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 witchcraft may misrepresent the dynamic complexity of such indigenous beliefs. Finally, we discuss a process of change in Aoban ideas concerning unnatural death, a shift from a belief in sorcery to a belief in self-destruction by supernatural means. The possibility that a society can “rewrite” a transitive process of sorcery into a reflexive mode raises new questions about the theoretical relations between witchcraft, sorcery, and structural principles of society.