The traditional diet of Vanuatu was vegetarian, occasionally augmented by a
variety of animals, including insects, fish, crustaceans, poultry, and pigs.
The staple food for the Īles Banks group, as well as of most of Vanuatu, was
pudding (lap-lap in Pidgin), which consisted of yams, taro, or banana. Men used
personal eating knives for this pudding (Speiser 1991 [1923]: 114-127). Elaborately
carved and beautifully elongated examples of pudding knives are found only on
Īles Banks and Torres. Their use was restricted to men of high suque rank; lower
orders would have used relatively simple and shorter knives (Speiser 1991 [1923];
128-9 and pl. 22-3). This eating knife is an excellent example and once belonged
to a high-ranking individual. The elaboration corresponds to the owner's rank,
with the longest and most elegantly carved belonging to the most elevated. Within
the men's house, each grade had its own sacred oven or fire at which only those
who had attained that grade could eat. A man could be killed for transgressing
the fire of a higher rank and he might forfeit his rank if he ate food cooked
at the fire of an inferior one. Speiser recounted the story of a high-ranking
man who was kept prisoner on a European warship and starved to death because
he could not obtain food cooked at a fire appropriate to his rank (1991 [1923]:
358). Coombe also mentioned exclusive cooking fires on Loh in Īles Torres, "Two
men there were who had mounted in rank so high...that no one else in the village
could eat with them. Presently one died. After his skull had been washed it
was placed regularly beside his quondam friend when-ever he ate from his exalted
oven!" (1911:144). See Coombe, Florence 1911, Islands of Enchantment: Many-Sided
Melanesia. London: MacMillan and Co.
Published: Hurst, Norman. 1996. "Power and Prestige: The Arts of Island Melanesia
and the Polynesian Outliers." Cambridge, MA: Hurst Gallery. |
