Paper short abstract:

Women in Vanuatu offer complex and nuanced understandings about the operation of women’s raets over land, demonstrating ‘vernacular’ translated, local meanings of ‘rights’. Rather than posit a set of ‘rights’ this paper explores local women’s agency in land dealings in Vanuatu so as to clarify how these ‘grounded raets’ operate for women.

Paper long abstract:

Women in Vanuatu offer complex and nuanced understandings about the operation of women’s raets (rights in Bislama) over land, demonstrating ‘vernacular’ translated, local meanings of ‘rights’ based on local relational identities, for this reason I have termed them ‘grounded raets’. Women’s land raets and agency must be interpreted with reference to power relationships, decision making and the gendered exercise of property rights and chiefly authority over landscapes. Practices of land leasing show that the agency of local women is actively contoured by interpretations of kastom, as well as the idea of land as property owned and leased by a masculine possessive individual.

Grounded raets for women are informed by ideas of appropriate kastom practice as the ‘ways of ples’, as well as to embodied and genealogical claims to ples. These vernacular ideas of raets do not equate with Western, liberal claims to equality that inform discourses around individualised human ‘rights’. Rather than posit a set of ‘rights’ this paper explores local women’s agency in land dealings in Vanuatu so as to clarify how vernacular land raets, or ‘grounded raets’, operate for women.