Paper short abstract:

For rural Ni-Vanuatu, the construction of a modern durable 'good house' makes concrete household-oriented goals and visions for the future. However, the increasing prominence of the household sits in tension with expectations to share, cooperate and live together well with wider kin and community.

Paper long abstract:

The house is the site for the negotiation of often-contradictory obligations, values and visions of the 'good life'. This is evident in Ni-Vanuatu households' decisions and goals in 'making a living'. Based on sixteen months' fieldwork in a rural Vanuatu community with a high degree of engagement in New Zealand and Australia's Pacific seasonal worker programmes, I explain how the construction of a durable 'good house' has become a preoccupation for Li-Lamenu households. The transition from a thatched home to a concrete house materialises changing moral and material standards of living, and the house's durability makes it an apt icon, standing for future household concerns. Li-Lamenu kinship idioms and ritual practices emphasise the house as a domain dependent on, but situated in tension with clan alliances upheld by senior men. The house is gaining increasing prominence as a base and end to making a living, but this has intensified tensions between household-oriented goals, and wider expectations of sharing and cooperation. These tensions are also arising in life-cycle rituals, which are increasingly aimed at the reproduction and provisioning of the household, but this paradoxically leads to a critique of ritual expenditure vis-a-vis other uses of money. Whilst theories of 'householding' and 'oikos' have often been developed in areas of peasant agriculture, understandings of morality, personhood and economy in Melanesia have been dominated by debates about reciprocity and exchange between clans. In adopting the perspective of the house, I contribute to ideas of domestic moral economy and Melanesian anthropology.

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