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Abstract
Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.
Notes
This paper is based on fieldwork in Ranon village on Ambrym island between 1995 and 2010, but its material is mainly a result of search into historical documents, first and foremost the original handwritten diary of Rev. Charles Murray from 1887. This diary has also received some attention in Annelin Eriksen's Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu (Eriksen Citation2008; also Eriksen Citation2006). We want to thank archivist Yvonne Wilkie at the Presbyterian Church Archives, Knox College, Dunedin, New Zealand for accommodating our use of this unique source of historical documentation, and we want to pay gratitude to the Pacific Manuscript Bureau at Australian National University for some of the other historical materials used. We also want to thank Rod Edmond, great-grandchild of Charles Murray, for his generous report from his visit to Ambrym in 2009.
We have been told that it was Paro Torere who pulled him into doing this, and this probably means that Rossi was considered an agnate of this Ranon man. ParoTorere was Deacon's main informant when he visited Ranon in 1926. Torere's geneology can be found in the paper about Ambrym kinship (Deacon Citation1927, 337).
Graham Miller reports that William Murray almost got into a fight with a local chief because he would not barter with tobacco (from Miller Citation1989, 88).
There is little mention of these communion tokens in the missionary literature from the New Hebrides (see, however, Steel Citation1880, 373–374; Inglis Citation1887, 132, 322), but they were currently in use by probably all of the missionaries in the last part of the nineteenth century. See http://renewalfellowship.presbyterian.ca/channels/r01171-8.html; http://www.antrimhistory.net/content.php?cid=55; http://www.phcmontreat.org/CommunionTokens.htm;
In another visit of the Dayspring the Ambrymese tried to convince the missionary, Rev. Mackenzie, to stay on Ambrym. They pointed out a piece a land for him and started discussing the price. Mackenzie wrote:As soon as they heard the word missionary there was no further evidence of hostility, and in a few minutes we had a number of them on board (…) They were exceedingly friendly, took us by the hands and led us to their village. (Miller Citation1981, 164–165)
These villages were later abandoned and their descendants today live in the coastal mission villages of Ranvetlam, Ranon and Linbul.