The past decade has seen a renewed anthropological interest in values, morality, and ethics. This article engages with this field by demonstrating how values can be strategies as well as ideals, prone to destabilize social order and divide people precisely because they are thought to be shared. The concept of ‘love’, referring to everyday practices of concern and care for others, is a core value for living on Ahamb Island in Vanuatu. However, adherence to the same core value does not necessarily create an ordered social world. Analysing three ethnographic cases, one of them a dispute with fatal consequences, I propose a model for studying values that accommodates ambiguity by uniting the notion of shared social values with individual experience and strategy. A methodological argument is that it is crucial for anthropological studies of values to assess the context for people's shifting interpretations and articulations of value in practice.

中文翻译：

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什么是爱？瓦努阿图价值观与实践之间的复杂关系

在过去的十年里，人类学对价值观、道德和伦理的兴趣重新燃起。本文通过展示价值观如何既可以成为战略又可以成为理想，从而容易破坏社会秩序并恰恰因为人们认为它们是共享的而导致分裂，从而与这一领域展开互动。“爱”的概念，指的是关心和关心他人的日常行为，是生活在瓦努阿图阿罕布岛上的核心价值。然而，坚持相同的核心价值并不一定会创造一个有序的社会世界。分析三个民族志案例，其中一个是具有致命后果的争议，我提出了一个研究价值观的模型，该模型通过将共享社会价值观的概念与个人经验和策略结合起来来适应模糊性。