Tanna Times Islanders in the World • Lamont Lindstrom ‘ © University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover photo: Women and girls at a boy’s circumcision exchange, Ikurup village, . Photo by the author. is book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identier (DOI): https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle// We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. for Katiri, Maui, and Nora Rika • Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria. (Amos : ) And he must needs go through Samaria. (John : ) Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv . Global Island; Memory . Chiefs; Names . Spirits; Stones . School; Where Are You Going? . Sickness; Women . Place and Road; Soarum Again . Cargo Cults; Kastom . War; Dance and Song ­. Persons; Disputes . Families; Sex and Love . Brokers; Respect . City Life; Voyages . Tourists; Digital Island . Home Ground; Kaha Monty In ­, I found my way to Tanna Island in what was then the New Hebrides, and Vanuatu today. My proposal to study dierential success with economic development as informed by religious aliation soon morphed into a series of better conceived and more fruitful projects. Then and now, the generous people of Samaria village put me up and put up with me. Over the years, I have come to know Samaria and its neighboring villages located within southeast Tanna’s Nafe language area. Although I write of Tanna as a whole, this is shameless ethnographic license that commonly takes one particular place as representative of some encompassing culture, society, and history. Tanna is a remarkable and complex island, and stories from a single village or area never adequately capture its larger truths. Anthropologists like to tell other people’s stories but local experts tell them even better. Tanna oers a rich and profuse narrative archive and Islanders keep this vital with recurrent retellings of Tanna’s times. I draw on island narratives to present the life stories of a dozen island personalities, situating these exemplar heroes and heroines within their cultural and historical worlds. Personal names, on Tanna, are tricky economic and family resources. The stories presented here introduce Islanders with their given names until we reach the present day. I re- name people who share our own times, asking their forgiveness for thus partly shadowing their persons. In addition to the many island stories told to me over four decades on Tanna, to understand these lives and their times I draw on the writings of explorers, missionaries, traders, administrators, reporters, and anthropologists who found their way to the island, beginning in . For those who might want to pursue a particular life story or an ethnographic theme, I provide suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter. This literature, selected from a larger canon that has informed my research and writing, oers additional, detailed ethno- graphic and historical information about Tanna and its people. xiii Passing years have decidedly lengthened the list of my benefactors and support- ers, on Tanna and elsewhere. This book draws upon years of island history and forty years of my own. As it may be my last, I must thank many friends and colleagues, some sadly missed. These include professional mentors including Margaret Mackenzie, Bob Tonkinson, and Roger Keesing; departmental col- leagues at the University of Tulsa; research hosts and island companions Ken and Anne Calvert, Gordon MacFarlane, Bob Paul, Cynthia Frazer; Kirk Human, Ralph Regenvanu, Marcellin Abong, Richard Shing, Jacob Kapere, Jean-Pascal Wahe, and Joel Iau from the Vanuatu Cultural Centre/National Museum; and fellow scholars of Vanuatu’s many cultures and languages whose research has in- formed mine and whose books ll my shelves, including Michael Allen, Lissant Bolton, Joël Bonnemaison, Terry Crowley, Annelin Eriksen, Ellen Facey, James Flexner, Haidy Geismar, Jean Guiart, James Gwero, Sabine Hess, Bergmans Iati, Margaret Jolly, Janet Dixon Keller, Thorgeir Kolshus, Daniela Kraemer, Joan Larcom, Vincent Lebot, Jeremy MacClancy, Carlos Mondragon, Anna Naupa, Ken Nehrbass, Mary Patterson, Jean-Marc Philibert, Knut Rio, Margaret and William Rodman, Benedicta Rousseau, Rachel Smith, Matthew Spriggs, Marc Tabani, John Taylor, Darrell Tryon, Chelsea Wentworth, and Alexandra Wid- mer, with much appreciation to Howard Van Trease, John Lynch, Robert Early, and Nettie Moerman for many entertaining and illuminating conversations in Port Vila’s kava bars. The University of Tulsa’s Oce of Research, the Henry Kendall College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Oce, and the Department of Anthropology partly supported open access publication. I also thank University of Hawai‘i Press edi- tor Emma Ching and her colleagues at the Press for transforming text and pho- tos into a tangible book—a book I oer to my island friends in return for many years of welcome and hospitality. Samaria is propitiously named and I owe most gratitude to the families I rst met there in ­, extending now to the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Rapi and Iati, Iau and Sakrai, Vani and Kasaia, Kieri and Jacobeth, Nakutan and Neiporo, Kamti Asori, Kauke Asori, and Sarei, generous and good Samaritans all. And I thank many other xv xvi Acknowledgments storytellers in neighboring villages. All are expert raconteurs of island lives and times, and I am much obliged that my own story has joined Tanna’s nar- rative ow. Ipare think that we live in a most hectic age, buf- feted by epic global ows of people, of things, of ideas. But our W times are not extraordinary. We might like to think we inhabit the world’s hub, the global core. But our place is not special. We might like to think we set the human standard, that everyone else desires naturally to emulate our ways. But we are not exemplary. Gaze out into the world and we can nd global networks established millennia before the Old World met the New World (or rst remembered so doing) in . These intensifying grids and channels have continued to proliferate. Globalization reaches us all. But within our intercon- nected world, despite this worldwide intercourse, we also nd myriad forms of local exceptionalism, going strong and underway. Global Island Come to Tanna, an island in the southern reaches of Vanuatu, a Y-shaped archi- pelago in the southwestern Pacic, miles west of Fiji and , miles east of Australia (map). Strangers from abroad found their way to Tanna in follow- ing the glow of its volcano, Iasur, which reddened the horizon. British explorer James Cook and his crew, on the sailing ship Resolution, were atypical visitors but not exceptional in that Islanders themselves sailed about Vanuatu’s south- ern islands and beyond to the Loyalties and New Caledonia. Their oceangoing ancestors had canoed in from the north about three thousand years previously. Cook needed to replenish his ship’s supplies of water and rewood and he also wanted to explore. Johann Forster, the expedition’s natural scientist, with his son Georg ventured forth into island hamlets located around a bay that Cook named Port Resolution, a er his ship. The Forsters reconnoitered and chatted with the locals whom they called Indians, a residue label from even earlier global encounters. They reported back to Cook that Resolution had landed on Tanna. This word, though, means ground or soil. An anthropologist in the s would Tanna map. Created by author. Ipare joke that Cook, searching for the island’s name, pointed downward: “What do you call this?” he asked. “Why, we call it dirt.” This may be just an amusing yarn as the Forsters provided few details of that linguistic encounter. Tanna might already have been the island’s estab- lished name, as it has since become. Some suggest that the island’s true name is Tanauta, which means something like “land of wealth,” and people on neigh- boring Futuna Island call Tanna Hgauta. Nomenclatural claims are muddled although Tanna is most recognized. The long archipelago has also shi ed iden- tity. Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, in , landed on its largest island that he dubbed Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. A century and a half later, in , French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed through northern Vanu- atu, pausing to rename the islands the Grand Cyclades, having in mind a smaller archipelago in the Aegean Sea. Cook, who was likewise inclined to bestow new place names, renamed these islands the New Hebrides a er some mostly tree- less islands o Scotland’s west coast. Leaving behind his newly identied Tanna and the New Hebrides, he sailed south next to nd a facsimile of Scotland, a long narrow island that he christened New Caledonia.