| Abstract: | This study focuses on peri-urban women in Vanuatu from 1972 to 1983 in order to measure the impact of a greater participation of women in the labour market, an increase in the number of consensual unions in the village, and the changing pattern of female migration. Not unexpectedly, these result in a loosening of ties between some villagers and village land. What matters even more is that such a loss of land rights endangers the ideological reproduction of this hybrid sociological form in Melanesia. In effect, peri-urban villagers walk an ideological tightrope. What remains of their subsistence economy generates a corporate ideology under the form of discourses on the virtue of communality, and this is what distinguishes and preserves the village social field from that of the town. A loss of land rights may well lead to a questioning of communality and a realization of the hegemonic nature of the ideology of social undifferentiation. |
