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This paper approaches its central theme of women's groupings in Melanesia via critique of several longstanding shibboleths, including examples of their strategic appropriation by indigenous people. These stereotypes include the romantic image of rural dwellers as pre‐modern traditionalists on whom Christianity is an imposed foreign veneer; the hoary rhetorical opposition of ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’/modernity and tradition/individual and community; and the pervasive essentialization of Melanesian women as ‘naturally’ family‐oriented, communitarian, and less individualistic and competitive than men. Seeking patterns in regional diversity and fragmentation, the paper examines cultural, historical, and structural correlates of a wide range of women's groupings, including National Councils of Women, church women's organizations, and the largely self‐financed local church fellowship groups which are growing steadily in number and significance in the virtual absence of effective state institutions. Increasingly, women's groupings are complementing their traditional Christian spiritual, domestic, and welfare concerns with attention to global feminist, human rights, and ecological issues which are often reworked locally into scarcely recognizable shapes. Eschewing romanticization, the paper considers the potential and the problems of women's groupings in male‐dominated Melanesia, including women's own divisions and their typical aversion to assuming public responsibilities.

In January 1997 I began a comparative research project on gendered engagements with Christian and state ideologies and institutions in Melanesia, in the course of which I spent August 1997 in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, and on the island of Aneityum, in Vanuatu's extreme south. 1 Determined to ground the project's broad scope in local perspectives, I undertook a systematic program of interviews with ni-Vanuatu, extended in written correspondence and subsequent meetings. One focus of the interviews was women's varied experiences of women's groups and organizations, gender relations, and citizenship in a modern, avowedly Christian Melanesian state. These themes are conspicuously absent from scholarly literature on Vanuatu, except in several pioneering articles by M a rg a ret Jolly and obliquely in Lissant Bolton's work on women's k a s t o m (Bolton 1993(Bolton , 1998 Jolly 1991a Jolly , 1996 Jolly , 1997. 2 That being so, an overv i e w is appropriate: this paper juxtaposes local and wider aspects of ni-Vanuatu women's lives as Christians and citizens and casts them in historical perspective. The paper's ethnographic depth is restricted by the brief time spent in situ and my reliance on lingua franca-Bislama, English, and French. However, I bring to the paper the compensatory breadth of more than a decade's detailed ethnohistorical research on Aneityum (Douglas 1989; 1998, 2 2 5-2 6 1; 1999; 2 0 01; nd), the invaluable help and direction of niVanuatu with intellectual interests similar to my own, 3 and comparative insights derived from an ongoing program of related discussions with Kanak, Papua New Guineans, and Solomon Islanders. 4 The paper charts the ambiguous, mobile interplay of individual and community in the selfrepresentations and actions of ni-Vanuatu in general and women in particular. It does so via a series of verbal snapshots of mundane sett i n g s ,

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