Temporary versus Permanent Population Mobility in Melanesia: A Case Study from Vanuatu

Melanesia's urban population tripled from a mere 7 percent of the region's total population in 1955 to 20 percent by 1985. The recency and magnitude of this development and the absence of any established forms of urban living in the region's precolonial history virtually rules out natural population growth as the principal cause behind this process of rapid urbanization and suggests massive internal population mobility as the most likely cause. The overall picture conveyed by the Melanesian mobility literature, however, emphasizes rural-based circular mobility as the predominant form of population mobility in the region. Seeking to reconcile this contrast, this article argues that much of the alleged continued predominance of circular mobility owes more to its underlying operationalizations, ways of measurement, and theoretical conceptualizations than reflects contemporary reality. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of recent developments in Vanuatu mobility set in the local and historical conditions of migration from the island of Paama. It is demonstrated how specific structural transformations on the island and in urban areas throughout this century were not only conducive to a change from temporary to long-term or permanent rural absences, but how they also have emerged as the direct result of mobility, thus highlighting the latter's dialectical nature. Evidence for this mobility change is derived from a comparative analysis of lifetime mobility histories of urban and rural Paamese men and women.