Policing the Holy Nation: The state and righteous violence in Vanuatu

Policing the Holy Nation: The State andRighteous Violence in Vanuatu

Knut M. RioUniversity of Bergen

ABSTRACT

In Vanuatu, the police force has in recent years been strengthened by foreign governmentaid. AusAid and NZAid are heavily involved inside the police force, seeking to create ‘goodgovernance’ and to shape Vanuatu’s national developments. However, these measures alsocoincide with some other unexpected developments. Recent cases of violence, and especial-ly of sorcery, have led the police to intervene in a quest for moral order. Police are becom-ing part of the articulation of new occult understandings of wealth and power. These devel-opments are traced back partly to the history of colonial governance and the idea of right-eous violence, but also to current restructurings of the Vanuatu state and growing Christianconceptions of Vanuatu as a holy nation.Keywords: Vanuatu, urban Melanesia, policy, sorcery, state, governance, colonial history.

INTRODUCTION1

Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, has always been a cross-road for the multiple currents of theinternational scene (Philibert 1981; Rawlings 1999). Today these include: growinginternational investment in land and in residential and commercial property; increased povertyand unemployment; new state intervention by Australia, New Zealand and the EuropeanUnion; and a proliferation of international and indigenous Pentecostal churches. Criss-crossedby these currents this little Melanesian city has become a moral battle-ground over modernityitself (Eriksen 2009a, 2009b; Lattas and Rio, Mitchell this collection; Taylor 2010). The cityhas become a contested field for realigning and reconstituting the relations and tensionsbetween kastom and church, men and women, person and kinship, master and servant, andnation and state. In opposition to commentators focused on Melanesian instability and ‘failedstates’ (Dinnen and McLeod 2009; McLeod and Morgan 2007), I will argue that state poweris being transformed and reinforced to meet new moral understandings of evil.

This article will focus on how the police force is instrumental in rearticulating thecontradictions of modernity. As in previous work (Rio 2010), I focus on the consequences oftaking the witch-hunt into the realm of police, state courts and bureaucracy. However, I alsoextend this perspective towards a more general view of the nation and state as beingtransformed by a process which is merging together different regimes of knowledge. Inparticular, those of a modern, Western, secular state system are merged with Melanesian formsof Christianity and with customary powers of divination. Comparatively, a similar processhas been well documented by ethnographers working in contemporary African societies.Within a context of a modern labour force, commodity forms of consumption, new forms ofmass media and experimental state forms, these ethnographers have analysed the emergenceof new concepts of the occult. These have been formed from collapsing and translating

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customary and western understandings of witchcraft, sorcery, magic, and power so as to createa new shadowy realm of evil operating at the ideological level of the nation (Comaroff andComaroff 2004; Geschiere 1997; Geschiere and Fisiy 1994; Meyer 1998; Rowlands andWarnier 1988). Increasingly, the post-colonial state as a domain of justice is capturing andincorporating this occult realm as a realm of truth which needs to be documented, interrogatedand subdued. Here, the state’s judicial-penal system participates in the creation andrationalisation of the occult (Geschiere 2006). Today, in Melanesia, this process makes thenation state into a new kind of governing structure, which increasingly seeks to secure controlover life through securing control over the invisible evil forces seen to be invading and takingcontrol of contemporary everyday life.

Recent developments in Port Vila have redefined the status of sorcery from being alegitimate local concern of kastom and chiefs to becoming part of a nationally defined fieldof irrational dysfunctional crime. I will focus on a recent case of sorcery where police andcourts took over the whole processing of the sorcery accusation and moved it away from thecontrol of local chiefs and big men. I followed this case during my fieldwork in Port Vila fromDecember 2009 through to May 2010.

2This was a period of intense attention to sorcery and

new forms of magic, revealed by my interviews with police officers, chiefs, church leaders,Correctional Services personnel, and those working in the court system as prosecutors andjudges. Much information also came from my network of friends from Ambrym Island andTongoa Island who were closely connected to these events. I have also consulted the publicdiscourse in newspapers and television, church communities and the gossip in kava bars.Today, the imaginative and often sensational field of sorcery is constitutive of Port Vila as amodern town, and this has increasingly come to shape its modern institutions such as thepolice and the judicial-legal penal system. The theme of this article might seem sensationalist,but that is because people themselves are focused on new sensational forms of evil that demandnew forms of policing and new forms of justice.

STATE INTERVENTION AND STATE RECONSTITUTION

Vanuatu is a special case in Melanesia when one considers the degree of investment in landand business in the last few decades. Expatriate real estate agents and business speculatorshave made huge profits from buying or leasing large plots of land and building resorts orsubdividing the land for sale to expatriates for holiday homes. Often this process builds onthe colonial project of land-appropriation, in that expatriate real estate agents have boughtmuch of the valuable land which was previously in the hands of colonial plantations prior toIndependence in 1980. These lands are now being subdivided for residential and commer-cial properties, creating new opportunities for consumption and wealth.

Following right behind this development is the record high investment by AusAid andNZAid in police in Vanuatu, both the Vanuatu Police Force (VPF) and its paramilitary wing,the Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF). Compared to what seems to be the situation in e.g. PNGor the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu is a very peaceful place. There is little crime and little politicalunrest. Despite this Vanuatu currently stands as the largest recipient of New Zealand’s‘Defence Mutual Assistance Programme’. In recent years, Australia has contributed to a majorupgrading of the Vanuatu Police Force, spending 28 million AUD between 2006-2011. AusAiddescribed its Vanuatu Police Force Capacity Building Project in the following terms: ‘Theproject aims to improve crime prevention and detection through improved police andcommunity relations. AusAID is implementing the project with technical support from theAustralian Federal Police’.

3Next to the big investment in the ‘Governance for Growth

Programme,’ which is focused on financial management and infrastructure, the police forceis the sector that receives the most money from AusAid. In comparison, over the same period,schooling only received 13 million and justice 9 million. Considering the poor state of publicschooling and that the crime rate has not really been growing significantly over the last

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decades, this investment in policing is quite anomalous. To some degree, this form of biasedaid-intervention is a response to the perceived regional instability of other Pacific nations,such as East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Solomon Islands. As Dinnen and McLeodpoint out ‘ Policing engagement are now often part of larger state-building interventions incountries emerging from conflict or whose states are otherwise deemed to be fragile or at riskof failure’ (2009:334). Such fears often involve rumours and moral panic that is most firmlyarticulated by the expat population, the Ni-Vanuatu elites, and the churches who voiceconcerns about a rapidly growing rate of break-ins and theft, which is taken as indicative ofrising moral chaos. I believe that fear of major future civil unrest in Vanuatu is fuelled byincreasing urban poverty and class divisions between the elites and the grassroots (Mcleod andMorgan 2007). Some of the ridiculously low wages paid to ni-Vanuatu workers include salariesof 1 AUD per hour for people who work in expensive resorts. There these same workers canobserve their owners and managers buying champagne at 50 AUD a bottle, and driving aroundin cars that cost 100!000 AUD. They observe not just expat Australians and new Chinesebusinessmen, but also an expanding Ni-Vanuatu elite made up of politicians, public servants,businessmen, foreign government aid employees and NGO mediators.

Yet, at the same time, there are few obvious signs of organised unrest and opposition byemployees and labour organisations. The much highlighted increase in theft and crime is notactually sustained by official statistics. Indeed, the National Statistics Office’s report on crimelists ‘crime against morality’ as the only crime that has been increasing. All other forms ofcrime have been decreasing, in a report for the period between 1996 and 2004. The VanuatuCorrectional Centre also lists domestic violence and sexual harassment of women (i.e. ‘crimesagainst morality) as overwhelmingly the most significant form of sentence for those in prison.

The recent major investments in Vanuatu police have resulted in a stronger policepresence in the streets of Port Vila and Luganville, the two major towns. In 2010, a wholenew fleet of shiny white police vehicles was constantly patrolling the streets.

Fig. 1. New Police vehicles outside the police headquarters in Port Vila (Rio, 2010)

One tends to wonder what they are doing; as the police trucks with their cages behindalways seem to be empty, and very rarely do you see police vehicles on emergency calls.Moreover, what are the effects of this hugely up-scaled police presence in a small nation likeVanuatu? With more personnel, resources and the symbolic authority of white cultural capitalwhat does the police force become as a state institution alongside other state institution withinthe nation of Vanuatu? I suggest the Australian massive input of strategically directed funding

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has resulted in the police force penetrating deeper into the actual governance of society,expanding out of urban centres of power to challenge more local forms of authority (Rio 2010).As we shall see, the police have tried to move into a new field, namely sorcery; now redefinedand merged with new understandings of dark occult powers. Though a large part of foreignaid funding is meant to go into strengthening a secular bureaucracy, purchasing vehicles andequipment and training personnel, a side-effect has been that police have expanded andreformulated their realm of jurisdictions so as to take up local contemporary understandingsof social evil.

Partly an effect of a fragmentation of state authority and partly of its moral rearticulation,the police force has become a more autonomous force that has sought to redefine its ownpriorities. This change is indeed integral to larger international processes. The general trendis that AusAid’s and NZAid’s engagement in governance is first and foremost aimed atstrengthening governance that lies immediately outside of direct state control. Both the‘Governance for Growth’ program of AusAid and the main efforts of NZAid are aimed atstrengthening infrastructure and communication technologies, but also ‘civil society’institutions that can promote ‘community governance,’ such as churches, NGOs, women’sorganisations, chiefs’ organisations and micro-credit institutions. Likewise, to some extent thelarge investment in the police has also worked to free the police force from direct state control.Even though there are arguments that the police should be kept under close surveillance andsubmitted to accountability both by Parliament and donors, the actual effect of aid interventionis increased fragmentation. An important aspect of the strong direct involvement of AusAidand NZAid has been the incorporation into the police and prison systems of external advisors,trainers and consultants. Their presence empowers the police force vis-à-vis national leadersand makes the police force an ambiguously structured institution. The police now take up aspace in-between the national Parliament, and foreign advisors and embassies, churches andpopular opinion. The police do, nevertheless, often seek to uphold their autonomy from foreignrule and will not passively accept any foreign interference when it comes to the definition oflocal crimes and local forms of violence which they, as Melanesians, claim to be more familiarwith. Their priorities are to protect Vanuatu as a profitable place for foreign interests andinvestment as well as to develop the prosperity of the independent nation. The underminingof direct hierarchical governmental authority and neo-liberal policies of creating checks andbalances on national politicians and parliament has enabled the police force to acquire a senseof becoming a body of governmentality of its own; or at least an autonomous body that needsto steer and participate in society’s moral governance. As a sovereign body with a dedicationto keep Vanuatu a ‘pure’ nation, the police force is slowly redefining its own priorities andbecoming an active agent inside the space between state governance and national sentiments.If we see the state as being restructured by the new external interventions and internal nationalchanges then this also involves partly a move towards a new concept of the state, which as weshall see, is ultimately a state needing to be strengthened by embracing religiosity (Trnka, thiscollection). If we look at policing in a perspective of longue duree, we realize that there areindeed deep continuities from the colonial period into the present situation. There is a sensein which the police now attempt to revitalize the ideals of anti-colonial nationalism that thepost-colonial state in many ways betrayed. In order to acquire a fuller view of the police andstate in Vanuatu, I shall have to also examine: first, current perceptions of the police and recentevents of policing; second, aspects of the historical formation of colonial policing and thegrowth of nationalist sentiments based in Christianity.

POLICE AS A WILD FORCE

After Independence and the break with England and France in 1980, people in Vanuatu havegradually started to conceive of the police as an alien institution. People acknowledge that,contrary to their hopes for the new nation, the police force is not within their radius of control,

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participation and comprehension. In accordance with the fragmentation of authority mentionedabove, they often think of the Vanuatu Police Force and especially its paramilitary wing, theVanuatu Mobile Force (VMF), as operating outside the law. This view is also shared by foreignobservers (Dinnen and McLeod 2009; McLeod and Morgan 2007). Local people are to somedegree afraid of the police. Some are said to take part in rape, in sorcery, violence andcorruption. A local newspaper recently published statistics showing that 40% of those surveyedbelieved that police mistreated people, and 60% believed that police did not give people fairtreatment (Daily Post 26th March 2010). The police are thought to be a wild, uncontrollableforce that makes sudden, unexpected arrests, with unclear motifs; a force that cannot bepredicted and that works with its own, separate rationality (Lattas, Lattas and Rio, Mitchell,Reed, this collection).

Recent events have also confirmed a view of the police force as driven by its ownautonomous agendas, which can be at odds with the government, parliament and the peopleof Vanuatu. In 1996, the President of the Republic was held captive because the VMF had notbeen paid their salaries. In 2002, the police arrested their own police commissioner, whoseappointment they disputed. In this case police officers were convicted of inciting mutiny,kidnapping and false imprisonment (Boege and Forsyth n.d). In 2004 the police paramilitarywing, the VMF, made attempts to arrest and kidnap the Prime Minister. In January of 2009,police officers beat up the publisher of the largest national newspaper, after it printed articlesthat were critical of police practice and prison routines (Daily Post January 18th, 2009).

Articulating widespread popular concerns, the chiefs of Port Vila and The NationalCouncil of Chiefs have also in recent years claimed that they do not fully appreciate orunderstand the role of the police. They especially hold the view that the police force isunnecessary when it comes to settling local conflicts and solving local crimes. The chiefs havea great deal of authority as mediators in ensuring local conflicts are solved according tokastom. In 2008, the prisoners of Port Vila ‘namba six’ prison escaped, and the prisoners fledand sought refuge in the Meeting House of the National Council of Chiefs. Thus they appealedto a different more benevolent form of judicial authority than that offered by the existing statesystem. There were accusations that the prisoners had been beaten up and harassed by prisonstaff. In a show of defiance and an assertion of their ultimate authority, the VMF came to theChief’s meetinghouse and arrested the prisoners at gunpoint. After this incident there wereaccusations by Port Vila chiefs that the police had violated the kastom authority of the chiefsand also, in a sense, the human rights of the prisoners as citizens of the nation of Vanuatu. Itwas even argued that Vanuatu does not need police since chiefs should uphold law and orderthrough village courts and by using voluntary community work and compensation paymentsas penalty for offences (Vanuatu Daily Post 11th March 2009). Although chiefs have to acertain degree been allowed to operate in the domain of justice, there has continually beenpressure on this model of hybrid justice and demands that it conforms more to an internationalwestern model of justice (Rousseau 2008:26). The system of chiefs is impressive with all ofits branches and many representatives at the grassroots level. Mitchell’s contribution to thiscollection has a fuller overview of this important institution. However, the chiefs’ actual powerto take action in important issues has become less and less over recent years. By comparisonthe police force has been intruding further and further into the domain of chiefs. The handlingof the prison escapees was such a case. In articulating their worry that people from theirrespective communities would be mistreated by police, the chiefs voiced popular assumptionsthat the police did not share their respect for human life, and that the prisoners would becomesubjected to unregulated forms of violence that sought to inflict vengeance (Reed, thiscollection).

For many, this was confirmed in March 2010 when the Coroner released a report on thedeath of one of the men who had escaped from a prison in Port Vila in February, 2009. TheVanuatu Mobile Force had set out on what they called ‘Operation Clean-Up’ and their ambitionwas to recapture every prisoner. The report revealed that a more concealed ambition was to

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make sure they would not be physically able to escape again, and the escaped prisoners wereseverely beaten. This report caused a lot of attention in the media of Port Vila, reinforcing thegeneral public view of police brutality. The deceased convict suffered ‘32 different injuries tohis head, chest, abdomen, right upper limb, left upper limb, right lower limb, left lower limb,and back’ (Daily Post, March 5th 2010). This violence took place in the interrogation roomat the Vanuatu Mobile Force barracks, before the prisoner was passed on to the hospital. In thereport, it is documented that the VMF officers had promised that they would break every bonein his body and either kill him or leave him severely handicapped. The police blamed theprisoner’s death on his alleged abusive use of marijuana and alcohol before he was captured.These allegations were meant to confirm perceptions of the prisoner as corrupted by evilinfluences – also proven by his prison sentence for rape, an example of ‘crime againstmorality’. However, the official autopsy made it very clear that the prisoner had been beatento death by a club, under the presence of at least four police officers. There were alsospeculations that the police had killed another escapee who was never found.

During the course of the inquest, members of the VMF continually threatened the Coroner– a New Zealand official. Armed officers followed him, he received death threats and policemenacingly handled unsecured machine-guns during interviews. In addition, the Coronerreports that:

Some persons attempted to use ‘black magic’ to influence the outcome of the Inquestby laying a ‘magic stone’ outside the Inquest, apparently with the intention of makingthe Coroner forget evidence he heard during the Inquest (Coroner’s Report 2010:37).

This confirmed to many people that the police force was not only an instrument of directextra-judicial violence and brutality, but also that it experimented with using magic powersto subvert the course of justice and to create its own unofficial regime of justice.

In the conclusion to his report, the Coroner calls for greater political control over thepolice force since its growing paramilitary force regards itself as above the law (ibid.). Theinquest produced evidence that the VMF explicitly saw itself as an elite force with no dutiesto either country or politicians; only their own immediate superiors.

4However, the distinction

between the Police Force, Correctional Services and the Mobile Force also becomes blurredin this case, not least because the Commissioner of VPF, had also held leading positions bothat the Correctional Services and at the Mobile Force. There are lines of loyalty between thesethree policing institutions, despite internal divisions and misgivings. We can look at the policeas a unified movement, especially when it comes to ambitions about moral order and thestructuring of the future of the nation. Its allegiance and lines of authority are divided intodifferent sectors, and neither of the different authorities – the people and the Parliament withtheir concern for equality and fair justice, or Aid donors and their focus on accountability,building civil society and transparency - can control or even comprehend the new institutionalstatus the police force has assumed. Today, it has more especially become an institution thatmerges state forms of social control with nation-wide fears of the occult. These in turn are alsoblended with Aid donors’ fears of political chaos and economic insecurity. Despite beingsupposedly subject to foreign funding and supervision, the police force has assumed its ownjudicial and moral priorities. It has also used the new increase in resources to strengthen itsown moral pursuit of evil not just in its ordinary human form but more especially in the newsupernatural forms that threaten the nation.

THE VAMPIRE CASE

In the first months of 2010, a whole new field of dark forces suddenly started to unfold andreveal itself in Port Vila. The fears merged stereotypical notions from the field of kastom with

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new manifestations of evil borrowed from the Western world. The resulting moral anxietyrevealed a new sense of crisis in the urban community, which was fuelled by a generalizedsense that the greed for money and human substances had escaped all moral boundaries andhad even become coextensive with each other. These fears about new supernatural sorcerypractices legitimised a perceived need for new more coercive policing regimes to deal with theunusual forms of evil that were now invading society. In particular, the fears involved a rumourthat started to be spread in Port Vila around the 1st of February about a man who wasdescended half from Paama and half from Tongoa. He had been arrested after he was caughtallegedly drinking his girlfriend’s blood. This reportedly took place in the middle of town, inthe Man Ples settlement. This is a squatter settlement with a mixture of people from differentislands, many of them unemployed; many of them living in small houses or sheds set up onthe mercy of Port Vila landowners; and many of them restlessly wandering around town insearch of a way to earn income. When the girlfriend was hospitalized she was very weak witha low blood count, and it took her several weeks in the hospital to recover. When she came outof hospital, she and her parents went to see the Melanesian Brotherhood, the tasiu of theAnglican Church. In Vanuatu and Solomon islands, they are known to be able to divine thecause of illness and to detect nakaimas (Bislama for sorcery). The family told the tasiu thatthe young boyfriend had regularly drunk blood from her over the last year, since August 2009.The girl had shown them two marks from this blood-letting, one right under her left breast andone on her back.

5The tasiu prayed for her and then approached the young man. The girl

revealed the secret because she could no longer endure the stress of the situation she was in.He had regularly come to visit her when he urgently needed blood. According to the girl, hewas part of a group whose members used different forms of magic to achieve superhumanpowers. In order to gain their magic powers they needed to kill people at regular intervals. Theleague of young boys was operating underneath some form of occult hierarchy with a cultleader who had knowledge and access to these various forms of magic. This cult leader hadmade the boy drink a substance that was now living inside him like a creature, which gave himthe powers of strength and to walk through walls. According to the girlfriend it was thiscreature inside that came out and quenched its thirst when the boyfriend drank blood. His jawscame out like that of a dog, and one tooth, the size of a finger, pierced through her skin andinto her heart. When he was finished the boy would then wipe the open sore with a magicalleaf and it would heal instantly and leave behind only a bleak, dry mark. He would then runoff with his friends to kill and commit thefts and burglaries using his powers (Lattas, thiscollection).

After he was captured the boy was imprisoned in a house belonging to his family in theMan Ples settlement, and he was beaten up by his own relatives over the next days in order tomake him confess his activities. Chiefs from Tongoa had then interviewed the girl and shehad again exposed the marks from where he had drunk blood. She told them that after he hadbeen drinking he would boast about how powerful he had become, that he could change intoany kind of being or go through walls. He had instructed her not to swim in the sea or to goout of the house after giving blood, or else she would die. This had made her situationunbearable.

I interviewed one of the chiefs about this, and he described that after interrogating the girlhe was so upset that he couldn’t bear facing the boy. As he walked past him, the boy was justgrowling like a dog. No one could approach the boy at this point – they were all too afraid ofhis powers. It was only the tasiu of the Melanesian Brotherhood who could come near him,and the tasiu had been ‘holding him’ and neutralising his powers. Later, the chiefs alsointerrogated the boy and made him demonstrate how his beastly jaw came out and how hecould walk through the walls. I was told that they had to realize ‘that it was all true’, eventhough they could not believe it. The family of the boy had told them that it had all started afterone night when the boy had been smoking so much marijuana that he had fallen over and hadnot woken up until the next day. This sleep had allegedly made him weak and an easy target

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for the cult group. This reflects another popular fear that excessive marijuana is the source ofnew moral evils that know no bounds (Bell 2006; Halvaksz and Lipset 2006; Lindstrom 2006).Many deaths at the Port Vila Central Hospital are now officially recorded as due to the abuseof marijuana, which is rapidly merging with the dark forces of sorcery as a cause of death. Thechiefs in the Man Ples settlement attributed the supernatural activities of the boys in thesettlement to their restlessness; that they drifted around too much and thus picked up thedestructive practices of the town. The constant movement and the breaking down of theboundaries of community and sociality alarms people as youths congregate in newrelationships to smoke marijuana, listen to music and enjoy modern consumer pleasures.

The squatter settlement of Man Ples was on the whole very upset by these events. Acrowd of people gathered around the house of the accused boy, and during interrogations heconfessed that the group had managed to kill two persons in the neighbourhood and had alsobeen stealing and breaking into properties around the capital. One of those allegedly killed wasa prominent person who had formerly been a political advisor in the government. People Italked to linked these monstrous and murderous incidents to greed for blood, but also formoney and commodities. What’s more, people commented how the presence of Chinese storeswas fuelling new desires and the fact that youth had emerged as major consumers but withoutany obvious source of wealth.

However, many people were not entirely convinced that this new magic of blood lettingand drinking was really using kastom from one of the islands. I joined representatives of theAmbrym community as they went to the settlement and declared to the Tongoa chiefs thatthey had no knowledge of such magic, and that it was certain that it did not originate inAmbrym kastom. They wanted to prevent Ambrym being targeted as the scapegoat for thiscase, as had happened in previous cases. Some declared that this was a type of nakaimas thathad been drawn out of some kastom long forgotten and belonging to the island of Tongoa.Tongoa chiefs I talked to said that in some ways it resembled the kastom of before, linked tothe ancestor world, but it also appeared as something completely new. On national televisionit was said that a ‘Western millionaire’ was behind the group, and that he had supplied themwith magic that originated in the Western world. It was added that as the boy drank bloodfrom his girlfriend, he would become a white woman. Reportedly, a special tooth hadpreviously been inserted into the boy’s mouth before he took up drinking blood, and this toothhad been an instrument from African magic. However, this was also a version of these eventsthat people I talked to in the settlement of Man Ples did not recognize. What all of thesefantastic speculations collectively point to is how the global circulation of culture and practicesis posited as creating new monstrous possibilities: African black magic and modernsupernatural surgery are infiltrating Vanuatu beliefs to create something barely recognisableas kastom. It is this movement away from one’s cultural heritage and into a circulation ofculture - governed not by kinship, ceremonies or gifts but by money - that worries people.When culture or kastom dealing with magic and the occult begins to circulate as a commodity,it becomes dangerous as it is accessible to everyone. It becomes dangerous as it enters themarket place where everything can be bought and sold. Here the excessive pursuit of consumergoods exists alongside sorcery and magical powers which have also become commodities(Lattas 1993, 2010). Here modernity’s appropriation of life is figured as blood being the secretingredient that is siphoned off to sustain and create wealth (cf. Weiss 1998).

These speculations about new modern monstrous forms of magic were acknowledged bythe family of the boy, who consulted each other and decided they just wanted to kill him. Theysaw no other solution in getting rid of the dangerous beast inside of him - a force thatthreatened their life in the settlement but also Port Vila and Vanuatu as they knew it. However,the police interfered and managed to stop people taking action into their own hands. The policehad all along been consulting with the tasiu from Banks Islands, who reportedly had magicalprotection against black power. The tasiu prayed and gave the boy ‘Holy Water’, and managedto cure him of evil. United through their struggle against sorcery, the police and the Anglican

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brothers were engaged in an innovative redefinition of state power. The tasiu had only recentlyestablished a branch in Port Vila. During the unrest in Honiara, in the Solomon Islands, thetasiu were credited and celebrated for taking on more and more the work of ‘clearance’, thecleaning out of sorcery and evil magic from villages. In the civil war they also played asignificant role as mediators and peace-makers. Some were even targeted and killed for thisengagement (Carter 2006).

The young ‘vampire’ or fampa, as he was widely called in Port Vila, was held in custodyin his house under the protection of the police and tasiu. Police believed he would be in dangerafter having named the other men reportedly in his group. They were expected to try to killhim. On Sunday 7th of February, there was supposed to be a community meeting over this casein the Man Ples Tongoa meeting ground. There nakaimas or sorcery accusations were meantto be settled in a customary manner by a council of chiefs in an open meeting. People fromall over Port Vila gathered to hear out the evidence and to get the full list of names of thefampa’s accomplices. The reported list, based on the boy’s testimony complicated matters forit included the name of a well-known elder of the Church of Christ and other prominent people.The tasiu was consulted over this list and went over it to verify its accuracy. He interrogatedthose who claimed to be innocent. In my interview with the tasiu, he explained that he endedup supporting the elder, because he had seemed very afraid and this was unusual for a sorcerer.

The planned public meeting did not take place. At the scheduled time, a sudden, explosiverain started and people all over the capital suspected the league of sorcerers was seeking tosabotage the meeting. When the rain passed, the police started to take matters further intotheir own hands. They were seen driving in and out of the settlement, and each time they hadgroups of men locked up in their mobile cages. A note was also put up on the gate of the ManPles Tongoa meeting ground by the community chiefs informing people that the nakaimascourt was cancelled (see Fig 2). I was told by some of these chiefs that the case was now goingto be handled by the police.

Fig 2. Public notice on a fence in the Man Ples settlement February 7th: ‘Sorrythere will be no court of nakaimas today’ (Photo: Rio, 2010).

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Further accusations and suspicions had led to three other boys being captured by thecommunity, who beat them up and then handed them over to the police – all based on thetestimony of the Tongoa fampa. The three men were held captive in gaol until their case cameup in the Magistrate Court. On Monday 8th the Daily Post newspaper reported:

Following the revelations of this young informant on break-ins in the Capital and‘nakaemas’, Police have checked the households he said they raided. Police havealready retrieved 2/3s of the stolen goods and after cross checking the goods werereturned to their rightful owners, which the informant had correctly identified. Inaddition Police have checked these houses for physical signs of forced entry forbreak-ins but there were none and that leaves no rational explanation of how thesepeople entered the house and stole the goods. According to Police investigators ifthey could establish the use of supernatural forces to enter locked premises thenperhaps it could also be established that sorcerers use such forces to take the lives ofothers. But it is going to be very difficult to establish this and that is something manypeople know and are afraid of.

Many people were surprised by the action of the police in this case. Some would have likedthe public meeting to have taken place so as to hear the evidence themselves and maybealso take part as witnesses. For many, it was also a relief that the whole case was removedfrom their settlement. Everyone knew it to be a dangerous case that could potentiallyexpand to include some of their own relatives and friends. The case also threatened toinvoke violent revenge from vampire’s supernatural league of sorcerers.

For many months nothing was heard of this case, though pastors mentioned it in theSunday service. They used it to remind their congregation that this was the result of peoplenot coming to church and not looking after their children and immediate family. A man whomI talked to in Man Ples claimed that the accused group of young men had used magic to getthe police and public to forget, lusum tingting, about the case (Lattas, Mitchell, this collection).

In the magistrate court, the case was at first broken up into separate cases, where thePublic Prosecutor mainly focused on the issue of illegal breaking and entering. During one ofthe hearings leading up to the court case, the Public Prosecutor informed me that the fampahimself was now healed – that he had been ‘cured’ from his affliction by the remedies givento him by the tasiu.

6In May, the police and the Public Prosecutor felt confident that they had

a firm handle on the case. They had arrested four men, including the man whom theyconsidered to be the leader of the group, a middle-aged man from southeast Ambrym. Theywere not going to prosecute the vampire himself, as his girlfriend had consented to the bloodletting and since he had cooperated with the police. He now became the main witness for theprosecution. The official charge against the other four defendants was expanded to coverintentional homicide of a well known political advisor to the government. Before I left PortVila, I interviewed the Public Prosecutor who was still preparing the court case. He waswaiting for forensic evidence, specifically bloodstains on the victim’s trousers, on a stone atthe scene of crime, and on a cover that the suspects had allegedly used when they transportedhis corpse from the scene of crime to where they removed its inner organs. A chief fromAmbrym was going to be brought in as an expert witness to report on how this murder wascommitted by magical means. The victim was allegedly first drugged whilst he was drinkingkava and then dragged to a remote place and killed. The offenders removed his vital organs,including his testicles. He was then brought back to life and walked around as normal until hefell over dead in his home a few days later. His wife had noticed that his underwear wasmissing and other mysterious things.

The Public Prosecutor informed me that all these incidents in the Man Ples area, whichhad led to the police operation, were not being viewed in isolation but as part of a larger chainof incidents involving sorcery and magic in the settlement. There reportedly had been constant

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problems with ‘bad magic’, especially to do with seducing and compromising women. For awhile, some women had been waking up naked in their own homes and suspected that theyhad unknowingly been taken advantage of by men who changed their appearance in order tolook like their husbands. A man from Ambrym had some years back been clubbed to death inthe settlement by the community for this reason. Even more seriously, there was much rumouraround town in the aftermath of the vampire case that the league of sorcerers was nowexpanding its activity and thus needed to kill more and more people. Every death in Port Vilawas now potentially the result of this group’s hunger for blood and power and for acquiringmoney.

7The police felt that they had to take control of this situation by launching this operation

into the Man Ples area and arresting key figures engaged in a more dangerous conspiratorialform of magic.

THE MORALITY OF BLOOD LETTING

This case demonstrates how global influences are becoming creatively localised to appear astruly rooted in local social relationships. It picks up a widespread symbolic structure of thecontemporary post-colonies; that of blood-letting related to perverted capitalist relations ofbuying and selling human substance.

8These events seem also to resonate with a recent global

mass media fascination with vampires and the occult. The Twilight books and films and theTrue blood TV series are popular among youth in Port Vila, along with other Westernsubstances such as marijuana. But in the new urban squatter settlements, blood-letting also hasits own more specific localised meaning. In the Man Ples area 60 to 70 % of adults areunemployed. They live off their relatives who work, and there is a concept for expressing thisway of draining relatives of money: stikim nek (i.e. ‘sticking neck’). This is the only way toget by, and it involves wandering around town every day looking for relatives with money. Thevampire metaphor of sucking blood resonates with these local meanings. The daily wanderinginvolves watching the incredible display of wealth of consumables and tourism in tax-freeshops, restaurants and resorts, a type of wandering that calls for reflections over inequality,relations of production, poverty and development, but also the seemingly free and ready accessto consumables. Many in the Port Vila squatter settlements see themselves as victims,especially as being robbed by politicians and business owners, particularly the new class ofAsian businessmen. This reviled elite seems to live an enchanted urban life of pleasure andwealth, and this leads to speculation and rumours about magical practices that can reversesituations of poverty to provide access to modern wealth.

For Taussig, in South America, a kind of magical demonic imagery emerges from themovement between different relations of production; from the domestic subsistence mode tothe capitalist mode (Taussig 1980). Likewise, in Port Vila, blood letting (stikim nek) becomesan ambiguous humorous way of rendering the encounter of kinship-gift relations with acapitalist mode of production and exchange. The view of town life from the perspective of therural areas, i.e. from the moral perspective of the domestic mode of production, is of amonstrosity of blood-letting that risks running wild. The vampire case thus comes as nosurprise; it is a symbolic formulation and caricature of existing popular understandings. Sinceagricultural production is not a possibility for the new urban generation, within the developingculture of town life, stikim nek is how relatives bleed and feed off each other using the moralorder of the domestic mode of production,. More especially, borrowing money is the only waymany men can make a living without submitting to the morally problematic and demeaningwork of selling and buying goods or labour. It is unemployed women who try to make smolbisnis (i.e. small-scale business) by selling clothes they have sewn, food they have cooked, orcrafts they have made or bought from suppliers. Some set up small stalls with souvenirs fortourists or they sell snacks for people to eat at the kava bars. Some also sell sexual favours atkava bars and there are rumours about both young girls and mothers who take part in producingpornographic videos that are for sale in local neighbourhoods. Whether such rumours are

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totally true or not, they fuel a perception of women and sexuality being forced out of thefamily in a desperate search for money and subsistence, but also in a search for consumergoods and modern pleasures. These perceptions of growing immorality are seen to underpinthe lawless nature of violence and crime in urban areas which is seen as directed not just atmeeting subsistence needs but new urban pleasures that cannot ever be fully satiated. Theincrease in urban violence and rape against women is seen in these moral terms.

The relation between the vampire and his girlfriend joins together many of these themesto create new articulations of a fantastic reality. The case remains legally ongoing andunresolved. It is part of a symbolic construction of poor urban settlements as a moral challengeto the nation of Vanuatu. The police, who now have access to greater resources, have soughtto meet this challenge by confronting the disordering evil of the occult. Using the tasiu astheir moral allies, the police embraced the story of the vampire as a privileged case throughwhich they could attack several issues in the settlements. Ironically, police will rarely arrestyouth for actual theft or smoking marijuana and never take action over girls engaging inprostitution, but the growth of the occult which is now associated with these phenomena allowsthem to attack the true evil that is revealing itself to be associated with all these other pettierforms of immorality. At this popular level, there is an alternative national discourse aboutdevelopment and progress, which is quite different from the concerns of AusAid and NZAid.The actions taken by police are rooted in popular understandings of the squatter settlement asa hotspot for satanic forces and illegitimate violence. This is in clear continuity with the battlesdescribed by Mitchell in this collection – between state order and alternative orders.

THE POLICE AS A SANCTIFIED, RIGHTEOUS BODY

It should be obvious from my ethnography and arguments that the police are not acceptedas saviours in a straightforward way. They are often seen to operate as a wild force, asunpredictable and capricious. Increasingly, the police also operate under a strong convictionof their own sovereign status as first and foremost a protector of the nation of Vanuatu. Thepolice force perceives itself as an instrument for the good nation, almost to the degree that itcan acquire the quality of a holy or at least sanctified institution. As is also reported fromFiji (Trnka, this collection), the Vanuatu Police Force has become increasingly involved inthe born-again Christian movement. When the old police commissioner stepped down forretirement in 2009, the national newspaper reported the following:

Lieutenant Colonel Lui Phatu before handing over the sword of command to hissuccessor of whom he called ‘Brother’ left the new Police Commissioner JoshuaBong with these words: Joshua, Do you love Vanuatu?.!

Lt. Colonel Phatu said he is referring to the words of Jesus Christ who asked SimonPeter three times: ‘Do you love me?’

He told the new Police Commissioner to put Vanuatu first in his new journey as thenew commanding officer for Vanuatu (Vanuatu Daily Post October 6th 2009)

By drawing on John 21: 15-17 and the final call of Christ to his disciples, these police officersand the public would also recall the next sentence in the Bible: ‘Feed my sheep’, as Jesus askshis disciples to bring forth the gospel to the world. In the face of his disciples’ wavering faith(for Simon and Peter had already denied Jesus three times), the message is that the pursuit ofwhat is good depends on faithful followers seeking to create the unified kingdom of the Lord.The dedication of the head of police is likened to a sacred quest where the police commissionerbecomes a holy figure defending the nation from evil, and by implication from both thecorruption of politicians and the new satanic forms of sorcery that the market place of desireis promoting.

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Alongside their work with modern white advisors, the police also participate in a modernreligious framework that directs their attention towards policing the realm of the occult. Therethe violence of the police can assume a sacred redemptive quality. In his book Violence andthe Sacred, Rene Girard observes that even in a secular state system of justice underpinningthe basis of punishment can be found moral concepts of a religious nature. He adds:

While acknowledging the differences, both functional and mythical betweenvengeance, sacrifice, and legal punishment, it is important to recognize theirfundamental identity. Precisely because these three institutions are essentially thesame they tend to adopt the same types of violent responses in times of crisis (Girard1988: 25).

Increasingly, in the Christian nation of Vanuatu, legitimate violence directed at the suppressionof other forms of violence perceived as illegitimate is heavily structured around certain newreadings of the Bible that emphasise a moral discourse of righteous violence. This discourseblends customary and biblical religious meanings of vengeance and sacrifice with secularjudicial-legal forms of punishment to create a modern witch-hunt. The police practices drawand rearticulate anew more widespread popular perceptions of remedial justice so as to createnew ways of seeking out and subduing evil within a state perspective (Rio 2010; cf. Comaroffand Comaroff 2004).

Accusations of posen or nakaimas in Port Vila have become part of popular fears of occultevil which can turn family members against each other. In the case of the accused vampire,he was held captive in his neighbourhood, and the righteous people of the communitylegitimately beat him up over several days, in order to get him to tell the ‘truth’. Participatingin these unofficial popular forms of justice and anger, different relatives attacked someonewho was their son, nephew or cousin. They beat him so severely that he confessed and gaveup other accomplices’ names. The violence produced its own self-legitimising evidence.However, the beating was also justified not just as an attack for correcting a wayward son ornephew, but also a cure for removing an evil force that has obstructed and captured his trueidentity. The violence was not directed towards the individual self, but rather towards arelational field wherein one aspect of a person had to be separated from another. This is notviolence or vengeance towards the person you know so well, it is violence that tries to retrievethat person you know so well from the corrupted figure of evil that has captured and hiddenaway his true identity. If the person dies in the process, you will at least retrieve the authenticbody of the person. This is better than living with that other corrupted body, which alsorepresents a threat to other persons.

The direction of the witch-hunt in this Christian context is ambiguous. For outsiders itmay look like punishment or vengeance, but for relatives of the accused it is also aboutseparating the good from the evil so as to restore moral integrity and balance in the person.As such, it is first and foremost an act of order and purity, and in the process the victim canbe sacrificed for the sake of ending violence and preventing more corruption of the religiousethical order that underpins society.

However, when the scale of this type of popular ethical logic is incorporated and upgradedto the level of the nation-state, and with police as its instrument, then the violence takes on adifferent sacrificial nature. It moves from the level of interpersonal relationships between kinand villagers into the relationships between national guardians and their subjects. Even thoughpolice officers and their family are themselves inhabitants of the settlements, and so togethershare in the moral panic and logic of the local witch-hunt when it breaks out, their action aspolice is only one step removed from the righteous popular violence of their neighbours.Indeed, police violence becomes legitimated as the righteous violence of the nation. It ispossible to interpret the police violence and killing as sacrificial acts rather than acts ofvengeance or acts of blunt brutality, which is contrary to the New Zealander Coroner, Justice

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N. Dawson’s report on the killing of the escaped prisoner. This murder occurs within a newreligious nationalist ideology where the state is vigorously reconfiguring itself as needing tobe built truly on the word of God. The restructuring and expansion of the Vanuatu police forceneeds to take into account how the police are expanding deeper into the surveillance ofsettlements and people’s lives, but also that the police, like the rest of the nation, is strugglingwith highly potent social and moral issues that are being increasingly formulated in theologicalterms (Reed, Trnka, this collection). I interpret the killing of the escaped prisoners – corruptedby marijuana and a sinful life – and the new investment of resources in solving the vampirecase, as the first signs of a new type of righteous violence in the post-colonial Vanuatu nation.

THE FUNCTIONING OF THE POST-COLONIAL STATE: NEW MASTER-SERVANTRELATIONS AND MORAL ORDER

Although I cannot do it fully here, it is necessary to historicise the state and the nation inVanuatu, in order to situate the police within changing social structures and processes.Nationalisms always emerge with specific cultural and ontological properties that are allowedto take hold under the regimes of specific nation-states (Foster 1991; Kapferer 1988), and inthe following I will sketch some emerging properties of a Vanuatu national imagery. Thenation-state in Vanuatu goes back to the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebridesthat was institutionally in place in 1906. As in other colonies, state governance was centredon the relationship between plantations and workers, and the state apparatuses worked toadminister these relationships in addition to safe-guarding the flow of goods and labour toand from the colonies (Philibert 1981). This was dually organised so that the French and theBritish administrations had their own police, their own District Agents, and their ownadministrative buildings and hospitals (Jacomb 1914; Rodman 1985). Both the French andthe British police recruited officers from the Melanesian population, and each patrolled thestreets of Port Vila and the outer islands to some degree. There was very little unrest andcriminal activity in this period; patrols mostly spent their time arresting labourers who weredrunk - as public drunkenness was illegal for labourers under the constitution. This disciplinarycontrol of the labour force is one legacy of the post-colonial police force (Mitchell 2000).Relations of sorcery took place beyond colonial control, and were to a large degree left to thedomain of customary regulation. This meant in practice that sorcery used to function as adisciplining order of its own, as an alternative to the state. To a large extent, the colonial statedid not concern itself with sorcery as it was partly viewed as a religious matter. This ischanging in the current post-colonial world, as sorcery becomes redefined as having escapedthe control of chiefs and big men so as to acquire an immoral demonic quality where it doesnot so much restore order as subvert the possibilities for moral Christian order.

In terms of these contemporary events, there is also another side to the legacy that thepolice force inherited from the colonial situation. It is important to note the close connectionthat existed between Church, state and moral order from the very early colonial period (Allen1968). The churches have always been associated with moving the spirit from ‘darkness’ to‘daylight’ and with promoting justice and righteous order in the colony and later in theindependent nation. Those who represented the colonial government on the islands werealways local men who were appointed Assessors and subject only to the District Agents. Onewell known example is William Tariliou from Tongoa Island. In 2010, at the same time as thevampire case was stirring up the Tongoa community, I took part in a celebration of his memoryorganised by his descendants. His sons and grandsons called for a return to the kind ofdiscipline and respect that he had enforced in the Shepherd Islands, and they prayed that oneday they themselves could enter government so as to honour this legacy. William was knownas Gavman William throughout the Shepherd Islands, and he policed the whole island groupfor many years. He had worked on the Queensland sugar-plantations, where he had trained tobecome a priest, and after he returned to Tongoa in 1907, he took up his birthright as a chief.

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Through good relations with the Norwegian missionary, Michelsen, the District Agents andthe plantation owners he became a colonial Assessor and received a royal medal for his servicein regulating village life. His duties included presiding over local village courts and disputes,but he also importantly upheld the national laws of the New Hebrides Government and itsrules, which included: encouraging church-going, cutting of grass, keeping the hamlet tidy,building proper toilets, fencing-in pigs, and sleeping on beds rather than the floor. These werejustified as health regulations but also were associated with Christian ‘daylight.’ People speakof these regulations as bringing ‘respect,’ as creating the dignity of a new moral person. TheGavman and its policing regulations provided for order in the islands, protecting andpromoting life. William gave permission to his policemen to kill any domestic pigs that werewalking about freely and to punish people who did not follow the regulations of tidiness andrespect. During those same years on Tanna island, there was also the ‘Tanna Law’ created andimposed by returned Queensland labourers espousing Christian values. In this local movement,there was a strong sense of the need for local state institutions to create better order anddiscipline that encompassed and managed all the minutiae of everyday life that escaped thegrasp of the colonial state:

Koukarei, Praun, Lomhai, and the other leaders of Christian organizations declarednew codes of personal conduct and bodily control that outlawed customary practicesof kava drinking, dance, penis wrapping, work and amusement on Sundays, and alsodrinking, swearing, and adultery. Tuesday became a mandatory day of organizedlabor. Christians worked to clear and maintain a system of horse trails (to improvecirculation of Christian truth statements), to clean and rebuild villages in the style ofthe new order, and at other set tasks. Christian leaders organized new police forcesto arrest those yet unenlightened people who violated the hegemonically establishedduties and truths of the new doctrine. In 1906, they also convened courts where theysat in judgment to try and punish sinners and falsifiers. (Lindstrom 1990:39)

Consequently, at the everyday level of people’s lives, the governance of the New Hebridescolonial state was to a large degree in the hands of local religious leaders. Thus a form ofindigenous government was constructed in the islands that attributed a more real content to themeaning of governance, nation and state. Simultaneously, at the same time asGavman Williamwas a colonial Assessor and an Elder of the Church in Tongoa, he was also part of a silentmovement of opposition to the colonial regime, an attitude he had already adopted when hereturned from Queensland, and his foremost legacy to his descendants was a wish that thepeople of the New Hebrides should one day become independent and self-sufficient in theireveryday needs. All over Vanuatu, the movement of Christian law thus became the start of anindigenous concept of a state form and justice that during the intense year of the Independencecould emerge relatively swiftly as a replacement for the colonial state. More than the colonialstate-apparatuses themselves, the indigenous emergence of policing and loa (i.e. law) wasdedicated to the moral functioning and structuration of everyday life in its minute forms.Paradoxically, this kind of self-governance and self-policing that Gavman William and TannaLaw represented were the first steps in the particular ideological formation that was thecolonial nation-state – and that also features in the structures of the Independent Vanuatunation-state today. The violence that now often appears as a result of ‘traditionalism’,‘brutality’, or ‘corruption’ is instead emerging from contemporary processes that particularlystruggle with that colonial moral imagery of law and order (Kapferer 2005, 2010).

However, the master-servant relation between ‘white man’ and ‘black man’, whichunderpinned the order and functioning of the colonial state, was at odds with this emergingsense of a dignified self and a just self-governing structure of loa. The relation betweenindigenous people and the colonialists was a complex one: on the one hand a relation of mutualadmiration and dependence, but on the other a relation of submission and scepticism. Even inthe 1970s when Independence became feasible, many villages around the country were divided

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about the role of ‘Master’ in their new nation. There were those who had come to see ‘whitemen’ as equals and brothers and who wanted to keep them, and there were those who sawthem only as suppressors and who wanted to get rid of them. During the political upheaval andriots, the big men of the victorious Vanu’aku Party, founded on Christian values mostly fromthe Presbyterian and Anglican Churches and tightly connected into the indigenous movementsof loa, were insisting on getting rid of the old Masta. This was on two grounds: the land ofthe New Hebrides belonged to people in the islands; and, perhaps even more importantly; itwas un-natural in a Christian nation that one man should be master of another. The latter wasat the heart of what has been called ‘Melanesian liberation theology’, with its ideal that ‘allare equal before God’ (Miles 1998:96). In seeking to overturn the colonial state, the activistsfor the new Christian nation of Vanuatu first and foremost attacked colonialism as a principleof hierarchy and alienation. Independence in 1980 was dedicated to creating a nation of free,equal Christian citizens who would establish their own more effective form of policing andmoral order.

The new nation-state, the ni-Vanuatu state, was thus founded on the principles of loa andMelanesian equality. There was a suspicion of any indication of dependence and a deep fearthat capital and labour would again corrupt relationships and create new forms of inequality.People are deeply sceptical of taxes, whether to the state or to the churches. For this reason,money, be it as salaries or development aid, is a constant source of disruption, corruption,envy and suspicion. The President, the Parliament, the Government and administrative serviceinstitutions such as schools, hospitals, police, immigrations and even the Post Office, areconstantly troubled by a fear of corruption and the evidence of it. In this way, the fear of new‘masters’ haunts the modern state in its various forms, and ‘evil’ is the common denominatorfor all manifestations of new inequalities. For the people in the villages and in the squattersettlements of town, post-colonial state institutions often no longer supply a means for realisingtheir needs, like the plantations did - a place to seek medicine, healing, reliable income orwelfare. Instead these state institutions have become places fraught with tense relationships,illicit powers and danger. Though pleased to be rid of the colonial regimes of France andEngland, people experience ni-Vanuatu state institutions as disjointed inefficient social systemsthat threaten to impose new inequalities, greed, extortion and exploitation (Lattas, thiscollection).

Ni-Vanuatu citizens now fear that they live in a disfigured master-servant relationship oftheir own making. In that context, people are nostalgic about the colonial government, aboutthe old life in the plantations and many surprisingly seek work in resorts or in businesses fornew white ’masters’, work that does not in any way cover their living expenses and where theyare continually verbally abused and badly treated. The rationality of this lies within theshadows of the colonial state – as these workplaces function to some degree as a substitute forthe old days when the plantations were at least sheltered away from any form of dangerousinequality among one’s own. One of the main issues for the new nation-state has beenaccusations and attacks on those who are blamed for reinstalling dependence, hierarchy andinjustice. Inequality has become the underlying horror of any ni-Vanuatu relationship, smallscale and large scale, and the eruption of jealousy and sorcery is especially potent when oneis concerned with holding office in government or a state institution. It is symptomatic thatamong the most dangerous places in Port Vila with respect to nakaimas in the eyes of theurban ni-Vanuatu population is the Port Vila Central Hospital. There people are seen going inand out all the time, some carry sick people but some are observed just going and coming andthey are believed to be trafficking sorcery remedies. State schools around the country arelikewise always infested with rumours about sorcery among the staff. This is my experiencefrom the Ranon Secondary School in Ambrym, where the school could not get a principal tostay on because of the fear of sorcery among the Ambrym employees. Recently there was alsoa very serious case on Maewo where a chiefly council decided to attack two men becausethey had been suspected of tormenting the staff at the Gambule Junior Secondary School in

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Maewo Island with black magic. The two men were then axed to death on Ambae as they hadtried to escape (Vanuatu Daily Post March 5th 2010). When I interviewed a Pastor of thePresbyterian Church in Port Vila about this, he defended the chiefs of Maewo as being in theirright to commit these murders. ‘If it was true’ that the two men had used sorcery to tormentthe school then this was an evil that the community could not bear to live with. They could bekilled legitimately in the name of God.

Likewise there are now many examples of how the police force is heavily involved in therealm of sorcery and enforcing a new moral formulation of good versus evil. We have seen thatit is widely believed that the police force itself is a thriving place for what is called nakaimasor posen in Bislama. This is tightly connected to a Christian rhetoric and worldview that thedark forces are lurking underneath social relations that are poisoned with envy and greed.Paradoxically, even though the police perceive itself as a tool for creating loa and purity, it isat the same time heavily marked itself by relations of inequality and thus jealousy. In 2003, apolice commander died under suspicious circumstances at the work place, and at the funeral,Prime Minister Edward Natapei, who is also a Presbyterian Elder, warned the Vanuatu Police:

Do not be jealous of each other whenever there is a promotion in the force. The HolyScripture says: ‘For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses hislife for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the wholeworld, yet forfeit his soul? (Pacific Islands Report 30th September, 2003)

In this discourse, the nation is directed to place its destiny and energy into an epic moralstruggle of the good and the bad, the righteous and the jealous, Christianity and Evil, lightnessand darkness, and progress and kastom. This cosmic struggle reveals itself in the everydaydisruptions caused by sickness and death. That the police force is a hotspot for experiencingand articulating such relationships is hardly surprising, given their use of judicial power, theirconcern with rank and hierarchy, and their use of violence (Mitchell 2000). It is maybesurprising to outside observers that a state institution, like the police force, should beinfluenced by notions of magic and sorcery, but the social ontology of evil is in factfundamental to the structuring of the modern Vanuatu nation.

Within popular discourse, Vanuatu is spoken of as a chosen nation, a pure nation in theeyes of God (Eriksen 2009a, 2009b). Such idealizations are in contrast to the impurity ofcurrently perceived activities in state institutions and politics. This gives rise to continualefforts by churchly representatives to purify the state and its institutions. Every first Mondayof each month, Prime Minister Natapei prays for the nation in his house, with two or threechosen pastors from different Pentecostal ministries. They pray for upcoming sessions of theParliament, if there is unrest, fragmentation or motions of no confidence, they pray for theprogress of the national economy, they pray for the success of the building of a new road, orthey pray for better health and less sorcery and evil. These are all things that threaten to harmthe benevolent nation by continuously exposing it to the powers of fragmentation andinequality.

The conception of the new nation that arose in the Independence movement is largelymaintained and upheld today through a churchly discourse of equality, purity, unity and loaand rispek. This church discourse calls for these national ideals to be acted upon, and embracedby the police. This nowadays can mean a need to use violence to attack and subdue the forcesthat threaten the nation with a corruption of its purity. The police force as a modern instrumentfor achieving a benevolent, holy nation is partly rearticulating anew the legacy from thecolonial Gavman and Assessors of loa. The new evils to be policed are not village hygiene anddiscipline, but urban relations centred on the perceived need and greed for money. That collegegirls now sell sex in the kava bars and are said to take part in pornographic videos and thatyoung unemployed boys wander around town in order to get money for marijuana, alcohol andvideo films evokes fears about modern Satanic powers merging with customary Melanesianforms of evil. The police are placed in the middle of this social field, not primarily because

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this is where they foresee civil unrest, but because this is where the major moral challengesto society lie.

My argument might seem contradictory. On the one hand, I have suggested that the policeforce is a body outside the state, perhaps even acting against the state, fragmented by asituation of foreign aid intervention and lack of political authority. In this sense, I argue thatthe police force takes on the role of defending the nation because the state has failed its dutiesin the service of ni-Vanuatu. On the other hand, I have acknowledged that the police force isa state institution, and in this sense part of the state’s expansion into new realms of activity,including realms hitherto left to the authority of the customary chiefs. The first point impliesa fragmentation of the state, while the latter implies a consolidation. But in order to betterunderstand these developments and being able to state these seemingly contradictory points,we need to rethink the way we conceptualize the modern state. In this Vanuatu material wemaybe see the emergence of what Kapferer calls the ‘corporate state’, sprouting out of thecolonial nation-state. By ‘corporate state’ he implies a competing formation structured onhorizontal networks, charismatic authority and employing locally what we might termcommunity governance models. This is a state formation that has been encompassed under thenation-state in the era of colonialism, but is now emerging as the encompassing structure inthe modern interaction between corporations, foreign (former colonial) development agencies,NGOs and state bureaucracy in the era of globalization (Kapferer 2010). Relating to thatargument we can foresee how state institutions such as police become redefined. They are nolonger operating vertically to implement order and control, but instead become horizontallystructured dynamics, spreading their allegiance to manifold authorities, and occupyingthemselves directly with human life in new and innovative ways. As we have seen, post-colonial police take up some legacies of colonial policing (e.g. moral regulation and directaction on inter-personal moral issues) while abandoning other (e.g. the intimacy with localleadership), but the resulting structure is an institution that appears both wild anduncontrollable and morally righteous at the same time. Shadows of the colonial ideology ofnationalism, equality and freedom continue to structure its motives, but in chaotic anddisorderly ways. I am thus proposing that the expansion of the police into new arenas ofinvolvement for national sentiments signals a weakening of the nation-state, but astrengthening of a corporate state that forces itself up from the relations between the economicsphere of land-rights and business, foreign aid programs and the Vanuatu nation-state. Thesentiments of nationalism are set loose from direct nation-state bearings, but are now enforcedthrough the churchly discourse of the holy nation. The police force is now operating inside theoccult itself (e.g. as seen in the magical attack on the Coroner’s work) and in company withoperators of divination (e.g. the tasiu of the Melanesian brotherhood and the Ambrym divinerin the court case) and this is testimony to a re-definition of state power.

CONCLUSION

In the first months of 2010 Port Vila town saw evidence of new types of violence and peoplewere to some degree shocked about the brutality of their own nation. At the same time as thevampire case took everyone by surprise, one was struck by the killing of the two sorcerers inMaewo island and also of the possible killing of two escaped prisoners. It seemed human lifeitself was at stake and it became apparent that murder was underpinning the workings of thetwo foremost institutions of authority. Supposedly the killings in Maewo had been sanctionedby a council of chiefs in order to clean out sorcery. It was believed in Maewo that thesesorcerers stood in the way of the development and progress of the island (The Independent 20.March 2010). The killings of the prisoners had been sanctioned by the police force, and it wasvery clear from the Coroner’s report that the police under the Police Commissioner saw thesekillings as legitimate - as a means to rebuild respect in the prison system and to clean outsome elements from the town that had to do with the abuse of marijuana and other suspected

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‘crimes against morality’ such as rape. It became apparent in letters to the newspapers and inmy conversations with people that many agreed about the legitimacy of these killings.

In order to understand these developments we should take into account that ni-Vanuatucitizens are facing a new situation that is to some degree enigmatic to them. The police fill anew space as particular kinds of operators under these changed circumstances. This iscomparatively similar to what Geschiere describes from parts of Cameroon, where the stateis ‘called in’ to handle a situation where the circumstances of witchcraft are so changed thatthey can no longer be met with local mechanisms of divination (Geschiere and Fisiy 1994:333-335). People are ready and willing to accept an intervention – the ‘State against sorcery’ assummarised by Rowlands and Warnier (1988:129) - in relationships wherein a model ofexchange or kinship is no longer sufficient. The appearance of the vampire only underlineshow estranged new manifestations of sorcery or magic have become, and how new relationsof poverty and greed create demons that people can no longer morally accept as truly inherentin local kastom. These incidents are then instead ‘translated’ into a vocabulary of the idealnation. When it comes to violence this is no longer an order of exchange or compensation, butbecomes an order of sacrifice.

One Sunday I was attending one of the new Pentecostal churches in a Port Vila settlement.The pastor is also well known for having been previously an elected chief from his homeisland of Tongoa and a chairman of the National Council of Chiefs. This Sunday he chose togo to the Old Testament for a reference to the building of the nation. Referring to thenationhood of the Israelites, sacrifice and the urgent necessity of a trust in God in the midstof drought, starvation and moral peril, the pastor made the whole congregation read aloudtogether, 1st King 18, the part where Elijah proves the powers of God over the occult beliefsof the prophets. He challenges the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal to make a fire andput a bull on top of it, and to make their god Baal put light to it. Even though they werenumerous, they could not make it happen. Elijah mocked them for this and he then performedthe miracle himself:

Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt-offering, the wood, the stones,and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. When all the peoplesaw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The LORD indeed is God; the LORD indeedis God.’ Elijah said to them, ‘Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of themescape.’ Then they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon,and killed them there.

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In this quote from the Bible we see an allegory for many contemporary events and processesin Port Vila and the nation. Current developments are mirrored in the world of the Bible, withthe social reality of Port Vila reliving an eternal paradigmatic struggle. This passage evokedthe hardships of creating a Christian nation and especially the sacrifices, even the sacrificesof human beings, which were necessary to accomplish this. The sacrifice of the unbelieversand the unjust, those who remained true to heathen beliefs or who adopted coveted new formsof the occult, were legitimate and necessary sacrifices for the development of the pure VanuatuNation.

Within this same realm of reasoning, it is also necessary for the sanctified institution ofthe police force to manifest their presence in the areas of Port Vila where it sees displayed themanifestations of the beginning of disbelief, evil power and demonic forms of violence. It isinteresting to note the double, local and foreign, interest in police: whereas foreign aid andinvestors want the police to uphold ‘civil order’, ni-Vanuatu police first and foremost aim tokeep moral, cosmological order. And so the case of the vampire represented not just areconstitution of kastom and sorcery within the town sphere, but is evidence of how the stateitself is also being reconfigured. An occult form of the state is emerging or is beingexperimented with - as it struggles with and participates in the occult. Contrary to the view thatcentralised policing does not have legitimacy in Melanesia (Dinnen and McLeod 2009, cf.

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Lattas and Rio, this collection), the Vanuatu police force and military is more and morestrengthening its state infrastructure of control and implementing its moral ambition of creatinga pure nation.

NOTES

1. This article is based on fieldwork in Port Vila in 2010 under the research project ‘Pacific Alternatives: CulturalHeritage and Political Innovation in Oceania’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. I want to thankAnnelin Eriksen, Kjetil Fosshagen, Lamont Lindstrom, Thorgeir Storesund Kolshus and Andrew Lattas formost valuable comments on earlier drafts. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for seriouscommentary.

2. Since my first fieldwork, in 1995, I have been following changes in sorcery on Ambrym Island and Port Vila.Throughout Vanuatu, Ambrym Island is feared for its sorcery, which is a prominent everyday aspect of peoples’social anxieties and an important rationale for action. This has not yet been fully acknowledged in Vanuatuanthropology, with the exceptions of the Rodmans (Rodman and Rodman 1991; W. Rodman 1993), Tonkinson(1981) and Mitchell (2000).

3. http://www.ausaid.gov.au/country/cbrief.cfm?DCon=6034_4754_8370_9688_2737&CountryID=174. An independent Member of Parliament, Ralph Regenvanu, challenged the Australian High Commission to take

up the consequence of the Coroner’s report and stop all financial support of the VMF. He implied that theVanuatu population did not see any reason for supporting a paramilitary force, which was now being largelycreated and financed by Australia. He could not understand why it should be allowed to continue when it couldnot be controlled either by parliament or the Australian High Commissioner (Daily Post 22.March).

5. This version of events is based on interviews with the tasiu who handled the case, with chiefs from the TongoaCouncil of Chiefs for Port Vila and observations made as I accompanied some of my Ambrym and Tongoafriends in their daily activities in the Man Ples area the days and weeks after this event.

6. The Public Prosecutor had interrogated another boy under the assumption that the power of the sorcery of thevampire had been so powerful that it had transferred itself to him. He had walked past the vampire, and a magicitem had passed from the basket of the vampire and over to the basket of this teenager. This had made himdedicated to misbehaving, trickery and sorcery. The Public Prosecutor collected corroborating evidence fromthe teenager’s basket, which contained a bottle with a liquid that he had used to clean his face with so girlswould fall in love with him. They had also found a condom. This would show the court what sort of immoralactivities the boy was now engaging in.

7. A rumour that I heard in April 2010 was that a member of the group had just stolen a whole stack of cash notesfrom the vaults of the ANZ bank in Port Vila without anyone seeing him. The league of sorcerers had allegedlyset up a base north of Port Vila, and several grotesque murders taking place in Port Vila settlements were in thecoming months blamed on this group.

8. Luise White (2000) describes vampire stories from East and Central Africa as general stories about the colonialextractive processes that were formulated on the level of the everyday. Brad Weiss specifically describes bloodstealing and blood selling and the commoditization of bodies in contemporary Tanzania (Weiss 1998). ForBolivia, Nathan Wachtel has described the reappearance of the colonial motif of the gringo blood feedingvampire after a series of mysterious deaths in the 1970s and 1980s (Wachtel 1994), Jennifer Cole reports storiesabout ‘blood thieves’ that caused general fear in a tense period of politics, elections and rebellion in Madagascarin1993 (2001:239-244; also Jarosz 1994) and Birgit Meyer addresses the intermingling of politics andPentecostal Christianity in Ghana whereby the exchange of money for blood is given a real political as well asreligious significance in the 1990s (Meyer 1998).

9. http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=1Kings+18

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