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...the sorcery that killed him. 'From malaria', replied with a pause for effect. 'Malaria?' I repeated. 'That's right, the malaria of Ambrym' he explained, as we all broke into raucous laughter. Rarely a laughing matter, sorcery is perceived by North Ambrymese to be a major factor in the recent government classification of this, the most populous part of the island as a 'backward area' and indeed, one of the reasons why one cannot reach it by air, unlike the west and south-east of the island. (1) Recently, in the latest of several abortive attempts to clear an airstrip after years of acrimonious negotiation over its siting, workers fled when one of their number was mysteriously drowned, his death widely rumoured to be the result of Ambrym sorcery. Neither the ubiquity of sorcery discourse in North Ambrym nor the reputation of the island as 'the Mother of Darkness', is new. This epithet was applied by missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to an island where opposition to their efforts was carried on with constant recourse to threats of sorcery against converts and the missionaries themselves by the leaders they referred to as 'chiefs'. Sorcery was part of the leaders' armory, used to perpetuate a system of inequality in which the young in particular, but also most women, were at a decided disadvantage.
In the mid 1990s a watershed area of North Ambrym featured in a pilot study for a partly UN funded project- 'Pacific Regional Equitable and Sustainable Human Development Programme' (1996). In this particular area, over 50% of all land was under dispute according to government reports, leading to a failure to implement infrastructural projects like water supplies, health clinics and schools and to encroachment into the rainforest for subsistence agriculture at a rate of almost a kilometre per year. The preliminary diagnosis of the problem as 'breakdown in human interaction', linked the lack of 'community' to the land disputes, rather than seeing the disputes themselves as symptomatic of a much deeper malaise in the whole of North Ambrym that had its immediate roots in the history of the colonial period in the district.
The accelerating pace of transformation in many Pacific rural areas that is a dialectical response to novel national political institutions and the varied penetration of global market forces, is manifest frequently in the ebb and flow of desire, fantasies and values, also itself connected to the way in which the past and future are imagined and represented in the present. Focusing on leaders, their trajectories and the resistance to them, is one means of gaining access to the complex processes by which post-colonial desire and representation are dynamically connected to power at the local level (2). The perception of North Ambrym as 'backward' is shared by many North Ambrymese themselves, who see their failure to improve basic living standards as related to the fear, distrust and animosity inspired by sorcery in outsiders and locals, and the lack of consensus that would enable leaders to transcend ancient and recent divisions.
Notoriously difficult to define, leadership is a 'fuzzy category' in an ill-defined field (Watson-Gegeo, K. & Feinberg, R. 1996:8). Some recent studies suggest that this is not simply the result of analytic failure, but rather a constituent aspect of what leadership is; even in the most apparently hierarchical political systems, leadership is resistant to typology and to delineations that emphasise either structure, or process, rather than the complex interaction between them. Inherently fraught with ambiguity, contradiction and contestation over behaviour, position, legitimacy and indigenous notions of power, as much as the ways we devise to talk about them, questions of leadership are inevitably connected to the wider political fields of which they are part. (3) Moreover, leadership is often intimately connected with what Kelly called 'a hierarchy of virtue' commonly arising from a cosmological matrix in which moral qualities inhere in notions of personhood and idealized, and often contradictory notions abo ut how leaders come to be who they are (Kelly 1993:10). When cosmologies and ideologies are challenged, the moral basis on which leadership ostensibly rests may be reinterpreted, but in a way that is never totally novel but offers variations on recognizable themes (Sahlins 1981, 1995). The concept of leadership is not a simple matter of categorization in a political system. Rather, leaders are always immanent in political processes where power appears, retrospectively as it were, to illuminate the discursive field of contestation and its victors. As we have long known, positions and offices have no predictive value in relation to sources of power. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the complex processes involved in the interpretation of the social imaginary of imported values and traditions, more and less recent, that transfigured ideas about the nature of leaders and leadership itself at a particular point in Vanuatu's history. I attempt this through an examination of the lives of the three most prominen t leaders in North Ambrym's recent history.
PRESENT PASTS
Ambrym has a long and varied history of contact with 'the West'. Some one hundred and fifty years of missionary activity, involvement in the labour trade in Fiji, New Caledonia and later Australia, as well as within the archipelago, colonization by two European powers with their own long history of animosity, and a more recent encounter with all that Independence and the creation of a nation state bring in their train in the contemporary Pacific, have produced no neat linear progression from 'primitive' to 'postcolonial' (Knauft 1999).The history of this contact moreover, like all of Ambrym's history before it, is powerfully influenced by the activity of the volcanoes at its centre, intermittently making their presence felt with sometimes devastating consequences.
In North Ambrym, less seriously affected by volcanic activity than the west and southeast, conversion was a slow process that left a vigorous community of anti-converts, still identifying themselves as kastom into the late colonial period of the seventies and beyond.
Calling them 'traditionalists' however would give no indication of the subtleties of their interpretation of and engagement with modernity, some of which are detailed later. Interaction between the two factions was mediated by varied religious affiliation on the part of the Christians, intermarriage, exchange and conflict. This conflict focused around issues represented locally in terms of modernity and the use of sorcery. It was the Ambrymese' notorious predilection for the use of the latter against their enemies that earned the island the epithet 'the Mother of Darkness' in early missionary accounts, now taken up in tourist brochures to provide an enticing exoticism for visitors to Vanuatu. Just as 19th century predictions about the 'disenchantment' of the world have proven premature, or simply wide of the mark, sorcery has been no more opposed to the embrace of modernity than other practices usually labeled 'religious'. The discourses of sorcery, modernity and politics have been shown in many parts of the world to have a disconcerting ability to reinforce one another (Geschiere 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Stewart and Strathern 1997). The attribution of deaths to the malevolent supranatural activities of other human beings tends, as any historian of early modern Europe knows, to be historically contingent, becoming more or less important according to the particularities of a complex set of circumstances. Two brief examples from Melanesia make the point. Knauft notes that Gebusi no longer accuse one another of witchcraft as they once did, while Stewart & Strathern note that among Melpa, the previously reported lack of interest in sorcery as a causal explanation for death and illness is valid only for the pre colonial period. In more recent times sorcery has become much more important (Knauft 2001; Stewart and Strathern 1997; and see also Zelenietz and Lindenbaum 1981 and Rodman 1993).
Present interests have significantly refigured the way the pre-contact past is viewed. During my first period of fieldwork in the late sixties to early seventies, North Ambrymese emphasized the horrors of the endemic fighting of the past, contrasting it with the peaceful present. Contemporary rhetoric in the 1990s was more likely to see this past as a kind of heroic period, when chiefs ruled magnanimously, women and the young knew their place and there was a consensus of values. In the pre-contact north, as far as can be ascertained, the fragmented polity consisted of founder-focussed domains, ideally centred around a male core of descendants of the founder, their wives and daughters. They were independent territories of relatively small compass, linked by myth and histories of origin, recursive marriage, by shifting alliances of putative 'brotherhood' and by regular enmity (Patterson 2002). A certain overall unity was provided by the ritual yam cycle linking domains in a sequence of planting and harvesting, orchestrated by the yam master, the senior male of the coastal domain of Fona, the primary origin site in the north. The shared fundamental precepts of the indigenous politico-religious system, based on the sacrifice of boars with artificially curved tusks that guaranteed the cyclic renewal of life itself and the perpetuation of the cosmic order also provided support for the prevailing system of inequality. Men, and to a lesser extent women obtained metaphysical power through the performance of difficult rituals involving those kin who safeguarded the blood of agnatic members of ancestral sites, linked to them by the women who, as 'roads', carried it forth and whose descendants returned it to its rightful place when claimed as wives. These rites were part of the complex found in northern Vanuatu called mage and known in the literature, somewhat erroneously, as the 'graded society'. Far from secular, these rites in North Ambrym were the creative basis of ontological and cosmological ideas as well as the means of status differentiation between individuals and groups. Sometime in the period before European contact, I would estimate between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were augmented by the acquisition of a similar but more hierarchical and elaborate complex from the neighbouring island of Malakula, also called mage (see Patterson 1981 and 2001 for a detailed discussion of the indigenous and imported rites).
As I note elsewhere, (Patterson 2002) fame and renown in the past were gendered; acquired by men through being...
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