Moving Histories: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Place in North Ambrym, Vanuatu

Recent writing on the ethnogeography of Vanuatu has identified mobility and primordial connection as two counterpoised aspects of connection to place that have a long history in the archipelago. These themes are taken up in this paper in the specific case of north Ambrym, an island community in north‐central Vanuatu in which the accidental geography of active volcanoes has fostered an equally active interest in making connections outside the island. In the post‐contact period, Ambrymese were more mobile than many of their neighbours, as they recruited vigorously in a labour trade taking them to distant destinations and facilitating a fragmentation of the local population, already decimated by introduced disease. In addition, conversion of a large proportion of the population to Christianity brought local movement. The named domains, with their primordial connections to ancient sites replete with cosmo‐mythic significance, were reconstituted as villages of one denomination or another, containing members of many different origin sites. Cash‐cropping became characteristic of coastal, Christian settlements whose residents saw themselves as opposed to their ‘heathen’ neighbours. For the bush‐folk, kastom was both symbolic of their identification with the past and their justification for exclusive access to its popular manifestations in the artefact trade, in the present. In the pre‐Independence 1970s, local politics and pressure on productive resources including kastom, forced a radical re‐emphasis on primordial connection at the expense of the more ‘rhizomatic’ attachments inside and outside domains, the boundaries of districts and even the island itself that had been, until then, more characteristic of Ambrymese place‐making.