Nakamals. The most salient feature in the cultural landscape is the kava drinking ground. These are forest clearings, shaded by magnificent banyan trees. Men convene there daily to prepare and drink kava (Piper methysticum). People also meet there to dance, to exchange goods, and to resolve disputes. Nucleated villages or scattered hamlets are located along the periphery of these circular clearings. At the last official census in 1979, Tanna had ninety-two villages that included 370 hamlets. Most villages are small, averaging about sixty residents. Most families possess one or more sleeping houses, plus a cook house. The traditional thatched house is still common, although many people now also build with corrugated aluminium and cement brick.
Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Tannese are horticulturalists. Using hand tools, they clear and burn off plots for yams and taro, ritually the two most important staples. They also grow manioc, sweet potatoes, bananas, and a range of other fruits and vegetables. Thanks to fertilizing ash falls from Yasur volcano, garden-plot fallow time is quite short. Domestic animals include pigs, dogs, fowl, and also introduced cattle and horses. Coastal villagers fish and gather reef products, although the Tannese are indifferent fishers. People are engaged primarily in subsistence production, although they also plant cash crops, especially coconuts, coffee, and vegetables.
Industrial Arts. Traditionally, island industrial arts were quite simple, consisting of stone tool making, the weaving of pandanus mats and baskets, and the manufacture of women's bark skirts and tapa belts.
Trade. The island's principal exports are copra and coffee and some other agricultural crops such as coconuts and peanuts. Lenakel town is the main trade centre for the island.
Division of Labor. Islanders practice a division of labour. Traditionally men did heavy garden clearing, plant yams, erect house frames, fish beyond the reef, and drive trucks. Women perform day-to-day garden work, cook, wash clothes, and weave baskets and mats. Men, however, also cook, weed gardens. Both take care of the children.
Land Tenure. Every Tannese boy receives a personal name that entitles him to several plots of land near a kava drinking ground. A name also may entitle a male bearer to perform various ritual acts, to control a section of traditional road, and so on. Every family possesses a limited number of names that are used each generation. If a man has no sons, he adopts boys (or other grown men) by giving them one of his names. Garden land, is plentiful, except in a few locales. Moreover, most people neither live nor garden upon their own lands; permission to use another's land is usually readily obtained.
Kin Groups and Descent. The most important kin group is the nuclear family. People have a notion of patrilineal descent, and families group into something like patrilineages, localized nakamals. These larger groups, however, are perhaps better called "name sets" rather than lineages in as much as new members are recruited by receiving personal names rather than by being born into the groups. A man only becomes a member of his father's lineage if he receives one of its names. Up to half of all men receive names from someone other than their fathers, and thus they may belong to a different name set. Single lineage/name sets are joined into larger groupings, associated with particular places or regions. Finally, each lineage/name set belongs to one or two moieties, Numrukwen and Kaviameta, though today these have only occasional ritual importance.
Socialization. A child is raised by both parents and, importantly, by older siblings. Boys are circumcised between 5 and 10 years of age; their emergence from about six weeks of social seclusion is an important ceremonial occasion. Girls' first menstruation is sometimes marked by the gift of pig and kava from their fathers to their mothers' brothers.
Social Organization. Two or more lineages/name sets are localized at each kava drinking ground. The men of several neighbouring kava-drinking grounds together belong to a named, regional group, of which there are about 115. Kava drinking grounds across the island are linked by a complex system of traditional "roads" along which men exchange messages, goods, and spouses. This road network, by which each Tannese village is linked to all others, has produced cultural homogeneity across the island, despite linguistic diversity.
Political Organization. Tannese society is hierarchically organized on the basis of sex and age. There are also two chiefly positions at most kava-drinking grounds: the ianiniteta ("spokesman of the canoe") and the ierumanu ("ruler"). These today have only occasional ritual importance. Among adult men a principle of egalitarianism governs social interaction. Unlike those found elsewhere in Melanesia whose positions depend on economic ability, on Tanna, a village leader owes his status to his age, his ritual and other local knowledge, and to the size of his name set. A second kind of "ideological" leaders are of the various island-wide political and religious organizations, such as the John Frum and Custom movements.
Social Control. Although national police and island courts operate on Tanna, most disputes are handled unofficially. When people must resolve their differences, they convene a dispute-settlement meeting at a local kava-drinking ground. Here, chiefs and involved third parties attempt to establish a social consensus that at least temporarily resolves the problem and ends avoidance between disputants. Resolution is signified by the exchange of pigs and kava between the two sides. Although traditional sorcery is today uncommon, islanders may believe that ancestors displeased with conflict may make them sick. A serious illness thus induces people to attempt to resolve outstanding disputes.
Conflict. Traditional raiding and cannibalism ceased in the early 1900s. In the period leading up to independence considerable social disruption took place but today, aside from occasional fights during dispute-settlement meetings gone awry, the island is remarkably peaceful.
Religious Beliefs. Christianity has merged with—not replaced—the traditional customs of ancestors and spirits. Missionaries proscribed a number of customary practices, including dancing and kava drinking, and reworked local political and economic structures. The John Frum and other movements, drawing upon both custom and Christianity, have added further, syncretic elements to Tanna's religious life. In addition to ancestors, people recognize various spirits associated with particular places, such as the reefs and mountain peaks. The Polynesian Mauitikitiki (Mwatiktiki on Tanna) is also a popular culture hero. John Frum continues his work as a spiritual mediator to the outside world, particularly to America. The John Frum-Custom people of the southwest claim a special relationship with Prince Philip of Britain who is, they maintain, a son of the mountain spirit Kalpwapen. It is a fascinating island for those interested in different types of religious practises.
Religious Practitioners. All men are in contact with their own ancestors. Kava drinkers, spitting out their last mouthful, utter prayers to surrounding ancestors buried on the kava-drinking ground. A few men and women are known to have particularly good contacts with the supernatural world by way of dreams and various ritual devices. These "clevers" diagnose illness, find lost objects, and so on.
Ceremonies. All Tannese ceremonies consist of exchange (of pigs, food, kava, woven goods, and lengths of cloth), kava drinking, and dancing that lasts through the night. Most are associated with important events in the life cycle of individuals. The family of the person involved gathers goods to present to his or her mother's brothers, with an equal amount of goods returned when the exchange is later reversed. Two ceremonies, not tied to individual life cycles, function to maintain regional relations. In nieri, people of two kava-drinking grounds exchange different kinds of food such as yams for taro. The nakwiari, involving several thousand people, is the island's most spectacular ceremony and involves exchange of pigs and kava between two regions, after a night and day of song and dance.
Arts. Island aesthetics focus instead on singing, dancing, and body decoration. Although people make panpipes and bamboo flutes, they use no musical instruments to accompany song or dance that, for rhythm, relies instead upon hand clapping and foot stomping. Women paint their faces in mosaics of colour that reflect the decorative dyed patterns on the bark skirts they wear to dance.
Medicine. Like most of Vanuatu there is plenty of local native plants that are used as medicinal cures. Island etiology cites maleficent spirits and ancestral displeasure is sometimes used to explain some illnesses. Also, an imbalance of body elements may cause disease. Everyone knows at least one or more secret herbal cures for specific ailments, and a few men and women are renowned as particularly astute curers or bone setters.
Death and Afterlife. Important men are buried on the kava-drinking ground; other people are buried in the village. Christian pastors typically officiate at burial. The traditional funeral, however, that takes place a month or so after death is the final exchange between a person's family and that of his or her mother's brothers. Ancestral ghosts go off to a land called "Ipai"; they may also remain close to their old homes, and they are often seen in gardens and the forest.
History & Geography - Bislama Tips - Local Foods - Kava
