achieving reconciliation overrode, at least for now, Mansan leaders’ concern for their political alliance with Ronan. However, among Ronan leaders, their sudden exclusion by Mansan caused resentment, not least because they depended on Mansan as an ally against Eneton, who were their main opponent in questions of land rights and power.

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One week before the transformation, on 30 October 2017, which was the same day I arrived Ahamb for my third period of fieldwork, Mansan and Eneton decided to make a ceremony and reconcile after Orwell’s and Hantor’s hangings. I was invited to take part in the reconciliation, which afterwards was celebrated by Mansan members as historic and the first step towards a full reconciliation between Eneton and the community. However, a reconciliation between Eneton and the community proper was still difficult to settle. The crux in the negotiations was that Eneton wanted the community to reveal the names of those behind the hangings. But community leaders insisted on protecting those involved, because they had acted to help the community as a whole. Those behind the hangings feared that Eneton would report them to the police if they disclosed themselves. Therefore, community leaders agreed to continue protecting them by keeping their anonymity. The transformation week itself comprised study sessions with HTL pastors from Pentecostal and Presbyterian churches around Vanuatu, crusades led by Malekulan Presbyterian Church elders including Edward and Cyril, and a total of 305 small and large reconciliations around the villages and in the community church.3 Reconciliations concerned everything from children who had gossiped about their teachers to husbands and wives who had been unfaithful, and a forty-year-old murder that nobody had known about. In addition,

Figure 6.1. The grand reconciliation ceremony between the community and Eneton on 9 November 2017. Photo by the author.

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HTL had appointed a number of ‘peacemakers’ (pis meka), who had personal conversations with every single member of the community, during which one was supposed to confess one’s sins, talk about one’s worries and be prayed for. At the end of the transformation week, after several days of negotiations, the transformation leaders eventually came to an agreement with Eneton and community leaders for a final reconciliation. The agreement was that everyone involved in the hangings should confess whatever they had done to their assigned peacemaker. The sins of the perpetrators would then be cleansed and they would be granted a new start. With Eneton’s material security seemingly secured, the values of forgiveness and unity could again and more easily be given priority. The road was now open for a grand ceremony to be held on the transformation week’s final day.

The Grand Reconciliation: 9 November 2017

The next morning, 9 November 2017, in a full church after an hour of praise and worship, the coordinator of the transformation programme, Pastor Jack of a Pentecostal church in Port Vila, announced ceremonially: We have agreed with God. We want to change the community. It has taken three years. Even though we smile at each other, we are not feeling good inside. But today, we will have peace. The chiefs want all of us to meet. Everything that is causing us pain, we will break it down today, to get peace and light in the community. God’s light is shining on the community today. We have been longing and crying for this day. Today the day has come. Pastor Jack also led the subsequent ceremony that took place outside the church. All members of Eneton lined up on one side of the field and all chiefs from the other nasara, representing the community, lined up on the other. The current chairman of the community chiefs, Hedrick, gave the first speech: This has been a big thing in our lives that everyone in Vanuatu and around the world has heard about. Today we have come together to straighten everything. Thank you God who has chosen this day for us and all the good messages of God that we have been based on during the time of the transformation, that has made us come back. Now it won’t be anyone who will be ashamed of this anymore. We only rely on God. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the South Malekula Presbyterian church who has made us reach this transformation on our island. They have truly seen our need. God decided that today we will finally have reconciliation. Thank you so much.

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While the chief was speaking, another community chief was holding up a little tree known as hari narmar, the traditional sign of peace in South Malekula. Eneton were asked to come to accept it, upon which they formed a triangle with the chief in front, and the remaining members behind holding a hand on each other’s shoulders. The community chief wept loudly while presenting the hari narmar, which the Eneton chief received and thus demonstrated his acceptance of the community’s apology. Everyone from Eneton then lined up before the community chiefs to shake their hands and weep together. The chief of every nasara gave a short speech using the microphone to ask Eneton to forgive them and their members. The Eneton chief accepted each apology, replying that he forgave them. After Eneton and every nasara of the community had exchanged apologies and forgiven one another, Pastor Gideon asked the community chiefs and Eneton chiefs to hold hands. He poured anointing oil on their hands as a final release of the sin they carried because of the killings and announced over the microphone: ‘With the problems that happened three years ago, I stand up here before the presence of God to pronounce blessing and release the curse that rests on these parties because of the deaths and the conflicts that followed.’ Nearly everyone in the community followed the ceremony, standing around the main participants. There was a big ovation and many were taking photos with their mobile phones (see Figure 6.1). The rest of the programme continued inside the church, where more speeches followed. First was Herold, my adoptive father and a current community chief, who had been asked to chair the sorcery trial in November 2014. He had been deeply emotionally affected by the hangings because he felt the burden of being responsible for the event. Taking the microphone, the chief looked down and shed tears before he spoke: Dear pastors. I want to tell all of you that . . . today we came together . . . thank you so much . . . today we have carried out the burden that has been with us. Around three years ago, we did something in our community. But we felt like . . . we couldn’t make it. And today I just want to thank God and all of you who have taken the opportunity to stay here with us. I believe that this is the way to build up our community again, to the kind of life our ancestors used to live by. After a short break, he continued: To make some clarifications about the death. I was a chief at the time and I was asked to organise the meeting. It took eight days and eight nights . . . and I am so sorry. I didn’t want the killing to happen. But I was taken out from the meeting and . . . this is an open wound in my life. Because I could not stop it. I was a leader in our community. With

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what has taken place today . . . it has taken out a big thing in my life and in the life of all of us in the community. We have been trying to make all of us unite again but God hasn’t allowed it until today. Today God provided the opportunity for us to unite again. I pray that God will open the door for us to pray and stay together again to build up his kingdom in our community. The speech generated a big ovation in the church. The sorcery trail had gone out of Herold’s hand, illustrating the ritual’s relatively unpredictable liminal force (see Kapferer 2005, 2015a). Next was the giving of gifts from the community to Eneton. In addition to a pig, the community gave several bags of rice and money for Hantor’s son to pay the bride-price for a future wife with whom he would eventually have children. This was part of the nga tötin practice, or ‘paying back life’ to ‘replace’ a deceased person, traditionally used to compensate a killing in South Malekula. The chiefs also announced that they wanted to pay for cement for the house of a young Eneton man to help rebuild Eneton’s future. After the gift presentation, Christopher, the chief of Eneton, came up to give his speech: Thank you to everyone. With the heart that we have, we have come together this morning. Transformation has been running and I want to thank you all for making this day possible so that we could come together to sort this issue out. I ask God to bless you for this work. We now stand up on behalf of our two seniors [tufala olfala] [Orwell and Hantor] to apologise if the names of the two are connected to deaths that have happened in the community. We want to ask you all for forgiveness. Only God can forgive us and the two for the bad things they have done. We ask God to bless all of you, the dead’s survivors, who have been suffering. Thank you so much. Now that I stand up before you, our families, I also want to say that we didn’t expect anything like this to happen in ‘daylight’. We came to ‘daylight’ a long time ago and didn’t think this could happen. But the ‘things of this world’ [ol samting blong wol ia] are affecting us. We killed someone while in ‘daylight’. The two are already dead and gone, but we are asking for all of us to cooperate. We are autochthonous Ahamb islanders [stret man Ahamb] and we follow God’s talk. If we live according to God, no one shall manipulate the boundaries of the nasara. We are one of the five autochthonous nasara of this island. We are asking for respect. Respect and God’s love should stay with us the whole time, and until the last generations. We want to thank you for all the gifts you have given us today as a result of the deaths. Chiefs, the community, the church; we want to say a big thank you.

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Let us now go back to the kind of life that we have lived for a long time but that the deaths interrupted and separated us from. Today, I declare that unity must come back. Pastor Jack, the coordinator of the transformation, took over the microphone and concluded enthusiastically: ‘The island is now clean! The island is blessed!’ The keyboard starting playing and there was happy and joyful praise and song. On the way out of church, those who had been appointed as peacemakers blessed everyone with anointing oil. While some people complained that the reconciliation was long overdue, people on both sides expressed relief that there had finally been a proper reconciliation. After the event, I was invited to Eneton to take part in the killing and preparation of the pig given as retribution. The pig was eaten by Eneton members that night, as is customary after traditional pig offerings. I met Eneton’s Nico and asked if they had really accepted the reconciliation. He responded: Yes, the case is over now because nothing comes higher than the church. The reconciliation will be kept. As Christians we believe that there is a next life. Therefore, we surrender because after death, we know that there is another life. We need to ensure that unity is kept. And Heaven is also a place of unity, right? So we must seek that in this life as well. The reconciliation was a relief for everyone involved, including the Eneton leaders. However, the road to reconciliation also entailed give and take that led to new uncertainties, especially the agreement between Mansan and Eneton that changed the political dynamics of the island. After the transformation, I talked to Herold, who was one of the community chiefs at this time, about the politics of the transformation. He was not entirely satisfied with how the process had proceeded. The organisers of the transformation didn’t want us to leave any problem open. They wanted full cleansing. But there are disagreements about our community’s history. When we were asked by the organisers to clarify who were autochthonous Man Ahamb [Ahamb persons] they rushed too much. They asked about the history of the island and we told them the story of the two twins,4 but they cut the story before it was finished and moved on. When the pastor asked how many original nasara there were, some said five and some said six. We didn’t come to an agreement about this issue. So despite the transformation being finished, there is still dispute. The chiefs must have a new meeting to clarify who the original [stret] nasara really are. Maybe next month.

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Four years after the transformation, while completing the final edits of this manuscript in December 2021, the dispute about autochthony is still left unresolved. Similar to other renewal movements that promise an end to the status quo and usher in a new beginning, the Ahamb revival may thus be said to have failed to produce the large-scale results it aimed for (Robbins 2004b; see also Lawrence 1964). Even though it has brought about changes to the status quo, it has not transformed it as thoroughly as the initial criticism of it demanded. As Robbins (2004b: 252) argues in relation to the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, who have been in revival mode since the late 1970s, the goal of renewal movements to dwell on the errors of the current human order – and demand that people change their lives to leave that order behind – is not easy to achieve. This is because if people are to sustain the material needs of their everyday lives, it is difficult to follow the often radical ideals that the renewal movement promotes and demands at all times. We have seen examples of this gap between idea and practice in both this chapter and Chapter 4. Even though most Ahamb people earnestly try to live according to God’s will, the Christian universalism the revival drew up, wherein everyone is equal, works well in everyday life when people are normally at peace with one another. However, no matter how committed people are to Christian values of equality and unity, it becomes problematic in situations in which land rights and control of one’s livelihood are at stake. It creates a conflict in values because Christianity entails an ideological system that, even though it is firmly rooted in islanders’ moral and ontological compass, does not comply with the material base of people’s lives, which is subsistence agriculture performed on clan-owned land (see McDougall [2009] for a similar value conflict in the Solomon Islands). Even though everyone seemed happy about the transformation event and ritually demonstrated their desire for new unity there, it did not make people set aside their material needs necessary to live a safe and secure life outside of the ritual. We can say that as an event and ritual the transformation exemplified Ahamb people’s emphasis on the value of love (including forgiveness, peace and unity) in their lives (see Robbins 2015). But the different stakes that people had outside of the event and ritual could not be put aside or ignored. These stakes affected its development and outcomes in ways that escaped the organisers’ control. Notes 1. The five confessing men were forced to perform the actual hangings, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, because the mob behind them did not want ‘blood on their hands’, which would taint them with sin. The five men were each sentenced to fifteen years in prison for intentional homicide and unlawful assembly (see Wari 2015). While completing the final edits of this manuscript in December 2021, the five men were still in prison.

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2. I want to let readers know that I knew Orwell, Hantor, the group behind their lynching and their families well. I have tried to maintain a somewhat neutral perspective in my presentation of the conflicts in the hope of letting the different parties’ stakes rather than my own come to the fore. 3. The number of reconciliations were counted and presented at the worship services held in the evenings to demonstrate the concrete results of the transformation’s work. 4. This is the origin story of the Ahamb population, which is about two twins arriving on the island in a giant scallop, a nahamb in the vernacular, which has given the island its name. The autochthonous nasara regard themselves to be descendants of these two twins.

•7 Hope, Blame and New Possibilities

The revival can be seen as a ritual process that was a ‘force in its making’ – with a capacity to alter or change, at least for the time being, some conditions for living (Kapferer 2015a). One important reason was that the revival carried with it a potential to realise and combine human and divine agency to form a higher unity. We can say that it dealt with the limits of the world, what was beyond them, and the place of human beings in this picture. The revival context became a space that enabled participants to break free from the constraints of a troublesome everyday life. In the liminal space of the revival, realities that could only be imagined in ordinary life could be realised. This was a reality in which everyone was humble and at peace with one another, everyone went to church, and there was no sorcery, fear or mistrust. Important values that had been suppressed or desired could become ‘real’ as opposed to merely ‘ideal’. Values were forces that moved people towards the future. If in the end the revival was not able to provide the radically new ground many hoped for, it was still a horizon towards which people reoriented their priorities and found some new perspectives from which to address old problems. In this chapter, I build on the ethnography of the previous chapters and discuss in more depth how experiences of fear and hope mutually constitute people’s mobilisation in complex contexts of insecurity and social change. I compare the Ahamb revival with similar renewal movements elsewhere in which people perceive their values and order to be under threat, which in turn mobilises them to act in the hope of change. Common among these movements, I argue, is that in contexts of insecurity, upheaval and social change, when people feel powerless and out of control of their lives, a search begins for someone or something different that can indicate that everything will be OK. The frustrated also start locating the source of their problems in deviant persons or groups who can take the blame and whose elimination can free the rest of them from their problems. The location of both possibility and blame is initiated or amplified by new, charismatic leaders who present themselves, or are presented, as offering the solution to the crisis. An important part of the appeal of these actors, I argue, is that they appear to take people’s concerns seriously in a way that established authorities do not. In contexts of uncertainty,

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they become an alternative good ‘other’ to mobilise around that indicates a radical break with the difficult past. In the revival context, the visionary children became one such charismatic actor. Being signifiers of innocence, purity and love, they cut right through the problematic structures of everyday life and presented an alternative order based on God’s true ways. Similar to other charismatic figures, like Greta Thunberg for climate activists and Donald Trump for displaced white Americans in the years around 2020, the visionary children created a window into what the future could look like and sparked hope that this future, or something like it, was possible. In this chapter, I return to the point made by Kapferer, Sahlins and Jackson: that in order to understand the significance of an event, we must first understand how it became meaningful and important to people. I will begin by examining how children came to constitute hope to the extent that they did in the turbulent context in which the revival emerged.

Children as Hope

After a revival worship service one night in July 2014, four months into the revival, I was sitting with my adoptive father Herold, who was community chief at the time, to relax and drink lemon leaf tea. Herold reminded me of how he had been worrying for the community lately and how the chiefs had struggled to make any changes. Disputes, political problems, selfishness and people not coming to church and community activities had become the norm. But the revival made the chief optimistic. At that night’s worship, he had again been impressed with how well and sincere the children were praying and approaching God. In fact, he argued, the dedication of the children outdid (bitim) most adults, including the church elders. ‘Those who will change the Ahamb community are the visionary children’ (ol pikinini we oli stap luk visen), he said. ‘It is not the young men of today. They are doing nothing’ (oli stap kranke nomo). The chief found hope in this generation of children, who took Christian living more seriously than the generation before them. He explained: Some of these children are so small. They are only in class one, but they already work with the Holy Spirit. They already know how to pray, they know how to preach [talemaot tok blong God]. They receive revelations and they share them with the community. At the community meeting last week we talked about how we fail in education. But in spiritual matters we have already hit the mark [kasem mak finis]. When these children reach the age of Jeremiah [Herold’s son, who was twenty-one], they will change the community. They will lead the community, lead the Men’s Fellowship, be teachers in Sunday school.

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It will not be like today, where the [Sunday school] teachers drink kava nonstop, do not come to public meetings, do not come to worship. These children will lift up our island [leftemap aelen blong yumi]. They will become good leaders and chiefs. You look, they are already travelling to Heaven. They will take these good things with them in life. They won’t be quarrelling [bae oli no gat fasen blong rau]. When the children grow up with a life like this, they won’t live a rubbish life when they get older. They will have a totally right direction in their lives. We will not need to suffer [harem no gud] anymore, as we do today because of the attitude of adolescent like Esmond [a young man who had been caught for adultery shortly before]. If the children give their lives to Christ, they won’t live that kind of life. When people worldwide talk about the future, the theme of children and youth never seems to be far away. The phrase ‘the children are our future’ is used globally, and children and youth seem to be a core symbol of new horizons, change, and a brighter and better future. What seem like crosscultural concerns about whether ‘today’s youth’ are able to maintain the existing order and simultaneously bring about a brighter future, as Herold expressed for Ahamb above, are indicative of society’s hopes for young people. The anthropological literature shows us several examples of how children are perceived as pure and without the stain of sin or the corrupting knowledge of the world (Lancy 2015: 43). Their innocence has made them worthy of receiving sacrificial offerings meant for gods and of being intermediaries between humans and gods. Examples from the Pacific, Africa and South Asia show how children sometimes occupy important positions as actors or leaders in rituals, taking part in offerings, sacrifices, divination, dance and singing (Lancy 2015: 47). Jane Belo, for example, describes an example from Bali of how a child is like a little god newly arriving from heaven in the form of an ancestor returned to earth. The child has a status of maximum innocence and purity and is ‘the nearest thing to a god which man may know’ (Belo 1949: 15). In a similar vein, Douglas Oliver (1974) shows how children in Polynesian pre-Christian cosmologies were believed to be exceptionally sacred, ranking higher than their parents (see also Gell 1995: 35). These examples underscore that the child is often classified as in a liminal state, not yet fully human, simultaneously representing life and death and not yet completely attached to the structures of society (see also Gottlieb 2000; Zelizer 1994).1 The children of Ahamb took on a similar role in the revival. They became messengers between this world and the afterlife – intended for those with the moral character of a child. During the revival, the moral purity of the children was continuously set up in contrast to that of the men. As Brian, a man in his forties, expressed it:

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The children do not question going to church at night. They have no other thoughts disturbing them. They do not hold back in church. The men, however, daot [are sceptical] because we do not want anyone to lead us. It is hae tingting [high thoughts about oneself] that is disturbing the men. But the Holy Spirit wants your thoughts to ‘go down’. Like those of a child. As we saw in Chapter 4, Ahamb men’s social world is to an extent characterised by respect, competition and leadership. The personal prestige found in male personhood reflects the image of the typical Melanesian man, who previously earned his masculinity by climbing the graded male society, known on Ahamb as the nakërkrohin. It is a male value to be a ‘manager’ of one’s social world. Men’s social life thus reflects a sense of hierarchy. Moreover, politics involve primarily male actors, and it is the men’s role to protect their social group’s interest in disputes. Because disputes constantly threaten to tear the community apart, and men who engage in them often become representations of the problem, characteristics associated with adult men were in this context of uncertainty devalued and criticised. In contrast to the prestige and selfassertiveness of the adult male, the morality associated with the child became symbolically powerful. Even though the capacities of the visionary children took the society by surprise, their role in the movement was not completely arbitrary and should be seen in the context of the broader position of children in Ahamb society.

The Significance of Children in Ahamb Social Worlds

In the revival, ‘becoming like a little child’ was the main goal because it made a person humble and open to others, which is important for realising love – a core social value Ahamb people relate to Christianity. However, in preChristian Malekula, when the male graded societies were an important part of village organisation, Bernard Deacon (1934) describes how ‘becoming like a child’ was associated with the degradation of male qualities and potential. Men of rank could become ‘like children’, in the sense of ‘powerless’, if they were defiled by contact with too much igah, a kind of sanctity that small children and women possessed. If this happened, the man would lose his rank and title, and ‘men would call him by his personal name [instead of his prestigious name of rank]; he would be treated with ridicule, contempt or pity until he had collected sufficient wealth of pigs to buy back his former status’ (Deacon 1934: 479). As noted in Chapter 4, it was precisely because children had not yet developed the self-assertiveness and pride associated with adult men that

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they were lifted up as focal points in the revival and were chosen by the Holy Spirit to be its mediums. Children exemplified the values of humility, obedience and love, which were the opposite of the traditional values and practices of the men. The changing evaluation of children can in this sense represent the changes Christianity brought to Malekulan society – hence illustrating the rupture with previous ways of life around Melanesia that Christian conversion is said to have furthered (see e.g. Barker 1992; Eriksen 2008; Jolly 1994; Knauft 2002; Robbins 2004a, 2007; Tonkinson 1981b; Tuzin 1997). As we also saw in Chapter 4, Eriksen argues that the Christianisation of Ambrym rendered irrelevant the former status of men in the graded societies. This is because the Presbyterian Church emphasised the values of egalitarian cooperation, congregationalism and community, while discouraging the hierarchical relations and competition of men located in the graded societies. This change was relevant not only for downplaying the relevance of gender differentiation of earlier times but also for elevating the status of children. Both on Ambrym and Ahamb, the Presbyterian Church is the dominant congregation. Presbyterianism is part of the reformed tradition within Protestantism wherein children have received special attention (Fletcher 1994; Miller 2001). First, the idea of the priesthood of all believers and the doctrine of justification by faith alone advocate for a fundamental egalitarian individualism that in theory means that children are equal to adults. Moreover, after the Protestant Reformation, the family was seen as the fundamental unit for fostering religious belief and social stability. Reformers therefore directed significant attention towards children and the family. Even though children were, like all human beings, viewed as tainted with original sin, they were more educable, while also in need of careful guidance in protection from the temptations and vices of the world. One shift that the Protestant Reformation brought was thus a new emphasis on the sacred duty of parents to ‘rear all children and prepare them for a blameless life’ (Cunningham 1995: 38). The introduction of Sunday schools to provide basic literacy training to children therefore assumed a significant role in Protestant religious instruction (Boylan 1988; Seymour 1982). In the Presbyterian communities in Vanuatu today, the Sunday school forms an essential part of village organisation. On Ahamb, along with the PWMU (the women’s organisation), the Sunday school is the most enduring church group, and each child is automatically enrolled as a member at the age of four and participates in classes every Sunday. These factors contribute to the child’s position in Ahamb people’s social world.2 Moreover, in everyday village life, children are not yet divided up into particular social and political positions. Children usually grow up in the village of their father’s patrilineal nasara and are regarded as members of that nasara. However, prior to adolescence, there is no real differentiation between

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children of nasara X or Y. Boys are not yet involved in politics and girls are not yet marriageable. This makes nasara membership and differentiation less important. Childrearing is a communal responsibility among kin, and children are often seen in the village of their mother’s brother (papa or angkel) and with relatives other than their natal family. The children in this way transcend the nasara and the village, and can be said to occupy an inferior, or liminal, position in the island’s social structure. In the contemporary context in which most islanders desire ‘development’ (divelopmen), it is also important to note that children assume the role as a ‘road’ (rod) for their kin and village. This is because children constitute an opportunity to eventually access new resources and relationships through marriage as well as through remittances earned by successful school graduates who may obtain a job in town (see Gibson 1988, Lancy 2015: 12; Leinaweaver 2008). Children are also expected to take care of (lukaotem) their parents when they grow old. But the more children in a household, the greater the family’s financial burden of paying for children’s school fees, food and clothing. Consequently, most families on Ahamb today have fewer children (two or three) than the generation before (who often had five or more) in order to concentrate their resources and even save towards the future (see also Lind 2014). As a result, it is likely that each child holds a particularly precious place for their family today. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which includes points such as that children’s interests should be a primary consideration, should also be mentioned when discussing the current view on children on Ahamb as elsewhere in Vanuatu. The Vanuatu government ratified the Convention in 1993 and its guidelines has been implemented in various national policies, such as free primary school education starting in 2010, as well as various governmental or nongovernmental organisation initiatives. It should also be mentioned that childhood (laef blong pikinini) was chosen as the topic of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre’s workshop for fieldworkers from the different islands in 2003 (see Lind 2014: 88; Regenvanu 1999). Children were thus included in the national discourse on kastom. However, the ratification of children’s rights and an increasing focus on children in national policy do not mean that people on Ahamb completely accept the liberal Western idea of childhood autonomy that underpins the children’s rights movement. Children are still ‘partible’ members of kin networks and play a role in everyday and ritual exchanges, not least in temporary or permanent adoptions (see Kolshus 2008; Wentworth 2017). In the revival, the children seem to have become a reflection of the community’s longing for new vitality, innocence and naiveté (see Lancy 2015: 73). Yet this is not the first time that the children have earned this role in recent

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times. In the wake of the dispute around Vanuatu’s general election in 2012, which I discussed in Chapter 2, the symbolic significance of children as common ground in contexts of dispute and division was evident. The election entailed a contest over which candidate the community should support for the position as MP – a matter of importance because supporting a successful candidate means being reciprocated throughout the MP’s period in office. The candidate of the nonautochthonous people won, and the election spurred a new and serious dispute along the dividing lines of the autochthonous (Man Ahamb) versus the nonautochthonous (Man Aur). The dispute embraced, as usual, everyone in the community and corrupted relationships between kin and various community institutions. However, when the outlook was at its most gloomy, the Sunday school children played a special role in bringing the community back together again. Their special role was assigned to them at the community’s celebration of Father’s Day, eight months after the election. On Ahamb, any event or memorable day such as Father’s Day and Mother’s Day includes a church service. The Sunday school and youth group had been assigned the responsibility of hosting the church service that day, and my adoptive brother Phelix, who was a long-time Sunday school teacher, song composer and youth worker in the community, was asked to organise a creative programme for the service. Phelix was tired of the recurrent disputes and divisions in the community. As a result, he composed a song he named ‘The Unity Song’ for the event. The song was to accompany a skit, performed by the Sunday school children, that illustrated the discouraging situation on the island, but also the hope of change. For the skit, a child from every nasara was picked to represent its own nasara. The children dramatised the Christian history of Ahamb, to which people had come from different places to unite in Christ. However, political discord was now dividing the once-united community. The main message of the skit, Phelix told me, was that Satan had come to separate the community, but that the children would bring everyone together again. The programme was designed to appeal particularly to the children’s fathers, the leaders of the community, in order to remind them of the island’s virtuous past when their ancestors invited anyone, from different places, to live together as Christians. It was the responsibility of the men to manage this heritage and to provide a safe and healthy environment for their children. However, this was a responsibility they repeatedly failed to meet. Now, with the skit and song, the children appealed to their fathers to bring back these values to secure a good and united future on Ahamb. Below are the lyrics of The Unity Song, written by Phelix, which concluded the children’s Fathers’ Day programme:

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Long taem bifo yumi stap liv olabaout Long plante difren ples Tede yumi kam stap tugeda long smol aelen ia from ol difren risen Be God i singaot yumi. Yumi kam wan. Yumi kam wan.

A long time ago we were living in different places At many different places But today we came to live together on this small island for all different reasons God, however, called for us. We became one. We became one.

Tede yumi kam stap tugeda Be laef i nomo olsem bifo Fulap difren kaen laef i kam blong seraotem yumi Uniti blong ol olfalla i stap lus finis mo disuniti i kam antap.

Today we came to live together But life is not as it used to be Plenty of different lifestyles have come to divide us The unity of our ancestors has already started to vanish and disunity has increased.

Kores: Mifala pikinini blong yufala mifala i krae from uniti Oh-Oh-Oh Uniti we Jisas i prea from Yumi let go ol difrenses we i stap seraotem yumi mo holem taet uniti blong bildimap komuniti blong yumi.

Chorus: We, your children we are crying for unity Oh-Oh-Oh [mimicking crying] Unity that Jesus prayed for We left all the different places that [previously] divided us and held unity tight to build up our community.

Papa mo mama, brada mo sista blong mifala Tede Jisas i stap prea from uniti blong joj blong hem Yu stap lidim mifala blong wanem rod? yufala nao i rod blong mifala.

Our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters Today, Jesus is praying for unity in his church You are leading us On what road? You are our road.

The church was full that day and even most of the disputing men attended the programme. The timing of The Unity Song and skit could not have been better. Men and women alike shed tears as the children went through the programme. People on the island told me that the confrontational tone of the parties softened after this event. Some claimed that it was only children who could successfully deliver this message to the community at this particular time. Almost every male adult was involved in the dispute, and women did not have a

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legitimate position from which they could confront the men in public. Micah, who helped organise the Father’s Day programme, reflected on the position of the genders and children during the 2012 dispute in this way: The man is strong [physically] but he also has a strong and stubborn mind set. The woman is not so strong and [consequently] finds it easier to say sorry, to have pity [lavem man], to cry and so on. It was hard for a man to solve this. If the men cannot come together as ‘one’, it is hard for the rest of community to come together as ‘one’ too. During this period, the women wanted to come to community activities such as church or make bring-and-buy markets, but the men said they would beat them if they went there. Therefore, we had no public meetings during this time. There were no youth meetings, and the Men’s Fellowship vanished. The only common meeting place was the Sunday school because the children were not affected by the dispute. They do not get involved in politics or in disputes. The character of children is that it is easy for them to fight but also easy to apologise, and the next day the quarrel is forgotten. But for men, it is easy to fight and difficult to apologise. Micah compared the force of the children on Father’s Day 2012 to their force in the revival: It is only the children who can change the community. If an adult man had created the revival programme, people would have been gossiping about it, torn it down. People would have talked badly about us who are involved in it. But it is the children who are doing it. That is why it is going so well. That is why it can continue and why people support it. If a regular church group was behind it, people would not have accepted it. But because it is through the children, what can we say [bae yumi talem wanem]? If it was only one child it would be difficult. But they are many, and [the Spirit comes to them] at the same time. The Bible talks about it too. Prophet Joel says: ‘The spirit will come and fill up the children.’ If I, as an adult man, would see a vision or get a message like the children, I would be afraid [ fraet] to tell anyone. But the children, when they get a revelation, nothing is stopping them. They are just spilling it out. They are not afraid [oli no fraet]. Micah’s reflections underline the innocent ‘betwixt and between’ position of the children. They are, in Turner’s sense (2008 [1969]), the ‘cracks’ in Ahamb social structure. They are mediators between kin groups because they have mothers and fathers from different nasara. They are not yet aligned with any political segment in society, and they can represent values of peace, futurity and cooperation as opposed to dispute, fragmentation and regression. Both

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on Father’s Day 2012 and throughout the revival, they appeared as the only agents of change that everyone could listen to. They also seemed to be the only legitimate figureheads of a moral renewal. Building on Turner’s perspective, I suggest that the children embodied several of the attributes of liminality. They were standing in the ‘limen’ between all the other people, representing their common cares, emotions and hopes. Unlike men, the children could not be accused of having political motives for their actions. As several of my interlocutors argued, the children simply could not have any other motives than telling the truth. As Turner points out, during liminality, the social structure is often challenged from the outside or from those who are lowest in the social hierarchy. Even if the children held a morally significant position, they were ‘structural inferiors’ with no rank, property or articulated role in the social system. They ‘possessed nothing’ (Turner 2008 [1969]: 95–99). The revival was therefore a humiliation of the ‘high’ or the dominant structure, as Donald Tuzin (1997) shows so explicitly in his accounts of the 1970s revival in Papua New Guinea, when the men of Ilahita village voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. On Ahamb, the humiliation of the high was evident in terms of how the visionary children publicly conveyed that the men posed a risk both to themselves and to the community if they did not let go of their kava, pride and stubbornness, and submit wholeheartedly to the Holy Spirit. This created a discourse wherein the strong men were dependent on the little children to look after themselves. Such lowering of the high during liminality, Turner argues, represents: partly a destruction of the previous status and partly a tempering of their essence in order to prepare them to cope with their new responsibilities and restrain them in advance from abusing their new privileges. They have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society . . . the chief must not keep his chieftainship to himself . . . but must still be a member of the whole community of persons . . . and show this by laughing with them, respecting their rights, welcoming everyone, and sharing food with them. (Turner 2008 [1969]: 101, 103; see also Turner 1974: 53) With the revival, the men could no longer see themselves as privileged members of society with the right to do as they pleased. Any leader was entangled in social relationships (not least with God) that demanded humility and obligation. No leader could continue violating these relationships by engaging in political disputes that set groups against each other and created divisions in society. If the men, like all other people, were to avoid punishment from God and achieve salvation, they had to stop seeing themselves as above relation-

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Figure 7.1. A number of visionary children are lining up to convey their revelations to the congregation. Children and women are laying slen on the floor after being filled with the Holy Spirit. Photo by the author.

ships and ‘come down’ (kam daon). The children were thus in an exceptional position to address those in power and appeal to them to make a change. Even though the children held a privileged position for signifying the need for change, I argue that the revival would not have had the same magnitude if it was not also for the divine agency associated with the Holy Spirit.

Radical Change with the Holy Spirit

The idea of ‘breaking with the past’ in order to be born into a new life is central in charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity (Engelke 2010; Meyer 1995; Robbins 2004a). The emphasis on the availability of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which crosscuts previous roles, positions, structures and realities, lies at the core of this potential. In Vanuatu, and particularly Port Vila, in the current millennium, there has been a mass movement of people into Pentecostal churches. Eriksen (2009a, 2009b) argues that this growth is largely due to a desire to ‘break with the past’ and turn in a different direction in order to foster development, security and new unity – tasks that the government and other leaders

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repeatedly fail to provide. In Port Vila, there are always new corruption scandals, educational and employment opportunities are lacking, there is a growing and visible divide between those on low incomes and the wealthy, there is an intense commodification of land previously used for subsistence and inexpensive housing, and a perceived rise of sorcery, in which the state apparatus, including the police, is suspected of being engaged (Cummings 2013; Eriksen 2009a; Kraemer 2017; Mitchell 2011; Rio 2011). Eriksen (2009a) argues that for the less advantaged in Port Vila, leaving the mainline churches of colonial origin (Presbyterian, Catholic and Anglican) for Pentecostal churches is a political statement: the first converts to the mission churches typically became the first village leaders under the colonial administration (see also Wittersheim 1998). Converted village leaders or their children became the prominent leaders of the independence movement, and the freedom fighters later became the backbone of the new state apparatus (Eriksen 2009a: 179). Because the country’s elite has been intimately tied to the established churches, breaking with these churches may be interpreted as a symbolic and material break with the colonial era and the independence the elite created – or failed to create (Eriksen 2009a: 189). In rural Vanuatu, the state apparatus is not present to the same degree as in Port Vila. Here it is chiefs, church leaders and, in some places, high-ranking men of the traditional graded societies who form the local government. However, as in Eriksen’s descriptions from Vila, many Ahamb islanders have for a decade or more been dissatisfied with their leaders, whom people find to have failed in uniting the community and providing a good life for all. A main reason for people’s resentment is that leaders engage in disputes over land rights and leadership, which keep dividing the community. Disputes also cause envy and anger, which is believed to bring sorcery – a main fear, as we have seen, of most Ahamb islanders. Tomlinson and McDougall (2012: 12) argue that religious visions become so effective in Pacific societies because people have lost hope that improvement can occur through secular means. In particular, Pentecostal movements are gaining appeal because they are perceived as taking the fears and worries of their grassroots supporters seriously. These are fears and worries that politicians, policy makers, and nongovernmental and human rights organisations do not necessarily understand or fail to address. Pentecostal churches and ideas are often more explicit in acknowledging the gap between official politics and grassroots concerns, and the churches target this gap as both a governmental and existential problem (Rio, MacCarthy and Blanes 2017b: 3). They go behind the apparent and visible and identify forces in the invisible realm that they claim are really behind the problems. They turn the unexplainable forces into tangible enemies that are hindering people in terms of realising the good in their lives – whether it is health, security, unity, prosperity or development.

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By translating local beliefs about destructive forces into universal categories of ‘evil’ and ‘Satan’, and combining this with a confrontational approach, Pentecostalism has in the past few decades become an influential tool for people who are mobilising in hope for a better future – whether in Melanesia, Africa, Scandinavia or the United States (e.g. Eriksen 2009a; Haynes 2017; Marshall 2009; Rio, MacCarthy and Blanes 2017a). It is also important to recognise how hopes in the miraculous powers of the Holy Spirit may become substitutes for services met by the state in other places. The hope in faith healing, for instance, can be particularly relevant when public health services are poor and cannot be relied upon. On Ahamb, like other places in Vanuatu, people pragmatically seek to make sense of illness experiences drawing on whatever resources they have at hand. Biomedicine, Christian prayer and traditional (kastom) remedies are all used, and people commonly combine them, depending on what they believe is the cause of the illness. When one treatment is not perceived as being effective, parents and caregivers seek help from another. Many ni-Vanuatu have an ambivalent relationship with biomedical treatment. There is only one proper hospital, in Port Vila, which is usually understaffed and lacks equipment. In rural communities, there is usually an aid post or dispensary at the most. Ahamb is occasionally without a nurse because of funding, for instance, during the period 2013–15, when the revival emerged. And even if a community or the government has succeeded in funding a facility, rural healthcare workers have limited capacity to give out medicine, and they cannot prescribe other antibiotics than penicillin (File and McLaws 2015: 5). With public health services not being perceived as efficient and with charismatic-Pentecostal orientation on the rise, many ni-Vanuatu have increasingly sought help from Christian diviners operating through the Holy Spirit (Eriksen 2014b; Eriksen and Rio 2017). A recent example from Vanuatu is the ‘miracle pools’ of healing water discovered on Santo Island in 2016. Throughout 2017, the pools attracted masses of ni-Vanuatu visitors (up to a thousand a day) coming from all parts of the country by ferries, cargo ships, planes and trucks, hoping to receive help for their problems (Garae 2017). The potential of miracles through the Holy Spirit on the one hand and the irreproachable children on the other made for a compelling combination in the context of uncertainty, division and deadlock on Ahamb. When there was no visible and ‘rational’ way of achieving change, the Holy Spirit, with its emphasis on miracles as a real possibility, became an appealing framework for people’s hopes of betterment. Together, the Spirit and the children explained the destructive forces that people suspected were at play in society, but that could not otherwise be easily grasped or understood. The Holy Spirit offered techniques for identifying and taking control of these forces, presented by children who could have no other motive than telling the truth.

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People did not know how to respond to the children’s surprising revelations and actions. As Micah and many others with him concluded when discussing the work of the children: ‘Bae yumi talem wanem?’ (What can we say?). People’s wonder made them reconsider their view of relationships and the world, which reinforced their hope that society could indeed change. The revival thus resembles the increasing popularity of charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity in many other places in the contemporary world, particularly in the Pacific, Africa and South America: in contexts of social, economic and existential insecurity, the Holy Spirit becomes an instrument to map, discern and heal communities from powers believed to operate out of sight (Rio, MacCarthy and Blanes 2017b: 3–4). It finds the persons and objects responsible, and highlights the need to destroy them so that persons and society can heal. Locating the source of one’s misfortune in concrete persons or objects, and giving the impression of being able to eradicate the problem, generates hope that a better present and future is possible. Following Rio (2014a: 323), the need to find, address and in some cases attack the sorcerer – a clear moral deviant who is repeatedly overcome by envy, anger and greed – reveals a deep social and cosmological worry that goes to the very core of one’s existential security in Vanuatu and elsewhere in Melanesia. As we have seen, the sorcerer is not only morally deviant, but also in other ways transgressive and inhumane: he has the power to do incomprehensible things like flying, walking around in invisible form, taking on the appearance of an animal, a family member or a friend, and infusing an ordinary-looking object with lethal powers without anyone knowing. The sorcerer is experienced to be a medium of unknown potent forces that can bring death and illness at any time – and in incomprehensible ways. Identifying and attacking the sorcerer with prayer or violence can thus in contexts of heightened uncertainty provide therapeutic relief from a transgressive invading force and allow people to regain some sense of control over the circumstances of life (Rio 2014a: 324). The charismatic-Pentecostal tools of discerning the hidden forces suspected of causing people’s problems are in the Vanuatu cultural context well suited to the local construct of the sorcerer, whose deviance is already blamed for people’s problems. I suggest that the dynamics we have observed in the revival – first, that people fear the dissolution of the values and security underpinning their society, which mobilises actions in the hope for change; second, that new charismatic actors appearing to take people’s concerns seriously become figures of hope for a better future; and, third, that a deviant ‘other’ is identified as the reason for the crisis and becomes the fulcrum around which the necessity for change is envisioned and enacted – can also be found in other revitalisation movements worldwide. The following sections discuss how we may find similar dynamics in the contexts of current climate-change activism and nation-

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alist populism, both of which have grown rapidly since the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly in Euro-American societies.

Climate Activism and the Significance of Greta Thunberg

The United Nations has called climate change ‘the defining crisis of our time’ and has warned that it is happening ‘even more quickly than we feared’ (United Nations 2020). Weather extremes, natural disasters, and food and water shortages are crises in themselves. Given the health risks, economic disruption and political conflicts resulting from them, we are likely to see severe problems for human society and the environment in all regions of the world. Despite this sense of multiple crises, people have not only despaired; there are also examples of hope that people can influence the future and change the direction of its course. Climate psychologists and communication scholars have in fact argued that the most successful initiatives to mobilise people to take action against climate change are those that build on the conjuncture of fear and hope (see Marlon et al. 2019). The New York-based grassroots advocacy group ‘The Climate Mobilization’, for example, states on its website that: ‘The climate crisis poses a terrifying existential threat to our families and everything we love. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Together, we can rise to the challenge of our time and restore a safe climate’ (The Climate Mobilization 2020). The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also drew on both fear and hope in his speech calling on the world’s leaders to action at the 2019 Climate Action Summit in New York: The years 2015 to 2019 – the five hottest years on the books ever . . . If we don’t urgently change our ways of life, we jeopardize life itself. Look around. Seas are rising and oceans are acidifying. Glaciers are melting and corals are bleaching. Droughts are spreading and wildfires are burning . . . I have seen it with my own eyes – from Dominica to the Sahel to the South Pacific . . . The destruction was not simply appalling. It was apocalyptic . . . We are seeing the future – if we do not act now. Dear friends, someone asked me the other day, doesn’t all of this make you despair? My answer was a clear and resounding no. I am hopeful. And I am hopeful because of you . . . The climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win . . . We have the tools: technology is on our side. Readily-available technological substitutions already exist for more than 70 per cent of today’s emissions. And we have the roadmap: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change. And we have the imperative: undeniable, irrefutable science. (United Nations 2020)

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Gutteres conjures up a fearful picture of how severe the threat of climate change is. We are moving towards an apocalyptic future if we do not act now. But he also identifies reasons for us to be hopeful. Similar to the Holy Spirit and visionary children on Ahamb, he attempts to ‘make visible’ the tools we have at hand to change direction and save the planet – here, technology and the political commitments of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change. However, many are critical of politicians, governments, businesses and leaders who despite the precariousness of our climate repeatedly fail to take the necessary steps to avert catastrophic global warming. Like the adult male leaders on Ahamb, Gutteres’ segment of society – privileged middle-aged men in powerful positions – does not necessarily have the trust or symbolic force to mobilise people to follow them and take action. They may even be conceived as the reason why we have arrived at this state of the crisis in the first place. Out of this impasse, in which established leaders seem unable or unwilling to take the necessary action for betterment and change, came a Swedish teenage girl, Greta Thunberg. In August 2018, Thunberg staged a protest outside the Swedish Parliament, holding a sign that read ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (‘School strike for climate’) and demanding more climate action from the government. Inspired and partly coordinated by Thunberg, an international movement of striking school students emerged in this event’s wake. Thunberg received massive attention in both traditional and social media, not least for showing no regard for established hierarchies. In February 2019, the then sixteen-year-old Thunberg opened a European Commission event by telling politicians to stop ‘sweeping their mess under the carpet for our generations to clean up’ and that they were ‘acting like spoiled irresponsible children’ (European Economic and Social Committee 2019). In the Climate Action Summit in New York later that year, she gave an emotional speech, appealing to world leaders about the urgent need to stop the effects of climate change: You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. Through her engagement, Thunberg has mobilised a worldwide movement of hundreds of thousands of teenage ‘Gretas’ with adult supporters calling for urgent change. In September 2020, she was the frontwoman for a global climate strike that gathered four million people in 150 countries, constituting at that time the largest climate demonstration in human history. She has met presidents, Pope Francis and other world leaders, and has persuaded them to make commitments in areas where they had previously fumbled; for instance, after Thunberg spoke to the UK Parliament in 2019, the government passed a law

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requiring the country to eliminate its carbon footprint (see Gov.uk 2019). She was appointed ‘Person of the Year’ by Time magazine in 2019 and has become something of a figurehead and voice for climate angst and activism worldwide. Thunberg’s impact has been phenomenal. Similar to the children who emerged as saviours of Ahamb Island in a context of fear and uncertainty, I suggest that her influence can be ascribed, at least in part, to her liminal position in the sociopolitical context in which she operates. Thunberg emerged in the midst of an international climate stalemate in which political leaders and business people seemed unable, or unwilling, to provide the action for change that many demanded. By virtue of being a female child with several medical diagnoses (Asperger’s, high-functioning autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder), she is an inverse example to the prominent, (often) middle-aged men in power who are enjoying the cosmopolitan elite’s privileges while doing nothing for the good of others. If people suspect that these leaders are driven by a lust for power and are serving their own economic interests at the expense of the planet’s and humanity’s survival, Thunberg, who is a structural inferior in this game, is ‘assigned the symbolic function of representing humanity, without status qualifications or characteristics’ where ‘the lowest represents the human total’ and ‘the extreme case most fittingly portrays the whole’ (Turner 1974: 234). As journalist Ross Clarke of the British weekly The Spectator asks rhetorically: ‘Who will dare criticise a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s?’ (Clarke 2019). Claiming that Thunberg was given the prime interview slot on the Today programme on the BBC without the normally inquisitorial journalist asking ‘an even slightly difficult question’, Clarke continues: It is not hard to imagine the mass outrage which would have followed had he dared to do so: middle-aged man bullying a schoolgirl and the like. As a result of Thunberg’s perceived untouchability, the climate alarmists have managed to promote their views in a way which would not have been possible had an adult spokesman of Extinction Rebellion [a global environmental movement] been on the air.3 Clarke’s characterisation of Thunberg’s untouchability is similar to Micah’s argument about the Ahamb revival’s visionary children. In addition to being the lowest in the dominant social structure, both Thunberg and the Ahamb visionaries fulfil the wishes of what adults typically want adolescents to be like: serious, hardworking and honest. Like the Ahamb visionaries, Thunberg is known to practise what she preaches, for instance, refusing to fly in order to cut down her carbon footprint and instead travelling to global climate events by sailboat or overland. Like the Ahamb children, she appears pure and innocent, and has become a powerful moral and symbolic ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott 1985) against the political power of the well-positioned strong. She identifies what is to blame (the current system and world leaders doing noth-

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ing) and the solution (we need to change our systems now). She communicates fear (if we do not change those to blame, it will be too late) but also hope (we can still change, so it is not too late yet). Because of this dynamic, she has, like the Ahamb children, become a fulcrum around which protesters have mobilised for change.

Fear, Hope and Nationalistic Movements

A similar fear-hope dynamic, fuelled by alternative charismatic leaders, can be observed in the growth of nationalistic populist movements in Euro-American societies since the Great Recession of 2007–9. Impactful movements of this kind include the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party in Britain, the National Rally in France, the Swedish Democrats, Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, and the followers of Donald Trump in the United States. The popularity of these movements has to a significant extent been based on the need to address the supposed reasons for people’s insecurity and fear: immigration from Africa and the Middle East which is seen as causing cultural erosion, Islamification and the risk of terrorism; governments demanding too-high taxes; international free trade taking people’s jobs; and notions that established institutions of government have become corrupt or unresponsive to ordinary people (see e.g. Evans 2012; Gusterson 2017; Shoshan 2016). Similar to the revivalists on Ahamb and climate activists globally, supporters of these movements perceive their moral order and safety to be under threat. Also in these movements, new, charismatic but unlikely leading figures emerge and gain supporters by convincingly identifying forces, groups or ideas they deem responsible for people’s problems, while presenting themselves, or being presented by others, as the solution to the crisis. In the context of fear and uncertainty, they are successfully representing an alternative good, or the road to achieving it. They claim that they will ‘take back our country’ and that ‘our way of life’ is being overtaken by newcomers with different values and cultures and a progressive left that attacks defenders of traditional values as racist and intolerant (Fukuyama 2019: 133). In context of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in 2015, Cathrine Thorleifsson (2019) discusses how the figure of the Muslim migrant became the focus for fear of moral dissolution and insecurity in many places in Europe – quite similar to the image of the sorcerer on Ahamb. Analysing the environment around UKIP, Thorleifsson shows how discourses, images and tropes were actively casting migrants as fundamental threats to national identity, culture and security. In particular, male Muslim migrants, imagined as violent and potential terrorists after al-Qaida’s terror attacks in the United States on 11

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September 2001, were portrayed as a threat to social order, imagined sameness and civilisation. The alien ‘crimmigrant’ other is, in these contexts, set up in contrast to the utopian European citizen represented by ‘ordinary, authentic, white people’, with the latter group idealised as the defenders of a civilisation and culture under threat. Along with its then leader, Nigel Farage, UKIP presented itself as the guarantor of new security and opportunity for the latter group in context of this threat (Thorleifsson 2019: 9). Farage seemed prepared to say what no other politician would, and by ‘telling it like it is’, he appealed to those who needed comfort and perhaps someone to blame, and who had lost trust in established political elites, which were regarded as being out of touch with their lived realities. As when seeking to understand the Ahamb revival’s attraction to its followers, it is necessary to look at the historical, economic, political and sociocultural context in which UKIP gained its appeal. Thorleifsson explains the growth of UKIP by using Doncaster, a thriving coal town in the 1980s, as a lens through which to view this. In the late 1980s, most of the coal mines in Doncaster closed due to the neoliberal restructuring of Britain’s manufacturing industry by the government of Margaret Thatcher, which was deemed unproductive and uncompetitive. The result for the once-thriving industrial town was economic stagnation, deprivation and increasing unemployment. After the closure of the pits, people who previously depended on the heavy industry for labour found themselves in an economic reality in which they now had to compete with cheap labour from elsewhere (Thorleifsson 2019: 5). Following the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, Doncaster also witnessed the arrival of many Eastern European labour migrants, which led to a rapid demographic diversification. As a result of the dissolution of industrialism and empire along with increased immigration and diversification, the previously privileged white majority in Doncaster were now facing new struggles over resources, rights and loss of recognition for their contributions to society. In 2015, UKIP won 24.1% of the vote in the general election. In this election, Thorleifsson explains, UKIP appealed to the grievances of dispossessed Doncaster communities, addressing the cultural, economic and racial anxieties related to such rapid social change. The party promised to restore Doncaster’s past greatness by reinvigorating the coal industry and providing secure jobs in fossil fuels, while also securing the nation’s borders against the alleged economic and cultural threats of immigrants. UKIP and Farage thus helped people in Doncaster and other Britons in similar situations to structure their feelings and hopes about the future by drawing on lost values and a sense of order and security from a nostalgic memory of the past (Thorleifsson 2019: 6). The visionaries on Ahamb had a similar role: the children exemplified and reminded people of their true values of love and unity, which were about to

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get lost but could be re-realised, and a society based on them revived, if only people submitted to the movement’s new order of government. Similarly, in the US national election in 2016, a predominantly white working class and petty bourgeoisie – feeling deeply alienated by the distant political elites – found hope in the Republican Party candidate Donald Trump and his protectionist economic policies and promises to build a wall along the Mexican border (Gusterson 2017; Martin and Krause-Jensen 2017). As Keir Martin and Jakob Krause-Jensen (2017: 5) argue, Trump reinstated ‘a long-lost sense of agency’ in these groups, in a society marked by economic deregulation that has worked to the disadvantage of the majority of Americans. In this context, Trump became a prophet speaking to a number of unmet social demands. Simultaneously, he pointed to a longed-for but hitherto unrealised possibility: he would make America – or rather, the white and alienated Americans – ‘great again’. The blame for America’s demise, he claimed, could be laid at the feet of leftist liberal elites who were out of touch with people’s true needs. To revive America’s greatness, several groups and characteristics seem to be in the way, including those who were ‘politically correct’ (most journalists and liberals) and non-western immigrants and ethnic others. In Trump’s view, these groups were ignoring rural voters and their problems, threatened the project to revitalise America, and needed to be defeated. While sowing hope among his voters that a return to (invented) traditions and order was possible, he simultaneously sowed fear when, with the help of his violent rhetoric, he singled out particular groups as threats to the security and wellbeing of ‘ordinary’ Americans. In this conjunction of fear (of national and racial doom) and hope (of restoring the integrity and dignity of the displaced), Trump gained momentum and mobilised millions of fearful, but also hopeful, Americans in the 2016 election. Trump also mobilised something of a countermovement based on the fear of the consequences for America and the world of his problematic character, which was based on self-promotion and a willingness to go around whatever stood in his way. These qualities made it hard to imagine anyone less suited to be the US President. In addition, in the eyes of many, the economic nationalism he proposed was likely to make things worse rather than better for those who supported him and many others (Fukuyama 2019: x). We might say that also this countermovement was fuelled by fear (of the damage he and his supporters could do to the world order) and hope (that it would be possible to overthrow him and change the minds of those voting for him). When assessing the mobilising force of renewal movements like the revival, Thunberg’s climate activists, UKIP and Trump, it is useful to pay attention to their performative aspects – how they present themselves as the solution to people’s problems, their charisma (or that of their leaders) and the organisation of their rituals. However, what is most crucial, as Martin and

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Krause-Jensen (2017: 7–8) point out, is to look at the audience. What is it that people experience to be at stake in their lives that makes the political figure or movement so worth following? As Pedersen and Holbraad (2013) advocate, it is important to have an open ethnographic approach to what people experience to be at stake when they make decisions in the name of safety and security. Similarly, I argue, it is crucial to have an open ethnographic approach to what causes people to fear and hope. This means a need to investigate people’s varied moral claims in different situations, their worldviews, their conceptions of personhood and the social, and their understandings of wellbeing and justice. I argue that both charismatic-Pentecostal Christian movements and populist movements in Euro-American societies appeal because they appear to take people’s everyday concerns seriously in ways that established authorities do not. Martin and Krause-Jensen (2017) and Hugh Gusterson (2017) suggest that Donald Trump appealed to millions of Americans in the 2016 presidential election precisely because they experienced that the established political elites no longer had anything to offer them. Moreover, the liberal mainstream’s demonising the ‘Trumpenproletariat’ – describing their thoughts and actions as backwards or stupid, as expressed powerfully in Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s characterisation of his supporters as ‘a basket of deplorables’ – fortified the image of the established elites’ lack of concern for the real problems of those whom Trump claimed to protect. The feeling of being ignored and even ridiculed left many Americans waiting for someone who would take them seriously – ‘no matter how contradictory, bigoted, and bizarre that “someone” might turn out to be’ (Martin and Krause-Jensen 2017: 8). Trump became the answer for millions of Americans who felt that the establishment no longer had anything to offer them. Ahamb people too had given up hoping that the problems in their community could be solved by their chiefs and original church leaders, as many of them were regarded to be part of the problems in the community. Like Thunberg, Trump and UKIP in their respective contexts, we may say that the Holy Spirit and its children emerged as a ‘parental figure’ (Wallace 2003: 21–22) that helped modulate people’s anxiety and restore their hope of new order, security and wellbeing.

Notes Parts of this chapter derives from the article ‘Paradoxes of (In)Security in Vanuatu and Beyond’, published in 2020 in Journal of Extreme Anthropology 4(1): 177–97 (DOI: https:// doi.org/10.5617/jea.7395). 1. Anthropological accounts also show us how children can be viewed as threatening, either in their own right or as vessels or avatars for ghosts and evil spirits (see de Boeck

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2005; Denham et al. 2010; Lancy 2015: 47–51; Santos-Granero 2004; Stasch 2009: 151; Stoller 1989: 45). 2. There are also other examples in history when children have been assigned special roles in Christian movements. Lorenzo Polizzotto (2004) reports on the significance of the pure youth in Christian Florence; Norman Cohn’s seminal book The Pursuit of the Millennium (1993) includes some accounts of the use of children in Christian cultic, egalitarian and anarchistic contexts. The Virgin Mary’s appearance before three shepherd children in the village of Fátima in Portugal in 1917 is another example that had a major impact (Bennett 2012). It is also worth mentioning that it was accusations from young girls that sparked off the witch hunt that became the famous Salem witch trials in the conservative Puritan colonial Massachusetts in the United States in 1692–93 (see Boyer and Nissenbaum 1974). 3. I am grateful to Victor Lund Shammas for suggesting this article.

• Conclusion

Robbins suggests that people in most places in the world try to live their personal and collective lives ‘pitched towards what they take to be a better world’ (2013a: 459). He further argues that the better world that people envision and their ways of trying to achieve it may differ greatly, given the cultural, social, economic, political and historical context. In acknowledging this diversity, anthropology has a critical potential for demonstrating that different values and ways of living are possible (2013a: 456). This critical potential of the discipline, Robbins argues, was largely set aside in the 1980s, when a focus on societies as radically ‘other’ than the anthropologist’s became subject to critique about misrepresentation and exotification of a constructed ‘other’ (2013a: 447–56; see also Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983). From the 1980s and 1990s onwards, the different ‘other’ in anthropologists’ attention was largely replaced by the ‘suffering subject’, typically victims of colonisation, missionisation, poverty, neoliberalism and other conditions of violence or oppression – whose social institutions and practices anthropologists must engage with critically, Scheper-Hughes argues, if the discipline is not to be seen ‘as quite weak and useless’ (1995: 410). However, because people who suffer also have hopes and dreams and strive to realise a good life, Robbins (2013a) as well as Sherry Ortner in her article ‘Dark Anthropology and Its Others’ (2016) advocate for the need to complement the attention on those who suffer with a focus on how people – including those who suffer – organise their lives to foster what they think of as good. The focus of this book is on how negative emotions and experiences form part of people’s attempts to realise positive visions of the future. I argue that it is the co-construction of these experiences and perspectives, in the form of hope and fear, that gives rise to and drives social movements like the revival, as well as current climate activism and populist political movements like Trumpism and UKIP. It was largely people’s hope of new wellbeing, security and a good life that made Ahamb people mobilise around the revival. This was a life that people feared was getting lost, but that they imagined could be conceived, not simply perceived. As their fears and hopes grew more intense alongside their experiences of heightened threat and possibility, Ahamb people increasingly sought out events and ritual contexts that allowed them to break free

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from the determinations of their everyday difficulties to envision something else and possibly achieve it. Because of the emotional energy invested in the event and ritual space that the revival became, it earned the potential to suspend ordinary, everyday realities and make people realise a different and better future – at least for the time being, as Kapferer (2005, 2015a) argues that rituals can do. However, the emotional energy released during the revival went in multiple directions. One direction, paradoxically, led to the murders of Orwell and Hantor, which were conducted in the name of the good to wipe out violence and suffering from the community, but ended up generating new violence and suffering in the community instead.

Understanding People’s Lives

A central point of this conclusion is the importance of engaging ethnographically with the different ways in which people experience the good and threats to it. Attention to context becomes crucial in this endeavour for detecting not only the intimate and immediate but also the distant yet powerful factors that shape people’s desires, interests, hopes and fears. Reflecting on her five decades of research on people in difficult situations around the world, Nancy Scheper-Hughes stated as follows about the role of the anthropologist in society: Anthropology is an intimate practice. It is a work of careful translation. We might have our biases, but we try to see each individual who works with us as a gift. They may be radically different in their ways of being in the world, just as we are radically different to their world, but if we work hard enough, we can almost always learn to understand each other. Anthropology is a vocation based not necessarily on love, but rather on a deep curiosity that is open to many surprises. It doesn’t mean you have to justify what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that you always have to please people. Our job is to understand the way people think, the way they live in the world. You just never know whom you’re talking to. (Brice 2017) To understand Ahamb people’s turn to the Christian framework in times of crisis, it is important to look at how, for the average Ahamb person, Christianity is much more than an autonomous religious domain alongside politics, law or economics. The same argument is likely to be valid for anyone who adheres to a religious, spiritual or other transcendental view of the world (see Asad 2008).1 Ahamb Christianity is also much more than personal belief;2 it is a cosmology, a moral ontology; it is about history, identity, fears, hope, community and a way of being in the world together. Christianity encompasses

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all sectors of society and its institutions, and can thus be called a ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss 2016 [1925]). Christianity offers an ethical foundation for existence and conduct that provides an ‘external guarantee’, as it were, that ‘completes one’s being and moral sentiments without which many feel rudderless and adrift’ (Hansen 2009: 6). To remove Christianity would for many Ahamb islanders mean to remove the pillars on which life itself rests. In the years before the revival, many Ahamb people feared that the Christian underpinnings of society were drifting away. The movement and its accomplishments therefore became a matter of the existential good – of love, humanity, happiness, safety and unity – values whose worth is incalculable (see Jackson 2005: 65). Most people on Ahamb submitted to the revival to some extent. The movement was not only about people’s belief or conviction that God or sorcerers were really there, but also about their conviction concerning the truth and importance of the social, moral and political project of the revival. Although some may have disagreed that it was really the Holy Spirit speaking through the children or that sorcerers were really flying in everyday to attack people, they nevertheless agreed with other dimensions of the revival, such as the general battle against sorcery, the emphasis on peace and unity, the importance of preparing during one’s life for the afterlife, and the fear of God’s wrath being unleashed if one disobeyed God’s commands. When confronted with the moral force of the revivalists’ arguments, no one would simply deny their truth, even if they did not attend revival worship services. To reject their arguments would be tantamount to denying God’s truth, something few would be willing to risk (see also Mahmood 2012: 178). Moreover, to dedicate oneself to the revival opened up the possibility of giving oneself up to several highly valued causes in Ahamb society. These include acknowledging the sovereignty of God; the importance of the wellbeing of one’s family, kin and community; and simply the virtue of living morally good lives related to the value of love. The revival thus became symbolic of values that everyone thinks of as good and, in one way or another, would like to realise in their own lives. As in the ritual cases explored by Robbins (2015a), the revival brought with it the promise of a realisation of these values in their fullest forms. The attention to values, I argue, is an important reason why the movement amassed the force it did and how it solicited a special attention or demand for participation from everyone (see Robbins 2015a: 21). The revival took on the character of a community project through which people tried to solve the problems of the past and change the conditions of the future. To not embark on this reform and thus signal that one was indifferent or critical to the values it promoted would from certain perspectives be close to a ‘moral suicide’, to use Hansen’s phrase (2009: 27). Accepting the revival, on the contrary, showed that one embodied these values and supported the need for their

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fulfilment in society. The revival thus resembles the totalitarianism of other Melanesian social movements aimed at restoring unity and social order. They demand that everyone believe and take part because ‘an obvious failure to totalize (if only to fence out) the known world of things and people demoralizes the movement. Stubborn evasion of the new collectivity undermines both sociality and [the homogeneous individual] personhood’ (Lindstrom 2011: 262). Therefore, those who do not take part are in one way or the other punished, as I have argued was the case of the suspected sorcerers Orwell and Hantor.

Forces beyond the Blamed ‘Other’

In the space of the revival, the cause of the community’s problems was first found to be the disputing men; later on, it became the sorcerers. In a project to rejuvenate the morality and cohesion of the community, the sorcerer was an easy target. As we have seen, when explaining sorcery, Ahamb people tend to focus on the personhood of the sorcerer. The sorcerer is a person who is overcome by envy, anger and greed, and who may even turn on his own close kin. While the notion of the good person is one who does not hesitate to observe one’s relational duties towards kin and others, the sorcerer devalues the social by committing attacks on them, which are often unprovoked. The sorcerer is the perfect deviant moral ‘other’ posing a threat to the good social order. As discussed in Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7, the fear of the sorcerer represents for Ahamb people the fear that things and relations are not what they seem. Fantastic forces exist that can burst out, invade and overtake the relations and categories of social life at particular moments (Rio 2014a: 323). We might say that the revival offered a space for individuals and collectives to ‘exteriorise’ these anxieties (see Siegel 2006: 84). They no longer belonged only to the person or group but were also given a place in a story about the world. The problems and anxieties were given a face, a form. People were finally given the tools and framework in which to approach the inexplicable problems blamed on the sorcerer. The sorcerer became a figure that could accommodate the explanation for many different anxieties, problems and traumatic experiences for different people – whether it was the abrupt loss of one’s loved ones, unexplainable sickness, unsuccessful business or any kind of misfortune. Siegel (2006: 25) argues that blaming sorcery cannot really accomplish more than indicating that powers are at work that one cannot understand and that continue to have unpredictable consequences. However, sorcery can give fear a name. It makes it possible to identify the powers that people fear. It also gives hope that these can be approached in some sense. History has shown how fear and insecurity can lead to multiple aggressive strategies of ‘othering’ and can legitimise new ways of surveillance – whether by religious visionaries,

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the state, the military or other means. Indeed, as Ruben Andersson (2019: 15) notes, the mapping and localisation of insecurity and danger – that is, naming and placing the threat – is itself a political act that hits the most basic of our emotions: it is both visceral and instinctive. As such, fear is a source of immense political power and can potentially be used, consciously and subconsciously, to achieve a range of different ends. Simultaneously, as Martha Nussbaum contends (2018: 61), fear is such a pervasive emotion that it often keep us from conducting proper analyses of, and responding properly to, the actual underlying causes of the fear. As we have seen, the fear of sorcery in Melanesia and elsewhere usually emerges in specific contexts: land disputes, political strife and increasing social inequality are seen as causing a new upsurge in sorcery. The feeling of being left out of progress leads to suspicion and reflections over inequality, poverty and development, and undermines trust in relations. This may cause envy, jealousy and anger, and motivate those so inclined to engage in sorcery, either to hurt someone, level out difference or achieve wealth for themselves. As anthropologists have long argued, rather than understanding current sorcery in Vanuatu, Melanesia and elsewhere as a retreat to tradition, it is therefore more useful to understand it as a product of new forms of discontent with a social world that brings insecurity, uncertainty and declining solidarity. The development of this specific social world is closely tied to the structural transformations associated with postcolonial economic and political liberalisation (see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). In Vanuatu, for instance, as we saw in Chapter 2, land reforms introduced after independence in 1980 in order to attract foreign capital resulted in large-scale land grabbing by foreign investors. The land grabbing is made possible through seventyfive-year leases that are easily renewed. Land leasing from indigenous landowners means a lot of wealth, at least in local terms, for the indigenous lessors. The economic inequalities are huge between those who are able to lease out land, or are hired by expatriate residents or the tourism industry, and those who are not (Eriksen 2009a). The opportunity of leasing out land, or preventing others from doing so, creates conditions under which kin are required to define themselves in terms of exclusive landholder clans and to articulate divisions among themselves that define new limits of reciprocity. The result is new inequality, conflicts, envy and anger, which in turn are believed to give rise to sorcerers. Like Nussbaum (2018), we might say that the fear of the sorcerer itself thus prevent people from spotting and responding properly to these underlying causes that produce the possibility of the sorcerer in the current context. A similar dynamic can be observed in the Euro-American context, where free trade agreements and neoliberal policies of economic deregulation seem to have worked to the disadvantage of the majority of working class and the

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petty bourgeoisie, particularly males and especially in the United States. According to Francis Fukuyama, both of these groups: point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, to whom they are invisible, but also downward toward the poor, whom they feel are undeserving and being unfairly favoured. People understand their circumstances as the fault of guilty and less deserving people, not as the product of broad social, economic and political forces. [Sociologist Arlie Russel] Hochschild presents a metaphor of ordinary people patiently waiting on a long line to get through a door labeled ‘The American Dream’, and seeing other people suddenly cut in line ahead of them – African Americans, women, immigrants – aided by those same elites who ignore them. (Fukuyama 2019: 89) These processes, Fukuyama argues, make people feel like a ‘stranger in one’s own land’. To feel honoured and valuable, one must feel, and feel seen as, moving forward. But in inexplicable ways that are ‘hidden’ from one’s view, one is slipping backwards (Fukuyama 2019: 89). Instead of blaming sorcerers for causing problems from their secret world, the blame here is placed on elites from the progressive left, immigrants, refugees, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, and even women who, from their ‘hidden corners’, are conspiring to hold white, Christian, hardworking American males down. But while blame is placed on groups that are seen as taking their jobs, affronting their dignity and increasing their insecurity, the main reason for these people’s marginalisation, disrespect and sense of invisibility is more likely to be located in neoliberal policies of downsizing and outsourcing their jobs to increase profitability, with the result that many factories, plants and other production facilities have closed down (see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). This means that hundreds of thousands Americans have lost their jobs. At the same time, neoliberal ideas of downsizing the state and its socialsupport programmes have resulted in a reduction of resources for those who are suffering from unemployment and underemployment (Ortner 2016: 53). A simple blaming of an ‘other’ is, in this context, thus also concealing the underlying forces at play in society that go far beyond the agency of this ‘other’. The naming and placing of blame through such ‘othering’ may also prevent people from approaching the underlying causes of their fear.

Taking People Seriously

Agnieszka Pasieka (2019: 5) argues that it is typical for studies of the far right and others who have politically ‘unsympathetic views’ to explain away their attitudes as a result of an ‘underlying cause’. This cause is typically identified as

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their marginalisation linked to neoliberalism, which becomes an all-encompassing concept synonymous with unemployment or underemployment, relative deprivation or dispossession due to jobs being outsourced or automised, and general unfulfilled aspirations. Pasieka further argues that for researchers trying to understand the far right: the idea of ‘victims of neo-liberalism’ has become so widespread . . . that an emblematic path for the far right’s rise has now become established. It is a story of once well-off and open societies, which, as a result of either economic decline or unrealized growth, return to integralist agendas, finding resource in nationalistic thinking and community-oriented practices. One does not need sophisticated analytical tools to recognize the incompleteness of such accounts and their wishful thinking cum mythical aspects. (Pasieka 2019: 5) Arguing against an exclusive focus on neoliberalism, Pasieka wants to bring the analyses of the far right beyond a focus on ‘narrowly understood economics or politics’ (Pasieka 2019: 5). She refers to Michael Mann’s seminal study of fascists (2004) and his argument for the need to ‘take them seriously’. By taking them seriously in this sense, Mann means to focus on the view of the world that the ideology conveys. Instead of dismissing it as crazy and vague, he advocates for recognising that ‘most fascists, leaders or led, believed in certain things’ (Mann 2004: 3). He argues that only by taking their values and worldviews seriously – which, for him, meant not only taking them seriously as enforcers of evil, racism, homophobia and the like, but also realising that few of his interlocutors were ‘misfits and marginals’ – will we get the chance to understand rather than excuse or relativise (see Pasieka 2019: 5). In the same vein, in order to understand Ahamb people’s mobilisation in the revival, not least the fear of sorcerers that led to the fatal hangings of Orwell and Hantor, it is important to understand what it was that people hoped for and what they feared in this context, while being neither dismissive nor defensive. It is also important to elicit the particular ways in which hope and fear were defined and shaped by different parties, and how people individually and collectively envisioned and embarked on their solutions. Along with practitioners of what Ortner calls ‘dark anthropology’ but also scholars of ‘the good’, I argue that it is crucial to maintain a critical gaze on the often harsh effects of neoliberal idea and practice, including inequality, displacement, oppression and alienation. However, it is also important to recognise, with Pasieka, Mann, Ortner and Robbins, that people’s lives also entail a variety of ways to engage with moral reasoning and moral claims that are not necessarily a direct result of being victim to the oppression of neoliberalism. The choices, interests and hopes of those we study should be explored in the context of the wide range of sociocultural logics and settings in which they

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appear. This implies an open-ended frame for investigating not only what people find to be good, but also what they find to threaten this good in different contexts. For this task, which I hope to have demonstrated in the present volume, there is still no tool as suitable as anthropology’s fine-grained and longterm ethnographic explorations of the multiple aspects making up people’s lifeworlds and practices. Notes 1. Asad (2008) argues that such isolation of religion from other social domains is a product of a unique post-Reformation Christian history and modern liberal Western norms, and cannot be seen as universal. 2. The debate about belief as a valid category is a large one that I will not enter into here. I shall only mention that anthropologists like Asad (1993), Donald Lopez (1998), Rodney Needham (1972) and Jean Pouillon (2008) have been key in terms of problematising the transferability of belief as a useful term when discussing religion outside of Protestant Christian contexts.

Appendix

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‘Jesus, You Are My Helper’

‘Jesus, You Are My Helper’ was the theme song of the Malekula revival from around its inception in November 2013. According to stories from South West Bay, the song was revealed to a girl who was among the first to be ‘slain in the Spirit’ (slen) in Lawa village in November 2013. I described this event in Chapter 3. The girl allegedly heard angels in Heaven singing the song during her spiritual journey, and she was herself singing the song while she lay slen. Someone made a recording of her singing on their mobile phone and figured out the lyrics. The song has later been sung in revival settings all over Malekula. The circumstances around the song contribute to the mythical origin story of the revival. Jesus, you are my helper Let me follow your footprints Show me your character in my life So that I can lean my life on you. Chorus: Jesus, please help me to walk like you Oh-oh-oh You are my strength and my footprint Yes Jesus! Please lift me high above the mountains Yes Jesus! Where no one can catch me too Where no one can catch me too Where no one can catch me too Lord, you are my only one Make me wise to see your goodness Lift me up and teach me your word So that I may prosper, success in your ways.

Glossary

•

This glossary lists terms in Ahamb (italics) and Bislama (italics and underlined) that appear frequently or are central in the text. Aliklikor

Envy

Ambat

White man

Angkel

Mother’s brother. Papa in the vernacular

Baho

Sorcery (general term). Posen, nakaimas or blak magik in Bislama

Banban

The sorcery of making oneself invisible. The technique enables the sorcerer to kill or do other actions such as sleep with someone without being seen

Bari

The sorcery where one manipulates the victim’s personal leavings or an item that the victim has used or touched. The sorcerer then puts the object in touch with his posen to obtain a desired effect on the victim

Barbar

A man-made spirit creature that can go off and steal, usually money

Bigman

Popular term for the Christian God. Atua is the term for God in the Ahamb vernacular

Devel

Malevolent spirit

Fraet

Fear; being afraid

Graon

Land

Hae jif

High chief; the highest chief

Hae tingting

To think highly of oneself

Glossary

185

Haedem

To hide; keep out of view. A characteristic of the sorcerer

Haikem

To be proud

Haindram

A plant, leaf, rock or fruit often linked to the origin myth of the nasara. Haindram is also a lif that has a hypnotising effect and is typically used to lead a victim to sorcerers

Hem wan nomo

Him or her alone; self-sufficiency

Hoknaet

Owl

Husürmarni

To ‘just follow’ someone, instead of sticking to one’s own original intention

Ita

Classificatory father

Kakaf

Grandmother

Kambak

Return; reunite with a collective

Kastom

Custom or tradition; ways of doing things that adhere to indigenous rather than foreign ideas and values

Kava

Mildly intoxicating drink made of the kava plant (Piper methysticum)

Kleva

Traditional clairvoyant

Komuniti

Community

Laet

Light; the Christian era. The opposite of tudak

Lav

Love; compassion. Napalongin in the vernacular

Lavlav

The sorcery of copying the body of another person

Luk save

To ‘see and understand’; to recognise (the needs of someone); to acknowledge someone or something

Lif

Local herbs. Can be used for good and bad purposes, from traditional medicine to poisoning. The term also refers to

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Glossary

light versions of sorcery where one is using herbs. Ndraun in the vernacular Man Ahamb

Person coming from Ahamb

Man Aur

Person coming from the mainland

Manples

Person of the place; a native

Nakërkrohin

The traditional graded society; the ceremony for achieving rank in the traditional graded society. Mange in Bislama

Nalhor

The secret men’s house. Available to those who are initiated into the nakërkrohin

Napalongin

Love; compassion. Lav in Bislama

Narbaruh

Classificatory daughter

Narmar

Peace; silence; to make peace or silence

Narör

A tree known around Vanuatu as ‘the milk tree of the sea’ (melek tri blong solwota). If one burns it, the smoke is believed to paralyse sorcerers

Nasara

A person’s patrilineage and ancestral place

Natshovin

The sorcery where one is using posen to render a victim unconscious and remove his or her internal organs. The intestines are left in the bush or buried, and the sorcerer can take on the physical body of the victim. The sorcerer is believed able to walk around in the victim’s body for up to five days before the body drops dead. If a person who dies has seemed healthy in the days before but been behaving differently from normal, it may draw suspicion to natshovin

Navindrmag

Heart

Navjon

Being part of a nasara through the mother’s brothernephew (MB-ZS) relation

Glossary

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Nawuswus

The sorcery of striking down someone’s mind or taking away their enthusiasm for something

Ndraun

Local herbs. Can be used for good and bad purposes, from traditional medicine to poisoning. The term also refers to light versions of sorcery where one is using herbs. Lif in Bislama

Ngavuy

Good

Paloghusür

To ‘listen/feel/hear/sense’ (palog) and ‘follow’ (husür)’; a term used for respect

Papa

Mother’s brother. Angkel in Bislama

Posen

Sorcery (general term); baho in the vernacular. Also a spirit creature created by the sorcerer by using bones from dead people, blood, herbs (lif ) and sometimes poison. The posen creature is kept inside of a bottle or an object such as a stone. In some cases, it can even live inside a person. This posen is regarded as a living creature that must be fed, normally with meat

Posen man

Sorcerer

Prahnah

Selfish

Prenmbus

The sorcery of copying the body of another person

Rao/raorao

Dispute, having an argument

Tötöt

Grandfather

Slen

To be slain in the Holy Spirit; faint in the Holy Spirit

Su

The sorcery of flying. Su is facilitated by a spirit and conducted in invisible form. A person in su can be identified as a travelling silent dot of light, usually at night. This mode of transport is sometimes humorously called Kastom Air Vanuatu, referring to the customary version of the present national air carrier

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Glossary

Tu tingting

Doubting, swaying, having second thoughts

Tudak

Darkness; heathen, the heathen era. The opposite of laet

Wan tingting

One mind; unity of wills

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Index

Ahamb language, xviii–xix location, x, xxiv, xxv origin story, 152n4 population, 1 village structure, 1, 41–43 Ambiguity in relation to land, 49–56, 69, 144–45, 149–51 towards the revival, 92–103, 116–19, 122, 133, 150 Ambrym, 36, 67, 89, 157 Ancestors, 16, 42–43, 54–55, 69, 148, 159–60 Anger, 4, 12, 17–18, 37, 47, 67, 80, 110, 165–66, 178 Angels, 27, 66, 69, 115, 121, 183 Angkel (mother’s brother), 111, 113, 158, 184 Anointing, 24, 26–31, 66–69, 85n1, 130 Anointing oil, 148, 150 Anxiety, 55, 96, 114, 118, 119, 127, 173 and blame, 11 and the good, 6 Apocalypse, x, xiv, 78, 92, 106n1, 167–68. See also Last days Aporia, 10 Ashford, Adam, 17–19, 132 Astonishment, 66, 84, 109. See also shock Autochthony, 42 claims to, 48, 50–61, 149–51 relevance of, 50–56, 144–45, 151. See also land, manples Belief, 117, 157, 165, 176–77, 182n2 versus law, 134 Bible, xii, 11, 14n7, 27, 67, 70, 76–77, 85n1, 85n4, 86n10, 112–15, 118–19, 129n5, 161

•

Big men, 59, 92. See also manager of social worlds Bislama, xvii Blame, 128, 135–40, 153, 166, 169–72, 178–80 Blameless, 153. See also Children and purity Brusco, Elizabeth, 95 Burridge, Kenelm, 9, 88, 90, 105 Cargo cults, 9, 56, 88. See also social movements Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity, 9, 68, 80, 95, 105, 129n5, 143, 146, 163–66 the appeal of 164–65, 173 and breaking with the past, 9, 163–64 and gender, 95–106 as global phenomenon, 143, 165–66 ideas and practice, 9, 68, 80, 94, 163, 165–66 movements, 9, 13, 143, 164 and sorcery and witchcraft, 117–19, 122, 129n1, 164–65 See also Christianity Charismatic leaders, 153–54, 166, 170, 173 Chiefs, 51–55, 69–71, 73, 82, 127, 133–35, 147–49, 154–55 ambivalence towards 60, 162 contesting chiefly positions, 51–61, 58–60 Council of chiefs, 51–58, 71, 91 desire to be, 89 diaspora chief, 141 finding the rightful, 144–45, 150, 173 in sorcery trials, 21–22, 32–35 and visionaries, 23 See also hae jif Children in Ahamb social worlds, 157–58

Index

as agents of change, 74, 131, 140–41, 154–63, 169–70 characteristics of, 87, 93, 96, 156–57 in Christianity, 87, 157 as messengers of truth, 22–23, 31, 68, 101, 125, 165–66, 168 as parental figure, 173 and purity, 57–58, 65–66, 87, 93, 155–7, 161–63, 169 as threat, 94–96, 156, 173n See also visions and visionaries Christianity arrival on Ahamb, 41–42, 62 and gender, 72–73, 88–92, 95, 105 mission, 41–42, 55, 106n2, 145, 164, 175 significance of, 176–77 and social principles and values, 2, 17, 40, 42–46, 56, 60, 89, 90, 92, 137, 151 See also Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity Clan, See nasara Cleaning the island, x, 67, 79, 101, 125, 126, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 150 Cleansing of persons, 28, 78, 80, 102, 126, 142, 147 Climate change, 1, 166–68 Colonialism, 49 and chiefly positions, 55, 145 and Christianity, 17 and churches, 164 Comaroff, Jean and Joan, 17, 117, 179, 180 Community church, 1, 62, 79, 94, 140, 146 economy, 1, 94 formation of, 41–42 as idea, 1–2, 89, 134, 159–60 leadership, 2, 48, 51–61, 95. See also chiefs meetings, 21–23, 32–33, 52–56, 69–73, 80 organisations and committees, 1–2, 71, 79–80, 88–89, 91 as problematic category, 2 as social unit, 1–2, 35–37, 55–60, 66, 77, 83–84, 100–102, 104–6, 110, 116–17, 126–28, 133–41, 159–62, 177–78 work, 2, 81–82

207

Confession, 21–23, 31–35, 37, 78, 116, 123, 125–28, 132–34, 139, 143, 147, 182 Conflicts, 51–61, 83–84, 130–40, 145–46, 150 of interest, 3–5, 51–55, 92–106, 131, 134–35, 137–38, 145 and the role of males, 65, 87–89, 92, 156, 159–62, 164 See also land disputes Crisis, xiii, 6, 15, 17, 38, 128, 130–131, 135, 153, 166–68, 170, 176 Culture, 6–7, 10, 55, 170–71 Custom (kastom), 55, 63n12 dance, 58–60 and land, 12, 49–51 national discourse of, 158 as negatively valued, 48, 110 and personhood, 41–43 and politics, 12, 60–61 as positively valued, 60, 69, 94, 110, 136, 141 and relationships, 44–48, 93 revival of, 55, 58–60 ritual, 22, 58–60, 91, 94, 120, 137, 141, 150, 165. See also nakërkrohin spirits, 16–17, 43, 47, 60, 67, 83, 89, 106n2, 110 119, 123, 126. See also devel Danger, 6, 16–18, 46, 60, 83, 92, 94, 109, 119, 124–25, 135–36, 179 Darkness, 41, 62, 73, 70, 106, 137. See also light Deacon, Bernard, 41–42, 156 Descartes, René, 3 Desire to change, 3–4, 9, 16, 84, 141, 153, 158, 163, 176. See also social change Devel (evil spirit), 38, 43, 83–84, 97, 117–18. See also custom spirits Development, 49, 58, 158, 163–164, 168–69 Dignity, 172, 180 Discrimination, 54–55 Division, 2–3, 57, 60, 141, 143–44, 159, 162, 179 Dreams, 43, 127, 168, 176 Durkheim, Émile, 4, 24

208

Index

Egalitarianism, 60, 89, 92, 98, 101, 157, 174n2 Elder Cyril (Ahamb’s revival coordinator), 25–26, 74, 79, 81–82, 102, 104, 117, 124–25, 132, 146 Election, 58, 141, 159, 171–72 Eliot (deceased boy), xxi, 15, 19–23, 25, 31–32, 39n2 Engelke, Matthew, 84, 85, 94, 101, 163 Eneton (nasara and village), 51–52, 54, 58–60, 71, 110, 135–50 Envy. See jealousy and envy Equality, 40, 43, 45, 48, 56, 89–90, 92, 95, 98, 125, 122, 132, 151, 157. See also inequality Eriksen, Annelin, 2, 9, 42, 54, 59–60, 85, 89–92, 94, 98, 105, 118, 141, 144, 157, 163–65, 179 Ethics, xix–xx Events, xiii, 3–4, 6, 8, 10, 15–16, 37–38, 84, 105–6, 130, 151, 154, 175–76 Evil, x, 13, 16, 17, 20, 26, 38, 61, 82–3, 97, 108, 110, 115, 118, 132, 165 Existential good, 177 movement, 165 panic, xiii, 15, 18, 37, 40 questions and answers, xiv, 6, 9, 38, 166, 167 threats, 167 Facebook, 14n1, 133 Farun (mainland village), 21, 24, 26–30, 128 Favret-Saada, Jeanne, 10, 109 Fear, 2–3, 5–8, 15, 18–19, 31, 33, 35–37, 40, 46–7, 56, 58, 60, 67, 75, 77, 84, 106, 109, 113–22, 126, 131–32, 136, 139, 144, 146, 153, 164, 166–73, 175–81 and hope, xi, 3–6, 8, 10, 15, 84, 105–6, 106n1, 109, 114, 118, 122, 131, 136, 141, 144, 153–54, 166–67, 170–73, 175–81 Foreigners. See waetman Forgiveness, 52, 76–79, 102–3, 126, 137, 139, 143, 147, 150–51

Forsyth, Miranda, 16, 18, 34, 131, 134–35 Fukuyama, Francis, 170, 172, 180 Fundraisings, 49, 85n6, 88 Future, 6, 8, 21, 55, 72, 101, 123, 127, 135, 141, 149, 153–55, 159, 165–68, 161 Gardens, 1, 16, 42, 43, 72, 79, 85n7, 114, 115, 127, 143 Gender and church organisations, 69, 72, 89, 104, 161. See also Presbyterian Women’s Mission Union (PWMU) and evaluation of their goodness, 31, 130, 95–96 and hierarchy, 8–9, 88–92, 94–96, 104–6 and public speech, 125 and ritual spheres, 89–90, 92, 100. See also kava as male ritual and social forms, 88–92, 94–96, 99–100, 105, 161 See also masculinity, Pentecostal gender paradox Gift exchange, 42, 45, 55, 91, 136, 158. See also reciprocity, sharing Gift of life, 52 Girard, René, 3, 11, 35–37, 40, 128, 135–36 God, 11, 16–17, 21, 25, 27, 30–1, 35–36, 52, 56, 61, 65, 67–9, 74, 75–78, 85, 117, 122–23, 126–28, 133–35, 147–49 God’s ways, 3, 45, 78, 80–1, 87, 97, 102–3, 137, 154, 177 Good anthropology of the, 5–6, 175 as contextually dependent, 7, 131 notions of the, 2, 3, 38, 40, 81, 88, 94, 118, 122, 138, 142, 145, 154–55, 164, 175, 177 notions of the not, 18, 46, 75, 80, 89, 102, 133, 145 person, 18, 31, 44–46, 101–5, 122, 178 Gossip, 95–98, 130, 146, 161 Guterres, António, 167–68 Hae jif (high chief), 55, 58–62, 70–71, 73, 145. See also chiefs

Index

Hantor (murdered sorcerer), xxi, 17, 21, 32, 35–38, 40, 51, 71, 105, 108, 123, 128, 131–32, 135–36, 139, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152n2, 176. 178, 181 Healing the Land (ministry), 143–44 Heart, x, 18, 29, 32–33, 70, 80, 87, 98, 102, 112, 130, 136, 142, 149 Heaven, 39n3, 66, 68, 80–81, 87, 93, 96, 102, 106n1, 123, 129n5, 150, 155, 155, 183 Hiding, 32, 35, 67, 74–75, 101, 110–12, 124–25, 139. See also personhood desire for transparent, visible/ invisible Hierarchy, 43, 60–61, 89–92, 96, 156–57 aversion to, 56, 89–90, 95, 98, 122, 151, 157 challenging established, 92–99, 105 desire for 51–52, 60–61, 172–73 inversion of, x, xiv, 162, 169, 88 See also gender and hierarchy Hoknaet (owl), 33 Holbraad, Martin, 6, 10, 173 Holy Spirit, x–xiii, 2–3, 5, 11–13, 20–33, 39n3, 57, 61, 66, 68, 70, 73–84, 85n1, 86n10, 87, 93, 95–98, 100–2, 106n1, 108–113, 115–19, 123–27, 129n5, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 143, 154, 156–57, 162–66, 168, 173, 177 Hope, 4, 6, 23, 31, 34, 36, 40, 58, 61, 66, 69, 73–75, 81, 84, 104, 109, 112–14, 116, 122, 126–28, 131, 135–36, 141–44, 153–56, 159, 162, 165–68, 170–73, 175–81. See also fear and hope Howell, Signe, 7 Humiliation, 92–93, 162 Humility, 3, 44–45, 56, 65, 81, 87, 93, 104, 137, 153, 156–57, 162 Husürmarni (following others), 98–100, 104 Identity, 33, 45, 50, 55, 88, 93, 94, 137, 170, 176. See also nasara Illness, xi, xiii, 31, 32, 35, 42, 43, 74, 76, 82, 91, 97, 110, 113, 125, 127, 140, 165–66, 178

209

Independence, 9, 41, 43, 48–50, 63n11, 164, 179 Individualism, 46–48, 92, 178 and land rights, 41, 56 and political units, 48 possessive individual, 46–48 and spiritual gifts, 97–98 See also personhood Inequality, xii, 17, 179, 181. See also equality Initiation, 59–61, 89 Insecurity, xi, 3, 6, 17, 19, 112, 119, 153, 166, 170, 178–80. See also security. Integrity, 88, 91, 94, 105, 172 Invention of tradition, 55 Jealousy and envy, 47, 97–98, 110, 117, 164, 166, 178, 179 Jealous anger, 17 Jesus, 57, 68, 70, 76, 78, 79, 85n1, 87, 97, 106n2, 115, 126, 129n2, 160, 183 Kapferer, Bruce, xiv, 3–4, 6–7, 12, 29, 37, 38, 82, 84, 105, 122, 149, 153–54, 176 Kava (Piper methysticum), 20, 33 bar, 47, 104 as cash crop, 1, 94, 107n3 critique of seeing kava as problematic, 94, 98–101, 104 as important, 92–94, 104 as male ritual, 33, 80, 91–92, 93–94 as problematic, 71–72, 80, 93, 95, 106n2, 130, 155, 162 theft, 79 Kinship ceremonies, 44, 140–41 expectations for, 44–58, 56, 92–93, 98–100, 138–39, 158, 177 relationships, 54, 93, 111, 113, 158 Laclau, Ernesto, 4–5 Land access to, 43, 51, 63n9, 135, 142 alienation of, 49–50 ancestral. See also nasara disputes, 50–58, 63n12, 65, 73, 79, 81, 110, 113, 130, 144, 150–51, 179

210

Index

laws, 49 leasing, 179, 41, 48–51, 58, 63n8, 63n10, 179 See also manples Last Days, x, 78, 92, 106n1. See also apocalypse Lavlav (the sorcery of copying someone’s body), 17, 22, 112 Lawrence, Peter, 9, 88, 151 Layard, John, 34, 41, 59 Leadership aspirations, 89–91 conflicts over, 2, 17, 40, 48, 51–60, 145, 164 qualities, 29, 87, 89–91, 156–57 See also chiefs, community leadership Lif (herbs with special properties), xxi, 17–18, 21–25, 32, 35, 77, 91–92, 101, 113, 123–26, 132 Light, 41, 137, 147, 149. See also darkness Liminality, 8, 38, 93, 131–2, 149, 153–54, 158, 162, 169 Lincoln (sorcery suspect), xxi, 22, 77, 122–26 Lindstrom, Lamont, 2, 9, 37, 40, 41, 45, 48, 55, 59, 63n5, 88, 117, 178 Lonour Island, dispute over, xxi, 41, 48, 51–58, 63n8, 63n10 Love. See napalongin Magic, 16–17, 20, 65, 67, 81, 84, 110, 117, 125, 132. See also posen Malekula custom (kastom), 33, 50–51, 59–60, 64n13 languages, xviii–xix location, xxiv, xxv mission history of, 41–42 Presbyterian Church of, 142–43 principles for land tenure, 51, 62n1, 63n9 residents from Ahamb, 1, 19–21, 57, 76 revival, 3, 69, 75, 85n3, 85n5, 87, 128, 157 revival convention, 23–31 traditional view of children, 156 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 19, 43, 54, 118

Manager of social worlds, 90–94, 105, 156. See also big men Man Ahamb (Ahamb person), 149–50, 159, 42, 48, 52–54, 159. See also nasara, personhood Man Aur (Mainland person). 48, 54–55, 159. See also nasara, personhood Manchester School, 8 Manples (person of the place), 42–43, 48, 62n1, 70. See also nasara Marriage, 42–43, 62n2, 79, 89–92, 158 Martin, Bernice, 105 Martin, Keir, 46, 48, 129n3, 138, 145, 172–73 Masculinity, 87–88, 93–96 Mass hysteria, 29 Mauss, Marcel, 177 McDonnell, Siobhan, 49, 50 McDougall, Debra, 2, 42–44, 48, 56, 60, 64n11, 88, 90, 151, 164 Melanesia, 9, 18, 19, 21, 37, 40–43, 45–46, 48, 54, 59, 72, 89, 94, 111, 117, 134, 139, 156, 157, 165, 166, 178, 179 Member of Parliament (MP), xxi, 58, 133 Men’s cult. See nakërkrohin Meyer, Birgit, 16, 17, 94, 118, 123, 163, Migration, migrants Euro-American fear of, 170–71, 180 migrants on Ahamb, 41–43, 50–56. See also Man Aur migration to Ahamb, 41–43, 144, 159–60 migration from Ahamb to mainland, 1, 19–21, 57, 76 Millennialism. See apocalypse, cargo cults, Last days Money, 47, 50, 53, 58, 71, 80–81, 94, 140, 149, 184 Morality in anthropology, 7, 14n4 moral deviance and rupture, 21, 38, 46, 63n7, 71, 94, 136, 166, 170, 178 moral disciplining, 87, 95 moral evaluations, 44, 56 of following others, 99–100 morally good and right, 2, 37, 47, 71, 88, 98–104, 117, 125, 131, 142, 151, 155–56, 177

Index

moral obligations, 45, 56, 125 moral renewal, 12, 58, 162, 178 moral solidarity, 4, 177 See also good, values Mother’s brother. See angkel Munn, Nancy, 17–19, 40, 46, 54, 77, 82, 88, 113 Murder, xi, 7, 15, 22, 31–38, 108–9, 116, 123–24, 128, 130, 132–39, 146, 176 Nakërkrohin (male graded society), 16, 59, 89–91, 145, 156 Napalongin (love), xiv, 1, 7–8, 36, 38, 44–48, 52, 56, 60, 65, 87, 99, 104, 122, 138, 149, 151, 154, 156–57, 177. See also good, morality, values Nasara (patrilineage and ancestral place), 41–43, 47–48, 50–57, 59–62, 62n1, 62n2, 63n9, 64n13, 70, 90, 92, 125, 135, 140–42, 144–45, 147–50, 152n4, 157–59, 161. See also manples Nationalistic movements, 170–73, 181 Nativistic movements, 9, 46 Natshovin (lethal sorcery form), 17, 20, 186 Neoliberalism, 175, 179–81 Newell, Sasha, 117–18 Nygaard, Bertel, 15 Ontology, 8, 90, 109, 151, 176 Ortner, Sherry, 5, 14n2, 175, 180, 181 Orwell (murdered sorcerer), xiii, xxi, 17, 21–23, 33, 35–38, 40, 47–48, 51–52, 59, 70, 77, 105, 108–14, 123, 128, 131–32, 135–36, 139, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152n2, 176. 178, 181 Otherness, 14, 18–19, 46, 75, 154, 175, 178 following others as virtue, 99–100 othering, 166, 171, 180 Paloghusür (form of respect), 98–100, 104. See also respect Panic, 115, xii, 11, 15, 31, 35, 37, 40. See also existential panic Papua New Guinea, 9, 34, 55, 88, 122, 143, 162 Pasieka, Agnieszka, 180–81

211

Pedersen, Morten Axel, 6, 173 Pentecostal gender paradox, 105 Pentecostalisation, 143 Pentecostalism. See CharismaticPentecostal Christianity Personhood desire for transparent, 18, 101, 112, 125. See also hiding, visible/invisible individual. See individualism and place, 42–43. See also nasara relational, 44–48, 60, 63n4, 63n5, 97–98, 178 Pledge to God, 35, 76 Police, 34, 36, 79, 133–34, 136, 138–39, 146, 164 Populism, 4, 170, 173, 175, 167 Port Vila, 1, 32, 34, 36, 49–51, 58, 66, 107n3, 108, 110, 113, 131, 133, 141–42, 147, 163–65 Posen (sorcery, sorcery creature), xi, 16–24, 30, 32, 34–35, 74–76, 81–83, 108–17, 122–30, 139 attacks, 18–21, 24–26, 35, 60, 84, 85n2, 98, 113, 115–16, 139. See also murder attacks on suspected sorcerers, 33–34, 36–39, 166 confessions, 21–23, 31–37, 123, 125–6, 128, 132, 134, 151n1 findings, xi, 12, 24–25, 32, 81–84, 109–22, 125, 166 forms of, 16–19. See also lavlav, natshovin, su as modern phenomenon, 17 objects, 32, 125 pledge against doing, 35, 76 posen man (sorcerer), 16–19, 30, 32–34, 47, 75, 122–33. See also Hantor, Lincoln, Orwell protection against, xi, 19, 21, 30, 36, 43, 61, 74–76, 84, 102, 104, 109, 115–19, 127, 136, 139 and state law, 34, 133, 139 suspicions of, xiii, 18–20, 22–23, 32, 48, 59, 65, 83–84, 110, 122–24, 165–66 trials, 21–23, 25, 31–36, 130–32, 135, 139, 148 Possessive individual. See individualism

212

Index

Postcolonialism, 49, 55, 179 Presbyterian Church, xiii, 1, 3, 5, 23–26, 41, 67–69, 85n6, 89, 94, 142–43, 146–47, 157, 164. See also community church Presbyterian Women’s Mission Union (PWMU), 69, 71–72, 85n6, 88, 100, 157 Prestige, 59, 89, 91, 156 Purity, 36, 67, 81, 87, 93–94, 154–55, 169, 174n2 Radcliffe, Brown, Alfred, 118–19 Rank. See nakërkrohin Reciprocity, xii, 1, 12, 47, 50, 52, 58, 141, 159, 179. See also gift exchange, sharing Reconciliation, 78, 122, 136–51, 152n3 Relationalism. See personhood Respect, 47, 60, 70–1, 88, 90–91 95–96, 98–100, 125, 149, 156. See also paloghusür Revival and children, 87, 93, 154–58, 161–63 chronology on Ahamb, xxi–xxii and comparable movements, 4–5, 9, 45–46 convention in Farun, 23–31 expansion of, 23, 66–69, 83, 104 and gender, 8–9, 88, 92–96, 99–100, 102, 104–6 introduction on Ahamb, 73–79 in Melanesia, 9, 107n4 principles of, x, 1–2, 80–81 reasons for, x, xi, 2–3, 7, 9, 24, 44, 65–67, 69, 74–75, 80–81, 106n2 as rite of passage, 93 as ritual, 3–7, 24, 29, 38, 80, 84, 94, 100, 116, 118–19, 128, 149, 151, 153, 175–76 Rio, Knut, 9, 18–19, 21, 34, 37, 52, 71, 82, 110, 114, 128, 136, 139, 141, 164, 166, 178 Revenge, 34–35, 42, 135–37 Ritual. See revival as ritual Robbins, Joel, 5–7, 9, 18, 40, 80, 88, 94, 107n4, 151, 157, 175, 177 Rumours, 58, 67 73, 132, 140

Sacrifice, xiii, 3, 11, 35–38, 39n4, 49, 53, 61, 89, 128, 135–36, 155 Salvation, x, 162 Satan, 16–17, 22, 117–18, 123, 125, 137, 159, 165 Seasonal workers, 79 Secrecy, x, xi, 12, 18, 21, 23, 33, 35, 59, 61, 67, 74, 77, 83, 89, 92, 109, 112, 162, 180 Security, 6, 19, 21, 43, 94, 131, 147, 163– 64, 167, 171–73. See also insecurity Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 175–76 School, 1, 22, 36, 54, 55, 57, 58. 67–69, 71, 114, 127, 140, 141, 158. See also Sunday school School fees, 1, 50, 158 Selfishness, 18, 46–48, 56, 80, 91, 99, 154 Sharing, 12, 45–6, 52, 55, 92. See also gift exchange, reciprocity Shock, 28, 32, 34, 35, 68, 137, 139. See also astonishment Siegel, James, 77, 83, 84, 114, 119, 122, 126, 129n4, 178 Sin, 35, 37, 80, 84, 85n1, 94, 95, 100, 102, 132, 135, 142, 143, 147, 148, 151n1, 155, 157 Slen (being slain in the Holy Spirit), xi, 15, 20, 27, 29, 31, 66–69, 80–83, 126, 132, 163, 183 Social change, 17, 31, 48, 61, 66, 72, 73, 76, 81, 84–85, 87–88, 93, 104–5, 123, 131, 136, 140, 147, 150–51, 153–55, 157, 159, 161–67, 169–78. See also desire to change Social movements, 8–9 Charismatic-Pentecostal, 9, 163–67 and climate activism, 167–70 fear and hope as driving force of, 3–4, 75, 170–73, 175. See also fear and hope in Melanesia, 9, 36–37, 88, 178. See also cargo cults nationalistic, 170–3 nativistic, 9, 46 ritual and, 4–5. See also revival as ritual Solomon Islands, 44, 55, 151 Sorcery. See posen South West Bay, xxi, 27, 66–69, 74, 76, 78–79, 183

Index

Spiritual gifts, 96–98 Spiritual screening, 102–3 Spiritual vision, xii, 21, 74, 82–83, 109, 111. See also visions and visionaries Spiritual war, 83, 106, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–17, 129n1, 131 Stealing, 77, 79, 80, 168 Strathern, Marilyn, 45–47, 63n4, 63n5, 88–92 Su (sorcery of flying), xiii, 16–17, 33–34, 65, 67, 83, 108, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 161, 177 Summers-Effler, Erika, 4, 24, 116 Sunday school, 41, 57, 114, 140, 155, 157, 159, 161 Tabernacle, 76–78, 85n3 Taboo, 43, 59, 83, 119 Thorleifsson, Cathrine, 170–71 Thunberg, Greta, 167–70 Transformation community transformation in November 2017, 142–51 ontological, 111 social, xii, 2–4, 96, 105, 112, 130–31 Tourism, 12, 49, 179 Trump, Donald, 14, 154, 170, 172–73, 175 Tu tingting (doubting, second thoughts), 80, 94, 101–4. See also wan tingting Turner, Victor, 8, 93, 131–2, 135, 161–62, 169 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 170–73 United Nations, 158, 167–68 Unity, 3–4, 7, 9, 36, 40–41, 44, 45, 48, 57, 60–61, 65, 101, 138, 147, 150–51 disunity, 104, 117, 130 the Unity Song, 159–61 See also values Values, 1–2, 6, 46, 65–66, 69–70, 81, 87, 130–1, 147, 151, 157, 161, 175, 177 in anthropological studies, 7, 181 conflicting, 7, 56, 131, 138, 151 conflicting interpretations of, 4, 7, 36, 52, 56, 85, 106, 137–38 core, 38, 40, 44–46 130, 136–38

213

as driving force for action, 6–8, 12, 65–66, 153, 171–72, 177 gendered, 88, 91–92 restoring, 69, 81, 137, 139, 159, 171 under threat, 6, 12, 46, 52, 153, 166, 170 See also good, morality Vanuatu churches, 85n6, 143, 146, 157, 163 general election of 2012, xxi, 58, 159 general election of 2016, xxii, 141 government, 158 and health, 20, 165 languages, xviii, 55 and law on sorcery. See posen and state law location, xxiii politics, 54, 55, 58, 141 politics of land, 14, 17, 40–41, 43, 48–51, 179 state apparatus, xii, 120, 164. See also police Vanuatu Cultural Centre, 158 Vanuatu Daily Post, 39n5, 63n10, 134 Violence, xiv, 6, 15, 19, 33, 35–36, 128, 166, 175–76 and the sacred, 36–37, 135 See also Girard, René Visible/invisible, xii, xiii, 12, 16–17, 19, 75, 83, 110, 121, 164–66, 168, 180. See also hiding, personhood desire for transparent Visions and visionaries, 75–6, 78, 80–84, 87, 92–94, 96–98, 100–5, 106n1, 108–28, 129n5, 131–32, 136–37, 139, 154, 156, 161, 163, 164, 168–69, 171, 178 Waetman (foreigner, white person), 28, 108, 133 Wagner, Roy, 10, 45 Wan tingting (consistency in thought, unity of wills), 19, 117. See also tu tingting Witchcraft, 16, 34, 109, 117–118, 132, 134. See also posen Wonder, 10, 29, 106n1, 111, 166 Yaws (infectious disease), 20, 39n2