I want to turn now to the metaphor of my title, which is itself a title. Tan Monong means literally ‘the ground is finished’, but its sense is comparable with the English phrase ‘known throughout the land’ in the sense of ‘renowned throughout the land’ and can be translated as ‘lord of the land’. It is a male title acquired by the performance of a rite called mage ne kuman, the significance of which is that it belongs neither to what I have referred to elsewhere as the indigenous mage of north Ambrym nor to the hierarchy of grades imported from Malakula known in the literature as the ‘graded society’ and also called mage (see Patterson 1981, 2002b). Although in some regions these rights are predominantly secular, in Ambrym the mage was, in its indigenous form, an instantiation of cosmology as well as the creative basis of status differentiation between individuals and groups.

Some time in the period before European contact, these rites were augmented by the apparently piecemeal acquisition of a similar but more hierarchical and elaborate complex from the neighbouring island of Malakula. The significant difference between the indigenous rites and the imported ones was that the former necessarily involved transactions between kin and those allied in marriage, whereas the imported ones were completely independent of such requirements. One could be inducted into one of the new ‘grades’ by anyone who had himself acquired it. The majority of the grades came into North Ambrym from the south-west bay area of Malakula via West Ambrym, but the two highest grades were imported from the small islands off the north-east coast. Somewhere in the hiatus between the acquisition of the two sets of rituals, the anomalous mage ne kuman arrived in Ambrym, according to legend, delivered by a woman from Ambae who came ashore at Ranon on the north-west coast, in a canoe made of coconut leaves. This rite, also called a mage, differs in almost all its elements from the imported kind but in the participation of female kin of both the initiate and the sponsor, it resembles the indigenous mage. And, like these latter rites, participation depended on having reached a certain level of the imported grades. The transfer of boars in the rite is unique. The sacrificial tusked boar that gives the right to the title Tan Monong must be given to the candidate by his father or a classificatory ‘father’ who then also acts as donor of the pigs that are exchanged with the sponsors for ritual insignia. In all of the imported mage, the candidate gives the pigs directly to the sponsors himself. In mage ne kuman, the candidates’s mother or ‘mothers’ (the wives of his father[s]) rather than his own wife, then sacrifice[s] boars to receive the title Jamarkon. With the receipt of this title, such women must observe, like high-ranking mage men, the restrictions on commensality with those of lower grade. However, on completion of the rite, they could now share their food with boys who had made the first grade of the imported series.

Mage ne kuman, like the indigenous rites, may be repeated but unlike them must always be acquired from specified kin. It was available, however, only to a man who had already achieved the difficult upper grade of meleun or he could attempt it if he had reached the lesser (seventh) grade of wurwur, provided that his father had reached the highest imported grade of mal. But while its elements are specifically North Ambrymese, particularly in the involvement of kin, its provenance is just as specifically foreign and not just foreign but female. The Ambae woman who brought it is said to have been mistaken for a man because she was wearing a mat skirt and had ‘the firm breasts characteristic of the women of her place’ (Guiart 1951: 68). When a man noticed the damp spot on a stone that she had sat on, realised she was a woman and made advances towards her, she took a canoe at night and went back to Ambae, leaving her ritual with the people of Ranon. Like the other indigenous rites, mage ne kuman had not been performed in the north since just before World War II. The French ethnographer Jean Guiart, who was in Ambrym just after the war, was given an account of the rite by his informant, John Manu, who had performed it, and I was given an account by the yam master of Fona domain whose father had performed it.^[9] Its memory lingers in ancestral names and in the frequently retold deeds of the hero Tan Monong Bariu –‘Lord of the Land, the warrior’—whose exploits made him the archetypal jafu gatlam or great man of the past. I heard his story many times, particularly when I asked for the definition of ‘a great man’. His story did not, however, concern his prowess as a fighter in battles against enemies. It concerned the murder of his father-in-law. ^[10] Compensating his affines with tusked boars after this shocking crime, he retrieved his wife from her natal place, and exchanged her for a ‘sister’ also visiting her birthplace, married, perhaps significantly, to a man of Fona and pregnant with that man’s child. Proceeding to successfully complete a difficult ritual of the indigenous mage that required a great many tusked boars and access to a fund of metaphysical power, he invited the husband of the woman he had appropriated and to whom he had given his own wife, to contribute to the exchanges with kin at the birth of ‘their’ child. By these acts he became a truly great man who had ‘finished the land’.

The story achieves mythic dimensions, I would argue, precisely because it ignores the ascendancy of the later imported rites, in favour of a thoroughly indigenised version of a foreign rite by whose title the hero is known, while demonstrating that what really makes a lord of the land is the ability to transform the inalienable ties of kinship. In appropriating the child of the descendant of another origin site with whom he does not share maternal origin, he demonstrates his supreme helan or power.

A man could thus ‘finish the land’ by achieving great renown, renown that had local and endogenous origins. There is, however, another way in which North Ambrymese speak of the land being ‘finished’. The move to cash cropping that began in a small way along the coast between the two World Wars accelerated after World War II, so that many coastal domains had planted much of the flatter areas with coconuts. Ambrym, with active volcanoes at its core and much of the inland in the north steep rainforest, has a dearth of arable land in some areas and, in some depopulated domains, a plentiful supply. Nonetheless, in the rhetoric of the late Sixties, the deep division between the majority of Christian converts and their neighbours and kin in ‘the bush’ was expressed not only in the former’s fear of the latter’s sorcery but in the conviction of the bush-dwellers that Christian’s were ‘finishing’ the land by cash cropping. The importance of yam cultivation went beyond subsistence, as will be clear from the previous section. The custodians of kastom, as the bush-dwellers saw themselves, complained bitterly about the declining varieties of yams, the curtailment of adequate fallow periods and the resultant poor crop quality and the encroachment of coconuts and coffee on land they felt should be reserved for yam gardens. Even more bitter and sometimes violent were the disputes over the bush-dwellers’ pigs rooting out their Christian neighbours’ coconuts or spoiling their unfenced gardens. Bush-dwellers fenced their gardens, leaving all but their valuable and cosseted tuskers to free range. The copra vs. pigs war was won when the Condominium Government decreed that all pigs must be fenced or tethered; marauding pigs could be shot with impunity when discovered destroying crops. It was no longer possible to keep pigs in the numbers required for a vigorous ritual life.

This hostility was increased by the growing perception in the 1970s that West Ambrymese refugees who had settled, intermarried and become prosperous after the disastrous 1913 eruption of the volcano that decimated their homeland, were avatars of an intrusive modernity linked to the British Government’s introduction of local councils and to a perceived promotion of one of their leaders over those who espoused their role as guardians of kastom from the bush. In the decade before Independence, it was made increasingly clear to the West Ambrymese that the previous delicate balance between primordial and exogenous origins, in which their presence in the north had so far been unproblematic, was fast giving way beneath a torrent of external rhetoric about the alienation of land in Vanuatu. Leadership and its grounds were severely contested in a way that drew on earlier models and refracted them through novel discourses about worth and value (Patterson 2002, 2003).

Very little land had been alienated to Europeans in North Ambrym, and the sole plantation owned by a French company (SFNH) was abandoned at independence, leaving the various claimants to sort out their rights to it. Disputes over this land continue. Although there had been numerous European traders up and down the coast in the past, most of whom had small parcels of land, with a single exception, they were long gone by the ’60s. Despite this apparent lack of motive, however, land issues loomed large in the late ’70s. Writing in the 1990s on post-independence politics in Ambrym, two educated Ambrymese commented that the Vanua’aku Pati’s campaign on land issues at the national level stimulated a local concern with the rights of immigrants who had moved out of their own domains in the colonial period (Alpi and Laan 1995: 325).

But just as kastom people did not reject aspects of modernity that suited them, Christians, particularly of the older generation, shared basic ontological assumptions with their kastom kin and neighbours. The mage was almost defunct but access to its titles was another matter. Although there is not space here to elaborate, a hereditary tendency in the acquisition of mage titles had clearly been developing for some time as is evidenced by the way, noted above, in which the Tan Monong title could be obtained by the son of a great man who was only relatively junior in mage rank himself. It was said that the highest grades of the mage could be attempted only by those who hailed from a ‘great kindred’, meaning one in which immediate ancestors were of high rank. It was also accepted that men could skip grades on the death of their high-ranking fathers and take their titles at the performance of the mortuary ceremonies. These tendencies then supported the claims of Christians whose ancestors had achieved high rank, contesting the equally important notion that all Christians in the kastom sense were ‘unworthy’ or ‘profane’. In the late Seventies, the eclipse of the kastom leader by his Presbyterian rival was a bitter blow, particularly when the latter was elected in 1975 by the chiefs of the administrative district CD2 to be the representative of kastom on the new Representative Assembly set up by the Colonial Government (see Patterson 2002b). When the Council of Kastom Chiefs (later the Malvatumauri) was established in 1977 and Willy Bongmatur, an Ambrym Presbyterian, was elected its president, the kastom bush-dwellers felt they had been betrayed. As head of this important new body, Bongmatur needed to establish his credibility at home and abroad. He was a third-generation Christian and also ‘from’ West Ambrym, so establishing kastom bona fides now became a priority for him. He constructed ceremonial grounds at the mission village of Ranmuwuhu in the north and another at Fanu in West Ambrym. He donned a penis-wrapper and bark belt for the first time in his life, killed boars and erected slit drums. Recognition did not have to be local and, in fact, it was a longstanding practice throughout Vanuatu to gain prestige from introducing exogenous ritual forms and materials. Clearly attested by the ascendance of the imported mage in the north and the role of the rite that conferred the Tan Monong title, the ‘foreign’ means to local ends had an ancient provenance. In 1978, at the closing of the Council of Chiefs in Malakula, Bongmatur gave a pig to Chief Enoch of Unua in return for the title Beranginvanu, which is translated in one hagiography of Bongmatur as ‘a huge stone in a large area of land’ (Aaron 1981:98). Berang in North Ambrym is, however, the name for the sculpted tree-fern image set up in the mage. In a later account of Bongmatur’s rise to fame, this time by an Ambrymese relative of his wife, this title has become ‘one of the highest titles on Ambrym, Peranginvanu (means the man who stands on a high hill or stone looking out over the whole land’ (Alpi and Laan 1995: 325). That he came to hold this title, the author comments, ‘attests to the widespread support and influence he had among the whole island population, despite his close association with a single political party’(ibid.). ^[11]

Bongmatur has more recently enlisted the aid of anthropologists in what perhaps is the contemporary way in which ‘finishing the land’ can best be accomplished. When I returned to Vanuatu in 1992, he asked me to write his life story, which he wanted published. I agreed, gave him a dictaphone to use and recorded a lengthy preliminary interview. Not long after, he was approached by Lissant Bolton, who wanted to interview him about his involvement in the Cultural Centre. He gave her 13 hours of interviews, mostly about his life and rise to fame. He has also been interviewed by anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom (1997). Bolton recently published an account of Bongmatur’s activities in this period in the Journal of Pacific History, which perhaps was not quite what Willy had in mind (Bolton 1998). Now retired and living between North Ambrym and Port Vila, where he frequently speaks out on local and global issues, he has constructed his own monument, a concrete church in his village in North Ambrym. One of the major ways in which he attempted to establish his right to become the President of the Council of Kastom Chiefs when his rival pointed out that he had never killed a pig, was to respond that while it was true that neither he nor his father had been involved in the mage, and that his grandfather had reached only a middle grade, his great-grandfather had sponsored his kastom rival’s grandfather’s accession to the grade mal meurt, the zenith of imported rites. Since it is generally known that the major sequence of grades called mage came to North Ambrym via the west, this seemed like a clinching argument. In the north itself, however, there were many who did not support Bongmatur who pointed out that the indigenous powerful rites involving kin, for which the imported grades were merely a preparation, as they were for the rite of mage ne kuman, conferring the Tan Monong title, were not performed by Bongmatur’s ancestors. Within living memory, however, Bongmatur’s kastom rival’s father and grandfather had performed them and their ancestor was none other than Tan Monong bariu.

In the past, fame and renown were acquired through being established in an ancestral place, even though many became known to their descendants precisely because they had come from somewhere else and had connections to other places. But tracing one’s primordial origins was not enough, one also benefited by demonstrating powerful connections to the wider world, through trade in material and intellectual property as well as prowess in giving tusked boars, frequently brought from elsewhere, to one’s kin. Manoeuvring oneself and one’s direct descendants closer to an apical ancestor was also a reason for keeping the knowledge of primordial connections and making claims to privileged access. In the post-colonial period, these claims became more important in relation to access to land and rights of domicile.

When the yam master of Fona village was removed from his position, after Nagriamel, the land rights and secessionist movement, was defeated at independence, a member of a junior line in the village, and a Vanua’aku Pati supporter, was appointed in his stead. In the late 1980s, this man built himself a large new concrete well (actually a water tank) into the side of which he engraved the words ‘Bungyam’s well’. As village chief, he was now asserting a claim to precedence in the domain that was made possible by a totally novel situation: the obliteration of a person’s once inalienable right to connection with their ancestors. His attempts to perform exorcism of those afflicted by Fona spirits were notably unsuccessful, according to the yam master’s son. Once the Vanua’aku Pati lost power after an uninterrupted first decade, however, the Francophone Government was keen to see the rehabilitation of those who had been punished nationally and locally after the events of the Santo Rebellion. In 1998, the yam master received a distinguished service medal from the Government and the next year held an inauguration feast in which his eldest grandson was nominated as chief of Fona village, in an attempt to restore the position of his descendants to pre-eminence in the domain. In 1999, I was summoned to what I expected would be his deathbed, to find that he was hoping for the sort of anthropological donation given, he had heard, by the Norwegian researchers working in Ranon village in the early Nineties. With enough money, he could erect The Wilfred Koran Community Hall, a monument that would ‘finish the land’ in a thoroughly contemporary, yet perfectly precedented manner. He also wanted to revive the mage ne kuman ritual that confers the title Tan Monong before his death. But even if he does not succeed, the fame of this title has already broached the shores of Ambrym. John Manu, Guiart’s informant of the 1940s, told the ethnographer that the ritual had been performed all over Ambrym and that his father had then taken it to Pentecost.

In February 2003, the Pacific Islands Report (http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/ pireport/2003/February/02-03-07.htm) documented the visit of the then Prime Minister, Edward Natapei, to central Pentecost to perform ‘a custom peace ceremony’ after several custom chiefs, ‘some of whom are Tanmonoks (paramount chiefs)’, were ill-treated by police causing the chiefs to cease performing their duties while banning law enforcement agencies from the island. Achieving the exogenous status of ‘paramountcy’, Tan Monong has indeed ‘finished the land’.