Ancestral Vigilance and the Corrective Conscience

Kastom is a Melanesian Pijin word (from English ‘custom’) denoting ideologies and activities formulated in terms of empowering indigenous traditions and practices. This article examines kastom among Kwaio people in the Solomon Islands, particularly how it has meshed with aspects of Kwaio culture to profoundly change people’s lives. The case exemplifies how anxieties at encroaching modernity can lead people to elaborate – rather than abandon or simply reify – ancestral traditions, as objectified kastom is transformed, extrapolated, and absorbed into everyday practice. It shows how this can occur through subjective processes that transcend the realm of overt cultural politics that has preoccupied so many anthropological studies of Melanesian kastom. With our attention so focused on the objectification of culture as kastom, anthropologists have neglected the concurrent subjectivization of kastom as culture. The two processes are constantly in play, each continuously shaping the other over time. It can become problematic to starkly differentiate kastom from culture except as analytical constructs.