Tom Bratrud

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Oslo

The relationship between public and private spheres is a long-standing theme in the social sciences. This introduction presents a framework for ethnographically examining people's access to various spheres and collectives as digital technologies reconfigure boundaries between the public and private. While asking questions of global relevance, our e...

In Norway, equality as sameness has been emphasised as the dominant social form, whereas initiatives for individual recognition should be kept to oneself or take place within a culture of equality. However, most Norwegians seek belonging and stimulation in ways that are compatible with equality. In this article, I discuss how communication of prest...

Digital Anthropology has in the past two decades emerged as a field that seeks to better grasp experiences of being human within digital technology and culture. However, digital technology is today so entangled in everyday practices that it gives as little meaning to single it out as a specific field of inquiry as it does to leave it out. Based on...

In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty mont...

The devilish has long been integral to myths, legends, and folklore, firmly located in the relationships between good and evil, and selves and others. But how are ideas of evil constructed in current times and framed by contemporary social discourses? Modern Folk Devils builds on and works with Stanley Cohen’s theory on folk devils and moral panics...

Sammendrag I denne artikkelen bruker vi «koronaåret» 2020 og hytteforbudet som empirisk inntak for å forstå mer generelle trekk ved norske forståelser av sted, tilhørighet og sosiale skillelinjer. Vi tar utgangspunkt i den økende bruken av hjemmekontor på hytta i forbindelse med korona-pandemien og spør hvorvidt fristilling i forhold til lokalitet...

This paper examines how the new material value of land in postcolonial Vanuatu intensifies people's shaping and re‐shaping of claims to autonomy and dependence. Ahamb, like many other villages in Melanesia, originated as a mission community with people moving in from various original homelands. The mix of people from different places facilitated ne...

The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of ‘love’, referring to everyday practices...

This article examines some paradoxical intersections of fear, security, and morality on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. I take as my ethnographic vantage point a child-led Christian revival movement that developed in the wake of enduring political conflicts on Ahamb during my fieldwork in 2014. The revival began as a process of moral...

This article discusses the co-creation of fear and hope in the context of the rapid growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. I take as my starting point how the conjoining of these sentiments operates in three different contexts: first, the growing dissatisfaction with leaders and the status quo in a rural village, the ca...

During a Christian revival movement on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu in 2014, gender- and age-based hierarchies were inverted as women and children were given divine authority and men were positioned as threats to sociopolitical renewal. In analysing these events, I develop Kapferer’s insights on the inherent openness and unpredictability of ritual dynam...

The Ahamb language is spoken by around 950 people, most of whom reside on the small Ahamb Island off the south coast of Malekula, the second largest island in the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Ahamb is one of more than 30 languages of Malekula, and little was known about it until 2017 when a major language documentation project was init...

Sorcery and Christianity have been in an intimate and seemingly opposing relationship on the small Ahamb Island in Vanuatu for more than a century. While sorcery is seen as the most potent threat to the good life as it brings suffering and death, Christianity appears as the main tool to address this and other problems of cosmological and social cha...

The article explores expressions of egality in a Melane-sian island context through an analysis of the relationship between a gift-based sociality and a market economy. I show how the people of Ahamb Island's intensified participation in a modernity characterized by capitalist modes of objectifying and subordinating human conditions evoke resistanc...