In many Austronesian languages, particularly those of Melanesia, we find interesting variations in the use of possessives. There is, for example, a major distinction between things such as body parts and kinsfolk that are inalienable and other things that are ‘alienable’. In the former case, also referred to in the literature as ‘direct’ or ‘zero possession’ (Lynch 1982), the pronoun is suffixed to the noun root (or ‘head nominal’). Two examples from North Ambrym to illustrate are tabling, ‘my body’ (where tabli is the root and ng the first person pronominal suffix), and raheng, ‘my mother’ (where rahe is the root and ng the suffix ‘my’). In many Western Oceanic varieties of Austronesian, however, the alienable category is further divided according to the class of nouns referred to.^[3]

The Ambrym case appears to be interesting in that the ‘alienable’ category is subdivided into a more than usual number of classes for the region. In the language of North Ambrym, there are six varieties of alienable possessive. Paton, the Presbyterian missionary linguist who published a grammar of Lonwolwol, the similar language of West Ambrym, distinguishes them as a ‘common’ set for ordinary things, and five other sets, which apply respectively to containers, fire and torches, liquids, maritime vessels and food. This last category, however, does not apply simply to food, as Paton notes (1971). Macintyre, in a paper on pigs in Tubetube, a community of Austronesian speakers in the Massim, notes that this category is often designated as indicating edibility but just as often contains ‘a puzzling array of things’, including, for example, appearance, height and enemies (1984). On the basis of the way in which these possessives are used in the Massim region, Macintyre suggests calling this a class of semi-alienable things that indicates mutability and transformation. Linguists have more commonly talked about this category as the one in which the food marker is used to indicate passive possession, such as ‘actions over which the possessor has no control where he is the patient, target, or involuntary experiencer’ (Pawley, cited in Lynch 1996: 96). ^[4]

In the anthropological literature on the use of possessives in Vanuatu in relation to land (such as it is), some distinctions have been made that appear not to be related to the linguistic arguments about possession. Margaret Rodman notes that in the Longana district of East Ambae, Vanuatu, ‘land is not like other possessions. A distinction is made between things that move or grow, such as trucks, animals, or gardens under cultivation, e.g. bulengu rivurivu and land in general or uncultivated land, nongo tano, ‘my land’, and my unplanted garden’(Rodman 1989: 38-9). While the latter take the ‘ordinary’ possessive, the former takes the one Macintyre refers to as the ‘semi-alienable’. In Ambrym, however, the words for garden and place, ‘ot’ and ‘vere’, take the ordinary possessive, while ‘tan’ whether cultivated or not, takes the semi-alienable one. In a parallel way, individual items of food and food in general take the semi-alienable, or what we might better call the ‘transformative’, possessive, while vegetables, piled up in a composite heap called a helat to be displayed and then given away, take the ordinary alienable possessive.

The significance of the distinctive use of possessives lies, I would argue, in the properties of the earth, its transformative and generative potential. Classed together with those things that it transforms, such as the father whose dismembered body produced yams in all their variety that are fed to humans and tusked boars, the huge yams that represent men and are exchanged at all moments of life crisis, the sacramental boars that also transform into humans or indeed were human, the plants out of which autochthonous ancestors sprang, the land itself possesses and transforms the people who emerged from it and remain connected to it. There is no space here to document fully the mythopoetic nexus between people, land and its products including humans (but see Patterson 2002), a nexus that is commonly noted for Melanesia (see Weiner 1998: 139). But, as Weiner points out, invoking Heidegger, the ‘ground’ or ‘earth’ also represents the ‘grounds for’ or origin of being. The origin of things, in North Ambrym, barite, in Bislama, their stampa, or ‘root’, is frequently located in the material transformative power of the earth in particular places and indeed in ‘placement’ itself. ^[5]

Tan, then, in the Ambrym context, has a range of cosmological associations that are not so evident in the other place words. The French missionary Tattevin recorded a myth from South Pentecost, also known in North Ambrym, which has a cognate language, in which the first men, a group of six brothers, emerge from a coconut tree (1929-31). The eldest instructs the others to collect Tahitian chestnuts (Inocarpus edulis or namambwe in Bislama) and to roast them. Taking a roasted nut, the eldest throws it at the youngest to whose genitals it attaches. When he attempts to pull it off, his genitals come with it, transforming him into the first woman, called Sermorp, the split chestnut. ^[6] The brothers live together in a communal house and Sermorp in a separate dwelling. Barkulkul, the eldest, sends them in turn to request various items from their metamorphosed brother ostensibly in order to see what she will call them—each is addressed by one of the five categories of unmarriageable relative, until Balkulkul himself is revealed as the one she will marry when she addresses him as ‘my dear sorcerer’. Apart from the establishment of the categorical elements of the kinship system, the myth isolates several categories of things that approximate—with a little creative interpretation—most of the alienable categories that are distinguished by noun markers in the language of North Ambrym: viz. fire (given to the one she addresses as ‘brother’), sea shells, which we can equate to ‘maritime vessels’ (given to ‘father’), vegetable food (given to the one she calls ‘cross-cousin’), bamboo, which we can equate with ‘containers’ (given to ‘mother’s father’), salt water (given to her ‘son’) and fresh water (given to her ‘husband’). The last two belong to the same general category (mukuen) from a woman’s point of view and both are associated in the myth with liquids. ^[7]

Another curiosity of possessive marking in Ambrym that Paton found inexplicable is that the word for ‘house’ takes not the general possessive marker but the marker for liquids. The word for house is ‘im’ but it also signifies, as is common in Austronesian societies, and indeed in many other parts of the world, an important descent group. In North Ambrym, this is the cognatic stock called the buluim or bulufatao, the ‘doorway’, rather than the house itself. This ancestor-focused descent group, I have argued elsewhere, symbolises ‘flow’ and ‘flux’—one travels through it as women are sent forth and reclaimed in the recursive marriage pattern, also common in such societies (Patterson 1976, 2001). That the fixed abode should be marked by the possessive for ‘flow’ or liquid seems particularly appropriate.

The link between transformative ground, and the doorway to a house built on it, is the path or road, which also symbolically represents certain kinsfolk. Paths flowing through doorways, as women and some male kin are said to do, are aspects of association with the more fixed quality that characterises the primordiality of the named domain. The origin of these landscapes replete with signification lies in a myth we find widely, but variously distributed, in the Austronesian world. In North Ambrym, the creator spirit, Batgolgol (cf. Barkulkul in the kinship naming myth quoted above), already encountered in another mythic context as the creator of women, is now identified with the Christian deity and is credited with having ‘produced all things’. On his creative path around the north of the island, however, he discovered several autochthonous beings already in residence (Patterson 2002a). He is said in one origin myth to have begun on the rugged east coast but when he arrived at the place called Barereo, he found an opposite-sex sibling pair who had hatched from the eggs of a small bird called tilala. Unimpressed by him, the man said to Batgolgol, ‘I’m here, this is my place; you go and do your work somewhere else.’ When he finally arrived on the east coast at Fona, Batgolgol found Bungyam, whose role is much more significant than the other autochthonous beings mentioned. In a series of apparently attenuated myths collected by the Catholic missionary in the vicinity of Olal, Bungyam and Batgolgol appear in another relationship commonly found in northern Vanuatu where one culture hero is clever, the other not. The significance of the ‘stupid’ hero lies in his connection to the earth. However nothing is as simple here as it may appear. In other myths known in North Ambrym and South Pentecost, Batgolgol is the great chief from whose dismembered body yams grow. In the version that I collected, the creator of yams is referred to simply as a great chief (jafu—a reflex of ratu). Sacrificing himself for his children, the father is killed, cut up and ‘planted’ by his youngest son. From his body spring forth all the varieties of yam that sustain his sons and all Ambrymese (Patterson 2002a).