Introduction

Archaeologists increasingly follow a relational approach to analysing and interpreting the past, particularly in North America (Holland-Lulewicz, 2021). This opening of the theoretical and interpretive landscape offers us the opportunity to experiment with different frameworks, including alternatives to the Western and positivistic ones that have generally dominated the discipline from its inception (Verdesio, 2022). In part, this shift correlates with an emergence of archaeological narratives that are increasingly written from the perspectives of precisely those “others” who formed the objects of study in colonialist archaeology and anthropology from the nineteenth century onwards (e.g. Nelson, 2021; Shing & Willie, 2019; Willie, 2019). There have been both “etic” (e.g. Cipolla, 2019; Marshall, 2021a, b) and “emic” (e.g. Chirikure, 2021; Gonzalez et al., 2018; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2018) discussions of how to craft an archaeology that is relevant for non-Western people, and how to take non-Western theoretical terms seriously in the discipline. These two questions are inter-related: to create an archaeology that speaks to non-Western and particularly Indigenous audiences, we need to create a habit of addressing people on their own terms, including within academic discourse.

Kastom is a common term in the Melanesian Pidgin languages throughout New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu as well as New Caledonia (coutume). The term serves as an umbrella covering a variety of broadly defined and situationally flexible “traditional” beliefs and practices, which are themselves subject to transformation, politics, contestation, and revision (see Jolly, 1994; Keesing, 1994; Lindstrom, 1982; Tabani, 2010; Taylor, 2010). One of the key elements of kastom is that it does not make distinctions between things that are typically separated in Western cosmology: humans and nature, the physical world and the spirit world, and even past and present are to some degree entangled and co-existing (David et al., 2012; Flexner, 2014, 2016; Flexner et al., 2018b; Urwin, 2019). Global archaeological theory would benefit from greater engagement with Indigenous ways of knowing following the emerging consensus that religion and “the sacred” are often inadequately theorised and poorly understood in archaeology and heritage studies (Boivin, 2009; Insoll, 2012; Meyer & de Witte, 2013). This observation rings equally true in “Indigenous” heritage (Flexner, 2016; Fowles, 2013), East Asian societies (Byrne, 2014), the heritage of Western religious traditions (see Gilchrist 2020), and European prehistory (Mitchell, 2020; Pollard, 2009).

It would be inappropriate to take an indigenous terminology out of its home location and project it onto foreign places. However, archaeologists interested in Indigenous or decolonising approaches have a responsibility to “take indigenous theory seriously” when developing a broad understanding of different frameworks and terminologies for understanding the past (Marshall, 2021b). A vocabulary filled with actor-networks, entanglements, meshworks, chaînes opératoires, optimal foraging, and more can only be enriched when it becomes equally conversant with global Indigenous frameworks for understanding past and present. Possibilities range from Māori whakapapa (Marshall, 2021a) to the “revelatory locales” of Native North America (Sanger et al., 2021), to name just a few recent examples in addition to the discussion of kastom that follows.

Kastom is above all a discursive tool. In my experiences in Vanuatu, the term is used selectively and intentionally to mark off beliefs and practices that belong to Islanders (“kastom blong mifala ol man ples”). Kastom embraces both beliefs and practices that have been part of island life for many centuries or even millennia, as well as those things that may have originally come from the world outside (see also Keesing, 1994; Tilley, 1997). Kastom is used to distinguish between practices grounded in reciprocity and community, against those perceived as the external impositions of profit motive and personal gain (see discussion of kastom versus bisnis in Gosden, 2004: 98–99). Kastom rhetoric includes the ways that people talk about their religious beliefs and how they changed through time from a kastom perspective, a focus in this paper which I contrast below with orthodox narratives of religious change. In Vanuatu the history of nineteenth and twentieth century conversion is interpreted as a process of incorporating Christianity into kastom, not Christianity somehow “replacing” the local religion as was often asserted in missionary narratives (Flexner, 2016).

The notion that religious “innovations” as represented by conversion to new faiths, beliefs, and practices are the primary driver of how people experience changing supernatural elements of their universe should be challenged as part of a colonial, Western, and male-dominated understanding of the past (see Frieman, 2021; Monton-Subias & Hernando, 2018). Kastom provides the temporal and spatial flexibility to offer a more non-linear and expansive account of the supernatural, inspirited worlds that Melanesian people lived with, and continue to live with, on a day-to-day basis. A kastom approach to the past involves explanations of history couched in place, performance, supernatural explanations, and dividual personhood, something Ballard (2014) terms “Oceanic historicities.”

Alternative Discourses: Ontological, Critical, Indigenous

One result of the increase in relational understandings of the past has been a proliferation of “ontological” archaeologies that use various (and sometimes contrasting) theoretical frameworks to produce novel accounts of worldviews, relations, or worlds connecting human and non-human actors across time and space (e.g. Cipolla, 2019). Graeber’s (2015) conceptualisation of “critical realism” offers a complementary approach. Critical realism takes supernatural and non-Western frameworks for understanding the world seriously and on their own terms. This kind of approach recognises the efficaciousness and “reality” of things that to Western eyes might appear “irrational” or “superstitious”, but also recognises the politics and contradictions in such experiences, and the self-critical and conscious “other.”

Graeber (2015: 9–11) describes the Merina fanafody of Madagascar, a kind of hail charm that is simultaneously perceived as offering protection while also being an object of debate and contestation within and between neighbouring communities. Through discussions of the contradicting claims over the supernatural powers (or lack thereof) of fanafody with “the Merina people”, itself a problematic concept, Graeber (2015: 11) “decided to take [his] informants seriously, and by doing so, to rethink [his] theoretical assumptions” about the value and power of these objects. Merina informants simultaneously identified the “real” nature of fanafody in the sense that it can be materially efficacious, while also acknowledging that this efficacy was a site of political and social manipulation amongst different practitioners and their audiences. This account of a contested and contestable sacred knowledge is remarkably similar to Lindstrom’s (1990) account of power struggles over kastom knowledge in Tannese society. It also dovetails with my own experiences living with and studying the religious beliefs and kastom of people from Vanuatu over the last decade (see Flexner, 2016, 2021). An approach couched in critical realism arguably avoids some of the problems with appropriation and erasure of Indigenous interlocutors sometimes identified in ontological studies (Cipolla, 2019: 615–617). It discourages the person with an etic understanding of a particular set of cultural phenomena from (often unintentionally) asserting an insider’s level of expertise.

Marshall (2021a, b) recently challenged archaeologists to take Indigenous theory seriously. Her analysis borrowed the Māori concept of whakapapa (most commonly translated as “genealogy” but actually encompassing an expansive meshwork of human and non-human relationships across time and space) to interpret a class of bone pendants that were inadequately understood using Western functionalist theories (Marshall, 2021b). Marshall (2021a) offered the possibility of whakapapa as a viable theoretical framework for interpreting archaeological materials outside of the Aotearoa/New Zealand context from which it originates.

These kinds of proposals allow archaeologists to follow alternatives beyond the white and male-dominated spaces of what traditionally comprises “theory” in archaeology and adjacent disciplines. However, they also produce something of a dilemma: on one hand this theoretical move creates the possibility of seeing other kinds of worlds to the one archaeologists generally inhabit as Western (or non-Western) scientists. On the other, it is difficult to take something other, local, and specific and apply it in a global framework if you haven’t done the work of engaging with the people from whose societies these kinds of terms originate, which Marshall (2021b: 323) acknowledges as a challenge. If global archaeology is going to use Indigenous theory, global archaeologists need to do a much better job of making our work and the professional spaces it inhabits more accessible to Indigenous people, who need to become equal partners rather than “informants” or subaltern “communities”. Marshall has a long track record of doing exactly this, so this statement shouldn’t be taken as a critique of her work specifically, though I recognise the irony in having both her papers and this one coming as single-authored works from scholars at Anglophone institutions in the UK and Australia respectively; greater capacity for co-creation is clearly a project to work on for the future.

There are of course a number of other issues with taking Indigenous terminologies and concepts and applying them to other places and times, particularly where a modern arrangement resulting from colonial upheaval is de-historicised and applied uncritically to other locations (see Spriggs, 2008). The goal here is not to universalise kastom to other Indigenous or non-Indigenous spaces in a simplistic way. Kastom comes from and is specific to Island Melanesia. The globalisation of Indigenous theory must respect the local specificities of Indigenous concepts to particular places and peoples. Simultaneously, it should identify commonalities and differences that can expand and improve interpretations of past and present. One example of a common phenomenon is the intricate collapsing of space and time in many Indigenous philosophies, true in North America (Sanger et al., 2021: 3–4) as well as Island Melanesia (Flexner & Taki, 2021; Unwin, 2019). A fluency with Indigenous theory should also encourage scholars to challenge apparently universal frameworks from Western scholarship.

Kastom is itself both an assertion of tradition, and a colonial invention. I argue that it is precisely this apparent contradiction that offers the malleability to incorporate novelty while asserting maintenance of ancestral ways in Melanesian societies (see also Keesing, 1994). To develop a kastom narrative incorporating an archaeology of “religion” or the supernatural, I first have to deconstruct what archaeologists have tended to think about religion in and beyond the Pacific region. Having unpacked the archaeology of religion in this way, I will then re-parcel a different approach wrapped in my understanding of kastom to draw closer to what I consider to be a critical understanding of traditional spiritual belief and practice amongst southern Vanuatu’s diverse communities over a period spanning three millennia.

Pessimism Regarding an Archaeology of “Religion”

Archaeologists have long held a relatively pessimistic view of understanding the supernatural beliefs of past people. “Religion” as a Western concept is perceived to be personal (even if it is practised communally), intangible, and ideally separated from other aspects of society. This view is encapsulated in Hawkes’ (1954) “ladder of influence” (Fig. 1a), in which religious institutions and spiritual life are perceived as the most difficult aspects of culture and society to access via the archaeological record. This is considered especially true for societies where historical or ethnographic data are not obtainable. Archaeological understanding of religion is also coloured by the secular humanist project that many of the humanities and social sciences appear to have taken on implicitly over the course of the twentieth century (a perspective that many scholars have challenged, e.g. Asad, 1993, 2003).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Assumptions and myths in the archaeology of religion: (a) Hawkes' "ladder of influence" that places religion in the least knowable category; (b) assumption that magic predates and prefaces organised religion in a simple, linear fashion; (c) secularisation myth that religious beliefs decrease over time; (d) myth of purification where modern institutions are assumed to disentangle previously overlapping social categories

Full size image

This has led to several related, and often unstated, assumptions underpinning much archaeological scholarship. One is a linear evolutionary framework, derived from Frazer (1922) and subsequent scholars that places “magic” as a precursor to true religions (Fig. 1b). Magic is perceived as a belief in supernatural forces that are managed through ritual practices distributed across society, while religion is institutionalised and ritual efficacy more centralised in practice as well as principle. In Oceania, there tends to be a discussion of magic and “shrines” in the more heterarchical societies of Island Melanesia, and “temples” and religious authority in the hierarchical chiefdoms of Polynesia. Polynesian archaeology also refers to smaller ritual structures as shrines but the term temple is rarely if ever used in Melanesia, despite the size and extent of many monumental structures in the region (compare Bayliss-Smith et al., 2019; Bedford, 2019; Kahn & Kirch, 2011; Kolb, 2006; Walter et al., 2004).

Because of archaeology’s commitment to rationalism, religion is believed to play a decreasing role as society moves towards modernity and people become more knowledgeable, scientific, and secular through time (Fig. 1c). The tendency to secularisation also follows the logic of separation of different elements in society as part of the project of modernity. Over time societal institutions like religion, economics, politics, and so on are thought to naturally become increasingly purified and separated from each other according to this logic (Fig. 1d). Latour (1993) has shown definitively that this goal of purification is unattainable, due to the proliferation of hybrids that defy categorical boundaries which emerge during such projects. Archaeological and historical accounts of religious conversion represent good examples of the inevitable failure of purification in such contexts (Flexner, 2017; Keane, 2007; Sissons, 2014). Attempts to separate religious change from culture change, or to completely erase an extant culture during the work of religious conversion, are impossible. In the former case, too much supernatural baggage from the previous belief system ends up retained in more or less covert forms. In the latter case, attempts to force an overthrow of deeply held worldviews result in avoidance, abandonment, or conflict with the agents of change.

Fowles (2013) offers one of the most comprehensive accounts for understanding the history of archaeological and anthropological thoughts surrounding the assumptions outlined above. He further identifies a myth of return that overlies the narratives of religious change created in Western academic discourse. Rather than a simple linear narrative from A to B, religious and primitive to secular and modern, Fowles prefers a route from A1 to B to A2. In the latter narrative, primitive, egalitarian societies distribute magical power and ability relatively horizontally (A1). Over time as religion is institutionalised and societies become hierarchical, supernatural power is concentrated in the hands of a few people and used to serve the purposes of the ruling class (B). With the advent of modern democracies, power is redistributed more equally, with science carrying on much of the functional and symbolic role once played by magic (A2). While this myth provides a triumphalist account of modernity, it too largely fails to capture the realities of religious experiences even in modern societies (Fowles, 2013: 12–23).

Narratives of linear evolution, secularisation, purification, and return have proven inadequate to describe and explain the occurrence of religious change and innovation in the past. One alternative is to produce accounts that are cognisant of the local and specific nature of religious belief and practice by engaging seriously with local and specific concepts and terminologies (Marshall, 2021a, b; Sanger et al., 2021). Australian archaeology has a long tradition of using the Aboriginal concept of “Dreamtime” (Flood, 1983) or “Dreaming” (David, 2006) to explain the long-term patterns of thought and belief that shaped Indigenous understandings of their Country, which is also an Aboriginal concept (Bird & Rhoads, 2020). For the Pueblo Southwest, Fowles (2013) has proposed “doings” as the appropriate term to describe people’s religious experiences. Doings provides a framework to understand the supernatural as it permeates all of Pueblo life, from everyday situations in the landscape or at home, to marked ritual occasions such as rites of passage or marking the change of seasons.

Accounts of situations of colonialism have been particularly enlightening for understanding contexts of religious change, often because the written records of the missionaries allow for an expansion of interpretive possibilities. Keane (2007) provides a useful historical account of Christian conversion on Sumba, Indonesia, centred on local agency and autonomy. Cipolla’s (2019) analysis of Iroquoian effigy figures partly draws on Jesuit accounts to draw out some of the connections between materials, practices, and spirituality. He argues, “we need a model that understands the owl pipe in concert with the rosary beads and the world in which the Wendat and Jesuits lived and communicated with each other. This was not a universe composed of two hermetically sealed worlds—one Jesuit, one Wendat. The owl pipes and the rosary do indeed speak of a world in flux, but one in which the edges of potentially radical differences came together and remade one another through the forces, conflicts, conversations, and atrocities often associated with settler colonialism” (Cipolla, 2019: 623). Fowles (2013: 237–264) points to the adaptable and encompassing nature of Pueblo “doings” during a sustained period of imperial encounter from the Spanish Empire to the United States. In my own research in Vanuatu (Flexner, 2016), I have suggested that kastom can provide a local framework for understanding entangled religious and cultural change in a colonial situation where Christian missions represented one of the major sources of foreign interlocutors.

Kastom in Southern Vanuatu’s Inspirited Islands

Southern Vanuatu comprises an islandscape of five islands and the surrounding Pacific Ocean (Fig. 2): the dormant volcanic high islands Erromango and Anietyum, the active volcanic island Tanna, the low coral atoll Aniwa, and the uplifted limestone makatea island Futuna (sometimes called West Futuna to distinguish it from a namesake over 1600 km to the east). These islands were closely connected through geographic proximity and shared cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Futuna and Aniwa are distinctive linguistically, classed as “Polynesian Outliers” on the basis of their languages belonging to the Polynesian family tree, but they nonetheless share much in common with their “Melanesian” neighbours (Flexner Bedford, & Valentin, 2019; Flexner, Bedford, et al., 2018). Southern Vanuatu was also connected to regional exchange networks further afield, to the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia to the west, and Fiji and Western Polynesia to the east (Keller & Kuautonga, 2007; Spriggs, 1997: 219–220).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Map of Vanuatu, highlighting islands and locations mentioned in the text

Full size image

Southern Vanuatu kastom is built on the relationships and connections amongst a variety of human and non-human actors and inspirited matter (Fig. 3). Subsistence in southern Vanuatu is based on a shared set of agricultural practices involving seasonally managed plots rotated between active and fallow states and inherited through kinship. The Oceanic crop suite is based on the starchy staples of yams, taro, breadfruit, and banana, supplemented with sugarcane and a variety of vegetables (Spriggs, 1986). In Aneityum and Futuna, people constructed massive stone terraces for irrigated and rain fed gardens (Spriggs, 1981; Flexner, Bedford, et al., 2018: 250–252). The Tannese constructed earthen mounds called takwu for growing yams, which could be over 20 m in circumference (Bonnemaison, 1991). The ritually important intoxicant kava was also ubiquitous in traditional gardens. Protein was primarily derived from fish, crustaceans, and shellfish, though people also raised chickens. Pigs were generally reserved for chiefly exchanges and ritual occasions, which in turn structured and reinforced patterns of community belonging (Flexner 2022 b; Spriggs, 1986).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Simplified diagram of connections between material and supernatural forces and beings in southern Vanuatu kastom (black boxes represent areas of known Polynesian influence or introduction)

Full size image

Subsistence is not simply a material practice in southern Vanuatu. Besides the intersection with kinship and community, gardens were powered by a variety of magic stones, called natemas evai on Erromango, fatu tapu in Futuna-Aniwa, and cognates of kapier in Tanna’s five languages. Stones caused specific crops to grow abundantly, called forth particular kinds of fish or turtles, or brought rain or sunshine. The greatly feared stones used for black magic caused illness or death or summoned terrifying cyclones. Specific stones could only be activated by ritual specialists with the requisite expertise, called Tupunas in southern Tanna, Tavuwa on Erromango, and Tanata Tapu on Futuna and Aniwa (Bonnemaison, 1994: 172–178; Capell, 1958: 42–43; Guiart, 1956: 63–66; Humphreys, 1926: 71, 167–170). Island landscapes were inhabited by spirits and other supernatural beings. Spirits were a source of anxiety because they could cause illness or social unrest. In Aneityum the natmas were autonomous and their daily and seasonal movements had to be accounted for in the arrangement of settlement space. In Tanna the ierehma could be controlled and propitiated with offerings and ritual (Douglas, 1989).

Creator beings in southern Vanuatu were generally aloof to human activities. Nobu of Erromango or Kwumwesin of Tanna are probably better translated as “infinity” or “beginning” than “god”. People recognised a creative force that made the universe and often raised the first beings or people, but that force then retreated beyond the realm of human experience or intervention. There were other paramount ancestors, above all the two Polynesian introductions Mwatiktiki or Majijihki (the demigod Maui), and Tangalua or Tagaro (the sea snake god; note I’ll alternate between these spellings below to acknowledge the linguistic variation between islands). Mwatiktiki was especially prominent as the ancestral being who fished the islands out of the sea, defended the people from cannibal monsters, and often shaped specific features of the landscape (Guiart, 1961: 48–52; Humphreys, 1926: 71, 165–167; Keller & Kuautonga, 2007: 98–145). The language and rituals of kava generally point to a Polynesian connection, even though kava was originally domesticated in northern or central Vanuatu (Lindstrom, 2004; Lynch, 1996).

Sacred geographies intersected with chiefly politics across these islands. Aneityum and Erromango were divided into a small number of wedge-shaped land divisions (seven and six, respectively) headed by a paramount chief, called Natimarid on Aneityum and Fan Lo in Erromango (Humphreys, 1926: 128–134; Naupa 2011: 19–76; Spriggs, 1986: 12; Spriggs & Wickler, 1989: 83–85). Paramount chiefs managed their responsibilities to society through a number of subsidiary chiefs, who in turn used their connections in kinship and locality to maintain order, ensure productivity, and prevent conflict where possible. Tanna was much more egalitarian and heterarchical, featuring approximately 120 land divisions and a matching proliferation of inherited as well as achieved chiefly titles (Bonnemaison, 1994: 146–156; Guiart, 1956: 9–17). Land divisions throughout southern Vanuatu are referred to as “canoes” (nelcau on Aneityum, lo on Erromango, neteta or neko on Tanna, and vaka on Futuna; Flexner, 2022).

Conflict on Tanna was largely based on competition over titles that could be won through combat or competitive feasting. Underpinning chiefly competition was a network of linked hamlets, gardens, and ritual spaces for dancing and drinking kava called imwarim or yimwayim (Brunton, 1989). Tannese society was structured by a moiety system composed of two competing groups: Numrukuen, wise and subtle of speech and endowed with magical knowledge, and Koyometa, direct and aggressive warriors (Bonnemaison, 1994: 148–153; Guiart, 1956: 24–27; 90–94). Futuna and Aniwa used the Polynesian title ariki, or sometimes tanata sore (“big man”) to refer to their chiefs, but followed the Tannese moiety system of Namruke and Kaviameta (Flexner, Bedford, et al., 2018: 250, 252; Keller & Kuautonga, 2007: 61–64).

Kastom and Christianity 1839–Present

When Presbyterian missionaries arrived in southern Vanuatu beginning with John Geddie in 1848, building on the work of earlier English and Polynesian proselytisers (Liua‘ana, 1996), they entered an inspirited world that took the foreigner’s claims to knowledge and control of a superior and novel god in terms of extant traditions that would eventually evolve into today’s kastom. Missionaries presented themselves to Western audiences as heroes converting dangerous “savages” (Paton, 1907) or as the sympathetic friends of the poor benighted natives (Watt, 1896). What southern Vanuatu’s people thought of the newcomers and their god can be partly reconstructed through telling moments of encounter, often ending with the death or expulsion of the missionary but not always. During an emblematic moment in the early days of John Geddie’s eventually quite successful mission in Aneityum, he was asked to remove a reed fence that was blocking the daily perambulation of a particularly important natmas (spirit; Patterson, 1882: 186). Geddie was flexible and assented, and subsequently went on to convert the entire population of the island as it collapsed because of introduced diseases (Spriggs, 1985, 2007). The Aniwan people reportedly converted en masse when missionary John G. Paton impressed a high chief by digging a freshwater well in the ground inhabited by a powerful sea snake spirit (Paton, 1907 vol 2: 176–192).

Tanna and Erromango proved more difficult terrain for the missionaries (see Adams, 1984; Flexner, 2016: 22–51, 75–80). The first London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary in southern Vanuatu was John Williams who visited Tanna and Erromango over two days in November 1839. On Tanna, the only remarkable event was someone spitting down the throat of Williams’ secretary James Harris to determine whether he was human (Lindstrom, 1980: 228). The following day Williams and Harris were killed in Dillon’s Bay, having failed to understand a chiefly tabu that prevented outsiders from passing beyond the beach despite repeated and emphatic warnings. An early attempt at LMS missionary settlement on Tanna by Turner and Nisbet in 1842 was doomed to fail when they were settled in disputed territory near Port Resolution. Failing to understand the precarity of their situation until it was too late, Turner and Nisbet were forced to flee even as the local neteta (territorial groups) attempted to ensnare them into joining the fight. It was known the missionaries had firearms that could turn the tide for one side or the other (Turner, 1861: 11–68).

On Erromango, the Presbyterian missionaries George and Ellen Gordon managed to live for nearly five years despite one or both of them regularly suffering from tropical diseases including malaria throughout that time. George and Ellen were killed in 1861 after a group of warriors from the neighbouring lo used a ruse to lure George alone into the bush. The story of the Gordons’ deaths is still related by people in Dillon’s Bay using a variety of natural stones and geographical features, continuing the tradition of narrating stories in place that is a persistent element of kastom. George’s brother James arrived in Erromango in 1868, only to meet the same fate as his brother four years after his arrival on the other side of the island at Potnuma. The murderer Nerimpau was killed by Gordon’s community in revenge for this act. The tree where the killer’s body hung, which still stands to the north of Potnuma, remains poisoned and cursed (Flexner & Taki, 2022). In the south of Tanna, the missionaries John G. Paton and John and Mary Matheson were forced to flee for their lives in 1862 after a series of epidemics and cyclones had made their presence unbearable for the local populations. In retaliation the following year, Paton summoned a British naval ship, the Curaçoa, to bombard and burn several villages, albeit ones that hadn’t actually contributed to the missionary’s removal from the island (Adams, 1984: 112–161).

Missionaries explained these events in terms of inherent native violence and the recidivism of “heathens.” Yet the local explanations have common elements that show a clear logic to decisions to kill or remove missionaries. When missionaries arrived in the land of kastom, their claims were interpreted in terms of bringing a new, and potentially dangerous kind of spirit with them. “God” was translated as kwumwesin, uhngen, or nobu but confusingly the missionaries claimed their spirit was the exclusive cause of illness, death, and catastrophe, which they had sole control over. Converts could access some of this power, but only through the intercession of the missionaries. When people began dying in huge numbers because of introduced diseases, as happened in 1860, or were poisoned at a feast hosted by the missionary in an attempt to gain converts (an explanation floated as a cause of revenge-seeking for both George and James Gordon), or gardens were damaged by a bad cyclone, the cause of these disasters was made apparent (Adams, 1984). The logical conclusion was that the foreign sorcerers and their dangerous magic had to be removed from the island to restore order (Flexner, 2016: 164).

Eventually, missionaries were successful in converting most or all of the population throughout southern Vanuatu. In part, population decline led to many villages and gardens being abandoned. People aggregated in coastal settlements centred around mission stations which offered access to material goods, including food and medicine. The conversion could hardly be called a “triumph of the gospels”, however. What happened in practice rather was an overlay of Christian belief and practice on extant kastom (Fig. 4). Deciding what traditional practices to allow and what to expunge as heathenism or idolatry is a classic missionary dilemma (Keane, 2007: 85). In many cases, people in Vanuatu tolerated the church so long as they were also allowed their magic, dance, and ancestral spirits (Flexner, 2016: 159–160). When the church overreached and attempted to wipe out all remnants of kastom, as happened on Tanna in the early twentieth century (Bonnemaison, 1994: 201–256), the result was a mass abandonment of mission churches and villages, and a return to the old ways. Today, the Presbyterian Church is challenged by a variety of more recent evangelical sects, as well as the John Frum “cargo cult” (Lindstrom, 1993). John Frum, in its current form arguably a response to the encounter with the massive logistical might of the US military during the Second World War, continues the adaptable and creative tradition of kastom, which sees ongoing evolution in response to a variety of internal and external forces.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Southern Vanuatu cultures with the addition of Christianity and mission influences as means of connection to the outside world while retaining most of kastom

Full size image

Archaeological Evidence, Traditional Historicities, and the Non-linear Temporality of Kastom

On Tanna, the term kwumwesin refers both to the deep past and origins, but also the far future and endings (Lindstrom, 2011: 146). A nonlinear approach to temporality can allow for an expansion of archaeological narratives that incorporates a closer accounting of lived experiences in island space (Flexner et al. 2022a). However, Tannese people and the other people in southern Vanuatu obviously recognise that they do not live in an eternal ethnographic present. People remember historical events, from the tragic arrival of John Williams at Dillon’s Bay, Erromango (Flexner, 2016: 22–25), to the shaping of Tanna’s geography during the period when the kapier roamed freely around the island (Bonnemaison, 1994: 115–116), to the departure from Futuna of the princess Sina Fine Ariki and her lover Jiverau across the waves on their way to Tonga (Keller & Kuautonga, 2007: 166–186).

My background in Western knowledge frameworks and academic archaeology of course limits my ability to completely understand or represent kastom. Amongst other things, I am not a permanent inhabitant of the islands in question, nor an insider of these societies, though I have close friends and affinal kin relations I’ve developed during periodic fieldwork over the course of a decade. As I’ve acknowledged elsewhere (Flexner, 2016: ix), my claims about kastom should be open to contestation and reinterpretation. However, as a starting point I do see some possibility for integrating an archaeological understanding of religious change from southern Vanuatu with the non-linear kastom temporalities suggested above (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
figure 5

Representations of time and temporality from archaeological and kastom perspectives, including those based in lived experience (right), local event-based histories (centre, translating from Bislama from bottom to top: time of creation, time of stones and the first men, time of Mwatiktiki, time of the missionaries to the present), as well as orthodox archaeological chronology (left)

Full size image

Traditional archaeological understandings of southern Vanuatu’s culture history rest on the building blocks of sites, dates, and artefacts placed in a chronological framework (e.g. Bedford, 2006; Flexner, Bedford, et al., 2018). A kastom reading of the past might start instead by looking backwards from the present. A linear archaeological narrative can be augmented with those elements of history that are locally interpreted, experiential, place-based, and involving narratives of return as well as supernatural explanations of the world (Fig. 5; see also Ballard, 2014). Most islanders are Christian today, but kava is still drunk, dances are held, kastom stones are needed to keep the gardens productive, and people remain wary of spirits (Flexner, 2016: 159–160).

Historical change is broadly understood through the local narratives of remarkable events from the past. Memories are filtered through their emplacement in islandscapes that provide consistent reminders of ancestors, spirits, and stories. In many cases “natural” features such as coral reefs, stone formations, plants, and trees are integral to these temporalities and historicities (Bonnemaison, 1994; Flexner, 2014; Keller & Kuautonga, 2007). As people travel around and between their islands on a daily round that can include the activities of gardening, fishing, or travelling to socialise and exchange with neighbours, these kastom places are all around them. Every encounter, expected and unexpected, is a reminder that the land and sea are inspirited and laden with the weight of a history that is both present and tangible. This history is sandwiched in a deep past and unknowable future that are perceived as identical, encapsulated in the Tannese concept of kwumwesin.

Within the landscapes of southern Vanuatu, there is no point at which one is not connected to a story, myth, inspirited place, or magical force. In other words, there is no “secular” space in kastom places. Life in the islands of southern Vanuatu is a constant series of encounters with the past, and with the supernatural. Rather than being paralysed by the presence of so much of the sacred, people simply treat all of this as part of their environment. Supernatural forces are managed; spirits are propitiated with offerings, prayers, or spells. Magical objects are harnessed beneficially to help people to survive and thrive in remote, small islands. Dance and song retain and expand connections between people and to place. The same tunes and choreography may be repeated over many years or even generations, but can be added to as new events occur and social memories evolve. Feasts and exchanges reinforce reciprocal alliances and bonds of kinship. All of this occurs against a backdrop of return to a deep future past that remains aloof and unknowable.

Conclusions

In this paper I have borrowed the Melanesian term kastom as an interpretive lens for understanding how local Islander experiences might mesh with or inform archaeological narratives about tradition, transformation, and temporality. Indigenous understandings often expand and collapse temporality as experienced through place. Other archaeologists have developed similar but distinctive approaches, as with “doings” for the Pueblo Southwest (Fowles, 2013) or “Dreaming” for Australia (David, 2006). Such approaches take claims about supernatural belief and practice seriously and on their own terms, while also recognising that they are sites of active political manipulation and contestation amongst the claimants, which can include both human and non-human actors.

I want to close by returning to the question of whether the specific Indigenous philosophy (or theory) of kastom could be applied in other places and times. Defining kastom can be a tricky business, especially as an academic outsider. Just as whakapapa does not simply equate to “genealogy”, kastom should not be glossed simply as “tradition”. Instead a defining quality of kastom is precisely its multivalent and fluid register, deployed by Melanesian people variably and strategically to do many kinds of discursive work. For archaeologists working in the region, understanding kastom is inherent and critical to working with and understanding local people. For those working elsewhere, I don’t offer kastom as a universal tool to solve all theoretical problems. Rather, it exists within Melanesian philosophical frameworks to be compared with the other philosophical frameworks that describe relational understandings of the world, whether based in Western-derived theories of actor networks or entanglements, or the many Indigenous ontologies, philosophies, or realities that people use to describe and explain their worlds.

Kastom as an integral element of theory is relevant across Melanesia and similar approaches apply in Oceania more broadly (see Kirch, 2018). Traditional stories and understandings of landscape can produce alternatives that complement mainstream archaeological narratives (David et al., 2012; Urwin, 2019). Outside of the Pacific, a more careful path needs to be tread, as the application of ethnographic analogy can produce a different kind of collapsing of spacetime that reproduces unfair and unrealistic colonial narratives (Spriggs, 2008). That said, like Marshall (2021a), I do see the possibility of drawing from Pacific concepts like kastom as a way of expanding the theoretical vocabulary and conceptual toolkit of archaeology. What is critical for such a development to be feasible is dialogue, both amongst archaeologists working in different regions (e.g. Price & Ljungkvist, 2018), and crucially discussions with the Indigenous peoples whose ideas we might seek to borrow for our own purposes. One of the more promising developments in places like Vanuatu is the increasing prominence of Indigenous archaeologists who can further integrate understandings of kastom and scientific perspectives (Willie, 2019).

Finally, there is the quite serious question of how the adoption of Indigenous terminology or “theory” meshes with very real and ongoing global inequalities in access to resources and information. My colleagues in Vanuatu might (or might not) be proud to see kastom represented and taken seriously as a philosophical concept, but that taking has to exist within long-term relationships of dialogue, trust, mutual respect, and reciprocity (see Flexner, 2021). An archaeology of Indigenous theory must involve ongoing and committed relationships to working with Indigenous people and advancing their interests in the ways we can, while also recognising the concrete limitations and contradictions that exist within our own institutions and social milieu. Nonetheless, the opening of a space to pursue these kinds of narratives prefigures a more equal archaeology in which the cultural “others” that once formed the subject matter of interest increasingly speak back to our discipline in their own voices (e.g. Nelson, 2021).