ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology.New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2022. xxii, 213 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$135.00, cloth; US$34.95. ISBN 9781800734647.
Fire on the Island provides an intimately detailed account of a sorcery panic in a small island community in Vanuatu that led to the lynching of two men. In recent years, hundreds of incidents in which local people have hunted, tortured, and murdered supposed witches and sorcerers have occurred across Melanesia, primarily in Papua New Guinea. Beliefs that individuals practicing “black arts” responsible for sickness and other misfortunes have deep cultural roots; yet, the consensus among experts is that the frequency and brutality must be accounted for in large part by contemporary stressors such as the lack of employment opportunities for the youth who make up the bulk of the population, disputes over local ownership of resources, and the weakening control of central governments. Tom Bratrud’s study brings to the fore another common element: Christian revivalism in which participants imagine themselves as engaged in “spiritual warfare” to cleanse their communities of Satanic forces.
In January 2014, Bratrud arrived at Abamb, a small island off the south coast of Malekula, for his second stint of ethnographic fieldwork. Typical of rural Vanuatu, the islanders are subsistence farmers who also earn small amounts of cash by selling copra. The Presbyterian Church has strong roots—in the early years when the mission faced fierce resistance, converts from Malekula fled for the haven of Abamb and their descendants today make up about half the population. Pastors and local leaders frequently appeal to a unifying principle of “love” based on ideals of support among family members and Christian morality. Bratrud found that unity fraying in the face of bitter land disputes, a growing divide between native and migrant families, a number of sexual attacks on young women and, most troubling, rumours that sorcerers, responsible for several deaths, were rampaging through the community. Abamb was thus primed when a Christian revivalist group that had begun a few months earlier on the mainland arrived in March. Within weeks, a large proportion of the community, made up mainly of women and children, attended nightly services, praying at length for the Holy Spirit to enter the hearts of islanders and end the divisions. To this end, the women pressured recalcitrant or dubious men to cease their politicking, to stop spending their evenings in kava drinking sessions, and to join the services. The central figures of the revival, however, were 30 or so children who night after night were “slain in the spirit,” receiving visions of the secret work of sorcerers. Guided by the children, revivalists tracked down and destroyed caches of sorcery materials. Any relief was short lived as the children’s visions and accompanying fears escalated to the point that the men the visionaries had identified as sorcerers faced a 19-day community trial. Five men not only confessed to practicing sorcery but gave gruesome accounts of their misdeeds, which increased anger and fear. Two men who had been at the centre of a long-standing land dispute had long been suspected of practicing sorcery. When the five confessors named the men as their leaders, they rejected the accusations. After people dispersed from the trial, a small group of youth conspired to hang the two alleged leaders. Wary of committing sin themselves, they had the five confessors do the deed.
This brief summary cannot begin to do justice to the incredibly detailed narrative Bratrud provides of the conditions leading up to the revival, its short but consequential development on Abamb, and the aftermath of the murders. Although he was away in Port Vila at the time of the trial and lynchings recovering from a dog bite, Bratrud received detailed daily accounts by phone. During the earlier stage of the revival, he was very much a participant, and interweaves his experiences with frequent interview excerpts from participants and acute observations. Using a device familiar to mystery devotees, he opens the narrative at the height of the frenzy, climaxing with the murders. We are thus introduced to the cast of characters at their most dramatic moment. The chapters that follow fill in their motives and understandings for what is otherwise an inexplicable act of violence on the part of a self-proclaimed Christian community.
In the course of telling his story, Bratrud discusses several theoretical concerns familiar to Melanesianists, such as the moral reasoning behind sorcery beliefs and Indigenous conceptions of personhood. His main argument, however, is that “in the context of insecurity and upheaval, fear and hope are powerful sentiments that work together to become a potent driving force for change” (31). Insignificant as Abomb may be on the world stage, in Bratrud’s view its experience helps us understand the power of child visionaries in contemporary social reform movements, such as Greta Thunberg, as well as the motivations guiding the masses in the United States to elect Donald Trump to the presidency. He’s right, yet the framework is very general indeed, not least compared to the density of ethnographic detail. Some complicating details get glossed over in the characterization of revival as “collective therapy led by the Holy Spirit” (31) and of the murders as a community “sacrifice” to expiate its sins. Bratrud does not speculate on the motives of the five confessed sorcerers, for instance, nor does he comment on whether they were willing executioners, a deed for which only they were punished by the state.
Despite some reservations about the theoretical framework, I consider Fire on the Island an outstanding contribution to the scholarly study of the nature and causes of contemporary sorcery and witch panics in Melanesia and their intersection with the waves of Christian revivalism sweeping through the region. The book will also make a splendid text for classroom use not just for the intrinsic interest of the story Bratrud tells, but equally for the richness of the material which allows for alternative interpretations as well opening a discussion about the practical and ethical challenges in ethnographically studying social movements that, whatever the positive motivations of most followers, escalate into violence.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver