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Article Excerpt
The political movement known as Nagriamel that developed after World War II on Santo Island in Vanuatu is a particularly good example of how the liberating dimension of an 'indigenist' movement can evolve into the traditionalist reinvention of a pre-existing form of social organization. Nagriamel was preceded on Santo by less well known syncretic and millenarian movements (Avu Avu, Rongofuru, Naked Cult, cf. Guiart 1958; Miller 1948; Raft 1928), from which it drew opportunist and selective inspiration. For former anthropologists in the post-World War II period, indigenist movements like the Nagriamel in the northern islands of Vanuatu, or the John Frum movement on the island of Tanna, were intended to generate new forms of collective identifications. (1) From the point of view of these scholars, ritual means to ascertain identity were doomed to be overtaken by new modes of pragmatic action and rational organisation. Cultic contest emanating from 'prerational' politico-religious movements would dissolve during the political process of decolonisation and nation-building. Peter Worsley (1957) who, with Jean Guiart (1951), was one of the main propagators of this argument, adds to his thesis that the factor of 'proto-nationalism' in Melanesian post-contact societies sums up an integrative or centralisation process, which encompasses different traditionally non united social groups. According to Worsley, this federative process is central to the dynamics of most Melanesian pre-World War II politico-religious indigenous movements. Historically, their rationality is supposed to lie in their becoming, in their transformation into bureaucratic forms of organization and unification. This ineluctable process of secularization, which leads from lower class religions to anti-colonialism, should also open the way to the invention of a wider identity based on shared feelings of a community of culture. Anthropologists like Jean Guiart (1983), Bernard Hours (1974) or Erich Kolig (1981) have adopted this theoretical framework to present and understand the historical shift of the Nagriamel.
In an old fashioned socio-evolutionary perspective, Jean Guiart proposed to establish a typology of nativism. He praised good nativism as based on a preserved identity and assumed political autonomy, and opposed it to a nasty will to power, based on irrational anti-White feelings: a neurotic attitude following a strong culture contact traumatism, for which past acculturation is held responsible. Both cases of nativism are seen as forerunners of nationalism, but only those movements that anchor their identity in preserved traditions could positively support the future of an enlarged cultural community. At the end of the 1950s, as a French government anthropologist in the New-Hebrides, Guiart strove to identify the first type of nativism with the indigenous movement that appeared in the island of Santo prior to the Nagriamel, and he identified the second with the John Frum movement in Tanna: 'For people who never received any education, we could observe curiously, that the man Santo's behaviour is far more rational than those of its Tannese counterparts; there's no more messianism left in the Santo's inland, and there's also no more trace of the strong anti-Whites feeling nor any will to power which impregnates so deeply man Tanna's spirit. The man Santo thinks in terms of secularised autonomy, and he feels able to negotiate with Europeans without any complex of inequality. Today, the man Santo act in a political manner, not like a neurotic' (Guiart 1958:223).
Thirty years after having expressed this contemptuous judgement, Guiart surprisingly changed his mind. The indigenous movement in Santo turned at the eve of Vanuatu's independence into an overt rebellion and followed a secessionist scheme. Guiart, forgetting all former considerations about 'secularised autonomy', judged as criminal this secessionist attempt, and described Jimmy Stevens, its leader, as a great manipulator in kastom matters (Tabani 2002). To justify the repression of Santo's rebels by the Papuan army, of which intervention was officially asked by the new independent government of Vanuatu, Guiart makes an astonishing use of the Tannese John Frum myth: 'Papuan [soldiers] have reacted much better than Whites. For Vanuatu's government viewpoint, solving this secession problem with the help of a black army against the white manipulators of Santo's rebels, fits in with John Frum's old prophecy of black soldiers coming out of the volcano to drive the Whites out of the country' (1983:208).
This proto-nationalist theory, which used to deal with different kinds of indigenous movements usually classified as Cargo cults, is contradicted by the facts, even if today in Vanuatu modern politicians could officially assert such a legacy. (2) It s a matter of fact that the observed direction of most of these movements since the World War II period goes from immediate political reaction (disobedience to colonial and mission domination) to sophisticated religious developments. The more virulent the initial spontaneous opposition is (seen as irrational by a former generation of anthropologists), the more prolific and complex is the following syncretistic process that extends it.
Keesing's contributions to the theme of the politics of identity and traditions are more efficient in grasping fast changing social realities in contemporary Melanesia. This is particularly true when he considers kastom as a political symbol that can be used simultaneously at different socio-political levels by stubborn traditionalist groups, secessionist movements, millenarian cults leaders and state politicians. Among the types of customary identity assertion movements that he identifies in the context of a nationalist wave in Melanesia during the 1970s, Keesing explicitly refers to Nagriamel to illustrate how the combination of a discourse on tradition (kastom) and political choices is distilled into a force capable of triggering separatist crises in the context of nation-building in Melanesia: '... the rhetoric of custom (kastom) is invoked with reference to a particular region or island or province within a postcolonial state. This may take the form of competition for state resources and political power, regional separatism, or even secessionist demands' (Keesing 1989:21).
Among Pacific scholars in anthropology, the kastom issue has become an endless debate. Kastomology is now integrated into most theoretical analysis of culture change in Melanesia. (3) Not so much because of its heuristic aspects, but because this topic has certainly raised more questions than it has answered. Whenever it is related to the past, to the state or to culture, the kastom and identity pairing is still very puzzling for anthropologists. Many disagree about speaking of kastom as 'invented traditions' because the word would encompass 'traditional traditions' and 'traditionalist traditions' (Otto and Pedersen 2005). However, nowadays traditionalist ideologies can make political use of any selected kastom, and even reject or deny other traditions that don't concord with Christianity (Bolton 1998). Traditionalism corresponds with deep transformations of indigenous cultural representations of continuity, links between the past and the present, and ideas about 'cultural revivals'. In a context of rapid change, traditionalism became foremost a theory of action. According to the philosopher Eric Weil, 'tradition [in the strict sense of the word] has moved away, and even unwillingly the traditionalist must admit it; if not, why should he like to return to a point he would never have left?' (Weil 1991).
In Max Weber's language, the traditional order, or, in the context of former colonies, pre-colonial customs, are ruled by 'strict traditionalism' (Strengen Traditionalismus) (Weber 1956): 'a traditionalism prior to the rising of the dichotomy between tradition and traditionalism' (Eisenstadt 1973). Max Weber's analyses are still very useful for our concerns, notably the theoretical value he gives to the concept of charisma. Charisma is an 'extraordinary' (Ausseralltagliche) and 'extra-traditional' (Traditionfrei) capacity to change tradition dramatically, a 'revolutionary force linked to the era of tradition' (Weber 1956); but charisma can also experience revivals in present legal-bureaucratic order through his extra-traditional transformative capacities.
In Keesing's typology, regionalist traditionalist movements should be situated at an intermediate level of engagement, between a kastom movement based on traditionally adapted syncretic foundations (like the John Frum millenarian movement on Tanna, cf. Tabani 1999 and 2008) and State neo-traditionalism (or post-colonial traditionalism) ideologically oriented towards nationalism (cf. my analysis of State custom in Vanuatu, Tabani 2000 and 2002). On Santo, the early impetus given by an awareness of a decline in longstanding traditions in still living cultures intensified significantly during the World War II interlude and the successive arrival on the island of hundreds of thousands of American troops, with all their technological power, and the singular presence of black soldiers as 'equals' to Whites. (4) Only with the emergence of a post-colonial period did Nagriamel deliberately engage in a traditionalist mobilisation which, in contrast with the preceding cults, did not make it possible to mitigate the cultural contradictions between the past and the present; on the contrary, it accentuated them. The separatist aspirations of Nagriamel would appear to correspond in this regard to the tipping point at which the incompatibilities between the ancestral lifestyle specific to cultural enclaves and their modern articulation in a broader context cease to be expressed through primarily ritual avenues.
In discussing the Nagriamel kastom movement, we must bear in mind both the nature of the movements that it stemmed from and the distinctive features of its political history in a colonial setting. Similarly, whether before the challenges of modernity and the issues of cultural adaptation in the diversity of its sociological reformulations, or faced with the weight of outside influences in its ideological orientations, the features of Nagriamel's strategy would remain unintelligible without reference to the central role played by its historical leader--Jimmy Moses Tubo Pantuntun Moli Stevens--more generally known as Jimmy Stevens. Analysis of Nagriamel's kastom demands should be viewed in the light of Stevens' autobiographical contribution to Nagriamel's profile for the greater personal benefit of his autocratic power and status as a prophetic leader. (5) This individual and charismatic aspect of the kastom demands will give me an opportunity to stress how, on a local or national, traditionalist (colonial) or neo-traditionalist (post-colonial), historical or contemporary level, this invariably raises the issue of the action of the 'inventors' of traditions, in other words of the relationship of independent subjects to their 'tradition' and the charismatic--extra-traditional--personifications of the pro- kastom identity discourse.
Lastly, I will view Nagriamel through the prism of a traditionalism which, despite its transformations and secessionist tendencies, never really achieved a nationalist dimension. As we will see further on, as a precursor of 'customary modernism' (cf. Babadzan 1988) or 'customary progressivism', Nagriamel was nativist second and syncretic in a marginal way. However, although it was traditionalist and selective, the movement raised no dogmatic objection to change, thus retaining some of its traditional flexibility. In wanting to symbolically present itself as the officially recognised perpetuator of the syncretic cults that preceded it, Nagriamel took on a nativist (anti-White), revivalist (anti-colonial and then anti-national) and millenarian (cargoist) heritage. I will also insist on the personal influence of Jimmy Stevens upon the main ideological orientations of his movement. If his action fundamentally relies on his very own charismatic power, like the stereotyped Sahlinian Melanesian big man, he became at the end of his life a forerunner of the contemporary traditionalist representation of ascribed kastom jifs (chiefs), whose authority is not anymore and necessarily linked to charismatic forms of leadership. As Lindstrom and White have observed:
Pacific leaders making claims to traditional authority, nowadays, are 'chiefs'. From Bougainville to Efate to Papeete, the esteemed title today is 'chief' (or jif or chef)--and this is the term that we, too, adopt to refer to Pacific leaders who claim traditional authority. Islanders thus echo sociologist Max Weber's language: 'In the case of traditional authority, obedience is owed to the person of the chief who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority and who (within) is sphere bound by tradition' (Weber M. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.) (White and Lindstrom 1997:6).
However, the syncretic features incorporated into Nagriamel's nativism only offered a feeble counterweight to the external influences and manipulation that this movement underwent. Nagriamel only really freed itself of its colonial francophile affiliations at the times when it collaborated with neo-colonial hyper-liberal and radically anti-customary operations of the Phoenix Foundation, itself inspired by the Austrian ultra-liberal Ludwig Von Mises Institute. (6)
THE 'ACT OF DARK BUSH' AND THE FOUNDING OF VANAFO
The political history of the kastom movement on Santo featured singular developments. The rebellion that occurred in the biggest and richest of the group's islands when Vanuatu proclaimed Independence entered Nagriamel's adventures as a footnote to the history of decolonisation. The news circulated in the major capitals; a strange struggle was unfolding in these far-flung islands. John Beasant, a former adviser to Walter Lini, described the cliche thus: '(...) a one-time bulldozer driver and self-styled chief with 'twenty-five wives', leading a 'stone-age army' in a 'bow-and-arrow rebellion' against the forces and concepts of an insensitive outside world' (Beasant 1984:1).
Far from such phantasmagorical allusions, it was a major indigenous land dispossession process that first gave impetus to Nagriamel. Conducted under the prompting of European settlers on Santo, this endeavour gathered pace after the war, mainly because of the roads that had been built by the Americans into the island's interior, towards areas vacated by their inhabitants because of their proximity to the military camps. The most coveted land was along the upper Sarakata River in an area known as 'Luganville Estate'. Ownership of this area was assigned to 'SFNH' (Societe Francaise des Nouvelles-Hebrides--French New Hebrides Company) for ninety-nine years under two Condominium court rulings in 1951 and 1959.
Indigenous protest was initiated during the 1960s by Buluk Paul, a 'custom chief' from the Santo interior, who claimed land rights over some of the SFNH land, which he intended to prove had been occupied by his own forefathers. This was the period when he first met Jimmy Stevens, who a few years previously had been a bulldozer driver. In this job, on the orders of the company that was employing him, Stevens himself had destroyed the remains of Buluk's ancestral village, including his parents' graves. Stevens had been approached by the man bus for an account of his participation in this activity and his possible ability to provide them with arms, as trading was his main activity at that time.
Buluk's approaches to Stevens soon went beyond a mere request for support. They became a proposal to lead an indigenous land claim movement. (7) The exact date of Nagriamel's founding remains inaccurately known. The movement was officialised in 1965. The 'Act of Dark Bush' was proclaimed in the back room of a Santo bar in order to assert the principle of the return of annexed indigenous land and to challenge any extension to the French settlers' plantations. The creation of Nagriamel completed the convergence of Stevens' ideological intentions and the mobilisation of Buluk and his supporters from the bush.
The movement's estimated few hundred members in the period before the 1970s subscribed to Buluk's and Stevens' plans to move into the highly coveted SFNH estate. This decision multiplied the conflicts that Buluk had occasionally started in the form of damage to fencing on settlers' plantations. He had already served six months in prison in 1964 for such acts. Now endowed with a founding charter and militant supporters united in support of collective land tenure, the subsistence economy and a form of social organisation perpetuating a way of life inherited from pre-colonial times, Nagriamel lacked a territorial base. It was agreed that it was necessary to possess an area symbolic of the new federating authority, as represented by the alliance between Buluk and Stevens, which would have to be a sufficiently extensive territory to enable the founding of a new kind of community. This community was to strive for the emancipation of the natives, rise up against colonial alienation and prepare the downtrodden dakbus people for their political emancipation. This 'New Jerusalem' was established in a bend of the Sarakata River and called Vanafo. (8)
Sitting in the very heart of the SFNH estate on the high flatlands behind Luganville, in a deforested area upstream from the falls and rapids of the Sarakata River beyond which stretches thick jungle, the Vanafo community originally amounted to a few traditional houses in a hamlet built on land claimed by Buluk. The name Vanafo, 'fruit basket' in the local language, came to symbolise the richness of the land meant to feed the people of Nagriamel. This hamlet rapidly grew to reach the size of a village and became the headquarters of Nagriamel's administration. This move was decisive for the future success that Nagriamel achieved, especially from the point of view of its expansion beyond the boundaries of the island. The name of Nagriamel was also designed to mark a transition from small isolated traditional hamlets to a major community concentration enjoying centralised organisation. Its etymology came from the names of two plants with various ritual...
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