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French

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10670/1.j6abm1

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Powers of custom in Vanuatu The powers of custom in Vanuatu: traditionalism and national building

Abstract

The traditions of South Pacific societies, recently condemned by missionaries as a world of tenderness, and then described as moribonds by generations of ethnologists, are now presented from the perspective of a cultural renaissance. In Vanuatu (former Franco-British Condominium of New Hebrides), the custom (kastom en pidgin-english) has since its independence become a political symbol for the celebration of melanesium. It can be found not only in the rhetoric of the ruling elites who have engaged in a process of national construction, but also in that of nativist movements hostile to their integration into this group. On the basis of the work on the invention of traditions, a topic dear to historian Eric Hobsbawm, and research into identity policies in Melanesia initiated by the ethnologist Roger Keesing, I am carrying out a critical examination in this thesis of the ideological weight of traditionalism in the national construction of the young State of Vanuatu. Examination of the debate on the invention of nationalist traditions and instrumentalisations of this process (using authors such as Weber, Weil, Gellner, Anderson, Shils, Eisensatdt, Smith, Babadzan in my analysis) makes it possible, in the ni-Vanuatu report to their past, to distinguish the transmission of a living culture from its folkloric reifications, to compare syncretic adaptations to modernity, the traditional ideology of the former colonial authorities and the neo-traditionalist ideology of post-colonial elites. On the basis of solid documentation, supplemented by my data and observations on the ground, I then examine in detail three significant examples of the instrumentalisation of the speech on kastom in the recent history of this archipelago. The millennial and syncretic movements of the islands of Tanna (John Frum’s worship), Santo (Nagriamel movement) and the nationalist ideology of today’s ruling elites are used to analyse the various forms of claims for cultural identities presented today as ancestral. In support of these comparisons, I stress the value of Vanuatu’s case in the debate, which has been particularly lively in recent years between oceanists, on issues of ethnicity and invented traditions.

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