Overlapping Land Tenure Stories: Ambiguity in Port Vila's Urban Precarity

Abstract

Migrants to Port Vila from elsewhere in Vanuatu and the customary owners of the land to which they move make agreements about land tenure. However, land can hold multiple meanings which can both support and undermine attempts to create durable agreements. We apply concepts of ambiguity and urban precarity to land in Vanuatu, which itself is already polysemic, to argue that ni-Vanuatu people perpetuate and negotiate multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings, to fulfill their various interests. Drawing on interviews with migrants and customary land owners, we demonstrate how people can benefit from a social context that allows for multiple narratives to coexist, even when they appear to contradict each other. However, this anthropology of ambiguity shows how it can also create new ways for disputes to occur and for powerful people to assert control.