Knut Rio

Subject and Object in a Vanuatu Social Ontology A Local Vision of Dialectics

In this article, the author addresses the social effects of material exhibitions in Melanesia. He suggests that people in Vanuatu perceive subjects and objects within a totalizing mode of production, in which the material object takes on the capacity of encompassing social relations. He introduces the Vanuatu case as countering some of the analytical problems with materiality, especially efforts to dismantle the subject/object distinction or to understand the role of agency and will in objects.

Missionaries, Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia: A Scottish Evangelist in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of mens ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.

Totalization and detotalization Alternatives to hierarchy and individualism

This article marks an effort to extend Louis Dumonts concept pair of hierarchy and individualism towards a more realistic understanding of social formations. Dumonts work is reviewed along with his critics, and through a survey of contemporary ethnography a move towards a concept of totalization is suggested. It is argued that a view of totalization and detotalization provides a vocabulary for a re-establishment of the social for the discipline of anthropology.

Introduction to an anthropology of wealth

ABSTRACT In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to ‘accumulated assets’. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we begin to understand the processes wherein it is constantly being pulled at from forces that demand appropriation, be that finance, community or state. We therefore outline wealth as a triangular phenomenon between capital, the commons, and power. Careful at the dynamics between such forces, we structure our analysis around the paradoxical social processes where wealth, originating in every day relationships and human reproduction, is continually exposed to claims – such as market alienation, but also ‘commoning’, or governmental state control.

A Shared Intentional Space of Witch-Hunt and Sacrifice

In this article, the issue is whether witch-hunts can be seen to share certain aspects with the realm of sacrifice. With resource to recent developments in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, it is argued that witchcraft is ‘the other side of sacrifice’ in more than one sense: firstly, as the witch is sacrificing its victim and breaking through to the social world from a world beyond and, secondly, as the witch-hunt is a movement with the purpose of sacrificing the accused witch for the healing of the community. The argument hinges on the alignment of the space intended by sacrifice and the space revealed by the appearance of the witch – as both articulating an engagement with ‘the very source of life’ (Hubert & Mauss 1964: 98).

Melanesian egalitarianism: The containment of hierarchy

Using Dumont’s analysis of value, this paper discusses the interplay between equality and hierarchy in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. From this vantage point Melanesian egalitarianism appears to be a dynamic and hybrid form that reproduces itself through tensions between different forms of potential inequality. The discussion is situated within a thoroughly globalized society, where money and Christianity have played a fundamental role for over a century, and where ceremonial displays and exchanges of food are still absolutely central to village life. Those food ceremonies create important material spectacles of sociality, where the exhibition, destruction and distribution of food are part of an ongoing process of submitting potentially hierarchical structures to an ethos of egalitarianism.

1968 and its other worlds: Global events and (anti-)state dynamics in France, Mozambique and Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contribute to a more global understanding of what we term ‘the 1968 event’ entails. However, this comparative analysis also underlines how its impact should be measured as, first, an experimentation with and attack on political reality, second, how the intricate connections between Euro-American and other worlds were integral to its articulation and, third, how paradoxically 1968 and its response spawned the rise of an authoritarian form of nation-state – eclipsing the openings in the firmament of the political, social and the real afforded by the original event.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia

ion: Notes from the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist

Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia

In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil.

Demons, Devils, and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila: On Changing Cosmologies of Evil in Melanesia

In accounts of “traditional Melanesia,” we learned that witchcraft was an underlying structural condition of relations between men and women and an ever-present potential of social relations themselves. In many ways, traditional sorcery practices were considered legitimate and morally “good” However, there are reasons for thinking that recent upscaling of beating, burning, or killing of witches in Melanesia can be related to the Pentecostal beliefs that align witchcraft with evil and individual morality. In Vanuatu today, especially in urban areas, there is hectic activity aimed at sorting out the problem of sorcery and witchcraft in the new Pentecostal churches, and these churches are designed for exactly the purpose of healing and exorcism. They move into suburbs with what they call “spiritual warfare” and cleanse whole neighborhoods for signs of hidden evil. Whereas the locus of the divination practices in Pre-Christian Melanesia was a realm of forces beyond human control, the modern equivalent ritual is directly attacking the moral person and making that into both an instrument of divination and a sacrificial body.