Figure 1 is a diagram that was drawn by Jif Ruben on a blackboard in the Avatvotu village gamali, and which I copied into my field notes in June 1999, a month after my arrival there. It is headed with the words, ‘Vanua toto deti—bwatun touva’ (‘Here is a tree of place—foundation of generations’). ^[10]

Blending cosmography with social topography, the image shows the emergence and presence of the differentiated cosmos that I have begun to trace above. It depicts the physical emergence of the island of Pentecost, and at the same time it traces the past and present distribution of atatun vanua, the ‘people of the place’, across that landscape. The island is imagined as a tree (toto), its branches ramifying on either side of a stout trunk. The tree grows from the soil of a unitary plenum, of land (vanua) and surrounding cosmos (ureure). This land is described as having formed during a cosmogonical episode in which fire and water met, reacted and affected the emergence of solid rock from the sea. Jif Ruben uses the words ‘Alen Vanua beobeo atero gabi mai wai’ (‘kastom land pushed from beneath by fire and water’).^[11] The land is enveloped by the stuff of ureure, the ‘material’ cosmos of lived experience—including ‘alo, mahava, visui, dodo mai tailangi’ (‘sun, air, stars, rain clouds and white clouds’)—of which the land (vanua) is also a part.

Historical provenance for this remarkable land-tree image is the divisive turbulence of the early 20th century, its recent emergence being framed within the struggle for hegemony and the power to dictate cosmology by recent converts to the Anglican faith and those supporting kastom. Jif Ruben describes the ‘inventor’ of this technology—his father by birth, Vira Livlivu—as a man of questions, a man who needed to understand (iloi) everything. For this reason, while his attitude towards the growth of Anglicanism was essentially ambivalent, he was at the same time drawn to its novel spiritual ideas and to the new forms of knowledge that it was importing, and which were becoming increasingly popular throughout the region. As a result of his thirst for knowledge and his desire to further explore the ideas and teachings of the Anglicans, Vira Livlivu became a catechist, and thereby learned to read and write. In the evocative and ambivalent image with which Jif Ruben enjoys describing him, Vira Livlivu stands at the door of the local village church house, with one hand he rings the bell for Sunday service, in the other he holds a rifle.

As this image suggests, Vira Livlivu came to the conclusion that the knowledge and practices contained within church and kastom should be mutually maintained in Sia Raga society. He saw that those two apparently competing ideologies might be incorporated into a productive duality as new figures within the social and ontological framework of tavalui (‘sides’). However fraught, this is a common sentiment today. In the context of the early 20th century, though, his position would no doubt have been quite novel, especially in consideration of the levels of conflict and violence that characterised the division (see Taylor 2003).

As a consequence of his interests, and in the hope that a fusing together of church and kastom might lead, ultimately, to tamata (peace), Vira Livlivu encouraged each of his two sons to pursue one of these divergent paths of knowledge. Today, Jif Ruben is the recognised kastom leader of Gelau, while his brother, Peter, was for many years catechist to the area. ^[12] On Sunday mornings, during my major field trip, Peter would read the Gospels to a smattering of local parishioners at the Lagaronboga church house. This was the time during which Jif Ruben, ten minutes walk up the hill, would habitually work with his exercise books, recording his knowledge of kastom. Utopian visions of tamata (peace) also provided the underlying reason why Vira Livlivu devised his ‘land-trees’ and passed them onto his son, Jif Ruben. Considering the continued importance of the knowledge that they systematise Jif Ruben has passed them to his own son, Kolombas.

Shortly after I arrived at Avatvotu—and before I encountered the land-tree on the blackboard—Jif Ruben spent one long afternoon picturing for me the shape and trajectory of Sia Raga cosmography. He began by describing to me the island’s first creation as rock and its emergence from the sea. He went on to explain to me the processes of death and decay by which soil was formed from the moss (lumute) that settled on the rocks of the newly formed island, and of how that soil provided a substance in which a process of rebirth could occur, thus enabling that moss to diversify, eventually becoming the many plant and animal life forms that exist today. ‘Lumute,’ he told me, ‘is the basis of all life.’

Jif Ruben always provided caveats to these renditions, interspersing his narrations with statements such as this: ‘I don’t know if what I’m telling you is true or not. This is just what the old men from before believed. It may be true. I don’t know.’ Yet he would also contradict his modesties by pointing out that this vevhurina (history, or more literally, ‘talk because of it’) could nevertheless be authenticated beyond all others. Proof that humans are ultimately derived from lumute, through a process of incremental transformation, is retained in the physical characteristics of the first animal to appear on Raga, the bebeure. As Jif Ruben told me, if you tie one of these moths to a piece of string and ask it a question, such as ‘Where is the rough sea?’ or ‘Which way is north?’, it will attempt to fly off in that direction. ‘It knows,’ he said. ‘That small piece of knowledge, that people emerged from it [the moth], is still here [retained in the moth]. This is apparent in that the knowledge that we have, this small knowledge, is shared by the small bebeure’ (recorded at Avatvotu village, May 2000). Just as the existence of graves, cycads and rocks authenticate people’s relation to place, so too the bebeure contains the dovongana (memorial, proof) of Jif Ruben’s account of Sia Raga history, and, by extension, of the authority of the land-tree.

On a more pragmatic level, the land-tree operates as a central technological device whereby Jif Ruben is able to maintain his position as judicial negotiator at land-dispute meetings, which, given the considerable flexibility of the Sia Raga land-tenure system, are commonplace. Insofar as social identities in the present are seen to be crucially linked to the landscape through the foundational actions of ancestors, the land-tree is therefore made to function in a very practical and disciplinary way: to help settle land disputes by demonstrating the historical relationship between the land and its embodiment by the ancestors of disputants, and therefore by the disputants themselves.

During the time in which I lived with him, Jif Ruben was often called away to different areas of North Pentecost to help settle land disputes. He did not, however, display or refer to these images in such meetings. This does not mean that they constitute some sort of ‘secret knowledge’. Rather, Jif Ruben was conscious that reference to written texts in such contexts is often viewed by others as undermining the authority of a speaker’s arts of memory and of oration. Instead, in actual practice, the land-tree provides one of many mnemonic strategies by which named plots of land (vanua) are known and ordered—also apparent in house architecture and weaving patterns, for instance. It is usually referred to or rehearsed in private, on paper or the blackboard in the gamali. To my knowledge, only a handful of adult males draw them, and all of these are residents of Gilau.