A contentious issue for Pacific Islanders, as well as researchers of the Pacific Islands, is ni‐Vanuatu notions of ‘belonging’ to urban centres. Previous research in Vanuatu has shown that despite generations of people born and raised in Port Vila, the nation's capital, the urban centre is not generally perceived as a ‘place’ to which urban migrants can say they are from. For many, exclaiming that one is ‘from’ town is tantamount to admitting one has ‘no place’. This paper, based on fieldwork among a group of urban young men in Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, argues that in contrast to this, Freswota young men are generating a new locative identity. Their urban community rather than their parents' home island places is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source of their sense of self, personhood and social identification. As such, these young men are the urban autochthones of the country.

Mobile phones have quickly become an important part of young people's social relationships in Port Vila Vanuatu. In particular, young people embrace the new technology's capacity to broaden the breadth of their sociality. They use the mobile phone to facilitate private and secretive communication, engage in unsanctioned relationships, pre-marital sexual relationships, and also multiple concurrent intimate relationships. Literature on mobile phone use often either takes the approach that mobile phone technology becomes purely incorporated into pre-existing social practices, or that it dramatically reshapes social ontologies. The present article argues for an alternative view, one that takes into account the nuances between these two analytical poles. This article suggests that young people use the mobile phone in practices informed by previous models of social relationships, yet the specific materiality of the mobile phone technology is influencing the direction in which models of social relationships are changing. In demonstrating this point, I pay particular attention to two material aspects of the mobile phone technology -the mobile phone as a repository of a particular kind of information -'evidence', and the capacity of the mobile phone to 'disconnect' people from their relationships by switching off the mobile. This article argues that these practices are influencing the emergence of a radically altered kinship and gender landscape in the urban context.

In Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, young men often mentioned the "empty saucepan". As seen in Luke's words above, the empty saucepan is an idiom they use to reflect some of the social problems they experience in urban Vanuatu today; high cost of living, alienation from access to agricultural land, high rates of unemployment, and financial insecurity. Yet, in the context of Freswota, the empty saucepan also speaks to specific concerns surrounding shifts in family relationships, often produced and maintained through a system of sharing of food. In Freswota, as in much of Port Vila, families face difficulties balancing their incomes with obligations to give and receive. As such, some urban families are increasingly excluding people, those who are seen as consuming without contributing, from eating their food. 2 This article examines why many Freswota young men frequently mention the "empty saucepan". It is through an exploration of the empty saucepan, that some of the contemporary shifts emerging in Port Vila become more visible. After a description of Freswota community and the young men who are the subject of this research, the article considers some of the constraints of urban living, what influence the emic notion of "contribution", in a context of neo-liberal capitalism, is having on inter-generational relationships, and what other relationships are developing. Ultimately, this article suggests that urban unemployed young men are increasingly experiencing their parents and other family members as unsupportive, and as such, other relationships in their community are becoming stronger. Family relationships in town are brokbrok: Food sharing and "contribution" in...

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