Ambiguity in a Charismatic Revival: Inverting Gender, Age and Power Relations in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT

During a Christian revival movement on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu in 2014, gender- and age-based hierarchies were inverted as women and children were given divine authority and men were positioned as threats to sociopolitical renewal. In analysing these events, I develop Kapferer’s insights on the inherent openness and unpredictability of ritual dynamics. However, I argue that such openness and unpredictability can also be tied to external factors including participants’ multiple and sometimes incompatible values and interests. Attempts to resolve ambiguities in ritual may eventually feed back into ritual ideology and practice in ways that make participants’ experiences disturbing and problematic rather than orderly and supportive.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritual
• gender
• revival
• Holy Spirit
• Vanuatu

Acknowledgements

I thank the people of Ahamb for their friendship and cooperation during my research. Thanks also to Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, Keir Martin, Ethnos editors Nils Bubandt and Mark Graham, and the anonymous reviewers for their fruitful engagement with the article. I am also indebted to Signe Howell, Thorgeir Storesund Kolshus and Matt Tomlinson for their reading and input on my arguments. Any shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The research for this article is based on totally 20 months of fieldwork in Vanuatu, in 2010, 2014, and 2017, and my continued contact with the Ahamb community through phone, e-mail, and Facebook.

2 Similarly, Jorgensen (2007) describes from the early 1970s revival in Telefolmin, Papua New Guinea, how all but one spirit medium were female. Robbins (2004: 135–136) also accounts for the centrality of ‘Spirit women’ during the late 1970s revival of the Urapmin, Papua New Guinea.

3 Given the sensitive nature of my ethnography, I will mention that I have been in dialogue with Vanuatu Cultural Council, the national body for administrating research in Vanuatu who has issued research permits for my three fieldworks, about the use of the material. I have also consulted the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees regarding the ethics of disseminating the material. One measure I have taken is to make the visionary children unidentifiable by leaving out or changing details that can identify them. I have also discussed the publication of the ethnography with various research subjects and come to an agreement about the form and degree of anonymisation.

4 The prophecies of Joel (Joel 2: 28; see also Acts 2: 17–21), forecasting the coming of the Holy Spirit in the last days and how the young will then prophecy and see visions, were also central in explaining why the revival had come at this particular moment and why children were having spiritual visions.

5 Because kava is intoxicating and has a side effect of sleepiness, the church has decided that its leaders, who are supposed to be exemplary spiritual and moral leaders, are not allowed to drink it.

6 This ‘spirit’ alluded to either traditional plant spirits or Satan, depending on who I asked. Before the revival, I had never heard people refer to kava as containing any dangerous spirit. Such identification of ‘new’ demonic powers, however, is typical for the spiritual warfare of Christian charismatic movements worldwide as discussed thoroughly in Rio et al. (2017).

7 The current Presbyterian Church house on Ahamb, completed in 1998, was financed through a donation of one bag kava per household to be sold in the capital Port Vila.

8 Two out of currently three small breakaway churches on Ahamb have been formed in this way.

9 PWMU is an abbreviation for Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union, often referred to as Ol mama (‘the mothers’ or ‘the adult women’).The Ahamb PWMU was established in 1950, while ‘Men’s fellowship’ was established in 1999.

10 I was myself in Port Vila during this tragic event but returned to Ahamb two weeks later.

11 The men could not drink kava on the same day as the service, however, because their intoxication would interfere negatively with the work of the Spirit who needed participants to be fully alert and receptive.

12 Eriksen (2016) discusses how Martin’s concept takes a specific concept of gender as the point of departure, which is problematic for Melanesian (and other) contexts. I do not engage further with Eriksen’s arguments here, however, as I find Martin’s points to be useful to illustrate the specific compromises that were made on behalf of the men in the Ahamb revival context.

13 See also Robbins’ (2001) account of how the revival that hit the Urapmin in 1977 was not only an intense movement that had its end, as accounts of such movements often portray them. Rather, the revival has now become their ‘church’ or ‘religion’.