Bunlap is a village in the south-east of
Pentecost Island in the
Pacific
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...
archipelago
An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Example archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the o ...
of
Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o ...
. It is the most well-known of a number of local ''kastom'' (custom) villages whose people aspire to retain a traditional lifestyle with minimal Western influences.
Unlike some other kastom villages, which remain strictly closed off to foreigners, Bunlap has profited extensively from tourism in recent years.
Culture
Clothing
Traditional clothing is still worn by many (though not all) villagers. For females this consists of knee-length skirts made out of fiber strips. For ceremonial occasions, ankle-length skirts are worn. Men wear only a wide belt around the waist, to which a cloth or leaf tube is attached. The tube is worn around the penis (reminiscent of a penile gourd), while the remainder of the genitals and buttocks are exposed. These garments are distinct from the similar, but still differing
nambas, which are worn by other indigenous peoples of Vanuatu.
Villagers from Bunlap generally put on Western clothing when travelling outside the area.
"Gol"
The Bunlap people perform an ancient ritual called the ''Gol'' (Bislama ''nanggol'') or "
land diving", in which men tie vines to their ankles and jump headfirst from platforms jutting out from a tower. The jumper's fall is broken by the vines, the other end of which is tied to the tower. A sloping surface of softened earth at the base of the tower provides some protection from injury in case of a broken vine, a vine of incorrect length, or a poor jump. The Gol inspired the modern sport of
bungee jumping, though the vines used are far less elastic than bungee cords, and the Gol jumper does not bounce up at the end of the fall. The Gol legend says that in the village Bunlap a man called Tamalie had a quarrel with his wife and she ran away and climbed a
banyan
A banyan, also spelled banian ( ), is a fig that develops accessory trunks from adjacent prop roots, allowing the tree to spread outwards indefinitely. This distinguishes banyans from other trees with a strangler habit that begin life as ...
tree, where she wrapped her ankles with
liana
A liana is a long-Plant stem, stemmed Woody plant, woody vine that is rooted in the soil at ground level and uses trees, as well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to the Canopy (biology), canopy in search of direct sunlight. T ...
vines. When Tamalie came up to her, the woman jumped from the tree and so did her husband not knowing what his wife had done. He died but the woman survived. The men of Bunlap were very impressed by this performance and they began to practise such jumps in case they got in a similar situation. This practice transformed into a ritual for rich
yam harvest and also for proving
manhood
A man is an adult male human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy.
Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the fath ...
.
Agriculture and cultivation
On the interior slopes of the island, villagers grow
taro
Taro (; ''Colocasia esculenta'') is a root vegetable. It is the most widely cultivated species of several plants in the family Araceae that are used as vegetables for their corms, leaves, stems and Petiole (botany), petioles. Taro corms are a ...
, a widely cultivated tropical Asian plant (''Colocasia esculenta'') having broad
peltate leaves and a large starchy edible
tuber
Tubers are a type of enlarged structure that plants use as storage organs for nutrients, derived from stems or roots. Tubers help plants perennate (survive winter or dry months), provide energy and nutrients, and are a means of asexual reproduc ...
.
Bunlap men often consume
kava
Kava or kava kava (''Piper methysticum'': Latin 'pepper' and Latinized Ancient Greek, Greek 'intoxicating') is a plant in the Piperaceae, pepper family, native to the Pacific Islands. The name ''kava'' is from Tongan language, Tongan and Marqu ...
extract at the end of the day for its intoxicating effects, similar to alcohol. The drink is extracted from root of the kava plant. Women are forbidden to consume kava.
Rites of passage
The young boys of this tribe are circumcised at the age of 5 with a knife made of bamboo. The wound is then wrapped with a special leaf to make it heal faster. The men celebrate after the circumcising ceremony by eating a special pie made of yam and coconut and baking it on hot stones. After 7 weeks of solitude, the boys are let out and another big ceremony is organised. The boys who are circumcised take a further step to the manhood by killing each pig in the ceremony.
Language
The people of Bunlap speak a slightly-distinctive form of
Sa language. Bunlap's dialect appears to be largely a mixture of the dialects spoken in
Panngi to the west, Baie Barrier to the north and Ranwas to the south. Anthropologists Margaret Jolly and Murray Garde have both spent time in Bunlap and acquired knowledge of its language.
Bislama
Bislama ( ; ; also known by its earlier French name, ) is an English-based creole language. It is the national language of Vanuatu, and one of the three official languages of the country, the other ones being English and French. Bislama is the ...
, Vanuatu's national language, is known to some degree by most adult men in Bunlap, although knowledge and use of Bislama among inhabitants of Bunlap is far less than in nearby Christianised villages.
There is no Western schooling in Bunlap, and many (though not all) of its inhabitants are illiterate.
In popular culture
The
Travel Channel
Travel Channel (stylized as Trvl Channel since 2018) is an American pay television television channel, channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, who previously owned the channel from 1997 to 2007. The channel is headquartered in Manhattan, with ...
documentary series ''Tribal Life'' follows the Bunlap community members.
Travel Channel :: TV Listings :: Weekly Schedule
{{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080119073941/http://travel.discovery.com/tv-schedules/series.html?paid=26.5726.115515.32536.5 , date=January 19, 2008
References
Populated places in Vanuatu
Penama Province