Seminar Series: Abstract

Dancing with Primordial Spirits: New Approaches to Rituals of Status Alteration of North Vanuatu
Carlos Mondragón - El Colegio de México

The purpose of this paper is to revisit ceremonial dancing and cosmological forces as evinced in the activities of the “secret societies” - commonly known as hukwe - of the Banks and Torres Islands in North Vanuatu. I will present new ethnographic data regarding the lehtemet, or ceremonial dancing and exhibition of headdresses (tamate), during which aspiring male candidates are given ritual rank and incorporated into the Torres sukwe. I will argue that, contrary to the predominant (since Codrington’s early description) interpretation of these ceremonies as “initiation rituals”, to do with secret power and knowledge, the lehtemet function as unique, and uncommon, events during which the process of incarnating primordial (pre-human) spirits allows local communities to make explicit - or totalise - the full panoply of relations that give rise to local forms of social reproduction

Carlos Mondragón is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology and Editor-in-Chief, Centre for African and Asian Studies (CEAA), at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. His Cambridge PhD thesis was on the Torres Islands in north Vanuatu where he has done three years of anthropological fieldwork. He also works on Tibet and on the history of early Iberian expansion and culture contacts in Oceania. He is the editor of Mas allá de la Religiosidad: el cristianismo global en perspectiva comparada (México 2008) and the author of numerous book chapters and articles, including in the Journal of Pacific History and Oceania