According to Sia Raga histories, the division of the land into vanua and bwatun vanua occurred as part of the same purposeful process and along the same tracks by which North Pentecost was colonised by their ancestors. This all began with Bwatmahanga, the ‘first man’ of Pentecost. According to Jif Ruben Todali, the appearance of Bwatmahanga defines the beginning of the third epoch or ‘generation’ (tauva) of Sia Raga cosmogony. ^[6] He was not the first sentient being to inhabit Pentecost, but he was the first person (atatu) to take fully human form, and, along with his siblings, was the apical ancestor of the people of Raga today. He is also remembered as the first ‘chief’ (ratahigi), the creator of the first household dwellings (imwa) and ‘men’s houses’ (gamali), and pioneer of the road to abanoi. Abanoi, an invisible other world (or ‘paradise’, as it is referred to in Bislama), is woven through the material world of human experience (ureure), and is inhabited by ancestors (atatun vanua) and other spirit beings such as tavalurau, whose name—meaning literally, ‘the other side of the leaf’—evocatively describes the relationship between the two realms. ^[7] Turning a leaf (rau) over merely renders the other side invisible. While both sides are always ‘present’ to consciousness, only one is accessible to the eye. As Jif Ruben Todali explained abanoi to me: ‘You can’t see it, but it is here with us anyway.’ Atmate, the ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ of the dead, are also sometimes described by the related term tavaltena, or ‘spirits of the other side’. Through these terms, the relationship between the two cosmological ‘sides’ of ureure and abanoi is pictured as simultaneously joined and separated. Bwatmahanga is the historical embodiment of key architectonic concepts. Two of the most important of these are present in his name: bwat, meaning ‘source’ or ‘foundation’ (see above), and mahanga, to ‘branch’ or ‘diverge’. Bwatmahanga is the figure of the one that becomes two.

Bwatmahanga appears in many origin narratives throughout the northern islands of the archipelago, and wherever he does he is always accompanied and thwarted by his adversary, Tagaro. ^[8] In North Pentecost, part of the reason why narratives involving Bwatmahanga and Tagaro are so important is that they engage with the origin of human engagement with otherness. They thereby provide insight into the ambivalent dualism that has become the fundamental architectonic feature of the Sia Raga cosmological, metaphysical and social universe. As Battaglia (1990) found of the Sabbarl, the idea of dualism in Sia Raga ontology is not simply positive and productive, but has equally negative and destructive tendencies. In this way, the entangled careers of Bwatmahanga and Tagaro suggest a relationship fraught with productive potential and antagonism. Like the monster Katutubwai of Sabbarl children’s stories, Tagaro’s relationship to Bwatmahanga represents that of ‘the spectre of the ambivalently valued Other that haunts the texts of human life—texts taken as interactional or ‘dialogical’ constructs, where the Other is historically an aspect of one’s own life’ (Battaglia 1990: 38). For Sia Raga, the processes of birth, growth, procreation, death and knowledge all depend on the continuing activation and engagement of that otherness, which contains the power to give and to take away. ^[9]

Tagaro’s arrival marks the beginning of human violence and of an era in which peace (tamata) no longer constitutes the natural order of things, but must be constantly strived for and negotiated. Today, the search for tamata represents the ultimate stated goal of all Sia Raga ritual enterprise. In the course of striving for social and cosmological unity within their already divided world, division itself becomes a part of that strategy. Jif Ruben once explained to me that marriage (lagiana), funerals (mateana) and male rank-taking ceremonies (bolololi) all ultimately represent strategies or roads (hala) to the attainment of that same goal: peace (tamata). In all cases, these strategies involve the engagement of dynamic relationships struck between things divided, or ‘sides’ (tavalu), found for instance in the distinction between the two moieties (themselves called tavalu), the lived world (ureure) and the Other world (abanoi), and more recently between alengan vanua (local fashion) and alengan tuturani (the fashion of whites). As I hope will become more apparent throughout the course of this paper, tamata lies at the ideological centre of moiety division, the associated division of people and land into individual descent groups and vanua, as well as the networks of exchange by which these are bound together. As almost anyone from North Pentecost will tell you, peace is the true goal of all Sia Raga cultural endeavour.