Introduction
Introduction Art and Commodity in Vanuatu On arrival in a small boat at the village of Fona, in North Ambrym, for the fi rst time in August 2009, I was immediately confronted with a black sand beach piled up with the typical North Ambrymese slit-drums and bwerang, or tree fern fi gures, to be shipped off , in that case to Paris, France. Such a scene sums up quite accurately what I came to study in Vanuatu. So, was it really going to be this easy, or was I just very lucky to have come at this particular moment? As it turned out, it was going to be both easy and diffi cult at the same time. North Ambrym is indeed very much still piled up with slit-drums (the easy part), but, as I later learned, most of them do not get sold so easily as was the case that one evening when I arrived for the fi rst time (the not so easy part). In turn, this pro- vided opportunities to investigate why local people in North Ambrym today still produce slit-drums and what really happens to them if they are not shipped off to the West a er some time. I say “a er some time” because, ideally, drums stand in North Am- brym villages or on beaches of yacht anchorages such as that of Nobul, just north of Fona, or sometimes in their rightful place, on a har or rit- ual ground away from the villages, because they need to age, or at least look old, before they are sold and shipped off to Australia, Europe, or the United States.
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