What is love? The complex relation between values and practice in Vanuatu

Abstract

The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of 'love', referring to everyday practices of concern and care for others, is a core value for living on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu. However, adherence to the same core value does not necessarily create an ordered social world. Analysing three ethnographic cases, one of them a dispute with fatal consequences, I propose a model for studying values that accommodates ambiguity by uniting the notion of shared social values with individual experience and strategy. A methodological argument is that it is crucial for anthropological studies of values to assess the context for people's shifting interpretations and articulations of value in practice.'It is a surprising thing, because Ahamb is a place of love, right?' George 1 suddenly exclaimed. It was December 2014 and three weeks since the tragic killing of two men feared to be sorcerers on the small island of Ahamb adjacent to the larger island Malekula in the South Pacific republic of Vanuatu. George, Bruce, and I were sitting on a canoe by the island's community church reflecting on the last months' events that proceeded the fatal act. The killing had taken place eight months into a Christian charismatic revival movement that swept over Malekula in 2014. The revival had gained a massive following in its capacity to morally and spiritually renew Malekula's villages through the supposed presence of the Holy Spirit. On Ahamb, the revival arrived during a time of enduring conflicts and division in the community and was frequently talked about as 'cleaning the island' . The movement gave rise to hope about a new future in which the island was reinstated as a place of concern, care, and unity. On Ahamb, these qualities are summed up as 'love' (napalogin in the vernarcular, lav in the national language Bislama), a core value for islanders' living, solidly rooted in both kinship and Christianity. While the importance of love as an ideal is undisputed on Ahamb, what love entails in practice, however, is anything but fixed, and subject to the continuously shifting vantage point of the person assessing a situation. One example of this ambiguity

A Thousand Eruptions

“…The same dynamic obtains in contemporary Melanesian revivals. Describing a recent charismatic upheaval on the island of Ahamb in Vanautu, for example, Bratrud (2021) shows how intensifying Christians have asserted their moral and spiritual preponderance by setting upon kava drinking, sorcery, and witchcraft as sins requiring immediate eradication. Through its incessant drive toward the apocalyptic eschatological horizon, religious intensity spawns mobs of spiritual antagonists impatiently seeking to cut away old growth so that the bright new light of the Holy Spirit may break through.…”