Talking about place : identities, histories and powers among the Na'hai speakers of Malakula (Vanuatu)

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of the Na'hai speakers of South Malakula in Vanuatu. It explores how people use the concept of pies, or place, to position themselves as social agents. It demonstrates how Malakulans understand place to be a key component of a person's identity and the repository of communal knowledge and power. It highlights the important political, economic and social ramifications of this concept, and explores why it continues today to be relevant in all aspects of peoples' lives, despite the radical social transformations that have occurred on Malakula during the last century. The first part of the thesis, Mosaics of being, argues that the vast linguistic and ritual diversity of Malakula (there are more or less 34 languages spoken on Malakula for a population of some 18,000 people) needs to be understood in terms of what I call 'deliberate differentiation'. Deliberate differentiation is itself a kind of political and discursive process that is predicated on an understanding of people as products of place. Part two, the placing of knowledge, explores the various discourses, not only spoken, but also embodied in people and places, which position people as 'products of place'. I discuss perduring narratives ('myths') that attach people to place, and demonstrate how Na'hai speakers have both appropriated and transformed 'western' knowledges by placing them in novel contexts (books and museums). At the same time, these introduced knowledges have transformed Malakulan epistemologies which make people from place. What emerges is that discourses of kastom, or 'ancestral ways', are not just looking back at an objectified past, nor solely about a politicised present, but in crucial ways, they also project a future. Kastom in Malakula, is very much about tomorrow, and that tomorrow, like past and present, is grounded in place, or pies in Bislama. Show more