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Session Detail (parallel)

Urban Melanesia

Coordinator(s)


Lamont Lindstrom, Christine Jourdan


Session presentation

Melanesians increasingly live in cities and towns. Census data are slippery, but estimates put Port Moresby’s population at over 400,000; Honiara at 80,000; and Port Vila at 45,000. Ethnically complex Nouméa (175,000) and Suva (90,000) feature diverse mixes of indigenous and immigrant communities. Anthropologists, too, in recent years have moved into Melanesian towns, either following migrants who leave their village homes behind, or conducting ethnography in dilating urban and peri-urban settlements. Urban anthropology in Melanesia dates back to Cyril Belshaw’s 1957 study of Hanuabada, and to early surveys of peri-urban communities like Hohola (Oeser 1969) and Maat-Efate (Tonkinson 1964), and ethnographic interest in Melanesian urbanity is growing along with the region’s cities and towns.

Town organization and culture are European imports, with deep colonial roots. Melanesian urbanity, however, is increasingly shaped by local sociocultural systems, particularly as citizens have repopulated towns following national independence. This is true of old colonial cities, and also of post-colonial new towns (e.g., Tanna’s Blakman Taon), some of which are developing rapidly around the sites of former colonial outposts.

This session seeks comparative analyses of urbanity throughout Melanesia. We build on previous ESfO (2010) and other recent analyses of Melanesian town development. We are interested in two aspects of this development: 1) continuing associations between city and hinterland, where the village flows into the town, and vice versa, carried along by the ebb and flow of urban migration; 2) new forms of urbanity that towns allow or demand, including new arrangements of time and space. These include transformations of family and kindred, expanding social networks, wage employment and other economic challenges, inventive petty economics, rentiers and incipient class development, new forms of political organization (e.g., taon jifs), and closer connection with police and other state authorities, religious innovation, sorcery panic and reaction to inequality and community discord, transformation of marriage custom, language losses and gains, better access to global culture via education, the media, mobile phones, and the Internet, innovative urban entertainment and diversion, new youth cultures with fresh musical, linguistic, and sartorial styles, intergenerational conflict, and urban rephrasing of tradition for a variety of audiences, including state authorities, children, and tourists.

Each Melanesian city or town is distinctive with its own particular history and conditions. But each also faces broadly similar demographic and economic challenges. The session will provide a comparative snapshot of accelerating island urbanity—how the city is Melanesianized.


Paper submissions are closed



Accepted papers


The role of urban cores in Melanesian mobility systems



Alessio Cangiano (University of the South Pacific)


Scholarship as well as development dialogues on population mobility tend to address internal and international migration as separate spheres. Yet the increasingly multidirectional, diversified, women-initiated and temporary/circular nature of mobility patterns suggests that migratory processes are interconnected. Across Melanesia, complex systems of mobility combining different patterns of urbanization, intra-regional movements and temporary and permanent international migration play a prominent role as drivers of economic and social development. Building on an integrated perspective for the analysis of different forms of mobility, this paper aims to shed new light on the role of urban cores in the Melanesian mobility systems. We will address questions such as: to what extent urban centres function as magnets for internal migrants, stepping stone for international migrants and hubs for intra-regional movers? Are different patterns of mobility independent, complementary or substitute? We attempt to answer such questions by building on a range of sources – official statistics and reports as well as in-depth case studies – to examine how the links between different forms of mobility are played out both in the structural dynamics and in migrant trajectories. A cross-national comparison will allow us to explore differences and similarities between Melanesian contexts characterised by different rates of population growth, stages of the urban transition and patterns of international migration. Our final discussion briefly reflects on some intersections between mobility patterns and various dimensions of urbanism, suggesting potential lines of inquiry for future research.

Losing passports? Attachment and alienation in the rural and urban Solomon Islands



Debra McDougall (University of Melbourne)


When outsiders have lived for many years on Ranongga in the Solomon Islands’ Western Province, people may joke that they have “lost their passports” (lusim paspot) and become “citizens” of the island. Such joking calls attention to the difference between connections to ancestral territory and membership in a nation-state, but it also reflects real worries about the possibility of alienation. This paper tracks the ways that migrants to customary and alienated land in rural and urban locales seek to attach themselves to local places and how they deal with the possibility of becoming alienated from ancestral places. These processes are strikingly similar across what Islanders and outsiders alike often characterize as a great divide between urban and rural lifeworlds. I suggest, however, that migrants to urban areas find it more difficult to attach themselves to local people and land. In rural villages on Ranongga, migrants from other islands become local by living on local land, caring for local people, bearing children, clearing land, planting trees, or even dying and being buried on their adoptive land. In urban areas, where people may be less dependent on local land and people than in rural areas, fluid and emergent place-based identities are likely to calcify into ethnic identity, understood as a fixed and unchanging quality of the person.

In and out: on the fluidity of households in Honiara



Christine Jourdan (Concordia University, Montreal)


This paper seeks to document and analyze residential patterns associated with the overflow of people in Honiara (Solomon Islands), caused in part by the movement of people between Honiara and the rural areas of the Solomon Islands. I will show that in such a socioeconomic environment, structured in part by circular migration, people’s movement, economic stress and wantok relations, the size and composition of households vary throughout the year. These variations, which are interesting in themselves for the challenge they pose to traditional economic definitions of households, raise important questions on the nature of urban social relationships and their transformations through time.

Aspects of the new Port Vila household



Knut Rio (University of Bergen)


My talk will address certain aspects of town life in the capital of Vanuatu. In my most recent fieldwork in 2010 and 2014 I have been investigating household economy and aspects of social organization in the settlements that rapidly spring up around the town of Port Vila. I will present one particular feature of these settlements as a test case for revisiting the long debate about Melanesian reciprocity, demand sharing and gift. Notably, in most households people set up a little store, from which kin and friends in the neighborhood can buy their household supplies. Like the household itself, the store is typically fenced off and barred in - not directly from fear of theft, but as a defence against aggressive demand-sharing and envy. My point will be that people in Port Vila now tend to use the store economy as a way of protecting the value of sharing from the too intruding world of relatives of neighbours

Betel nut, markets and the politics of urban space in Papua New Guinea



Timothy Sharp (Australian National University)


In Papua New Guinea (PNG), open-air marketplaces are central to the lives and livelihoods of both rural and urban people. They are important sites of trade and of social interaction, but they are equally spaces of contestation in which some people belong and others do not – sites of everyday struggles around territory, resources and identity. These exclusionary struggles are central to the social production of these spaces, and in shaping the capacity for different people to engage the marketplace to make a living. In this paper I explore the socio-spatial relations and dynamics of exclusion which shape PNG’s marketplaces. The paper reports findings from long-term geographic and ethnographic research on the country’s flourishing betel nut trade – there, the most visible manifestation of a growing ‘informal’ economy. I argue that the foregrounding of exclusion within local narrative about marketplaces are in tension with views of marketplaces as inclusive public spaces.

RESPEK and Other Urban Vila Keywords



Lamont Lindstrom (University of Tulsa)



Telling urban migration stories, Tanna island residents of Port Vila’s settlements commonly use a number of key words to describe life in town. I follow the “key word” method of cultural analysis to approach island appreciation of urban experience. In recorded interviews, respek (respect) was one notably frequent and useful word. I leave it to others to compose a genealogy of respect but my guess is that sharpening ethno and gender identity politicking nearly everywhere has significantly boosted the term’s utility, including in the socially complex post-colonial Melanesian towns. (The term appears in T. Crowley’s 1990 Bislama dictionary, but not in J. Guy’s 1974 Bislama handbook.) Tanna migrants bemoan respect’s absence but they evoke it constantly to explain conflict and disappointment. I also glance briefly at other common urban Bislama keywords that circulate in talk about Port Vila including sikiuriti (security), mobael (both telephones and Vanuatu’s military force), noes (noise), and fri (free; freedom).

Apocalypse Now? Youth, Temporality & Moral Panic in Nouméa



Tate LeFevre (Franklin and Marshall College)


This paper explores the current moral panic surrounding urban Kanak youth, as articulated through the discourse of “youth crisis” [la crise de la jeunesse]. Employed by loyalist politicians and Kanak customary leaders alike, this discourse depicts urban Kanak youth as pathological cultural subjects whose misrecognition of socio-historical context leads prevents them from “temporally integrating.” Urban youth are thus imagined as adrift in time and space—disconnected from the past, and incapable of projecting themselves into the future. Yet from the perspective of most Kanak youth, it is customary leaders and politicians who are temporally confused, not them. Exploring this disjuncture allows me to show how contemporary Kanak youth actually do locate Kanak identity in both time and space—and how this distinguishes them from their parent’s generation. I end by considering the contemporary situation of Kanak youth in light of both Karl Mannheim and Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of generations and the possibilities of socio-political transformation.

Models of the person and of the social in Pentecostal Port Vila



Annelin Eriksen (University of Bergen)


I will claim that in urban Vanuatu Pentecostal Christianity has become an encompassing cultural logic. This can be observed in different ways and in different contexts, from everyday prayer in workplaces, morning hymns in schools, lunch prayer before eating, but also in people´s reasoning ("it is up to God", "God will provide" ). However, the most striking presence is perhaps on what we might call the "healing scene". In the urban settlement of Fresh Wota or the squatter settlement of Ohlen, for instance, there is a healer in every second yard, locally known as "a woman who prays". The Holy Spirit is called upon every morning and every night. There are prayer rooms filled with people who come together to seek comfort and protection against what they perceive to be the "roaming power of witchcraft and sorcery".
In this paper I want to argue that this lifeworld implies a specific theory of the social; a theory of how the body works, of what the person is and what the nature of the social is. At the heart of this social theory, from a "Pentecostal Port Vila", is the dynamic of creating borders, of creating insides and outsides, at different levels and in different contexts.

The Influence of Feasts on Children’s Food Security in Urban Vanuatu



Chelsea Wentworth (Michigan State University)


This paper examines how feasting has become a coping mechanism for children’s food insecurity in urban and peri-urban areas of Vanuatu. Vanuatu is experiencing high rates of childhood malnutrition related to household food insecurity, with the highest incidence of malnutrition in children under age five occurring in the urban capital of Port Vila. In an attempt to ease the burden of food insecurity, children augment their diet from sources outside the home. Based on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, surveys, and a visual-cognitive elicitation project conducted in 2010 and 2012-13 in Vanuatu, I demonstrate that in the city one way children cope with food insecurity by eating at lafet, or special occasions of community feasting. My research illustrates that both women who serve food at feasts and children who attend the feast simply to eat are changing the customary meaning of feasting in urban contexts. I argue that food insecurity loosens parent’s control over their children’s food intake, enabling children to seek copious amounts of food and foods possessing high social and caloric values from sources outside the home, particularly large community feasts for events such as weddings and funerals. Data presented here demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives conjoining anthropological, biomedical and public health research to better address the challenges presented in the study of food insecurity and feasting in urban Vanuatu. Results implicate a significant relationship between the seemingly disparate phenomenon of feasting and food insecurity, which calls for a reexamination of the role of feasting in the study of malnutrition.

New communities and the State in Suva, Fiji



Jenny Bryant-Tokalau (University of Otago)


The urban communities of Fiji are changing from the historically ethnically segregated neighbourhoods of colonial times to a myriad of multi-ethnic, multi-generational, diverse and highly unequal urban centres. A major development in modern Suva is the emergence of new forms of leadership, especially in the poorer, informal settlements. These are focused around religion, employment or housing need and less frequently around village of origin. Layered upon such changes is the push by the communities themselves, NGOs and government authorities to have more secure tenure, even on state land which was always an insecure option for anyone but traditional land owners. This paper will examine the situation of Suva’s urban poor and what is being done to ensure that everyone is able to have a stake in the new and rapidly developing communities.