The Hundred Days of Sara Mata: Explaining Unnatural Death in Vanuatu

Who or what killed Sara Mata? During the hundred days of mourning that followed the young woman's “unnatural” death, residents of Aoba, an island in Vanuatu, sought to discover the cause of Sara's death. Alternative local explanations of the death highlight the ambiguity that characterizes Aoban beliefs about people's ability to cause death by supernatural means. We show the conventional anthropological categories of poison, sorcery, and …