A Political History of Nagriamel on Santo, Vanuatu Marc Tabani CNRS CREDO – Marseilles ABSTRACT This article relates the political history of the Nagriamel movement on Santo, Vanuatu, and tries to account for its traditionalist excesses by reference to biographical aspects of its charismatic leader Jimmy Stevens. Stevens was the main architect in the unification of the ‘dak bus pipol’ (communities living in the island’s remote interior) under a form of custom (kastom) he himself partially devised. This review of the life of this unusual character, who started as a ‘boy’ serving his colonial masters and became an ‘island king’, a self-pro- claimed ‘Prince’ of ‘Santo Custom’, and of the way he exploited the nativist assertions of his indigenous supporters, will also provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the trou- bled period surrounding Independence in the Republic of Vanuatu. Key words: Nagriamel, Jimmy Stevens, traditionalism, politics of tradition, Vanuatu. The political movement known as Nagriamel that developed after World War II on Santo Island in Vanuatu is a particularly good example of how the liberating dimension of an ‘indigenist’ movement can evolve into the traditionalist reinvention of a pre-existing form of social organization. Nagriamel was preceded on Santo by less well known syncretic and millenarian movements (Avu Avu, Rongofuru, Naked Cult, cf. Guiart 1958; Miller 1948; Raff 1928), from which it drew opportunist and selective inspiration. For former anthropol- ogists in the post-World War II period, indigenist movements like the Nagriamel in the northern islands of Vanuatu, or the John Frum movement on the island of Tanna, were intended to generate new forms of collective identifications. 1 From the point of view of these scholars, ritual means to ascertain identity were doomed to be overtaken by new modes of pragmatic action and rational organisation. Cultic contest emanating from ‘pre- rational’ politico-religious movements would dissolve during the political process of decolonisation and nation-building. Peter Worsley (1957) who, with Jean Guiart (1951), was one of the main propagators of this argument, adds to his thesis that the factor of ‘proto-nationalism’ in Melanesian post-contact societies sums up an integrative or centrali- sation process, which encompasses different traditionally non united social groups. Accord- ing to Worsley, this federative process is central to the dynamics of most Melanesian pre- World War II politico-religious indigenous movements. Historically, their rationality is sup- posed to lie in their becoming, in their transformation into bureaucratic forms of organiza- tion and unification. This ineluctable process of secularization, which leads from lower class religions to anti-colonialism, should also open the way to the invention of a wider identity based on shared feelings of a community of culture. Anthropologists like Jean Guiart (1983), Bernard Hours (1974) or Erich Kolig (1981) have adopted this theoretical framework to present and understand the historical shift of the Nagriamel. In an old fashioned socio-evolutionary perspective, Jean Guiart proposed to establish a typology of nativism. He praised good nativism as based on a preserved identity and 332 Oceania 78, 2008