Throughout Vanuatu, the words ‘vanua’ and ‘tan’ while having varied local salience, have entered the vocabulary of the nation state as part of indigenous political discourse about land and identity. In order to understand this local politics, we need to appreciate the importance of ‘place-making’ as an aspect of claims to precedence in an environment in which primordialism and movement into and out of place are valued and contested (Rodman 1992, 1994; Patterson 2002). Place-making at the national level, however, involved land in a rather different context that had emerged long before the colony of the New Hebrides became the Republic of Vanuatu in 1980. This is not surprising, of course, in an archipelago in which vast tracts of the most productive land had been alienated by Europeans. In consequence, the indigenous political groups that emerged in the 1970s saw land issues as the basis of their case for decolonisation and their rhetorical appeal to the varied populations of the islands (Lini 1980; Sope 1974; Van Trease 1987).

Two islands, Tanna and Vanua Lava in the Banks Graip, already incorporated the words we are investigating in their names, from the period of European exploration. When it came to a new name for the independent republic, the members of the first major political party were in no doubt about what should be the focus of such a name as they soon realised it should also be for the party they had formed. According to Walter Lini, who became the first Prime Minister of Vanuatu, the name of the party was changed from the New Hebrides National Party to the Vanua’aku Pati because ‘we decided that the name of our country should become Vanua’aku’ (Lini 1980: 26). I have so far searched in vain for anything that explains how the ‘aku’ in the Republic’s name transmogrified to ‘atu’, but I suspect that the Vanua’aku Pati members were convinced by their opponents and friends that the name of the country should not be that of a political party. The details of this decision and the choice of word has not, as far as I know, been published. ‘Atu’ is translated from an unspecified language as variously ‘has arisen’ or ‘stands up’. Walter Lini, and most of the other members of the proto-government (and later the elected government), came from islands in which ‘vanua’ rather than ‘tan’ featured as a polysemic word for land, domain, village site, and even men’s house.

Two other political parties, both opposed to the Vanua’aku Party, incorporated ‘tan’ in their name; one calling itself Natui Tano or ‘the children of the land’ was short-lived. ^[1] The other, Tan Union, a Francophone party, emerged in 1977 in opposition to the anti-Independence Francophones and the Vanua’aku Pati (Boulekone 1995: 198). Unlike Natui Tano, which, according to Van Trease, was merely

an extension of the New Hebrides National Party shortly to be renamed as mentioned above, and … relatively short-lived, fielding candidates at only one election, Tan Union remained a force in local politics until recently. (Van Trease 1987: 216)

At the local level, the vocabulary and discourse of land and place are also refracted through the struggle for independence and the coming to prominence of the ideology of man-ples, a Bislama (Vanuatu pidgin) term that is also deeply contextual with its meanings of ‘indigenous person, primary landholder, recognised descendant of a founder of place’. These contexts frequently make local words extremely difficult to translate into a language such as English where the connection between people and places is overtly distinguished.

Preliminary inquiries into land and place categories in northern Vanuatu show a distribution that tends to feature one or the other of the vanua and tan terms. Although both words might be present, if ‘vanua’ is prominent in local discourse then ‘tan’ is not, and vice versa . In Ambrym and South Pentecost there appears to be no reflex of ‘vanua’. In Vao, one of the small islands off north-east Malakula, Layard gives venu and vanu as ‘village’ or ‘place’—as in translation of the village name Togh-Vanu (Layard 1942: 75). In mainland Malakula, ‘vene’ appears as part of clan names in a description of the Nogho rites but no translation is offered (Deacon 1934). In Malo, tan appears as part of clan names (Hume 1985). In East Ambae, ‘vanue’ is important but ‘tano’ less so. Writing of this region, Margaret Rodman says, ‘Vanue is not land (tano), it is lived space in which place and people are part of each other’ (1987: 35). However, we do find both words in some places, as noted above, and other words with similar meanings but apparently different origins, in others. In the Banks Islands, according to Codrington the village site is referred to as ‘vanua’ while house sites are called ‘tano ima’ (Codrington 1957 [1891]: 65). Vienne, who worked in the Banks from the late 1960s to the early ’70s, gives a more lyrical and nuanced account of the relationship between vanua and tan. He says:

On the ocean float the islands: the vanua. The matter that constitutes the vanua is the tano, the earth, but also the place, the space, the land, the apparent and particular toponymic form of the ‘vanua’. The relations lama/tas (ocean/sea) and vanua/tano are in fact more complex than a simple opposition between space and matter. The two oppositions, taking into account the ensemble of their meanings, divide in a parallel manner, contrasting term by term from the general to the specific. (Vienne 1984: 69; my translation.)

He elucidates further:

In this sense the vanua is also ‘home’, the free and appropriated space, dominated and known by those who belong to you and to whom you belong. The vanua is inscribed in the ‘mot’ which is contained by and distinguished as uncultivated space, the wild, home of spirits and enemies, opposed to cultivated space, the domestic, home of men. The ‘mot’ is the Vanua gona, the closed space—the territory of spirits. (Ibid.)

In West Ambae, Michael Allen noted the segmentary and polysemic character of the vanua term. While noting that the earth as substance is tano, vanua, according to context, can represent the whole island of Ambae, ‘a district, a village, a village section or simply an individual’s land’ (Allen 1969: 132). But the definition of the maximal segment identified by Allen as the village or ngwatu i vanua (literally, the ‘head of the land’) is a function of local politics and shifting allegiances that were accentuated after the introduction of cash cropping before World War II.

Vanua, then, is a segmentary concept that is context dependent for its meaning. Used rhetorically to indicate the indivisibility of the land in Ambae, in situations where alienation is likely, the ‘corporateness’ of the concept was, according to Allen, easily overridden up to and during the time of his fieldwork in the late 1950s (Allen 1969: 132). In a summing up of linguistic evidence, in a recent work on reconstructions of Proto-Oceanic, Green and Pawley generalise these more specific instances to PMP (Proto-Malayo-Polynesian) and Poc (Proto-Oceanic), commenting that:

although reflexes of PMP *banua carry the meaning ‘village’ in a number of languages belonging to different high-order subgroups (or at least are given this gloss in dictionaries) a host of other evidence, summarised in Blust (1987: 94-5, 99-100) suggests that PMP *banua and its reflexes referred primarily to an inhabited territory; not only to the land but to the human population and dwellings and all plant and animal life and other elements that contribute to the maintenance of the human community—a complex concept with no simple equivalent in European languages. … Indeed, the single word glosses that bilingual dictionaries give for reflexes of *banua should generally be regarded not as accurate descriptions of their meaning in the source language but as shorthand translations designed to fit the categories of the target language. (Green and Pawley 1998: 63)

In the same volume from which this quote is taken, Osmond, in a chapter on horticultural practices, lists a third term, which we find distributed throughout central northern Vanuatu but which is not listed among the terms discussed in this volume. I have already quoted its Mota Lava reflex—namely ‘mot’. Osmond gives the Proto-Austronesian as *quCaN and the Proto-Oceanic as *qutan, where almost all the listed reflexes have lost the initial phoneme. The translation given for the Pan is ‘fallow land’; for the Poc, ‘bushland, hinterland’. Two of the local reflexes listed also give ‘garden’—a meaning found in North Ambrym, which one might think indicates the opposite of Vienne’s quoted definition of ‘mot’ as wild and uncultivated land. Osmond comments that: this change of meaning is probably due to the fact that, in

Melanesia gardens are often remote from the village and surrounded by bushland, so that to go to the garden is to go into the bush. (Osmond 1998: 119)

This would appear to be a similar problem of translation rather than contradictory meaning as noted above. This overview of north central Vanuatu foregrounds vanua as a place word; in the next section, I turn more specifically to North Ambrym, where other words are prominent in the discourse of land, place and precedence.