In Oceania, land is vital to identity, viewed as spiritually nourishing and sustaining. It serves as the foundation for livelihoods and cultural practices, making Indigenous dispossession deeply impactful. This work examines the land rush in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014, during which over ten percent of customary land was leased. Siobhan McDonnell provides fresh insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations through multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography. She illustrates a complex landscape of commodification, highlighting the roles of powerful Indigenous men who manipulate power and property. McDonnell details the land-leasing processes and the interplay between investors, middlemen, and local actors, revealing how property serves as a means for foreign interests to reassert capitalism and neocolonial control. The legal identity of "landowner" reflects contradictions between Vanuatu's kastom rights and individualized property rights. Property has also fostered masculine authority, allowing men to manipulate land claims. The book discusses how these transactions have created new domains of agency and desire—both foreign and local. It concludes with an analysis of Vanuatu's 2014 constitutional and land reform package, which aimed to better address Indigenous land rights and halt the land rush. Drawing on extensive research and community engagement, this work exemplifies an anthropological practice rooted in recipro
