Table of Contents
The first wave of scholars interested in the archipelago of Vanuatu, known as the New Hebrides before 1980, made frequent reference in their work to continuities and commonalities linking the region to its north-west, but it is in the work of linguists and archaeologists rather than in anthropology that Vanuatu’s position in the Austronesian world has been recently established. In most of the work of the second wave of scholars working in the colonial period in Vanuatu, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, anthropologists were much more likely to refer to theoretical issues arising from work in Melanesia, for which PNG is frequently the metonym, or even to Australia, rather than to Austronesia.
Some of the work of that period focusing on land and place in Vanuatu, mostly published in the 1980s, brought out two master tropes of ‘ethnoscapism’: rootedness in place and mobility (Bonnemaison 1985). For Bonnemaison, Melanesian ethno-geography is characterised by reticulated space or networks, in which places are linked by alliances where there is no dominant centre, only foundation or primordial places (Bonnemaison 1996: 36-8). These notions seem eminently compatible with some of the core ideas identified by Fox as prominent and enduring features of Austronesian communities, such as concern with a multiplicity of origins, use of terms such as ‘path’ and ‘road’ as metaphors for important links between founder-focused groups and a concern that the blood or flow of life carried by female descendants of founders should be returned to the group of origin by means of some form of recursive marriage between descendants (Fox 1993, 1997; Fox and Sather 1996). All of these features are important in north Ambrym, an island in northern Vanuatu that is the focus of this chapter.
In foregrounding the importance of place and place-making in the Austronesian world, the Comparative Austronesian Studies Project offers the opportunity to consider the political dynamism involved in the local development and reinterpretation of old concepts in a region with a commonality of conflicts relating to land and identity. I begin with a brief overview of the vocabulary of ‘place’ in the national arena in Vanuatu since independence, then in the works of various authors writing about the north and north-central regions where various common usages are found that will be familiar to Austronesian scholars. I follow this with more specific detail on the somewhat different vocabulary in North Ambrym before proceeding to a discussion of the contemporary context in which land metaphors and the mythopoesis of earth and place have been played out in that island.