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From http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa5.2/miles.html

The Place of Pigs in Indigenous Vanuatu Societies

In traditional Vanuatu society, pigs confer power. Leadership-- the status of bigman-- is achieved through the accumulation of pigs, whose ceremonial sacrifice is a means, particularly in the northern and central islands, to ascending a progressive scale of chieftainship (graded society). Killed pigs are distributed and eaten throughout the community, but they are not valued chiefly for their nutritional or economic benefits: pig worth is a function not of size or taste but of teeth and sex.

Through a painstaking and protracted process, the lower canines in a boar's jaw are teased to grow in a circular pattern. This is accomplished by knocking out the animal's upper canines, thereby eliminating grinding resistance and providing space through which the lower canines can grow. So as to protect these elongated tusks from breakage, the animals are fed by hand. By carefully nurturing the pig and its teeth, a task which takes years, the owner is rewarded with a curved tusk. Masters of the tusk even tease a double circle out of the boar's mouth; the greatest experts can even cultivate three round turns of teeth. These are the pigs whose sacrifice, accomplished by a deft blow to the spot where the snout meets the head, confers status. The tusks are thereby accrued, and confer the right to wear other insignia of rank.

In Vanuatu's polygamous societies, pigs were the essential medium of dowry and pig ownership enhanced men's marital eligibility. Adultery, otherwise a capital offense, could be mitigated by pig-giving. In one group in which females predominated, men unceremoniously traded women for pigs (Harrisson, 1938). Potential wives were valued in terms of their ability to care for the household pigs, who themselves usually shared family quarters. It was not unknown for lactating women to suckle piglets and for pig-caring to take precedence over child-bearing (Harrisson, 1936a; Jolly, 1994). Understandably, for such women the killing of pigs was as much a cause for sorrow as for celebration: "women cry and wail as for an eldest son. Some have loved these pigs" (Harrisson, 1937, p. 32).

Indeed, the relationship between person and pig is so intense in the Melanesian context that it has been characterized as "pig love," worthy of psychoanalytic, and particularly Jungian, analysis (Jolly, 1984). Pigs are not esteemed as living beings because they are valued commodities; rather, they possess material value on account of their intrinsic being. Pigs are given personal names for reasons that transcend the anthropomorphic equivalent of pet-naming in Western society: in Melanesia, the pig is considered to have a soul. Pigs are regarded as family members, albeit non-human ones (Jolly, 1984)

For Melanesians, identification between person and pig is intense and is in no way compromised by the periodic ritual obligation of the former to kill the latter. Indeed, it is the combination of pig love with death which invests the human-porcine relationship with such intensity. "Identification with the beast one has nurtured is stressed in several ways: by caressing the unfortunate beast while tethered to the stakes, by crooning special songs about its life, and by sharing a special sacred pudding with the pig just before its death (a sort of Last Supper?)" (Jolly, 1984, p. 96).

Human-pig relations also carry strongly gendered overtones:

Since pigs, like humans, are alive and procreate, they can readily convey the reproductive as well as the productive character of human existence.... The pig thus embodies the pattern of relationships between men and women, and between male and female qualities. (Jolly, 1984, p. 176)

The sexual parallelism inherent in the human-pig relationship goes beyond the scope of the present paper, except to underscore the intensity of pig symbolism for Melanesian men and women and the deeply held place of the pig in the traditional Melanesian world-view.

Depending on the local political system, all of a village's pigs and women could officially belong to the bigman (Harrisson, 1936a). Among the Big Nambas on the island of Malekula, pigs had names where wives did not (Gourguechon, 1977). Female beauty was believed enhanced by a tooth knock-out ceremony reminiscent of that performed upon the domesticated boar. Yet on other islands, women had their own ranking scales and related pig-killing rituals (Hume, 1985; Rodman, 1981). One group on a northern island traced its ancestry to a woman born of a sow (Rivers, 1914). Elsewhere, to the south, another group which believed itself to be descended from the son of a sow used as its group label the word for calling pigs. Inter-sexual or hermaphroditic pigs were particularly rich in symbolic power, with the "whole culture" of one group revolving around them (Marshall, 1937).

In rituals reminiscent of the North American potlatch, villages competed with each other for status through a system of mass pig-exchange and sacrifice. Pig-exchanges were also used to ratify peace agreements between warring villages. These agreements put a halt to "payback" killings by substituting a tusker pig for each unavenged enemy. Among anthropaphagic islanders, pig sacrifice was associated with cannibalism; and (good) human flesh is today still likened to succulent pork (Harrisson 1936a; personal communications). With regard to the most awesome and power-conferring of all Melanesian practices-- the eating of killed or captured foes-- pigs thus became surrogates for human beings. Indeed, "Pig business, with a climax in sacrifice, became the central theme of life, modifying cannibalism; with it came equal opportunity for all to ascend the social ladder of piggery..." (Harrisson, 1937, p. 110).

Similar to the sacrificial lamb or the scapegoat in Old Testament theology, pigs in Melanesia were killed as penance for taboo violations that occurred during sojourns in the white man's world (Harrisson, 1936a). They were needed to celebrate birth as well as death; and for those who did not give pigs their due, a special devil awaited in the afterworld (Harrisson, 1937). Secret societies revolved around them (Rivers, 1914). Pigs could be paid as tolls to permit passage through a village's land to the coast; on occasion they were traded for penis-wrappers; and, as the ultimate goal of plantation labor, tusked pigs were eventually given a standard monetary value by white traders (Harrisson, 1936a; Harrisson, 1936b). "Pigs our are life and our progress. Without pigs we should only exist" (Harrisson, 1937, p. 24).

It is important to stress the group-specific nature of these pig-related beliefs and rituals. While pigs had relative importance in virtually all of the indigenous societies which made up the archipelago now known as Vanuatu, the aforementioned practices were not universal. Even with regard to pig-killing for rank-taking, the names of the tusks, the details of the ceremony, and the actual system of bigman hierarchy change considerably from island to island and group to group. In some Vanuatu communities, particularly in the southern islands, bigman hierarchies did not even exist and pigs lacked the same ritual value, as has been described above. Not coincidentally, it was in these islands that ranking in the Christian church came to supplant virtually all other criteria of indigenous leadership.