‘Awakening the Stones’: The Nieri Performance, Gardens and Regeneration in Tanna, Vanuatu

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2017, islanders from six villages on the southern island of Tanna, in the archipelago of Vanuatu, sculpted more than 50,000 taro into a large ship for the nieri, the premier Tannese exchange based on mythic injunctions to feed allies and protect land. Ships, canoes and stones are generative forms in Tanna and are woven into the interstices of daily life, gardens and ritual. This ritual, planned after the category 5 2015 Cyclone Pam destroyed gardens in Tanna, was also designed to ‘awaken the stones’ which ensure the fertility of gardens. The nieri reasserts the material and spiritual primacy of gardens through the exchange of food that engenders a particular kind of sociality and person in Tanna. During the performance, taro were swapped for yam from six coastal villages. Closely allied, taro and yam are gendered beings whose lives are entangled in the relational worlds of humans and other non-human beings. The fluid and ephemeral art forms that characterise Tannese ceremonial life are dependent upon and attuned to the cycle of the yam and taro garden. I explore how the ‘taro ship’ gathers the multiple relations and diversities that emanate from gardens. The nieri and the spectacle of taro ‘becoming’ ship, makes visible social, cosmological and ecological relations through the aesthetic forms that connect the everyday and myth.