Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other: Self and Society in Fiji

“Karen J. Brison has written a lucid account of Fijian life that probes many of the tensions and contradictions found in globalizing societies today. Most importantly, the reader encounters these predicaments through the voices of a diverse range of Fijians: men, women, and children who provide eloquent testimony about being indigenous in a (post)modern world. This is one of those rare volumes that advances anthropological debates while giving us a book that also makes for an excel—Geoffrey White, University of Hawaii lent introduction to contemporary Oceania.”

ple in Fiji as they work at self-fashioning in a changing world dominated by contradictory systems of values. Showing us how individuals and communities navigate between the pulls of communal and individualist models of selfhood, she gives us a rich, person-centered view of what the global era looks like to those living at its margins. Engagingly written, this is a book that succeeds in bringing theory and ethnography together seamlessly. It deserves to be widely read by people interested in the conjunction of culture and selfhood in the global era.” —Joel Robbins, University of California, San Diego

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other explores the fluid and context-bound nature of cultural and personal identity among indigenous Fijians. National identity in Fiji often emphasizes a romantic, premodern tradition based on a chiefly hierarchy contrasted to the “individualistic” cultures of Westerners and of Indo-Fijians. But indigenous Fijian villagers are generally more concerned with defining their identity vis-à-vis other community members, urban and overseas relatives, and other regions of the country. When people craft self-accounts to justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community, they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity on the margins is an experience of anxiety-provoking contradictions between competing ideologies—that of international ideologies versus local experiences. Indigenous Fijians have been exposed to global ideas and government programs extolling the virtues of “premodern” communities that place communal good and time-honored tradition over individual gain. But other waves of policy and rhetoric have stressed individual achievement and the need to “shake” individuals out of community bonds to foster economic development. Individuals feel contradictory pressures to be autonomous, achieving individuals and to subordinate self to community and tradition. Karen J. Brison examines traditional kava ceremonies, evangelical church rhetoric, and individual life history narratives to show how individuals draw on a repertoire of narratives from local and international culture to define their identity and sense of self. Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other is appropriate for upper-level students and anyone with an interest in Fiji or anthropology.

KAREN J. BRISON is associate professor of anthropology at Union College.

For orders and information please contact the publisher LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 • www.lexingtonbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1488-9 ISBN-10: 0-7391-1488-3 90000 9 780739 114889

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other

“Karen J. Brison has written a fine book that vividly captures the challenges faced by indigenous peo-

BRISON

Anthropology • Women’s Studies

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other SELF AND SOCIETY IN FIJI

K A R E N J. B R I S O N

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other Self and Society in Fiji

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright O 2007 by Lexington Books First paperback edition 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hardback edition of this book was previous cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows: Brison, Karen J. Our wealth is loving each other : self and society in Fiji /Karen J. Brison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Fijians-Psychology. 2. Fijians-Ethnic identity. 3. Fijians-Social life and customs. I. Title. GN671 .F5B75 2007 305.80099954~22 2006102354 ISBN-1 3: 978-0-7391-1488-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391 -1488-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1489-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-1 0: 0-7391 -1489-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN- 13: 978-0-7391 -3 126-8 eISBN-10: 0-7391-3 126-5 Printed in the United States of America e N ~ h paper e used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992.

For Vaseva Dakui and Jiutajia Radave who made it all possible

Contents Preface 1 Introduction: Self and Society in Fiji 2 Defining the Community Through Ceremony 3 Constructing Self and Community Through Religious Discourse 4 Re-Imagining Sociocentrism 5 Imagining Modernity in Rakiraki 6 Crafting a Community 7 Imagining Identity Among Rakiraki Children Conclusion: Identity in a "Postcultural" World Bibliography Index About the Author

Preface

Vanua . . . a social unit associated with a particular territory . . . is an experience which embraces all Fijian tradition because it is the place where one's ancestors lived and died, the place where these ancestors in spirit forrr-the Vu-now live, watching over and protecting their progeny. Vanua exerts a spiritual force in people's lives because the Vu exemplify the sacred ideal of living in the old or traditional way. [Katz 1993: 26,271 Vakaturaga . . . having the characteristics of one who lives according to the way of the chiefs . . . describes the ideal Fijian way of life and the ideal Fijian personality. . . . Living in the traditional manner, Fijians achieve harmony and unity among themselves caring for and sharing with one another, and allocating resources fairly. Only through respecting and honoring others, which is to say, through fulfilling one's duties and responsibilities toward others, is this harmony possible. Respect and honor then come back to the one who displays these qualities, while others fulfill their reciprocal responsibilities. . . . To succeed brings recognition, honor, and respect, enhancing one's reputation and making one feel good, and most important, truly Fijian. But in the Fijian way, the individual does not seek or savor such recognition; humility comes first and stays to the end. [Katz 1993: 27,291

Katz's romantic portrayal of indigenous Fijian culture contrasts Fijian communalism to Western individualism. The Fijian community has a sacred order; individuals are not motivated by personal greed but think in terms of keeping the community, or vanua, on the "straight path" laid

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down by the vu, or ancestral spirits. This involves everyone playing his or her role assigned by age, gender, and rank in a hierarchical community, and everyone assuming a correct demeanor of respect for others and for communal tradition. Fijian born anthropologist, Aselele Ravuvu, writes that the ideal Fijian, knows his places in society and complies unquestioningly to his various traditionally defined obligations and responsibilities. His actions are usually focused on service to others. He achieves respect, acceptance and recognition within his group for being attentive and complying, and respectful to those who hold traditionally defined authority over him. [Ravuvu 1983 : 1031

Ravuvu goes on to contrast these traditional Fijian ideals to those associated with new (Western) economic and political systems in which the rights and freedoms of individuals are "unduly emphasized" (Ravuvu 1983: 106). Indigenous Fijian culture, as portrayed by Katz and Ravuvu, also stresses the importance of being kind, loving, attentive, complying, and willing to put others' needs above one's own. Ravuvu says that the ideal Fijian "should show loloma (love and kindness) to all . . . he is ready to help and serve others" (Ravuvu 1983: 103). The respectful person, "offers or provides services for others on his own initiative, or gives support and encouragement to those who are depressed or faced with difficulties" (Ravuvu 1983: 105). Consistent with these values, there is a strong obligation to share with extended family members and to contribute to communal causes and events. Like Katz and Ravuvu, many indigenous Fijians contrast their own way of respect for community and tradition, to the more "individualistic" cultures of Westerners, and of the Indo-Fijians who comprise about 44 percent of Fiji's population. I heard over and over again during the twenty-one months between 1997 and 2003 during which I lived in Rakiraki, a village of some seven hundred people in the northeast comer of Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, that indigenous Fijians were a community-minded people whose "wealth," as a common line in ceremonial speeches asserted, lay in "loving each other and serving the Lord." Villagers took great pride in the idea that indigenous Fijians had a special culture, given to them by God, which gave life a kind of value that money could not provide. They contrasted themselves in this respect to people such as Indo-Fijians, urban relatives, and Western tourists, who often had much greater wealth and power. Individuals worked hard in church and in everyday life to subdue willful selves and live up to higher

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ideals of commitment to community. And many people experienced this as a fulfilling way of life. The ideology of the sacred, traditional, community was enacted on a daily basis in the sevusevu, a ceremonial exchange of kava that framed life cycle rituals, communal politics, arrivals and departures from the village and most other events (Brison 2001a). Sevusevu stressed the ways individuals were embedded in communities and enacted the hierarchical structure of the community through drinking order. Sevusevu also emphasized proper observance of an unchanging Fijian tradition. The narrative of the community on the straight path of tradition was likewise evident in the Methodist church to which the vast majority of indigenous Fijians belonged. In Methodist events men, women, young and old acted out their proper role in the community and framed all individual actions as representing a group and conforming to Fijian tradition (Brison 200 1b). The strength of people's commitment to sacred Fijian tradition surfaced dramatically on May 19, 2000 as my family and I were getting ready to wrap up a year of anthropological research. George Speight, a businessman from the indigenous Fijian ethnic group that comprises just over half of Fiji's population, stormed parliament with a small group of armed supporters and took hostage most of the parliament. Among the hostages was Mahendra Chaudhry, the first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. Many of the members of parliament, including Chaudhry, were to remain hostage for almost two months as Speight tried to have put into place a new constitution recognizing the right of indigenous Fijians, as the owners of the land and guardians of a sacred tradition, to control the office of prime minister. But it was evident to me in during my time in Rakiraki that the strong pride in an indigenous Fijian tradition defined in opposition to Western and Indo-Fijian culture was just one of many ways that villagers had of defining self, community, and nation (Brison 2002,2003). Thus I had been surprised when Rakiraki villagers had so strongly favored the 2000 coup. Many villagers had told me in the months leading up to the coup that they did not see anything wrong with having an Indo-Fijian prime minister and that ethnicity was less important than ability in parliamentary representatives. Furthermore, many people called into question the notion of a sacred, timeless, Fijian vanua. Pentecostal Christian villagers and many young adults, for instance, often spoke of themselves as being part of international Christian communities and questioned traditional Fijian custom and leadership. Indigenous Fijian identity was also in many contexts a strongly local identity, defined in opposition to other areas of Fiji, not one that spanned the entire national indigenous Fijian community. In the week following the coup, for instance, it became apparent that Rakiraki villagers were at least as resentful of the president,

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Ratu Mara, an indigenous Fijian who hailed from Southeast Fiji, as they were of Mahendra Chaudhry, an Indo-Fijian. The following pages examine the idea of the sacred, traditional, vanua in Rakiraki discourse, public and private. Anthropologists such as Keesing (1989), Thomas (1992ab), and Linnekin (1990) argue that Pacific Islanders have forged cultural identity through political struggles. People define self in opposition to the culture of the colonizers and rival groups, often emphasizing a romantic, communal tradition, the contrasts with "Western individualism." More generally, Appadurai and others (Barber 1997; Friedman 2002; Gupta and Ferguson 1999; Hannerz 2002) point out that indigenous Fijians are one amongst many groups that emphasizes the sacred and unique status of their cultural traditions. "Globalization" often leads to "retribalization" or an insistence on the importance of particular identities and traditions (Barber 1997). Faced with pressures from international capital and political pressures from more powerful groups, many marginal groups look to their unique cultural tradition to build a sense of pride and solidarity and to fight for their rights. Furthermore, the idea that marginal, "primitive," groups are bearers of valuable cultural traditions is emphasized by many first world nations whose tourists flood to remote areas of the globe seeking quaint "tribal" peoples with "happy, smiling faces" who seem to offer a panacea for the woes of "modern" life. Indigenous Fijians and others pick up on these ideas in order to win respect, power, and some economic benefit (see also Sylvain 2005). Such romantic, "antimodern" imaginings of tradition bolster local pride and power but also have a cost. Keesing (1989), Lawson (1996), Robertson and Sutherland (2001) and many others argue that vague, positive, ideologies stressing communalism and respect have supported the privileged position of elites from southeastern Fiji and have glossed over and suppressed class, ethnic and gender inequalities. In the following pages, I move beyond national discourse to examine the narrative of the sacred vanua in day-to-day village life. As Mageo (2001) argues, rhetoric opposing communal Pacific cultures to individualistic Western (or Indo-Fijian) ones tends to dominate "intergroup discourse" where Island groups fight for political and economic rights against other groups. But equally important are "intragroup" discourses in which the rigid dichotomies give way to more heterogeneous and multivocalic ways of imagining self and other. I argue that examining "intragroup" discourse reveals a more complex criticism of local culture (see also Norton 2000; Robertson and Sutherland 2001 on national discourse). Villagers bring the "figured world" (Holland and Eisenhart 1998) of the sacred vanua to life in a multitude of ways as they draw on this shared ideology to address a number of concerns. Day-to-day life involves a wide array of preoccupations beyond the need to protect one's rights

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from encroachments by other groups. Villagers are absorbed with positioning themselves vis-A-vis fellow villagers, and by more amorphous existential concerns created by living with conflicting ideologies and value systems (see also Robbins 2004). I move beyond Fijian race relations and national politics to argue that understanding indigenous Fijians constructions of self and community involves appreciating both the impact of global modernity and the ways that global ideologies are reconfigured to make sense of very local situations (Englund 2002). We no longer live in a world where "communal" and "individualistic" cultures can be neatly opposed, although we do live in a world where many people act as if they can (see also Robbins 2004). As Robbins (2004: 332; see also Kray 2001) argues, in many areas of the world people are confronted with two conflicting moral systems, one stressing relationalism and another stressing individual accomplishment. These conflicting ideologies pose problems. Rural Fijians want to live up to communal ideals; but they also feel pressure to prove that they are autonomous individuals who can achieve personal success. Faced with these contradictory ideologies, and limited possibilities for achieving individual economic success, many villagers find that imagining self is a matter of trying to prove that they are both autonomous and conform to communal ideals. Individuals craft hybrid accounts of self and society, modernity and tradition, which resolve the particular contradictions in their own lives. In the process, they blur distinctions between global and local, urban and rural, and create new kinds of translocal identities (see also Besnier 2002,2004). In the process of examining identity construction, I re-examine a longstanding preoccupation with culture and self in the Pacific. Becker (1995), for example, argues that indigenous Fijians are less preoccupied with body weight than are Americans because Fijians have a "sociocentric self," internalized in the course of growing up, which inclines them to see their personal characteristics and achievements as the product of the efforts of relatives rather than of personal willpower. Rakiraki people did exhibit an active desire to conceive of themselves as parts of larger communities and they often seemed to want to feel that their individual will was subordinated to a larger social good. But as Mageo (1998) and many others point out, any culture offers individuals not one, but several models for understanding self and community. Instead of taken-for-granted assumptions about individual, self, and society, contemporary people everywhere are confronted with an array of master narratives, some local and some international. People are not free to construct self, just as they choose, because some of the available ideologies, such as the ideal of sociocentrism, are hegemonic in local society due to economic and political forces. Indigenous Fijians in rural villages, for instance, understand well that their culture is sociocen-

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tric; they realize that they need to justify their own behavior as properly sociocentric to win local acceptance. But they are also influenced by other ideologies that shape their desires and motivations. In the process of justifying these desires as suitably sociocentric, individuals slowly inhse the narrative of sociocentric selves in a sacred vanua with new meaning, and pave the way for an increasing variety of acceptable life choices. In short, understanding the relationship between culture and self in our contemporary global village is a complex task of analyzing the repertoire of available ideologies, the social forces that make some of these ideologies dominant, and the ways that individuals and groups give these ideologies new meaning as they use them in very particular contexts to achieve very specific purposes. This is the task that I undertake in the following chapters, moving from history, to public discourse, to the ways that individuals position themselves within these public discourses. Perhaps it was not entirely a coincidence that my research in Fiji also taught me the benefits of working as part of a group, and of sometimes losing sight of individual goals in order to play one's appropriate role in a community. In indigenous Fijian villages, people frequently told us, everybody had their "duties" and "burdens" and good things were generally achieved through everyone playing his or her assigned role. My husband, Stephen Leavitt, and I each started our research in Fiji with our own interests and agendas. I had studied community politics and cultural identity in Papua New Guinea and had brought these interests to Fiji along with a new interest in the ways that children constructed gender identity in their play. Steve had studied personal experience and millenarianism in Papua New Guinea and had come to Fiji with an interest in the evangelical Protestant sects winning an increasing number of converts in Fiji. We soon found, however, that Fijians had their own ideas about what we should study, and how we should study it. Among these ideas was a strong sense that we, like Fijian men and women, belonged in different spheres and could grasp different kinds of things. We had both previously worked in the same area of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. But we had not been married when we conducted that research, nor had we lived or worked in the same village. We had not encountered in Papua New Guinea such a strong sense of being locked into local gender roles and activities. Probably some of this was due to the fact that we had come to Papua New Guinea when we were young and single while we came to Fiji, along with our son Jeffrey, as a family. But I suspect that our experiences in Fiji also reflected the fact that there is much stronger sense in Fiji that there is a Fijian tradition that has to be maintained by everyone, local or foreigner, who wants to be a part of a Fijian village.

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So we each came to inhabit a social world consisting mostly of people of our own gender. After our first five months of research in 1997, we realized, in looking at our photographs of the trip, that we each knew different people. Steve knew well senior men whom I had never even seen but he was entirely unfamiliar with the senior women of the village with whom I sat regularly. These experiences impressed upon me the importance to indigenous Fijians of the idea that everyone should fit into a social role and play his or her part in a community. We were welcomed when playing our assigned role as honored guests. But we found Rakiraki villagers to be guarded and uncomfortable when we tried early on to work our way into informal social gatherings, doing interviews, and even doing traditional ethnographic activities like censusing. Villagers did think that we should attend local ceremonies and events, like funerals and church services, where we would be carefully seated in places for honored guests, and accorded the treatment reserved for such guests. We were fed choice food; we were served in the early rounds of kava ceremonies in which people drink roughly in order of importance. We were given pillows so that we could lie down and sleep through the long, slow parts of these events. We were flattered by this treatment and appreciative of the efforts that Fijians made on our behalf. But we were also frustrated by the difficulties of penetrating beneath the ceremonial faqade of Fijian culture. We had both been trained at University of California, San Diego where the anthropology department emphasized the importance of looking beyond cultural symbols to find the people who used these symbols to make sense of their lives and compete for power. Over the months that we lived in Rakiraki, we did eventually manage to find the people beyond the fagade. But this was a long slow process. I came away with a strong sense that indigenous Fijian culture was a different experience for Fijians of different ages, personalities, and genders. My experiences brought home to me that there is no single cultural world or experience to be objectively captured (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1993; Clifford 1988); everywhere, there are multiple experiences, and multiple orientations toward communal values and belief systems. Psychological anthropologists emphasize that cultures provide many competing models of self and emotion; furthermore, migration and mass media expose contemporary people to a vast array of beliefs systems and ways of making sense of their lives. In such a world, one can no longer speak of a single cultural way of conceiving of self, shared by all group members (if, indeed, such a unified group experience ever existed). Instead, we must look at the ways individuals draw on cultural resources to piece together life stories that give meaning to their lives (Appadurai 1996; Strauss l992ab).

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I make no claim that the interview material presented in the following chapters is representative. I did my best to contextualize the interviews I did with women by talking with Steve about what he was hearing from men. But, ultimately, I came away with a much richer sense of women's lives than of men's lives. So while I cannot claim to have captured an "average" Fijian experience, what my material does illustrate well is the problems with the notion that such a thing exists. To a certain extent, their age, gender and rank shaped people's experiences and views. But it was also abundantly clear that each individual had his or her idiosyncratic take on the public ideology used to craft life stories that gave each a sense of control or worth within his or her own life conditions. My appreciation for the ways that individuals positioned themselves differently within indigenous Fijian culture was greatly enhanced by the work of ten dedicated and talented undergraduates from Union College, the small liberal arts college in upstate New York where we teach, who accompanied us to Fiji as part of two anthropological field terms abroad which we directed. In 1997, Sarah Ahart, Deborah Cederbaum, and Arnber Johnson lived with Fijian families in villages close to Rakiraki for an eleven-week period. During this time they completed weekly exercises involving such things as doing a partial village census, collecting genealogies and explanations of local kin terms, interviewing households about their incomes and expenditures, observing and analyzing rituals, and conducting life cycle and life history interviews. Each of the students also chose some aspect of local society of particular interest to investigate and analyze. In 1999, Erinn Gregg, Megan Lee, Michelle Nason, Apryle Pickering, Stephanie Sienkiewicz, Emily Sparks, and Andy Spitz completed a similar, eleven-week, term in Fiji. Amber Johnson and Andy Spitz also each independently returned to Fiji to conduct summer research projects. I soon realized that the students' experience of Fijian villages was different from ours. They were accorded the same "honored guest" treatment as were we, on occasion. But because they were so young, and because they lived with families, it was sometimes easier for the students to participate in day-to-day activities of village families than it was for us. They also had much greater access to the world of adolescents and young adults than we did. After receiving a couple of impassioned love letters, Amber Johnson decided that this distinctive art form was interesting enough to warrant being the topic for her independent study. In the process of studying love letters, she learned a great deal about local teenagers' views of romance and how these sometimes differed from their parents' views that marriages should be arranged with an eye toward setting up good alliances for their lineages.

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In 1999, Emily Sparks and Erinn Gregg were inspired by Anne Becker's (1995) suggestion that indigenous Fijians do not generally suffer from eating disorders because their culture prompts them to see themselves as the product of a network of loving relatives, and to value contributing to a community over cultivating an impressive "self." Emily and Erinn interviewed many young women on their attitudes toward body-weight and found that, in fact, many of them did attempt to diet but often had trouble maintaining diet and exercise regimes because of local pressure to show concern for others by accepting food and socializing rather than working on one's body. These findings suggested, as I will discuss later, that it was too simple to argue, as many had done, that Fijians and Americans were guided by different assumptions about the relationship between self and society. Apryle Pickering and Megan Lee both studied the lives of young mothers and wives and found (as did several of the other students) that young, married women were generally deeply dissatisfied with their lives and resented a communal culture which often subordinated their interests to those of more powerful others. In fact, both students talked to several young women who had chosen to be single mothers, feeling that this life was better than the fate of being controlled by a husband and his family. Debbie Cederbaum also alerted me to the costs of indigenous Fijian communal culture through her study of attitudes toward the handicapped. Debbie found that people believed that physical and mental handicaps were the result of "curses" which followed behavior that violated village moral codes. As a result people often tried to conceal their children's disabilities instead of seeking out treatment for them. Finally, Andy Spitz, as the only young, single, male of our group, offered me access to the world of young males and revealed for me the way the views and interests of young males differed from those of their female counterparts. Andy was shocked to discover that even sweet and affable young men took for granted that their wives should be perfectly obedient to husband and family. Young men, who were granted somewhat more autonomy in local culture, were much less likely to question indigenous Fijian communal culture than were females of the same age group. The research of our students, then, opened up to me a world of young adults and adolescents to which I would otherwise have had little access and led me to the idea that indigenous Fijian communal culture is not something which people take for granted but is, instead, a construction which people either question or support depending on their own life experiences and position within local society. I also benefited greatly from the work Stephanie Sienkiewicz, Sarah Ahart and Michelle Nason all of whom investigated the ways that indigenous Fijians constructed their identity in relation to other cultural

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groups and in government policy. Stephanie took on the question of relations between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. She found that both indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians agreed that indigenous Fijians were highly "cultural" people whose respect for community and tradition prevented them from prospering economically. On the other hand, both groups agreed that Indo-Fijians were "cultureless" people with no sense of community, who lived only to make money for their families. Sarah Ahart investigated Fijian attitudes toward secondary school education and alerted me to a move on the part of the Board of Education to turn schools in rural Fiji into vehicles for encouraging students to value indigenous Fijian tradition and for teaching students useful skills in village life. This policy was designed to combat a perceived tendency for rural youth to flood into urban areas in pursuit of scarce jobs and to end up being a criminal fringe element. Michelle Nason investigated Fijian attitudes toward tourists and found that villagers took pride in the fact that Western tourists thought of Fijians as unusually friendly and hospitable people. Fijians, unlike people in many areas of the world, reported that they liked interacting with tourists. Contact with tourists seemed to reaffirm for some people the idea that indigenous Fijians had a culture which made them special and for which they could win the respect of the world. These projects alerted me to the ways that local constructions of identity were shaped by national and international rhetoric. Villagers drew from these constructions the idea that it was their special culture that gave them a valuable place in a larger world. I did not intend to make use of our students' work in my own writing. And I frequently disagreed with our students' analyses of their findings, feeling at the time that they lacked the maturity and awareness of other cultures to properly contextualize their findings, for instance, on the misery of young women. But just as time and distance has restored my ability to empathize with our Rakiraki friends' attitudes toward the coup, so I have come to see that just as Steve and I, differing from each other in personality and gender, each had access to a different slice of experience in an indigenous Fijian society divided by gender, so too our students, at a different phase of life and in a different position in their host villages, had access to a segment of experience which might otherwise have remained opaque to us. I moved, then, from trying to understand indigenous Fijian village culture, to examining the many strategies, public and private, that individuals used to make sense of their lives. In the end I found that, as our Fijian hosts suggested, the experience of working with, (if not always loving!), each other was immensely rewarding. Funding for this research was provided by NSF summer research grants in 1997 and in 2003, and Union College in 1999-2000. I am greatly indebted to a number of people for their intellectual and moral

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support. Peter Devine and Amanda Haag accompanied me as research assistants in summer 2003. In Rakiraki village Vaseva Dakui went out of her way to make us feel at home and to share with us her insights into Fijian culture. Jiutajia Radave, likewise, became my friend and generously gave of her time and knowledge, painstakingly translating tapes with me and helping me to understand the complexities of local life. Without these two active and intelligent women I would never have completed this project. I also benefited from the support of Vilimoni Dakui and all of the members of mataqali Masiratu including Adi, Jeri, Seinemere, Siteri, Eramasi, Samisoni, Joe, Tale, Lusiana, and Makareta. A particular thanks to the children who befriended my son Jeffrey: Kolora, Levi, Nabakeke, Naica, Madela, Lusi, and Menani. Thanks also to the local families who took our students into their homes and made them feel welcome. On the home front, my mother, Jane Badour, as always, supported me in a style above and beyond the call of duty with weekly letters and care packages. My bother, Jeffrey Brison, and his partner, Lynda Jessup, kept me going with constant assurances of interest and useful references to relevant literature. My husband Steve and son, Jeffrey, discovered Fiji with me and shared the joys and hardships of living and working there. I remember with particular appreciation and with sad fondness those who passed away before this project was completed. Tio and Suluweti told me their life stories and their ideas about village life. And finally my father, David Brison: thanks Dad for passing on to me your wanderlust and curiosity about other ways of living; thanks for discovering Fiji for me; thanks for always being interested in what I was doing and for never doubting that it would go well. I wish you were here.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Self and Society in Fiji

The first time I met Elenoa, a woman in her late fifiies who became one of my best friends and most valuable informants in Fiji, she explained to me the differences between indigenous ~ijians'and Americans. Elenoa had heard that I had come to live in her village to study Fijian culture. So on the evening my family and I moved into a small house next to hers, she took it upon herself to come over and summarize for me what I would find. The most important thing in Fijian culture, she suggested, was respect. Americans, she continued, were very interested in individual rights. Fijians didn't worry about people's rights. Instead, Fijians valued respecting both other people and communal traditions. The result, as she would remind me numerous times over the following months as she struggled to suppress her disapproval of my lax discipline strategies with my three-year-old son, Jeffrey, was that Fijians were respectful and obedient. They didn't, however, tend to be as smart and able to do well in school as Americans who were encouraged from an early age to be confident and make their own decisions. There was a cost, then, to the Fijian tradition of respect. Nevertheless, it was important to maintain this tradition as it gave Fijians a sense of pride and an important place in their own country and in the world. When Elenoa's teenage daughter, Ema, came over to introduce herself the following day, she expressed similar views. It was important, she insisted, to maintain a Fijian tradition of respect for custom and community because it was only this distinctive culture that kept Fijians from being a poor and oppressed minority in their own land. Ema pointed to

2

Chapter One

other Pacific groups like the Maori and the indigenous Hawaiians whom she said had lost their sense of purpose, their pride, and their land when they lost their culture. Ema complained many times to us over the following months about the oppressive nature of communal culture in her village. When she graduated from Teachers College a few years later, Ema applied for a post in a different area of the country so as to distance herself from communal demands. But, like her mother, Ema argued that indigenous Fijians needed their culture to maintain their pride and their position in Fiji. Everywhere I turned, with whomever I spoke, I encountered similar patterns. Like Elenoa and Ema, people asserted that indigenous Fijians were unusually "cultural" people, whose lives were based on respect for each other and for time-honored traditions. This culture made indigenous Fijians very different sorts of people from both Westerners and from members of Fiji's second largest ethnic group, the Indo-Fijians. Indeed, many people (including some Indo-Fijians) said that Indo-Fijians and Westerners had no culture and no sense of community at all. They just lived as individual families whose main purpose was to make as much money as possible. But it had been equally evident to me that villagers had many ways of imagining self, community and cultural identity. In the course of tagging along behind Elenoa one week in her round of committee obligations and ceremonial functions, for instance, I heard her voice contradictory views about indigenous Fijian tradition. Early in the week, when we arrived at a meeting in a community hall in a neighboring village, we found on the blackboard an outline of the ideal Fijian clan structure, consisting of ranked lineages each with their own task (fishermen, warriors, and so on). The host villagers explained that officials of the Fijian Affairs Board were going round to all the local villagers to teach people about traditional Fijian social structure and to urge people to return to their special lineage roles. The people in the village were very excited saying that they had not been aware that Fijian villages were supposed to be organized that way and had been very interested in hearing about this aspect of their tradition. Elenoa was also impressed, asking how she could arrange for Fijian Affairs to do a similar presentation in Rakiraki and asserting that indigenous Fijians would be much better off if they returned to their traditional way of life. A few days later, however, after we had attended a meeting of Methodist church committee members, Elenoa said that the Methodist church erred in supporting indigenous Fijian custom too much. The Fijian clan and village structure had served its purpose in its time but people should realize that things couldn't stay the same; life must constantly change. Fijians must realize that their initiative was suppressed by tight-knit, "back-to-back," communities where people gossiped incessantly about

Self and Society in Fiji

3

anyone who wanted to try anything new. The ideal thing for the future would be for families to leave their villages, return to the land, and live, as did the Indo-Fijians, as individual families each looking out for their own interests. Couldn't I see how the Indo-Fijians had prospered? Indigenous Fijians should realize that they too could only prosper once they freed themselves from the shackles of community and tradition. A similar contradictory attitude toward indigenous Fijian tradition was evident in government and in the educational system. People "knew" about the special cultural nature of indigenous Fijians in large part through the influence of a British colonial government that had put into place many policies to preserve Fijian communal culture and to use it to protect Fijians from the evils of rapid development and deculturation. These policies had in turn been shaped by social science wisdom of the day. Conversely, people "knew" that indigenous Fijian communal culture was an obstacle to development because of other waves of government policy, influenced by other waves of social science theory, which had stressed the ways that communalism was detrimental to development. In fact, villagers who were middle-aged or older had lived through waves of governmental policy aimed both to preserve communal culture as a protection from the "anomie" of rapid development and to shake people out of this communal culture to allow development (Ravuvu 1987). Ema had learned about the importance of indigenous Fijian tradition in her social science course at a local high school. This local high school, which stressed commitment to village culture, had been established as part of a campaign by the national Ministry of Education to encourage rural children to be satisfied with remaining in the village instead of flooding to urban areas where there were not enough jobs to go around. On the other hand, teachers at this same high school told me that they saw this emphasis on tradition as excessive and that it hampered individual success. Observing village life convinced me that cultural identity was fluid and contingent on situation for many people. In some contexts, people enacted a sacred Fijian tradition emphasizing subordinating individual desire to community and to communal protocol. A neighbor, Apalosi, for instance, reckoned that he sat on some twenty-five different committees each of which met regularly for daylong sessions framed by long opening and closing ceremonies. We also regularly heard messengers arriving with gifts of kava, a slightly narcotic root whose consumption is central to all indigenous Fijian ceremonial activities, several times a week at Apalosi's house. Each kava gift required, minimally, that Apalosi and his family participate in a kava drinking ceremony of several hours in length. Apalosi also regularly attended kava ceremonies at the home of the Tui Navitilevu, the local high chief who lived nearby. And all the villagers we knew were regularly involved in church-related gatherings, in wed-

4

Chapter One

dings, funerals, first birthday parties for firstborn children, circumcision celebrations for young boys and many other celebrations each of which required contributions of time, food, money, and traditional ceremonial valuables such as mats and whales' teeth. Many of the same villagers, however, belonged to Pentecostal churches, which emphasized membership in a world Christian community and frowned on kava drinking. Like Elenoa, at times they were quite critical of village culture.

Modernity and Identity on the Margins In the following pages, I examine the "continuous self-fashioning" of rural indigenous Fijians in public discourse and in life history narratives to show how cultural and personal identity are fluid and heterogeneous. Modernity on the margins is an experience of anxiety provoking contradictions between competing ideologies, and between international ideologies and local experiences. Individuals position themselves relative to competing ideologies as they refract through idiosyncratic life circumstances, leading to creative, hybrid, reformulations of international ideologies. Barber (1997) and many others argue that mass media and multinational corporations have exposed people across the globe to American assumptions about individualism and consumerism. The obvious fact of global exchanges of ideas has led anthropologists and other social scientists over the past ten or fifteen years to call for a paradigmatic shift in the study of other cultures. The time is over, many claim, when we can look for distinctive "cultures" attached to particular communities. In fact, people have always moved between communities and localized groups have always defined their identities through interaction with other communities (Barth 1969). However, developments in transportation, mass media and mass communication have led to an unprecedented level of awareness of other cultures as well as increased ability for individuals to choose their own communities through migration or through communication with distant others. And the ideologies that people find important are no longer exclusively those associated with local communities; in fact, movies, television programs, and other mass media productions can have as much impact on people's sense of self and community (see also Foster 1999). This focus on global interconnections and constructed identities has raised new issues about local agency in the face of global forces. Some scholars point to the destabilization of local truths as creating new scope for "imagination" (Appadurai 1996) and individual "self creation" (Gid-

Self and Society in Fiji dens 1991), as individuals to draw on multiple images in piecing together satisfying senses of self that vary from context to context (Gergen 1991). Giddens (1991) argues that global modernity erodes tradition and creates increasingly reflexive beings consulting various experts in making decisions. Furthermore, the very basis for defining identity shifts from social role to individual lifestyle as, the influence of tradition and custom shrink on a world-wide level, the very basis for our self-identity-our sense of selfchanges. In more traditional situations, a sense of self is sustained largely through the stability of the social positions of individuals in the community. Where tradition lapses, and lifestyle choice prevails, the self isn't exempt. Self-identity has to be created and re-created on a more active basis than before. [Giddens 2000: 651 Psychologist, Kenneth Gergen (1991), similarly argues that today's global social networks and international exchanges of ideas have created new kinds of people who are no longer embedded in single cultural traditions (see also Appadurai 1996). Gergen argues that people are increasingly autonomous from small, localized communities; we have become a world of postmodern "saturated" selves whose identity and values differ from context to context. Like Appadurai, Gergen suggests that with the growth of mass communications technologies such as email, many people have networks of relationships spanning the globe. Many people have more regular contact with distant professional colleagues and friends than with their own neighbors. As a consequence, people no longer have a single coherent sense of self-defined in terms of local cultural values and assumptions. Instead, individuals have multiple selves each enacted in the context of a different set of relationships and different cultural models (see also Ewing 1997). While interacting with my colleagues at, Union College, the small liberal arts college in upstate New York where I teach, I may enact a self who values commitment to teaching and to students. But when engaging in email correspondence with distant colleagues I become another self guided by a drive to win professional prestige through publishing articles contributing to esoteric anthropological debates. Since I no longer interact exclusively with one local community, enforcing coherence in behavior and values, I am free to enact multiple selves in different contexts. And in the process of operating on different values and assumptions in different contexts people become increasingly relativistic, aware of the existence of competing cultural values and assumptions and accepting no single "culture" as a tacit, taken-for-granted, truth.

6

Chapter One

Holland et al. (1998) and Ochs and Capps (2001) also emphasize individual agency in constructing a sense of self. People draw on a repertoire of master narratives provided by their culture in order to convince themselves that their lives are coherent and understandable and to win social support from others. These master narratives are often associated with particular social contexts (such as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings studied by Holland et al.) where individuals take on identities in the "figured worlds" of that context and come to experience their lives according to these constructions (see also Ewing 1997; Kondo 1990; Strauss 1992ab; Strauss and Quinn 1998). As individuals draw on standard narratives to make sense of their lives, they infuse them with new, idiosyncratic, meaning. Ochs and Capps (2001) suggest that individuals want to feel that their lives are coherent and understandable and this leads them to stereotypical explanation. But they also want to encompass the full richness of their own experiences and so innovate on standard plotlines. In this way, "selves" are culturally constructed, but individuals have agency to work within these cultural constructs since narratives are inherently "dialogic" (Bahktin 1981) accumulating new meanings as they are used by individuals in a variety of situations (see also Strauss 1992ab).* Other scholars, however, point out that modernity does not always provide a free-for-all for unfettered imagination. Instead, modernity has a distinct "content" (Giddens 1991; Robbins 1998, 2004) involving Western ideologies centering around individual autonomy and achievement; these ideas have a privileged status among the array of ideas circulating in global "ethnoscapes," because they are backed by power, money, and status. People everywhere have to grapple with these ideas, often in environments offering rather limited possibilities for realizing autonomy. Barber (1997) and others warn that local languages and cultures everywhere in the world could be replaced by a shallow, international, consumer-oriented culture fostered by multinational industries. As Waters (1995:197) puts it, "Under consumer culture, consumption becomes the main form of self-expression and the chief source of identity." All over the world, particular cultures give way to a global form of identity driven by multinational industries. However, just as often as local cultures give way to a homogenized world, corporate, culture, globalizations leads to "retribalization," or an emphasis on distinctive ethnic cultures defined in opposition to the West. As Giddens (2000: 31) suggests, "Globalisation is the reason for the revival of local cultural identities in different parts of the world." Indeed, according the Giddens (2000: 66) and others, global modernity creates fundamentalist movements calling for a return to sacred truths as less powerful groups resist economic and political encroachment, and as peo-

Self and Society in Fiji

7

ple everywhere respond to the alienating potential of a world where everything is up for grabs (see also Waters 1995: 193). In Fiji, retribalization is evident in the thinking of people who reject democracy based on common roll elections as inappropriate to an indigenous Fijian culture based on ranked vanua, tied to particular pieces of land. This is part of an effort to protect Fijian control of land and government in a world where many fear that unchecked economic competition could quickly relegate indigenous Fijians to the bottom of a national and world order (Keesing 1989; Lawson 1996). Sometimes Islanders embrace tradition and sometimes they reject it (Keesing 1989; Thomas 1992). But Keesing (1989) argues that in either case Islanders are still are locked into an oppositional thinking based on "Manachean dualisms." Such thinking can be helpfid in preserving cultural diversity and local pride but can lock into place inequalities within groups based on gender, race, and so on. Lawson (1996), for instance, points to the way that the emphasis on a united indigenous Fijian tradition has suppressed discussion of regional, ethnic, and gender inequalities.

Fijian Selves in a Global Village In the following chapters, I examine the impact of global modernity by taking a fine-grained local view of issues often analyzed through examining national political rhetoric (e.g. Kelly and Kaplan 2001). Global modernity had clearly created a greater reflexivity in imagining self and community in Rakiraki as villagers responded to the ideologies of Christian churches, mass media and international aid organizations. And these forces had, in some contexts, led to a re-traditionalizing of personal and communal identity. But looking beyond national political discourse revealed that the poles of "local tradition" and "global modernity" were breaking down. These stark oppositions were most evident when villagers compared themselves to Indo-Fijians and Westerners. But villagers also tried to define identity v i s - h i s other villagers, urban relatives, and so on. When individuals imagined their identities in these contexts they blended the global and the local in interesting ways to create spaces for new ways of living. Villagers operated within distinct constraints. Kray (2001) says that rural Guatemalans are subjected to contradictory pressures to be autonomous and to submerge self in community. Such pressures are particularly acute in Third World societies that are inundated with international media and ideologies that both push individual autonomy and achievement and celebrate the virtues of quaint, premodern, communal cultures. Contradictory ideologies create anxieties for some people since, "if two dif-

8

Chapter One

ferent behaviors imply values that are fimdamentally contradictory, then a person cannot regularly practice both without eventually recognizing the conflict in values. Recognition of the conflict in values may lead to a crisis of self' (Kray 2001: 397; see also Robbins 2004). Anxieties are also created by gaps between international ideologies and local experiences as individuals strive to become "autonomous selves" in environments offering limited possibilities for autonomy. Kray (2001) argues that Guatemalans, faced with anxieties caused by conflicting value systems, seek personal integration by wholeheartedly embracing religious ideologies endorsing either commitment to community or individual autonomy. In contrast, I suggest that rural Fijians author creative solutions to contradictions they experience in their lives. The contradictions are predictable: rural Fijians experience a similar set of tensions between demands to be autonomous and to be part of communities. But the resolutions individuals reach are multiple. People reconfigure the global in idiosyncratic ways, in response to their own personal circumstances. But they do this within real constraints, posed by the inflexible conflict between modernity and locality. Individuals in daily life were also more often preoccupied with defining their place v i s - h i s fellow villagers and extra-local relatives than with defining a place for indigenous Fijians within the nation and within the international community. The opposing impulses to "cosmopolitanism" and "fundamentalism," noted by Giddens (2000: 66) and others, blend into a more ambiguous and amorphous desire to imagine identity in new ways that break down the dichotomies between these poles. As Kelly and Kaplan (2001) argue, the recent focus on "identity" is a preoccupation that conceals as much as it illuminates. Rakiraki villagers, like the community leaders and politicians examined by Kelly and Kaplan, draw on ideologies in different ways in different contexts to define situations in particular ways suited to particular purposes. In doing so, they must reach compromises with those around them, crafting narratives that draw on shared values in such a way as to win general support. It makes no sense, therefore, to speak of a singular indigenous Fijian identity even within Rakiraki village where villagers draw on national Fijian ideologies, local identity constructs, international Christian ideologies, and even international popular culture to craft unique senses of self that vary according to context. In the process, people blur distinctions between global and local, urban and rural (see also Besnier 2002,2004).

Self and Society in Fiji

Postmodern Sociocentrism My exploration of individual and communal self-constructions will lead me to re-examine a classic debate about "sociocentric" Pacific selves. Earlier "culturalist" models claimed that one's fundamental sense of self is shaped by tacit cultural principles internalized in childhood. Ochs (1990) and Morton (1996) demonstrate the way interactions with caretakers impress upon children the idea that they are low status people who must accommodate to those who are older and wiser in a hierarchical world. Sahlins (1987) suggests that Fijians and other Polynesians view history differently from many Westerners, seeing change as something that always emanates from the top in a society with a sacred, hierarchical order. Such assumptions, Sahlins suggests, are often altered when brought to bear on new kinds of situations. When Polynesians, for instance, applied their ideas about sacred hierarchy to Westerners, the ideas about the nature of hierarchy were altered. But these deeply rooted cultural assumptions shaped interpretations of new events. Just as Fijians and other Islanders are said to be preoccupied with hierarchy, so they have been described as deeply sociocentric. Becker and others (see, for instance, Kirkpatrick and White 1985; Lutz 1990; Strathern 1988) argue that Pacific people approach social life with a fundamentally different set of assumptions about the relationship between individual and community than do Westerners. Lutz (1990), for example, argues the Ifaluk people of Micronesia view emotions as "between" rather than within people in the sense that they always see emotions as tied to particular kinds of interactions rather than as stemming from internal psychological processes. Ifaluk people, then, think about altering social situations when Americans might focus their attention on adjusting personalities. Strathern (1988) suggests that Pacific peoples do not think of themselves as "individuals" who have distinct personalities that stay the same across contexts. Instead, they view themselves as "dividuals" whose characteristics vary according to the social networks and contexts in which they are embedded. Thus, she argues, among Papua New Guinea highlanders, even gender is not viewed as a fixed aspect of individual identity. Instead, males and females are "partible" consisting of various body parts such as breasts and penises which can be made more male or more female according to context. Such works have prompted much valuable questioning of Western models of personality and the extent to which they can be applied across cultures. But as Spiro (1993), McHugh (1989) and Farley (1998) point out, contrasting sociocentric selves with individualistic ones is too sim-

10

Chapter One

plistic. In fact, most cultural conceptions of self have both individualistic and sociocentric components. McHugh (1989) and Farley (1998) both point out that a public ideology encouraging individuals to put aside individual desires for social good actually recognizes that people have antisocial impulses. In fact a public emphasis on subduing individual pride and desire for the greater good in Fiji implies that individuals do experience problems with becoming perfectly sociocentric selves. More generally culturalist models have been criticized for overlooking the presence of many master narratives, sometimes mutually contra.dictory, within any culture. Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), for example, shows how the Bedouin of Egypt have some discourse genres that celebrate romantic love as resistance to authority, and other discourse genres that deride romantic love as a sign of dangerous weakness of character. Similarly, Jeanette Mageo (1998) has suggested that, in any culture, a dominant emphasis on one set of character traits will, of necessity, create a preoccupation with the opposite set of tendencies. She argues that a dominant emphasis on respect for authority and communal tradition in Samoa, has created a population with strong covert desires to be "cheeky" and to flaunt individual talents. Furthermore, the culture itself offers many contexts where such behaviors are both allowed and encouraged. The presence of numerous different master narratives in any culture opens a space for individuals to construct their own life stories and to interpret their place in the community in different ways. Both the desire to become a sociocentric self, and the equally strong desire to see this as a personal choice, were aspects of narratives Rakiraki villagers put together to define a meaningful place for themselves in their community and in the wider world, as they tried to resolve tensions between computing ideologies and between ideology and circumstance. They resolved tensions between conflicting pressures to be autonomous and to be communal by casting communalism as an individual achievement. The narrative of sociocentrism was most appealing to those whose fates were, for various reasons, tied to rural villages and networks of relatives. In fact, the vast majority of Fijians at some stage of their lives fall into this category since the largest employer is the government that mandates retirement at fifty-five. Few retirees have the means to maintain an urban lifestyle so they live their last few decades of life in rural villages or dependent on urban relatives. Similarly, many young Fijians find that employment opportunities are in short supply for those with no post-secondary education. Young women who cannot get good jobs also face pressures to marry. It is perhaps also not surprising that those who chose to see themselves as opting for communalism as a higher good emphasized the fact that this was a choice not something that was forced on them from the outside. People were preoccupied with the possibility of being looked down upon by wealthier relatives, mem-

Self and Society in Fiji

11

bers of Fiji's other large ethnic group, the Indo-Fijians, and by Western tourists. By stressing the fact that they had chosen sociocentrism as a higher good than individualism, people suggested that they were fundamentally equal to those who were wealthier. While there some overarching similarities to the ways rural villagers imagined themselves and their culture, however, each individual also had his or her own way of piecing together a meaningful identity. Examining individual life stories revealed that each person had his or her own way of being sociocentric: some people were heavily invested in the idea of contributing to a community; others focused on the bonds of sharing and caring that united villagers; others saw themselves as part of an educated and/or high ranking vanguard whose role was to help the rest of the community but who were above the need to submit to communal prescriptions themselves. Looking beyond the national scene revealed a plethora of strategies for re-imagining tradition and modernity, self and community. Villagers were concerned with their identity vis-k-vis an international community, overseas relatives, and Indo-Fijians. These concerns pushed people to a rigidified version of tradition. But they were also concerned with crafting a self in relation to fellow villagers, fellow employees and so on. These concerns led to recastings of tradition and modernity, self and tradition. People in Fiji and elsewhere were caught in a web of contradictory global ideologies advocating modernity, romanticizing premodern tradition, and so on. But individuals responded to these ideologies through crafting versions of self that creatively reworked these Manachean dualisms. On the one hand, that there were distinct limits to villager's abilities to re-imagine their worlds. Many people were dependent on village kin networks and had to at least pay lip service to the dominant sociocentric ideology. Modernity, for them, was a condition of winning small compromises between international images of lifestyles and very local circumstances supporting a limited range of social roles. On the other hand, the cumulative effect of numerous individual reworkings of the dominant ideology was to slowly create space for a greater variety of lifestyles. In the process a new, postmodern, incarnation of the Pacific sociocentric self was emerging. Chapter Two analyzes the rhetorical construction of communalism in Rakiraki rituals and ceremonies. I will show how speeches and exchanges portray the community as comprising categories of people each playing its proper role in perpetuating a harmonious community. Existing analyses of ceremonial language in the Pacific suggest that it stems from tacit assumptions about the cosmos and about human nature. I suggest, instead, that Rakiraki ceremonial language had an outward looking quality and was designed to define the relationship between villagers and the

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Chapter One

outer world. As Appadurai (1996) suggests, people all over the world are aware of alternative ways of construing themselves; distinctive local practices are generally "localizing strategies" designed to create and reaffirm local distinctiveness for particular purposes. But sevusevu were aimed at multiple audiences. Most analyses of Pacific identity construction stress the way that Islanders define themselves in opposition to Westerners and to other groups such as Indo-Fijians. But villagers were equally preoccupied with defining themselves in relation to other indigenous Fijian groups such as urban relatives and people from other regions of the country. Identity construction in sevusevu showed that identity was complex and shifting. Chapter Three compares the discourse of community and self in the dominant Methodist Church and in the increasingly popular Protestant evangelical sects, and then looks at the way individual Fijians talk about their religious experiences. All of the Christian churches involve a complex ideology about the relationships between individuals and communities. None of the churches suggest that individuals are unproblematically sociocentric or willing to subordinate themselves to society. Instead, they offer many models about the relationship between self and society that suggest, as does the personal testimony of individual Fijians about their religious beliefs, that a dominant cultural emphasis on community generates many submerged, but equally shared, ways of understanding the problems experienced by individuals who try to subordinate their wills to the demands of the larger group. All of the churches emphasized the need to be part of a community and all of the believers expressed a desire to subordinate their individual identity and desires to the needs of a greater community. But church rhetoric and individual narratives portrayed a sociocentric orientation as a hard won achievement of a disciplined, individual self. In this way, religion helped villagers to work through conflicting pressures to achieve as individuals and to subordinate self to community. I also stress, however, differences in constructions of self and community within the Christian community. Pentecostal Christians conceived of themselves as part of an international Christian community, while members of the dominant Methodist church configured themselves as part of a national, Christian, Fijian community. Both of these kinds of identity were somewhat different from that established by the sevusevu. Chapters Four, Five, and Six will examine the way a series of individual villagers construct a sense of self in life history narratives. Chapter Four examines the life stories of four women. I show how women selectively emphasized different aspects of Fijian sociocentric ideology. In order to win acceptance, women had to portray themselves as following sociocentric values; but they could work within this ideology to justify a variety of behaviors. Some women drew on an ideology of chiefly

Self and Society in Fiji

13

aloofness to argue that they could be properly sociocentric but still be distant from social obligations; others took the opposite strategy of arguing that a truly sociocentric person was one who cared for others, as did many women as wives and mothers, not one who followed the orders of higher status community members. Examining women's narratives suggests that, as Holland et al. (1998), Ochs and Capps (2001) and others suggest, even relatively powerless individuals have some space to work within dominant cultural narratives. Each woman works within a similar set of ideas but brings this "figured world" to life in different ways in order to justify her own life circumstances and to marginally enhance her own autonomy. Contemporary rural Fijian women grapple with international ideologies emphasizing autonomy and craft life accounts that win small compromises between local circumstances and international ideas. Chapter Five examines constructions of identity by two women who conceive of themselves as part of a national vanguard. I show that both women challenge the opposition between "modernity" and "tradition" suggesting that "modern" lifestyles and values stem from true "chiefly" Fijian values. Villagers claiming to support tradition, according to these women, are in fact less traditional than are apparently modern urban professionals. Thus, "tradition" and "modernity" are fluid categories, defined for particular purposes. Starkly opposed in much national rhetoric, they are drawn together in village discourse. Chapter Six, throws into relief the sociocentrism of young women, by comparing them to two older men. Both of these people, as I argue is typical of older Fijians, were less focused on the "share and care" ideology of Fijian culture but were very invested in the ideology of playing one's role in a community. I suggest that older Fijians, who receive a great deal of recognition for their role in perpetuating a sacred Fijian vanua, tend to find this role satisfying. But each of the two individuals examined in this chapter also had an idiosyncratic way of imagining his role in the community, responding to particular life circumstances. Furthermore, these two men's vision of the Fijian nation and their role within it differed radically from that of the 2000 coup leaders. Finally, Chapter Seven attempts to look in to the future by examining constructions of cultural and personal identity among Rakiraki children in their play. I found that children's conceptions of identity blurred the distinctions between local and global, traditional and modern, to an even greater extent than did adults. Furthermore, boys and girls differed in the ways they defined self and community suggesting a future of even greater heterogeneity in indigenous Fijian constructions of identity. Boys drew on the anti-authoritarian associations of the local dialect to locate themselves within an imagined international community of autonomous, "macho," young men that included international sports stars and movie stars like Stephen Segal. Girls drew on the cosmopolitan associations of

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Chapter One

the national standard dialect of Fijian, Bauan, to imagine themselves to be part of extra-local international communities of urban professionals and Christians. In the process, children created new kinds of translocal identities and ways of being Fijian. Looking beyond the national scene, in short, suggests a more complex and happy picture of Fijian identity. Indigenous Fijians may, at first glance, appear to be caught between the extremes of "McWorld," or complete loss of their local culture, on the one hand, and "Jihad," or retrenching to a rigid, essentialized version of local culture, on the other. But close examination reveals that indigenous Fijians, like humans everywhere, grapple with the contradictions in their lives and author novel solutions that blur the distinctions between modernity and tradition, global and local. In the process, the slowly make space for a variety of ways of being truly Fijian.

Notes 1. Here and in the following chapters, I sometimes follow Rakiraki practice in referring to indigenous Fijians simply as Fijians. 2. Strauss (1992a), for instance, shows how three American factory workers all, on the surface of it, subscribe to the idea that hard work can bring success to anyone. But in practice, none of the men believe that their own comparatively modest achievements result from lack of effort. People construct their identity by working cultural narratives and symbols in novel ways into a coherent life story. Public ideologies also take on different meanings and motivational force for individuals depending on the way these ideologies have been associated with idiosyncratic life experiences. Strauss (1992a), for example, shows how one man's childhood history of asthma led him to think of himself as different from the mainstream and to adopt ideologies, different from those embraced by the rest of his family, that he viewed as consistent with his iconoclastic sense of self.

Chapter 2

Defining the Community Through Ceremony

There is perhaps nothing that captures the essence of Fijian culture better than the sevusevu, the ceremonial presentation of kava (Fijian: yaqona), a mildly narcotic root central to ritual and sociality in many Pacific societies. The sevusevu is a central component of all life cycle rituals, social gatherings, healing ceremonies, and community meetings. Visitors and locals alike regard the sevusevu as an essential element of Fijian culture both because its occurrence is so frequent and because the sevusevu seems to encapsulate such central cultural themes as the preoccupation with relative rank, the high value placed on sociality and hospitality, and the "pervasive and delicate elaboration of ceremonial life" (Katz 1993: 326) into everyday contexts. David Stanley, the author of one of the most popular tourist guides to Fiji, illustrates the way that the sevusevu has become emblematic of Fijian culture for many outsiders when he presents a detailed description of protocol in a sevusevu, warning the tourist that correct mastery of this protocol is necessary to acceptance in a Fijian village. Stanley tells the tourist that, the ceremonial preparation [of kava] is the most honored feature of the formal life of Fijians, Tongans, and Samoans. It is performed with the utmost gravity according to a sacramental ritual to mark births, marriages, deaths, official visits, the installation of a new chief, etc. . . . The guests present a bundle of waka [dried yaggona' root] to the hosts, along with a short speech explaining their visit, a custom known as sevusevu.

Chapter Two The sevusevu is received by the hosts and acknowledged with a short speech of acceptance...[after the ceremonial mixing of the kava the] mata ni vanua [chiefs spokesman] then says "talo" ("serve"). The cupbearer squats in front of the tanoa [bowl] with a mbilo (half coconut shell), which the mixer fills. The cupbearer then presents the first cup to the guest of honor, who claps once and drains it, and everyone claps three times. The second cup goes to the guests' mata ni vanua, who claps once and drinks. The man sitting next to the mixer says "aa," and everyone answers "matha" ("empty"). The third cup is for the local chief, who claps once before drinking, and everyone claps three times after. The mata ni vanua of the first local chief claps once and drinks, and everyone says "matha." The same occurs of the second local chief and his mata ni vanua. After these six men have finished their cups, the mixer announces, "Sa matha saka tu na yaggona vaka turanga" ("the bowl is empty my chieY2), and the mata ni vanua says "thombo" ("clap"). The mixer then runs both hands around the rim of the tanoa and claps three times. This terminates the full ceremony, but then a second bowl is prepared and everyone drinks. During the drinking of the first bowl complete silence must be maintained. [Stanley 1996: 528-5291 While there are minor variations in sevusevu protocol fiom region to region within Fiji, Stanley's description captures well many of the central features of the event. First, the sevusevu is highly formalized and the precise prescription of each behavior sets the event apart from day-to-day life and gives it a sacred aura. In fact, the sevusevu is an illustration p a r excellence of a kind of speech defined by Bloch (1975) as "formal." Bloch noted that public oratory among the Merina of Madagascar followed a highly predictable formula to such an extent that little new information was conveyed in speeches. Orators made reference, in an entirely predictable fashion, to shared values and mythic events and made little reference to the particulars of current problems and events. Bloch went on to suggest that this formal code, though a poor way of commenting on specific events, was regarded by the Merina as sacred in nature, and efficacious in the same way as prayer or other religious speech. In face of the "messy" reality of a society, formal speech asserted that society conformed to a time-honored, "epic" (Duranti 1994), ideal form. Sevusevu speeches, which always follow very similar formulas and which are considered ritually efficacious, are a good example of formal speech. Second, the sevusevu expresses typically polynesian3 notions of social ranking both through the order of drinking and through providing each "chief' or important person, with a spokesman (Fijian: mata ni vanua). The chief-spokesman structure reflects the common Polynesian

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assumption that high-ranking people are semi-divine and should remain remote from the everyday social fray. Finally, the sevusevu, which generally requires that people stay through several hours of drinking until the kava bowl is emptied, encapsulates a commitment to sociality typical of Fiji and other Pacific Island cultures; participants express their willingness to put aside personal comfort and other activities in order to demonstrate their commitment to the group. As Turner (1986) notes, by participating in sevusevu, people demonstrate both respect for rank and commitment to communal solidarity. The small number of existing analyses of sevusevu, and of other kinds of ceremonial greetings in Polynesia, explain the sevusevu (and other genres of formal, ceremonial speech) in terms of local assumptions about the polity and about relations with the cosmos. Arno (1985) notes that sevusevu are part of a larger genre of "impressive speech," light in informational content and used to display for the community the legitimate authority of high-ranking people. Myers and Brenneis (1984: 26) suggest that ceremonial speech forms in Pacific societies like Fiji where people are ranked according to age, gender, and lineage membership, both reflect and reinforce assumptions about rank. It is common in such societies for high-ranking people to be seen as remote from day-to-day struggles; high-ranking people are considered semi-divine, infused with sacred power of ancestral spirits. As such, they are expected to be, "dignified and composed [to avoid] being drawn in to unnecessary confrontation with others and . . . unruffled by bickering and gossip. [They] must maintain [their] self-respect and authority during a crisis . . . and remain cool and steadfast when [their] views and feelings are challenged" (Ravuvu 1983: 103-1 04). To engage in straightforward political debate about contentious issues would compromise a leader's image of being detached and remote. Furthermore, as Arno (1985) suggests, straightforward attempts to persuade followers could undermine the authority of the leader by implying that he needed to win support, instead of being able to take this for granted. By using formal language, orators avoid the appearance of lowering themselves to petty politicking. People strategically define a particular situation as formal, through use of specific speech devices, in order to stifle debate, to frame a decision as final and above the political fray (Kuipers 1990), or to create an appearance of consensus which allows debates about specific problems to occur without threatening the community (Duranti 1994). Duranti (1992), analyzing a similar ceremonial greeting in Samoa, argues that individuals make use of these greeting to make subtle claims about relative rank in the community. Rankings are fluid and people use sevusevu to define their rank differently depending on the context and what they wish to achieve. Ceremonial speeches in communal events also reflect Fijian (and more generally Polynesian) assumptions about the cosmos. Arno (1993)

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argues that Fijian communal affairs are governed by a concern that relationships must be dodonu (literally: straight). Here "straightness" refers to everyone following correctly the requirements of his or her role as governed by time-honored Fijian tradition. The sevusevu, and other ceremonial speeches, emphasize placing people correctly in their proper role. This straightening of the community is seen to have ritual efficacy, allowing the vu to infuse human society with power (Katz 1993). Through drinking kava, participants come into contact with the world of the vu and infuse their mana into human society (Turner 1986). In the following pages, I examine sevusevu and other aspects of the ceremonialization of life in Rakiraki. As the literature suggests, senior men in Rakiraki used the discourse of consensus and tradition to advance their own reputations in an arena where restraint and distance from conflict were taken as a sign of high status. Rakiraki people were influenced by assumptions about the relationship between the supernatural and human society that emphasized the importance of human society being in a straight, time-honored, order. I encountered these ideas in Rakiraki in peoples' preoccupation with the possibility the sevusevu and other ceremonies could make people sick by putting them in the wrong place. It was clear that ceremony was viewed as something that brought human society together with a supernatural order by either reinforcing, or failing to reinforce, a correct time-honored order to society. But all these political and religious acts take on new meaning in a contemporary world where village Fijians are well aware of other ways of life and are always concerned with defining a meaningful place for themselves in a world where urban relatives, and members of other cultural groups, are often richer and, in some contexts, more respected. Bloch (1975) argued that one function of Merina formal speech was to assert that the Merina had autonomous communities governed by traditional elders. In fact, most important decisions were handed down to local communities by higher levels of government; but Merina elders, nevertheless, gave impressive formal speeches in long local meeting to convince themselves and the rest of the community that, indeed, the village was still an autonomous polity. Like Merina speeches, sevusevu, and other genres of Fijian formal speech, are used by villagers to define a place for themselves in a national and international community. Villagers use sevusevu to convince themselves and others that they are, indeed, guardians of a sacred cultural tradition, worth more than money. Almost everyone in the village had a stake in perpetuating the image of the traditional, "straight," Fijian village. Many people realized that the idea that the order of Fijian society was sacred was a key element in the ideology supporting a constitution that entrenched Fijian political dominance in parliament. Many Fijian villagers also shared a common interest in convincing urban relatives that rural villagers were guardians of a tradition

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that urban relatives were obliged to support through fiequent monetary contributions. Older people in the community, who were the chief participants in rituals, also generally supported these ideas. The pressures of defining indigenous Fijian cultural identity may also have increased the frequency and changed the nature of sevusevu and other kinds of ceremonial speech. Both scholars and ordinary Fijians comment on the proliferation of sevusevu and other kinds of ceremonial events in Fiji over the past few decades. Sevusevu were once semireligious rites and the right to participate in them was restricted to highranking people. Now sevusevu are a daily occurrence and most adults participate in them regularly. Villagers and academics alike also note a more general explosion of ceremonial exchange in recent decades. Perhaps sevusevu, and other village ceremonies, have proliferated in fiequency as they come to bear a new symbolic load of defining a meaningful identity for senior men in rural community, and for rural Fijians more generally (see also Carrier and Carrier 1989 for a similar case in Papua New Guinea) vis-h-vis international tourists, and urban Fijians. More generally, the well-known Pacific emphasis on maintaining harmony through formal ceremonial language stems as much from the need to define a place for islanders in a wider world as from indigenous assumptions about the polity and the cosmos. Duranti (1994) argues that in Samoa formalized speeches or lauga generally open and close meetings but that less formal speeches (talanoaga) in the main body of the meeting leave much more room for individual commentary on specific events. This is to a certain extent also true of Fijian meetings, but Fijian public speech-both political and ceremonial-is striking for the extent to which the formal dominates the less formal. Going along with this, there was a marked dispreference for mentioning conflict or the many ways that the "messy" reality of social life failed to conform to an ideal order in public. Arno (1984, 1993) suggests that a public emphasis on consensus and formality is traditional to Fijian villages and reflects assumptions about leadership and about proper individual comportment. Rakiraki ceremonial speech may also have become more formal and harmony-centered as villagers felt the needs to live up the image of living a sacred communal tradition, in face of an external world and of new sources of conflict within the village.

The Sevusevu: Form As Arno (1985) suggests, sevusevu reaffirm shared values and, indeed, examining sevusevu is a good way to uncover the central tenants of the indigenous Fijian presentation of self. Sevusevu speeches almost always assert that Fijians are "like family" and that Fijians place primary impor-

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tance on "loving each other and worshipping the Lord." For example, in a sevusevu to the Rakiraki high chief, the Tui Navitilevu, to obtain his blessings on the division of two Methodist church districts in his area, Rakiraki and Raviravi, the presenter of the sevusevu suggested that it was intended to reconfirm the bond of friendship between the two new districts. The recipient of the sevusevu took up this theme in his speech pointing both to the fact that the sevusevu was an honored and respected tradition and to the importance of sitting together as family: The offering [of yaqona] is honored and respected. It is accepted by Uluda [house of the Tui Navitilevu] by the gentleman the Tui Navitilevu, the head of the land. Thanks very much. Our coming to meet at one . . . time near the end of. . . this year. . . . In the journey of the 1900s, let us jump to 2000. We will meet again and we will be like family. The Tui Navitilevu is truly very happy that you friends and family come and sit again that you . . . come [to] see each other again today.4 Similarly, many speakers draw their speech to a close by reminding the gathering that "our wealth is loving each other and serving the L o r d (noda yau e veilomani kei veiqaravi nu Kalou). Sevusevu, however, go beyond the reaffirmation of shared values to assert a more general picture of the Fijian community, largely implicit in the structure of the speech. Most Rakiraki sevusevu begin either with: awa beka nu vanua, au vura (the vanua is perhaps full, I appear) or ai yaba (on behalf). Both lines point to the fact that the speaker represents a larger group, an essential theme in the sevusevu that frames every interaction as one between two Fijian polities. The idea that individuals are always embedded within, and working for, a community is a central component of Fijian identity. Fijians contrast themselves on this score to Indo-Fijians and Europeans whom they see as acting always for individual benefit. The theme of social embeddedness is continued in the next lines of every sevusevu which identify in some detail either the intended recipients of the sevusevu or those who are giving the yaqona (both kinds of information will appear in the speech but their positions sometimes vary). In either case, the speaker may identify a particular person but will always embed this individual immediately within one or more groups by mentioning the chiefs whom he or she represents. For example, when we went to ask permission for Stephanie Sienkiewicz to leave her host family to return to America, our spokesman, Solo, suggested that our sevusevu was going both to her host family, and to the whole village in which they lived, as well as the two chiefs who led that village. Solo, in turn, suggested that the sevusevu was coming from us, Stephanie's pro-

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fessors, but also from the whole village in which we lived in Fiji and from its chief. On other occasions, people who represented us dealt with the relatively unusual situation that we did not belong to a Fijian vanua by saying that we were representing "the big government of America and its leader, the President." An essential element of the sevusevu, then, is framing everything an individual does as an act representing his or her group. Fijians, the sevusevu asserts, never act on their own but only as emissaries of Fijian vanua. The sevusevu similarly asserts that each Fijian vanua has a proper and sacred rank order tied to a particular geographical location and blessed by the supernatural world (either God or the vu). A common closing, for instance, will send the sevusevu, to the high chief of the recipient group and either to God or to "those who stand behind." Elenoa suggested that "those who stand behind" were the vu of the community. In fact, many sevusevu consist of little more than a thumbnail sketch of the order of the communities giving and receiving the sevusevu, mentioning the high chiefs, each important man, the spokesman, and either God or "those who stand behind." Other sevusevu conclude with long exhortations for the Lord to bless all those present, listed, of course, in order of rank. The act of sending the sevusevu through one legitimate chain of human command up through a second chain of human command, is portrayed as something which calls forth the blessing of the Lord on the community. A human community in proper order, in other words, will be blessed by the Lord. The current political structure is thus represented as part of a sacred order laid down by supernatural forces and not subject to human manipulation. This structure was, for instance, evident in the sevusevu presented to the Tui Navitilevu by Raviravi people to mark the division of the Rakiraki and Raviravi church districts. In closing his brief speech of presentation, the Raviravi spokesman reiterated the chain of command in the two communities, clearly framing the event as an interaction between vanua, but also firmly embedding the Methodist Church leaders within the vanua: on behalf, sir, of your chiefs house of Naulukoro, from the young gentleman, the Tui Navatu, on behalf, sir, of your community of Vatukaloko. (Thank you). On behalf, sir, of each important gentleman . . . in the church division of Rakiraki. On behalf of the church and its officials sitting here. On behalf of its person, I come as its voice. On behalf the offering, clear and straight, to my big house of Uluda and to its owners, to the community, to the Lord, and it goes. This speech, like most sevusevu, also asserts that this sacred social order is rooted in a particular geographical location through frequent

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mention of the houses of the various chiefs involved, "Uluda," the house of the Tui Navitilevu, and earlier "Naulukoro" the house of the Tui Navatu. High ranking people were often referred to by the names of their houses in formal contexts. Sevusevu also commonly referred to the important people of the community as the "tops of the high foundations" (veidela ni yavu cecere). House names are of particular significance in Fiji because of a belief that each family should build their house on a yavu (foundation) handed down through their lineage from time immemorial. This was part of the more general belief that people needed to occupy their particular place in a sacred order of society laid down through history and sanctioned by the supernatural. People suggested, for instance, that one family in the village was plagued by mental illness because they had built their house on a yavu that belonged to another family and were being punished by the vu. By stressing the connection of a high ranking person and his named house, then, people were implicitly drawing a portrait of a Fijian community living according to a sacred order, tied to a particular piece of land. This was an assertion that was important in the larger context of a Fijian nation. A similar message about the sacred and inviolable nature of the Fijian vanua is conveyed in the way the sevusevu speech portrays each individual as the representative of a tradition existing outside of human society. Most sevusevu speeches conclude with long "ai yaba" sections such as that quoted above in which the speaker asserts that he is representing a particular chief, and his vanua. Like the speaker above, most people will end by asserting that they are coming on "behalf of [the yaqona's] person; I come as [the yaqona's] voice." The speaker is referring here to himself, the person who is speaking for the yaqona. He asserts that he is also coming on his own behalf. This means that the speaker means personally what he says. But it also suggests that the speaker as representative is conceptually separate from the speaker as a person; his words are not personally chosen but, instead, follow a prescribed protocol existing outside the speaker. In fact, it was important in sevusevu speeches to follow the proper formula. Good speakers were ones who spoke with feeling and who preserved a distinctive rhythm in their delivery, rather than those who included novel ideas in their speeches. The impression that the speaker is just a representative of a larger tradition is further reinforced by the suggestion that the speaker is the "voice of the yaqona;" that is, he is not speaking his own words but the words of the yaqona. This locates the sevusevu words outside of individual personality and also outside human social convention, in a natural world of yaqona. This again suggests that the Fijian community and its tradition are not arbitrary human constructions but instead arise from a natural and supernatural order. Yaqona, a root that comes from the ground, ideally acts as a vehicle connecting ancestral spirits of a particu-

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lar location with a human community that is naturally connected to that location. Again, then, the sevusevu asserts that the Fijian vanua is sacred, that it is rooted to a particular piece of land, and that it is not a human construction but, instead, is laid down by the supernatural world. Bloch, Duranti, and Arno all assert that formalized speech reinforces the status quo by raising it above the level of everyday political maneuvering, to the level of shared values, above debate. The Rakiraki sevusevu illustrates this process par excellence in its insistence that society conforms to a time-honored sacred and natural order. As Myers and Brenneis (1984: 4) argue, the sevusevu, like many kinds of political speech, does more to "reproduce the context which makes power possible," that is, to reinforce a certain set of assumptions about the nature of the world, than to influence decisions about particular situations. In contemporary Rakiraki, however, the "context" produced by the sevusevu and other kinds of public speech is but one among an array of competing views of village society. Furthermore, the sevusevu was never completely successful in suppressing other points of view that were embodied in contexts such as informal gossip circles. In fact, the sevusevu was meaninghl and important to Fijians, particularly Fijian men, because of its role in asserting the model of the sacred and traditional Fijian community over other competing views.

Competing Views of Fijian Society The model of rural Fijian society endorsed by the sevusevu was one that was clearly central to local self-image. However, the model could be challenged on all points. Not surprisingly, for example, the assertion in sevusevu speeches that people were like "family," "loving one another," masked a more complex reality of backbiting and suspicion within the village. In fact, like any good ritual, the sevusevu was often performed to assert continued kinship and goodwill in situations where these were seen to be in jeopardy. The sevusevu given by the Raviravi people to the Rakiraki people, for example, obviously asserted that the bond of kinship must continue because that relationship was jeopardized by the separation of the two church divisions. Beyond that, however, the sevusevu came in the middle of a big dispute between the Rakiraki pastor and Rakiraki villagers because of the controversial firing of the Rakiraki catechist by the pastor. The sevusevu both reasserted the smooth relationship between vanua and church by locating the pastor firmly within the vanua of the Tui Navitilevu, and presented the whole of Rakiraki, including the pastor, as a united community. It is, of course, not surprising that a ritual should assert harmony and connection when these were under threat. But there were also more gen-

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era1 signs that the ceremonial emphasis on harmony and order masked a pervasive sense that Fijian communities were in many ways not at all harmonious and that there were fundamental disagreements about its order. When I conducted a series of life history interviews with village women, for instance, many of the women I interviewed eventually confessed to disliking village life, which they characterized as full of backbiting and sorcery. Elenoa, for example, complained one day, Staying in the village like this is just nothing. I think it's good for people that come [to visit from foreign countries; i.e. people who visit from foreign countries usually like Fijian culture]. But to me, what I see, nothing can be done other than the same old thing. There's no new things. . . . Yeah because we were brought up that way and that's why I said Fijians, in a time, they will be living like this. I said [to my husband], "You see that's why I don't want you to go to the village because there is nothing new, no development there. You'll just, when you go and mix around with them, you'll be like them and just sit and drink grog [i.e. yaqona], same old story that will go over and over again there's no development." Well that's their life. They think it's OK. That's good. But it's not supposed to be like that. God doesn't live like that; He develops each day. He changes every day. So He said, "People, so you see Indians [i.e. Indo-Fijians]. They are different; they have their own land. They are well off the way they see is so far they are they sees things that are they are very developing people. That's why they don't live in the village; they go out and live on the land."

Elenoa went on to talk about her mother's brother, with whom she had lived for a while as a child. He had led a new religious movement that advocated leaving villages, leaving Fijian customs, and living in individual family groups on the land. Elenoa spoke approvingly of his views saying that he had been wise in realizing that the Fijian way of life had once served Fijians well but that everyone had to change. Now, she argued many times, Fijians were ready to advance to a higher spiritual state where they did not need the church and chiefs to tell them what to do but could worship the "living L o r d in the world around them in their own way. Ema also voiced the common view that Fijian villages no longer conformed to the sacred, time-honored order at all. People had lost respect for tradition and hierarchy; villages were now just hotbeds of gossip and drunkenness. Ema started by speaking of the way that village life failed to live up to what she had learned about Fijian culture in secondary school. Ema asserted that Fijian village life had moved far away fiom the ideal portrait embodied in the sevusevu: people no longer had respect for

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rank, they did not know how they were related to each other. They did not know traditional Fijian kinship practices. What was left was just an empty shell without any real knowledge of, or respect for, Fijian traditions. She explicitly connected the need to preserve tradition with maintaining Fijian power and pride. Ironically, Ema herself had no desire to live a more traditional life. Her fondest hope was to get a job in another area of the country to escape the demands of her family. Ema was not unusual. The paradox of village culture for many people was evident here: people were ambivalent about living the tradition but felt that if the tradition died, Fijians would lose out as a group. And like her mother, Ema felt that what was left, after real respect for tradition had gone, was an oppressive village environment where people were jealous of one another and practiced "black magic" against those who succeeded financially. It was also apparent that the public assertion that Fijian society followed a sacred order, rooted to a particular piece of land, was a political assertion made in particular contexts to achieve particular goals. Within Rakiraki, for instance, there was a great deal of disagreement about the ranking of people within the community, and even about the degree to which people should be ranked in the Rakiraki area. These disagreements stemmed in part from differences in the Bauan, or southeastern, model of Fijian social organization taken by the British to apply to all of Fiji, and a local, Rakiraki, model of Fijian social structure. Norton (1977) argues that the Bauan model that grouped ranked lineages under a regional high chief was not historically typical of the west of Fiji (see also Kaplan 1995) where there were few high chiefs holding power over large areas. Nor was it clear that Western vanua conformed to the classic, Bauan, pattern of specialized and ranked lineages each performing a particular task within the community. When I asked one senior man about it, he said that they had not traditionally had all the specialist lineages in the Rakiraki area, although he did think that they had had priestly lineages, warrior lineages, and perhaps fisherman lineages. The British colonial government, however, has acted as if the Bauan model applied to all areas of the country and had registered local land and relationships as if they followed the Bauan model. The result in the Rakiraki area was pervasive ambiguity about the structure of local social relations that generated different kinds of behavior in different contexts. I slowly became aware over the months, for instance, that there was a great deal of bad feeling between two of the mataqali in the village where we resided. These tensions surfaced when a woman from one mataqali made some ambiguous remarks about how the people from the other mataqali should go and have a good look at the Volai ni Kawa Bula, or national registry of Fijian clans, before running around acting like such big shots. Months later, a woman whose mother

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was from the first of the two clans, explained to me that a good look at the registry would reveal that the leadership of the whole clan had once passed back and forth between the two mataqali of the clan. This view was in distinct contrast to that of the other mataqali whose members had carefully explained to me that their mataqali was the "executive" branch of the clan, while the other mataqali were their servants, priests, and warriors. Members of that mataqali proudly explained to me that when they held a funeral, wedding, or other public event, members of the other mataqali were obliged to come and do the work of cooking for them. Members of the other mataqali were also supposed to act as mata ni vanua, or spokesmen, for the head of the other mataqali and to accompany him on clan ceremonial business. While, in practice, we did sometimes observe members of both mataqali behaving according to this model in 1997, by the time we returned to Rakiraki in 1999, there had been a noticeable drop off in interaction between the two mataqali. When the headman from one of the mataqali tried to organize both mataqali to go together to perform some ceremonial obligation, he would often find that the members of his "subject" mataqali had already gone ahead without him and made their own presentation. The villagers demonstrated an ability to move back and forth from one model of local hierarchy to another depending on purpose and context. When relations within the yavusa (clans) were running smoothly, people were happy to act on a Bauan model of ranked lineages; but when the style of the headman became too autocratic, people quickly asserted that the Bauan model was not appropriate to the local context. Sevusevu, which asserted an unchallenged rank order in the community could be used strategically to gloss over such disagreement when the context demanded it. Examining patterns of participation in sevusevu also revealed significant differences in opinion about ranking within the community. Again this disagreement went beyond the status of particular individuals to a more general questioning of the principles of ranking within the village. As Duranti (1992, 1994) points out, the vague rhetoric of consensus and harmony in sevusevu and other ceremonial greetings, may, in fact, conceal much subtle negotiation about relative rank. This was evident in Rakiraki where people made their claims about relative rank through such strategies as avoiding sevusevu, or declining to drink yaqona by pleading illness, if they felt rank was likely to be construed incorrectly in a particular sevusevu. I first became aware of these subtle strategies by asking innocent questions about the order of yaqona drinking in a regional women's gathering. An elderly women had been chosen at the gathering to drink the first cup of yaqona. The woman sitting next to me at the gathering made some vague remarks about how the woman chosen to drink first came from the highest rank clan in the area, the clan of the

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Tui Navitilevu. A woman who had been sitting to my other side, could hardly contain herself and took me aside afterwards to explain that the order of drinking had clearly been wrong and that she had excused herself from the drinking since she (and everyone else) risked getting ill by drinking out of order in a sevusevu. She felt that she herself should have been selected to drink first since she was married to the headman of the village where the Tui Navitilevu lived making her, in the absence of the Tui's wife, the highest ranking woman present as the spouse of the man who, according to my informant, ranked just under the Tui in the region. My curiosity piqued by these comments, I decided to call on several of the other senior women of the village to see what they thought about relative rank among women. I found pervasive disagreement not only about the relative ranking of local mataqali under the Tui but also about the relative rank of women who were married into the village versus those who had been born there. Generally, women, like my informant, who had married into the village felt that women took their rank from their husbands. Everyone else, however, felt that women's rank stemmed from the mataqali they were born into so that women who were married in from other areas were generally ranked lower than those who had been born in the village. These disagreements generated discomfort about the order of yaqona drinking in women's gatherings and it was not uncommon for many women to refuse to drink the yaqona. The disagreements also carried over to church where the senior women of the community sat in the front pews. I soon found that the women disagreed about where people should sit and those who sat in the front pew were regarded by many as being siosio (having an inflated view of one's rank, impertinant). Examining people's behavior at sevusevu suggested, then, that there was competition between different models of the community. Significantly, when I tried to ask similar questions about drinking order among the men of the community, I found them to be much less forthcoming on the topic. One senior man quickly dismissed my questions saying that there was no set order of drinking since this would vary according to the context. One event might involve people of Navuavua and Navutulevu (the two component villages of Rakiraki) interacting as two separate villages; in such an event perhaps the headmen of each village would drink first. Another event might feature the same group of men but this time all acting as emissaries of the Tui. In this context, drinking order would be different according to whom the Tui had chosen to represent him. I suspect that the men did have subtle strategies for negotiating relative rank in sevusevu. And I often attended events that were mysteriously under-attended, probably because of disagreements about the version of relative rank in these events. But it was significant that the men were more reluctant to discuss these disagreements with an outsider than were the women. The senior men regarded themselves as those who

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defined the order of the village. And it was important to them to assert to an outsider that the village, indeed, conformed to the ideal pattern embodied in sevusevu. A final important way in which the model of rural Fijian society asserted by the sevusevu masked a more complex reality concerned the relationship between people and land. Sevusevu, as noted above, assert a sacred and inviolable connection between a particular social group and a particular piece of land. Sevusevu assert that those who participate do so only as the current "tops" of "sacred foundations" where their ancestors have always lived (see also Turner 1986). It took very little digging, however, to find that few people felt this to be an accurate portrayal of local society. Many people, including the Tui Navitilevu, had built their current houses on entirely new sites and were obviously not living on the sacred yavu of their ancestors. Beyond this, most people believed that there had in fact been a great deal of mobility traditionally. People had been driven from their villages by invasions of people from other areas. Some people told stories about how their ancestors had just moved to get away from infighting within their own villages. And there had clearly been a great deal of relocation in the colonial era where the government had been concerned to move some coastal villages to higher ground. All of these historical particularities suggesting a flexible relationship between people and land, however, were masked by the rhetoric of the sevusevu. More generally, examining informal gossip among my neighbors revealed a view of the rural village community rather different from that asserted in the sevusevu. While the sevusevu stressed the importance of keeping the community in a sacred rank order, gossip and informal social interaction revealed that many people saw rural villagers as a relatively undifferentiated group and were preoccupied with the relationship of this group to the larger national and international community. Through gossip, backbiting, and pointed sarcasm villagers manifested a disdain for anyone who thought that they were better than anyone else as well as a pervasive fear that many people did think themselves "above" other villagers in terms of education, wealth and knowledge of the outside world. They also gossiped about people who acted as if they were of higher rank than everyone else maintaining, instead, that in the village everyone was like a family. Gossip and informal social interaction, then, revealed a model of the village community as comprised of relative equals, whose status in the world was defined by their commitment to a cultural tradition that was not necessarily valued by others. This alternate view of the village community was apparent, for example, in people's preoccupation with language choice. I heard the young women of the mataqali with whom we lived complain on several different occasions about villagers who spoke Bauan, the national stan-

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dard Fijian, in preference for the local Rakiraki dialect. One young woman who was married into the village said that she had gone out of her way to learn the local dialect since women who failed to do so were regarded with contempt and suspicion. The contrast between the model of the village community embodied in the sevusevu and other "respectful" practices, and that embodied in informal social interaction was also evident in people's use of terms of address in the village. We heard at great length from villagers about how respectful Fijian practice required avoiding using the personal name of many categories of people (or even avoiding their presence altogether). Once people had children, for instance, they were to be addressed by a teknonym "father o f ' or "mother o f ' their eldest child. Grandparents, similarly were to be called "Grandfather o f ' or "Grandmother of' their eldest grandchild. Senior men were also addressed by the name of their house rather than by their personal names. In practice, however, we noticed that use of these terms of address was restricted to formal contexts such as church or village-wide ceremonies. In fact, people who insisted on using such teknonyms in informal interactions were sometimes ridiculed for putting on airs. Harmonious public discourse seemed to be used to assert an image of a sacred, peaceful community in face of fears that it was not in fact so. Furthermore, there were indications that public discourse had become increasingly "harmony-centered" as people used this discourse to assert an image of the village as a harmonious polity. For instance, several people complained to me that the conflict between the head pastor and the community of Rakiraki should have been discussed publicly. There had, in fact, been a meeting among the senior men of the community to discuss the controversial firing of the lay preacher, but the Tui Navitilevu had quickly put an end to the discussion, saying that people should not start conflict between the vanua and the church; the two must work together. The suppression of conflict in public discourse was a more general pattern, as were people's complaints about the lack of public airing of disagreement. These trends were, for instance, evident in the single mediation session that I witnessed during my fifteen months in Rakiraki. This mediation session was held to look into rumors of sorcery following the death of a prominent Rakiraki woman. Eroni, an elderly man from another area who had lived in Rakiraki with his wife's family for many years, went to a senior man of his wife's clan after hearing rumors that he had ensorcelled the dead woman. This senior man then told Eroni to go to the head of the village where he resided. In his opening remarks the village head asserted in several ways that he was uncomfortable with tbreaching communal harmony in public meetings. First, he asserted that there should be no fighting amongst those present and that the audience

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should just watch, and not become involved. He explicitly contrasted this kind of hearing, where fighting was minimized, with the traditional "way of the vanua" and said that now in the time of government, it was not proper for such free-ranging exploration of conflict to take place in public. Similarly, he said that he would speak Bauan Fijian instead of the local Rakiraki dialect, since speaking the local dialect might cause him to feel preference for some of his relatives over others. In other words, he argued that speaking Bauan would preserve his neutrality. Again this suggested that he associated local, traditional, practice with a more freeflowing discussion of conflict in public. Third, he forbade talking about the dispute outside the lineage or village, revealing his concern that the community should maintain an appearance of perfect harmony in the eyes of the outside world. Finally, he concluded by saying that he did not like to hold such hearings within the village and felt that they destroyed the harmony between relatives. These remarks, then, suggested that the village head disapproved of the public expression of conflict within the village, but believed that such public airing of grievances had occurred in the past. He concluded his speech with an obscure remark about how the villagers should not love Indo-Fijians instead of fellow indigenous Fijians. This possibly revealed that his concern with ending a traditional practice of airing grievances in public stemmed from an anxiety about declining ethnic solidarity amongst Fijians: if Fijians fought amongst themselves, this might cause them to befriend Indo-Fijians and lose sight of the need to defend Fijian land rights against the Indo-Fijians. Consistent with his opening remarks, the village leader cut the discussion of the sorcery rumors short. He then suggested that the rumors had been spread entirely by two young women, both of whom were married into the village. This interpretation deflected blame from two more senior women, and, in the process, made it look as if the rumors were just the result of young women acting irresponsibly and did not reflect any more basic tensions with the village. In fact, the rumors had fairly clearly reflected a more pervasive schism in the village. Some of the people who attended the hearing later spoke to me disapprovingly of the way the village head had handled the hearing. His wife said that he had just swept under the rug conflicts that should have been discussed. Another young woman, similarly, said that it would have been better to let people air their grievances since if they did not do so, malicious gossip and perhaps even sorcery might follow. She argued that another local headman would have conducted a much more thorough hearing. When I asked a few people about other village hearings, however, people could only remember one such hearing that had been held within the past few years. The young woman also said that there had been community meetings to address disputes when she was a child in another area of Fiji and that such meetings were good things that helped

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to head off conflict within villages. All of these remarks suggest that people felt that public discussion of conflict once had been more common. I suggest that the increased emphasis on communal harmony in Rakiraki public discourse stemmed from an increase in tensions within the community that placed strains on communal harmony. As people began to suspect that they were not part of harmonious villages, they felt an increased need to assert such harmony in public discourse. First, there were tensions springing from ambiguities and disagreements about the nature of ranking in the community: should the community be ranked and in what fashion? Some of these tensions sprang from differences between local ranking practices and the Bauan model of Fijian society imposed by the British. Others stemmed from differences in attitudes toward rank as villagers came to see themselves as part of a larger national community. The sorcery rumor, for instance, reflected a couple of common sources of tension within Rakiraki and in other Fijian villages. The victim of the rumor was a man living with his former wife's clan. Despite having relatively low status within the village as someone who was living uxorolocally, this man was relatively wealthy. In fact, he was much wealthier than his surrounding, higher status neighbors. Such sources of tension were not at all uncommon in Rakiraki where high genealogical status had little correlation with high status based on wealth or education. Furthermore, it was not uncommon for fellow villagers to have different ideas about who was of high or low status depending upon whether they placed more importance on achieved "modern" things such as wealth or "traditional" criteria like ascribed position. Sevusevu clearly sewed as arena for local people to make claims about relative status within the village. They also sewed as a context where people could temporarily alleviate anxieties that local society was not what it should be by reaffirming that the community was, indeed, "like family" and did, in fact, have a sacred rank order. But examining a range of sevusevu involving Rakiraki people revealed that sevusevu did more than convince local residents that local society conformed to a sacred order and to establish relative rank. In fact, many sevusevu were aimed at an audience external to the village. I detail below the role of sevusevu in asserting that rural Fijians occupied a worthy place in a larger world because they were guardians of a sacred cultural tradition.

Defining Rural Fijian Identity Through Ceremony One audience of sevusevu was international tourists. Stanley (1996) asserts in his tourist manual that the sevusevu is a central element of Fijian culture and these views are not lost on Fijians many of whom work on

Chapter Two resorts where mock (and very truncated) sevusevu are staged regularly for the benefit of tourists. I did not tape record a sevusevu performed for tourists so simply note here that sevusevu were regularly used this way to display for the outside world the fact that Fijians were friendly, hospitable and deeply "cultural" people. These were ideas voiced by many local people who took pride in the fact that tourists like to visit Fiji because Fijians were much more friendly and "cultural" than were Westerners. A second obvious audience for indigenous Fijian assertions of identity were Indo-Fijians. Indeed, both indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians had well developed notions about the differences between the two ethnic groups. Occasionally sevusevu were used to define indigenous Fijian identity vis-A-vis Indo-Fijians. At one local funeral, for example, an Indo-Fijian man arrived to present yaqona to the community of the deceased, following local Fijian practice. He also brought along with him a crate of bread from his bakery in town, a slight departure from the local practice of bringing root crops and other foods to help feed the guests at the funeral. The indigenous Fijian man who presented the baker's sevusevu for him took the opportunity to subtly comment on the differences between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, The vanua is full, I appear. Relationships, there are a lot of relationships. Some of our relationships are just in name [i.e. there is no substance to the relationship]. [But] It is seen that [our] relationship together with [these Indo-Fijians] yes that is a really good relationship. How many weeks ago did they bury the father of this [man] sitting here? I thank him for remembering the friendship between our families. A group from this village went up to them within the last two weeks [i.e. a party from this village had gone to the funeral of the Indo-Fijian man's father]. There the idea of this visit this day today lay [i.e. the Indo-Fijian man got the idea to come here from the Fijians having gone to his father's funeral] because your children were with this man here [i.e. the Indian man was the teacher of some of the Fijian children from the village]. They didn't wait when they heard the black clouds were over us here [i.e. that there had been a death in the village]. That shows the bond of friendship. This is not a religious or political meeting, it is just because of the friendship [i.e. the IndoFijians came just because of the friendship, not because of the demands of church or politics]. They present just one small valuable, very small, but it should be received with a loving heart. [They also bring] one carton of bread because he makes bread in his house and it is asked again if you go buy bread in town that you go buy in his store. Its message is achieved. Its representative is me, on behalf of myself, me, its man, I come

Defining the Community Through Ceremony make an offering on behalf of the sevusevu seen and straight to the vanua. . . . IEI Here the indigenous Fijian spokesman honors the Indo-Fijian man for coming to the funeral in a speech not unlike the speeches of offering on behalf of indigenous Fijian guests. The Indo-Fijian is portrayed as showing his concern to preserve the "bond" of relationship between the two groups, just as indigenous Fijian groups bringing offerings always assert that the offering confirms that the relationship is still strong despite the death. But the sevusevu speech also subtly comments on differences between Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians. The speaker asserts that the Indo-Fijian man got the idea to bring the offering to the funeral from the fact that a group from the village of the deceased had recently brought an offering to the Indo-Fijian man's father's funeral. Thus the practice of showing concern about relationships is solidly located within the indigenous Fijian community. And the speaker also asserts that since the man had brought bread from his shop in town, he is asking that those who receive the bread patronize his shop in the future. In this way, the speaker asserts that the Indo-Fijian man is, in fact, primarily acting for financial reasons. I never heard an indigenous Fijian gift described in this manner. Sevusevu, then, portray indigenous Fijians as loving people, concerned with community and relationship in opposition to Indo-Fijians who are portrayed as concerned primarily with individual profit. This message was reinforced by the atypical structure of this sevusevu; there was no suggestion that the Indo-Fijian man was acting as the emissary of a community. This again underlined the construction of Indo-Fijians as individualists, only out for their own good, in opposition to communityminded indigenous Fijians. It is significant, however, that this and all other sevusevu speeches were made in Fijian. In fact, it is considered disrespectful to deliver a sevusevu speech in any other language regardless of whether or not the recipient understands Fijian. Consequently, these comments on the differences between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians were comprehensible only to the indigenous Fijians present. Sevusevu, then, have an inward-looking nature, asserting an in-group identity. The subtle details of the speeches are lost on other communities and so the speeches do not primarily serve to define indigenous Fijians identity to Indo-Fijians except in a very general way through displaying a Fijian respect for tradition and rank. A more important external audience is other indigenous Fijians who do have the shared language and cultural knowledge to interpret the subtleties of the claims made in sevusevu. Sevusevu made a host of claims about local Fijian identity v i s - h i s other groups. I quickly found, for instance, that the Rakiraki people felt that it was very important to make

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sevusevu speeches in the local Rakiraki dialect, not in standard Bauan Fijian. This assumption seemed to be shared by many other groups with whom the Rakiraki people interacted. The insistence on performing sevusevu in the local dialect was in marked contrast to a preference for performing prayers and church sermons in Bauan. In fact, the same speaker might on one occasion excuse himself for performing a sevusevu in local dialect, claiming ignorance of Bauan, and on another occasion perform an opening prayer in perfect Bauan. The sevusevu, then, was used to reinforce distinctive local identities. One context in which this was important was in interactions between people from different regions of Fiji. As Kaplan (1995) and Norton (1977) have noted, various areas of Fiji construe the nature of the panFijian polity differently. Many Fijians from Southeast view Fiji as comprising three confederacies under the leadership of three high chiefs (Roko Tui), two of whom come from the southeast. Many southeastern Fijians are also wealthier, better educated, and more cosmopolitan than those from the North and West of Fiji. In Rakiraki and in the sugarproducing north and west of Viti Levu more generally, however, people said that the confederacies were just an administrative convenience and that actually Fiji comprised numerous local groups under the leadership of many local chiefs (Tui). The use of local dialects in sevusevu was, in part, an assertion that it was local identity that was important; local groups were autonomous entities under their own Tui, not vassals of a Roko Tui from the southeast. The use of the sevusevu to assert local autonomy was evident in a large wedding that many Rakiraki people attended in Suva, Fiji's capital. This wedding brought together the daughter of the Tui Navitilevu's sister and a close relative of the Roko Tui Dreketi, the paramount chief of Burebasaga, one of the three confederacies. During the event, however, it became apparent that the two sides did not have the same view of the situation. The Rakiraki women who attended the wedding had told me beforehand that this would be a glorious event since it brought together two such prestigious families, the family of the Tui Navitilevu, and the family of the Roko Tui Dreketi. In the minds of the local people, this was a marriage between equals. At the wedding, however, the Rakiraki women were very irritated by signs that the groom's side saw themselves as being of higher rank than the bride's side. Instead of sitting together as was usual at a wedding, the Rakiraki women complained, they had had to eat separately from the women of the groom's side and had had to wait until the women from that side had eaten first. The problems were exacerbated a few days later when the two sides got together to divide the mats, household goods, and tapa cloths given to the couple as wedding presents. Instead of giving the bride's mother a large share, as the Rakiraki women thought was appropriate, the women

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from the groom's family set aside just a few of the mats and pillows of lesser quality for the bride's mother, and divided the majority of the items given by the groom's family amongst themselves. The senior woman with whom I attended the division of the wedding presents, claimed to be mystified by the actions of the groom's family. I suggested to her that the groom's family might think that they were of higher status and should keep their fine goods to be distributed amongst high-ranking relatives. The woman conceded that this might be true but insisted that this was the wrong way to view the situation since the bride and the groom were equally highly born. The Rakiraki way of demonstrating hospitality by giving away the finest goods, she continued, was much better. The sevusevu presented by the Rakiraki people asserted the Rakiraki view that the two parties were of equal status. The Tui Navitilevu's herald, Samuwela, opened by asserting that he would speak in his local dialect because he did not know Bauan. In fact, I had heard Samuwela perform prayers in fluent Bauan on many occasions. His insistence on speaking in Rakiraki dialect, then, was a subtle assertion of an autonomous local identity: Rakiraki people would speak in their own dialect, not adopt the Bauan dialect in deference to a higher-ranking group. Samuwela also presented the sevusevu as going from the Tui Navitilevu to the Roko Tui Dreketi, thus moving the two to equivalent status. A possible alternative here would have been to say that the sevusevu was coming from the Roko Tui of Kubuna, the confederacy of which Rakiraki was a part. This construal, of course, would have acknowledged the Tui Navitilevu to be a lower order chief than the Roko Tui Dreketi. The Tui Navitilevu's herald said, You gentlemen, please excuse me for I do not know the Bauan dialect. I can only speak in my own dialect, in Rakiraki [dialect] although I know that you will understand me. The land is full, I appear. In the chiefly way toward the chiefly lady of Burebasaga, the Roko Tui Dreketi, to the high and chiefly tribes under the chiefly authority this day today. We thank God for giving us life. It's also the Lord's decision that we are sitting together today on this wet soil [of the Rewa delta where the Roko Tui is from] so we your relatives have arrived. We have come to stand on top of your land today. That's why our high chief the Tui Navitilevu is here, the chiefly house of Rakiraki is Uluda. It is sitting in your presence today. I would like you to know, Ma'am, the land of Rakiraki is here in your presence we, your relatives, are here today. The couple have already been united religiously. [This is] the sevusevu of the vanua of Rakiraki the sevusevu from the land of Uluda, their sevusevu the honorable gentleman the Tui Navitilevu to the

Chapter Two honorable lady the Roko Tui Dreketi. It is small. Please do accept and bless it during our sitting here today so that our lives may be long. May God love us. Just as sevusevu assert one among many possible ways of viewing village society, so the sevusevu also reinforces one among many possible ways of construing the relationships amongst groups in Fiji. Here Samuwela started out by claiming to be speaking Rakiraki dialect only out of ignorance of Bauan. His initial posture, then, was of a lowly ignorant villager addressing cosmopolitan urbanites. But then he went on to undermine this characterization by stressing the similar status of the Roko Tui Dreketi and the Tui Navitilevu, and by stressing that both sides were relatives united under God by the marriage of the couple. This sevusevu, then, played with the tendency of the urban southeasterners to view the rural people from the north and west as inferior "country bumpkins" and reframed this relationship as one between equals under Fijian tradition and under God. Rakiraki people also used sevusevu to define rural identity vis-A-vis urban relatives. One major occasion for sevusevu was fundraising ceremonies associated with church and village in which urban and overseas relatives were invited home to give money to their rural communities. In such events, rural Fijians used sevusevu and other aspects of ceremony to define themselves as guardians of tradition, keeping alive the sacred Fijian way of life while urban and overseas relatives devoted themselves to making money. Again, this interpretation of the situation was only one among many possible ways of looking at the relationship between rural villagers and urban relatives. Successful urban and overseas relatives were often inundated with requests for money from rural family members. One successful Rakiraki man living in Suva claimed that he knew many professionals who had been "ruined" by such requests and that he had only preserved his own sanity by making it clear that he never gave money away. Such comments all portray rural villagers as continually dependent on richer urban family members. It was not surprising that rural villagers preferred to assert that they were, in fact, doing valuable ceremonial work in the village, essential to the well-being of the Fijian nation, which urban relatives were obliged to support with cash donations. These dynamics were apparent in a large fund-raiser in late 1999 to raise money for the new Raviravi Methodist church district that had just attained independence from the Rakiraki District. In this event, "children" of Raviravi who lived in urban areas were invited to come to donate funds to the Raviravi church fund. In return, the children from the workplaces were honored by being presented with the seven standard presentations of ceremonial goods customarily given to welcome an

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honored guest. The speech by the Raviravi herald was a good illustration of the way rural people use sevusevu to define the relationship between themselves and richer urban relatives. The herald received a tabua (whale's tooth), a traditional valuable, offered by the urban relatives along with their gift of money, I come and receive sir the tabua. The tabua to confirm the relationship and the stone [i.e. tabua] of our staying with our relatives, the stone [to mark the] giving [of] big wealth. You came and gave, our children. I come to accept this wealth on behalf of the important chiefs of Raviravi. They give importance to your shed this day today. I come to accept again this valuable on behalf of the church, [represented by] the two pastors here. The wealth is accepted by the clans sitting here this day today. I come accept the spirit of coming here today. Our thanks is big to you for arriving [to meet] our needs this day today. You arrive here. You have done your duty this day today. Yesterday, the men of the vanua sat [together]. The men of the vanua met to arrange for what will be heard today. Yes this day today you came . . . they are sitting this day the members of the vanua of Raviravi from my big house the [honorable] chief the Tui Navatu and also each of the important men they give weight to the vanua they help do the duties . . . I accept this valuable. Good health to you and let the Lord bless your life and cause the big valuable that you have lost from each of your pockets to soon be replaced. Good health to you men. Good health the members of the yavusa. We should just love each other. I pray to the Lord. The Lord just is here in our life to make our spiritual life grow. In Raviravi, we will think in our souls of the Lord.

Here the herald from the village thanks the urban relatives for their wealth but portrays it as their "duty" in the community to give this wealth and reminds them of the "weight" that the elders of the vanua give this event. He reminds the urban relatives that in losing wealth they gain something much more important, that is the blessings from the Lord that follow when everyone in the community does his or her proper duty. In this way, rural and urban Fijians are construed as being part of one big community, each doing his or her own "duty" to preserve the traditional Fijian polity. This is quite a different view from the other obvious interpretation of the situation, that poor rural relatives are relying on the charity of more prosperous family members in urban areas.

Chapter Two

Defining Identity Through Sevusevu Sevusevu and other kinds of ceremonies are "localizing strategies" through which rural villagers, particularly senior men, attempt to assert one definition of local culture over other possible versions. Scholars have stressed the ways that sevusevu and other kinds of formal speech in Polynesia stem from taken-for-granted assumptions about the cosmos and about the polity, and at the same time reinforce these assumptions. Examining Rakiraki sevusevu suggests that in some ways, they aim to reproduce assumptions about power within the community by stressing the important ritual role of senior men within a sacred ranked community and by reinforcing rank relations in the community. However, it was equally clear that few assumptions about the polity or the cosmos could be taken for granted in Rakiraki. In some contexts, villagers praised the sacred rank order of Fijian communities; in other contexts they suggested that all villagers were equal and people were more preoccupied with relative wealth and education than with their duties to the community. In this environment, sevusevu were meaningful and motivating not because they confirmed taken-for-granted assumptions but because they constructed community in one particular way in face of equally compelling alternatives. Villagers used the sevusevu to assert that they were guardians of a sacred tradition in face of competing interpretations. They also asserted their equality to Indo-Fijian, southeastern Fijians, urban relatives, and international tourists. If many of these people had wealth and power, rural Fijians were still important in a larger scheme as guardians of a sacred tradition, more valuable than money. In the world of contemporary Rakiraki, sevusevu and other genres of formal speech certainly assert one version of the polity and the cosmos. But they cannot necessarily be said to reproduce "the context which makes power possible" (Myers and Brenneis 1984: 4) in an unambiguous way. Instead, the sacred Fijian polity remains but one alternative among many possible competing views. Furthermore, as Fijian villages suffer new strains and villagers are increasingly embedded in a larger international community, public formal discourse has become both more harmony centered and more formal. The headman who led the hearing over the sorcery rumor, for example, was clearly worried about the image of the village to the outside world as represented by me with my tape recorder but also by the police who had been purposely not invited to the community. The headman reminded the assembled villagers repeatedly of the need not to let the dispute get out of hand and not to let it be heard beyond the bounds of the sub-lineage involved. Villagers also complained that more and more of their time and limited resources was being spent on sevusevu and other ceremonial occasions.

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Besnier (2000: 24) writes of another Pacific Island society, Nukalae'ae, that the powerfd drive to publicly assert communal harmony "was a powerful construct . . . perfected over a century and a half of interaction with the outside world." Besnier argues that marginalization and shortages of resources have forced the Nukalae'ae to rely on each other and to try to preserve harmony to that end. More importantly, however, decades of contact with foreigners who extol the peace loving and harmonious nature of the Islanders, has convinced the Nukalae'ae that "emphasizing communalism and concomitant values can be a powerful political tool for their island communities in the face of a threat from the outside" (Besnier 2000: 26). Besnier suggests that the drive to preserve communal harmony had helped the Nukulae'ae to maintain a sense of pride. But it also leads to ostracism and scapegoating of those who do not fit in. Fijians, as well, have been convinced through the course of a long history of colonization by the British and postcolonial struggles with Indo-Fijians, that their sacred and harmonious communal culture is necessary for their survival within their nation and within a larger international community. And, as on Nulalae'ae, Rakiraki people seem to have become more and more reluctant to discuss conflict in public as they worry more and more about their place in a wider world. But, as the next chapters show, there are many ways of imagining identity.

Notes 1. Stanley adopts an anglicized spelling of Fijian words here and throughout the excerpt, presumably to make it easier for visitors, not familiar with Fijian spelling conventions, to pronounce words. The correct Fijian spelling is "yaqona" which follows the Fijian convention of using the "q" to represent the "ngg" sound. 2. Stanley's translation here is only loosely accurate. A more precise translation would be "It is empty, sir, the chiefly yaqona." 3. Fiji is part of Melanesia but its culture strongly resembles that of neighboring Polynesian countries like Samoa and Tonga. 4. I tape recorded sevusevu and translated them from Rakiraki dialect with the help of a local research assistant.

Chapter 3

Constructing Self and Community Through Religious Discourse

The Methodist church, the dominant denomination in Fiji, painted a portrait of Fijian society similar to that embodied in sevusevu. Methodist church services asserted a sacred order to the Fijian community involving an unambiguous ranking of individuals and groups, and distinct social roles according to gender, age, and rank. The Methodist church service also encouraged individuals to act as members of communities, and to subdue personal desire in order to do their sacred duty in a community sanctioned by God. In recent decades various evangelical Protestant sects such as the Assemblies of God, Seventh Day Adventists, and numerous other small groups, have become increasingly popular, particularly among young and urban Fijians. Evangelical services encouraged people to subordinate themselves to God and community, but there was little emphasis on social ranking or on age-specific social roles. Furthermore, evangelical discourse emphasized individual problems, and individual emotional connections over social roles. This chapter examines the competing constructions of community and self in the services of various churches attended by Rakiraki villages. Giddens (2000), Waters (1995) and others argue that the spread of evangelical and fundamentalist, Christianity goes hand-in-hand with globalization as people flee from the "anomie" produced by a postmodern world with no sacred values by looking to fundamentalist assertions. In Fiji and other "marginal" nations, however, religious fundamentalism is often associated with Westernization and cosmopolitanism and often

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challenges local traditions (Davidson 2004: 148; Newland 2004; Robbins 2004). Pentecostal sects often appeal to those who conceive of themselves as wanting to be free from the shackles of tradition. Robbins (2004: 3 19) argues that Christianity, particularly in its Pentecostal forms, "always comes to new situations equipped with a set of arguments for why people need to throw over an inadequate traditional moral system in favor of the new one it can provide." Robbins argues that the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, are, like many people, caught between a moral system fostered by Christianity and an indigenous one that still forms the basis of their social life. The Urapmin and other people look to the ecstatic dimensions of Pentecostal Christianity as a way to release them from the demands of the traditional moral system and from the tensions between the old and Christian morality. Similarly, Kray (2001) suggests that Guatamalans are confronted with conflicting world and religious ideologies, some pushing them toward communalism and other stressing individual autonomy. When they choose between the traditional Catholic church and newer evangelical churches, rural Guatamalans escape these tensions by immersing themselves in communities stressing one set of values over the other. I also argue that rural indigenous Fijians looked to the various churches available to them to help them resolve the tensions between conflicting ideologies. While Christianity and local tradition clearly represented opposed moral systems for the relatively isolated Urapmin (Robbins 2004), indigenous Fijian identity had long been entwined with Methodism. Methodism, Tomlinson argues, (2002, 2004), is seen by indigenous Fijians in some ways as challenging pre-Christian tradition. But in Rakiraki and other areas, Methodism was more generally viewed as a central part of an indigenous Fijian way of life that had arisen hand-inhand with Christianity. Indeed, some people believed that indigenous chiefs had been naturally Christian even before Christianity was introduced to Fiji from Tonga (see also Newland 2004). As will be evident below, Methodism in many ways reinforced a communally oriented moral system. But Fijians, nevertheless, experienced moral tension; Western mass media and several waves of development policy in Fiji had stressed the need to shake individuals free from communal constraints to realize individual goals and desires. While the Urapmin and other isolated groups might have been felt caught between two discrete and opposed moral systems, rural Fijians, who had grown up with this debate about the relative merits of comrnunalism and individualism, had no single taken-for-granted set of assumptions about the relationship between self and community. Moreover, Fijian religious discourse did not take for granted that Fijians saw themselves as products of relationships and were committed to fulfilling a role in a community. Instead, both public and private discourses were satu-

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rated with a sense that Fijians were strong individuals who resisted incorporation into the community at every turn. Many people expressed the sense that commitment to a community was more meaningful than individualism. But they always represented themselves as having freely chosen to commit to a community at some point in their lives. Robbins (2004) and Kray (2001) argue that the tensions between moral systems stressing relationism and those stressing individualism are in some ways essentially irresolvable. But I suggest that evangelical churches and Methodist churches alike drew together the conflicting poles of individualism and communalism by suggesting that believers had freely chosen to embrace communalistic values; communalism was cast as an individual achievement. Evangelical sects, as Davidson (2004) and Martin (2001) suggest, provided ways for people to imagine new kinds of communities and to conceive of themselves as being both properly communal and individually successful.

The Methodist Church Ravuvu (1983: 94) writes that, "Christianity is . . . of central importance in the life of Fijians" and that "Church-going and church-related activities occupy a good proportion of the non-working time of many Fijians in villages and towns alike." By far the dominant religion in Rakiraki, as in most areas of Fiji, was Methodism. In Rakiraki, sixty-nine of the ninety-two households (75 percent) described themselves as Methodist. This figure, however, far overstated church attendance since villagers who did not actively participate in any kind of institutionalized religion often described themselves as Methodists. On an average Sunday morning, attendance at the Rakiraki Methodist church averaged between two hundred and fifty and three hundred people (out of a total population of about seven hundred in the two villages served by the church). Of these people, usually aljout one hundred were children, many of who were sent to church by parents or grandparents who did not themselves always attend services. Of the remaining villagers, twenty-three households (about one hundred and twenty individuals) attended other churches while the rest just stayed home. These figures give a sense of the status of religion in Rakiraki village life: everyone in the village acknowledged the importance of belonging to a church; but, for many people, participation in religious services was not meaningful enough to lead to regular church attendance. Church services contained implicit messages about the way individuals should ideally be embedded in communities. Also implicit were theories (or ethno-psychologies) about typical problems between individual and community. I will look first at the Methodist church. Metho-

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dism was introduced to Fiji in the late nineteenth century and most Fijian families had been Methodist for several generations. The Methodist Church of Fiji was run by Fijians and was viewed by Fijians and academics alike as most often working hand-in-hand with the vanua. Ravuvu (1983: 98) argues that many indigenous Fijians view God and Christian church services as performing similar roles to the vu and ceremonies designed to elicit their support for human communities. In Rakiraki, Methodist services followed a logic similar to that embodied in traditional religion. Just as sevusevu "straightened" the human community to persuade the vu to empower it (Katz 1993), so Methodist church activities assigned people to their proper social roles in order to win God's blessing. Methodist services also portrayed the community as having a sacred, time-honored form, mandated by God; God blessed the community that conformed to the ideal order and withheld blessing from the disorderly community. Individuals were encouraged to be humble and do their duty to the community instead of pursuing personal goals and desires. Spatial organization in churches, for example, was roughly similar to that of ordinary houses. Traditional Fijian houses had high and low status spaces and high and low status doors. The front entrance of the house, where the cooking fire was traditionally located, was considered low status space. Women, children and low-ranking individuals generally clustered in the part of the house near the front door. Houses traditionally also had side doors located near the back of the house where the family slept. High-status guests seated toward the back of the house used these doors. The Methodist church paralleled this spatial organization. Methodist churches had front doors on the wall facing the altar through which most people entered the building. They also had a door on the sidewall of the church, near the altar through which high status men such as lineage heads and church officials entered the church. Inside the Rakiraki church, the local high chief, the Tui Navitilevu, sat in a chair near the altar. Other high-ranking men had special chairs placed in the high status end of the church, forward of the pews occupied by the rest of the congregation. A center aisle divided the pews, with one side reserved for women and the other for men. On both sides of the church, men and women were arranged roughly by rank, with status decreasing toward the back of the church. Methodist sermons and other church related activities also reflected the emphasis on assigning individuals to proper social roles in other ways. Individuals, for example, were encouraged to join fellowships. Older men belonged to the Men's Fellowship; older women belonged to the Women's Fellowship; both married and single men and women between the ages of twenty and forty belonged to the Youth Fellowship,

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while children were encouraged to attend Sunday school. These fellowships, again, followed a similar structure to that which predominated in village ceremonies like funerals or community meetings. Other ways of involving the congregation in the church also reinforced the categorization of people by gender and age and the subordination of individual to community. The Methodist congregation in Fiji is divided into groups based on demonstrated commitment to the church. Children and young adults are generally siga tuberi, or those who are led. When an individual decided to make an active commitment to the church he or she became a siga dina, which literally translates as a true day or sun. Those who chose to become siga dina were sworn in as a group in front of the congregation on an annual basis. They pledged to devote their lives to God and follow the "straight" ways of doing their duty. This language was very similar to that used in funeral eulogies and other contexts to describe individuals who follow the "straight" way (valavala dodonu) of performing their proper role, or duty, in the community. For example, when the senior pastor swore in the new siga dina for 2000 he exhorted them, "You who have been called this day today have a big duty to do. You should be peacemakers at this time. You should remember also that the Lord is listening to you. If we have a true heart and are children of God, children from Heaven, it is our duty to carry the burden from the Lord. Yes that is what the Lord needs at this time today." The language here of "carrying burdens" and "doing duties" for the Lord is very similar to the language used to describe the ideal relationship between the individual and the vanua. Like the vanua, the church emphasized the legitimate leadership of older people over younger people. In church ideology, as in vanua ideology, legitimacy was conferred on those who had mastered a traditional body of knowledge, sanctioned by the community, and, in the process, acquired the wisdom and maturity necessary to lead those lower down in the system. Many people remained siga dina for their entire lives but some went on to take on more responsible roles in the church after passing an interrogation by the district Methodist church council. Individuals could elect to become Sunday school teachers, prayer leaders, sing in the choir, or to take on numerous other roles. They could also choose to become lay preachers (dau vunau), who did much of the work of delivering sermons in rural church districts where only one head pastor (talatala qase) was assigned to as many as twenty or thirty villages. Some people became catechists (vakatawa) assigned to do much of the work of visiting the congregation and recruiting congregation members in individual villages. Each change of status involved passing an oral examination by the local Methodist church committee and being sworn in, often as part of a group of people making a similar commitment, in front of the congregation. The language of these ceremonies emphasized "duty" and fol-

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lowing "straight ways," much as does the language of the ceremony swearing in siga dina. The hierarchy of church statuses also reinforced the more general vanua pattern of women and young people being subordinated to senior men. In theory, taking on a particular role in the church had little to do with one's status outside the church. In practice, however, rank within the church reflected fairly closely rank outside the church. Children and adolescents comprised the majority of the siga tuberi. Siga dina tended to be married men and women between twenty-five and forty. Those who took on more active positions tended to be older men and women. Furthermore, while both men and women could become dau vunau, the vast majority of dau vunau were not only older men, but also high-ranking men in the community. The other category of people who were commonly dau vunau were professionals like teachers, and government workers posted to the area from other parts of the country. While such people had little official status in the vanua they were generally respected for their education. Methodist church sermons also supported the subordination of the individual to the traditional community. It was quite common for church services to include a "word from the vanua" delivered by a senior man on behalf of the Tui Navitilevu. Such messages always started and ended, not unlike a sevusevu, by naming in order of importance the various groups comprising the community: the honorable gentlemen, the Tui Navitilevu and the senior pastor; the men; the women; the young women and youths, and the children. Such messages also often contained reminders to the community of the importance of adhering to traditional Fijian ways. For example, in the Christmas service, the senior man who delivered the words from the vanua reminded people of the importance of not being influenced by tourists into doing such things as wearing shorts in the village. Sermons and prayers asserted a version of a community that was sacred and time-honored, not unlike the version of the community conveyed by sevusevu. Prayers often involved calling upon the Lord to give people strength to carry their burdens, and do their duties, for the church and the community. Methodist prayers and sermons often reminded people that they were performing the same duties as had their ancestors before them. For example, on the Sunday of the swearing in of the siga dina for 2000, the senior pastor opened with a prayer, We thank You on behalf of the people fi-om previous times. They gave their lives to you and all of them supported the church. We remember the lives of the congregation of the church on earth at this time. We thank you for forgiving our sins, we pray also with a humble spirit. All of them proclaim

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your name. Love the congregation of the church of [Rakiraki] so that they [will be] together and work together and will then be able to raise up their spiritual life and also the lives of those [who] are called to our church's service. Deacon, catechist, siga dina, with your loving heart, my Lord, You help them to do the things [that they need to do]. We hope that you will bless their lives. Our fellowship this good morning this day today, please open our spirits so that we will have great faith in you in the church today. We offer [them] to you, [that] their lives will be blessed. They have already offered their lives to you. Please forgive their sins; please purify and keep [them]. We bow and pray [not] in another name, just your name Jesus, our Lord and savior. Here the senior pastor stressed the continuity between the actions of the present group of siga dina and those of past siga dina who had offered their lives to God in previous generations. He stressed the way that individuals did service for the church community, in a humble spirit, receptive to direction from God. In doing so, they raised up not just their individual spirits but also the whole community. He portrayed individuals, as putting aside individual interests to play roles in a time-honored pattern ordained by the Lord (see also Miyazaki 2004). The emphasis on community over individual was reinforced by the use of the subject keimami (we, addressed to large group, exclusive). Methodist prayer leaders seldom used the first person pronoun au but instead almost always used the first person plural pronoun used when speaking of a large group, keimami, thus framing the prayer as coming from a united community, instead of from an individual. The senior pastor also called upon the Lord to bless the church hierarchy. Methodist church sermons portrayed individuals as naturally full of pride, wanting to act in pursuit of personal desires and for personal aggrandizement. Sermons painted this faulty human nature as an obstacle to fulfilling God's plans and to bringing forth his blessings on the community. The sociocentric bias was evident also in the idea that it was communal, not individual, blessing that was the ultimate aim. These themes were apparent when a local pastor led the annual service to bless the first harvest of the new year. The pastor started by suggesting that many Fijians feared the soil, that is, did not want to farm, because they had forgotten that they had been brought into being by the Lord in order to grow crops. People became "proud" and wanted to turn away from God's plan for them. This was a popular refrain in sermons. In the Methodist view, individuals were in continual danger of turning away from their sacred role in the community; when people accomplished things they needed to be reminded that it was God who had made this possible. The pastor said,

Chapter Three If a person fears the soil, no, [don't do that] just fear the Lord. The thing that you shouldn't fear is the soil. We, the believers, we belong to the Lord and we are in the Lord's world and are the Lord's farmers. Oh we the people come and fill up this world. It is right that we should produce. . . . As Isaiah the prophet said, "Us, we are the Lord's beloved farmers. "If anyone is the Lord's beloved, that is you. The Bible says, 'This plant here is a tree from Egypt that should be brought to be planted in Israel."' The Lord didn't say, "Just bring good crops and leave over there the bad crops." No, "Bring everything, the good crops and the bad crops." Good crops or bad crops or the spotted/mildewed, the Lord brought them and put them in his farm and then formed them, formed them and put them in his farm. Isaiah said, "Many of the plants brought here lived, and then the people just became proud again." The plants lived, [the people] were able to do their work, and then [they] forget who planted the crops. Maybe our life is going to be like that. People, the Lord has planted us in the world. Some of you men and women fulfill your destiny or accomplish your duty. We forget who brought us here from the place of laborers, the place of death, that He can free us from the tie of sin, in order for you to become born again. The pastor continued on this theme linking current political struggles to the fact that Fijians had turned away from their God-given duties. Interestingly, the pastor suggested that it was falling away from this sacred tradition that had contributed to current political troubles. The Chaudhry government had mounted a campaign to reform land laws. According to local rumor, Chaudhry had suggested to Fijian chiefs that they surrender their "unused l a n d to the government who would then allocate that land to Indo-Fijians who would be displaced when land leases expired. Chaudhry argued that if Fijians failed to do this, the Fijian economy would collapse since the economic health of the country rested on the labor of hard-working Indo-Fijian tenant farmers. The pastor obliquely responded to these charges in his sermon, suggesting that Fijians' current political vulnerability stemmed from the fact that they had ignored the Lord's mandate that they should be farmers, producing food to glorify Him. One thing that we are womed about at this time today is our land. It is causing upheaval in the government. They want to take the land that is not being farmed. That is the main reason why the government wants to take the land, because they want to farm it and even if it's your land, the government will farm it for you. What that means is that the land should be farmed. It is right that this should cause pain to us, the owners, the

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things said here. Yes but one thing, you should farm your land. I don't like to see land being leased out because we should just farm our own land. This Sunday today is called the Sunday for the farmers or Sunday for men. It is our duty to farm; just put everything in the soil because it looks nice to the Lord to see his farmers are healthy. Here the pastor reminded the congregation that the right way was to play one's allotted role in a plan laid down by God. He interpreted the current political problems as a result of turning away from the sacred order of Fijian life. Themes such as these suggested both that Methodism reinforced an ideology of communalism and that there was anxiety amongst Methodist preachers on the question of people's ability to subordinate individual desire to social role. This sermon also revealed the close link between this kind of ideology and the political situation of indigenous Fijians. As Elenoa indicated in her first conversation with me, many indigenous Fijians saw preserving their communal tradition as important to holding on to their land and political power within Fiji. They feared the possibility of losing their culture and then, as a consequence, losing their land and political power, which they believed had been the fate of the Maori and indigenous Hawaiians. The emphasis on humility before God was consistent with a general belief that individuals should not take too much pride in self but instead should make themselves "useful" to the community. A funeral eulogy for a well-regarded man, for instance, stressed that the deceased, Solo, had been much respected for such qualities. The brother of the dead man's wife said of Solo, Solo built each [cement] block house here in [our village]. We see the results of the huge labors Solo did in this community of Rakiraki. Also you know, my sisters [were] all brought up by Solo. Solo's manner of living when he was here was just like a lake flowing slowly. I never heard Solo say one bad word to any person. A man who was loving; a gentleman with a good heart; a gentleman who worshipped the Lord and was a member of the choir until he got too old. . . . Yes Solo was very useful in the vanua of Rakiraki, useful to the church, useful to the school, usehl for everything. Here the speaker grouped "worshipping the Lord" with a list of other socially desirable traits such as loving other people, being of a calm temperament and having a good heart. The respected individual is one who is usehl to others in the community because of a willingness to be humble and loving and to put others' needs before his or her own.

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Our students also found that many people saw participating in the Methodist church as a way to help them to do their duties and play their role in the community more generally. For instance, three women interviewed by Emily Sparks (1999) stressed the way that Methodism had allowed either them or their husbands to curb anti-social desires, or to have the strength to continue to play their correct social roles despite obstacles. Religion subdued "the self' in order to allow communion with the community. In many ways, then, the Methodist Church reinforced a view of rural Fijian society similar to that conveyed in sevusevu. Despite the strong association between Methodist church and vanua, however, rural Fijians did not always regard these two institutions as analogous (see also Tomlinson 2002,2004). In fact, Rakiraki villagers regarded church and vanua as separate systems and felt that there was tension between the two. Close examination revealed that the vision of community offered by the Methodist church and the vanua were, although similar, not precisely the same. The difference between vanua and church ideology was apparent in the language used by each. Sevusevu, and speeches from the vanua delivered in church, were almost always delivered in Rakiraki dialect. Prayers and sermons, on the other hand, were generally delivered in Bauan even if they occurred in the context of ceremonies held outside the church. The shifi from local dialect to Bauan indexed a shift in people's conceptions of the communities they were addressing. Speaking local dialect indexed loyalty to a particular local polity and a reluctance to appear subservient to other groups within Fiji. Speaking Bauan, on the other hand, indexed that the speaker was conceiving of himself or herself as located not just within a local polity but also within a pan-Fijian community of Methodists united under God amongst whom regional differences were not significant. Methodism, then, allowed Fijians to imagine themselves as part of larger indigenous Fijian community (see also Robbins 1998,2001 on Christianity in Papua New Guinea). The conceptual separation between church and vanua allowed at least some individuals to conceive of the church as a new community, to which they had chosen to commit themselves willingly. In this way, they could find in the church a resolution to desires to, on the one hand, remain distinctively Fijian, but, on the other hand, feel that they were autonomous and successfd individuals. This was appealing particularly to senior women since church structure, in some ways, gave women more obvious prominence than did vanua occasions.

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Evangelical Churches Rakiraki villagers also belonged to several evangelical Protestant churches. Four families attended a Seventh Day Adventist church located just outside Rakiraki village. There was also a small Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall that two Rakiraki families attended. The largest of the alternative churches was the Assemblies of God church to which nine Rakiraki households belonged. Many families also belonged to small churches such as the Holiness Revival Fellowship (three households), the World Christian Fellowship (one household), the Nazarene Church (two households) and a smattering of other small churches that were attended by one of two village families. I attended services of the AOG church and the Holiness Revival Fellowship in the Rakiraki areas. I also attended services of the World Christian Fellowship and the Assemblies of God while visiting Rakiraki people who lived in Suva. Our students estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of the people in the villages in which they lived belonged to other churches besides the Methodist one. Each of the evangelical churches had its own idiosyncratic beliefs, but there were many common themes particularly in the messages about the relationship between individual and society implicit in the form of the service. Not surprisingly, Fijian evangelical churches like evangelical churches everywhere, viewed themselves as rejecting the human social "establishment" and emphasizing a community of believers all more or less equal in the eyes of the Lord. Miyazaki (2004), for instance, notes that Seventh Day Adventists in Suva do not connect present events to past traditions as do Suva Methodists; instead, Suva SDA services stress connection to a world community of Adventists. The de-emphasis on local tradition and identity was implicit both in spatial arrangements in the church, and in the content and structure of sermons. In AOG churches I visited in Rakiraki and Suva, for instance, there were separate men's and women's sections as in Methodist churches. But people were not seated according to their rank within the vanua. Furthermore, the distinction between church officials and congregation was broken down by inviting individuals to give personal testimony about their experiences before the sermon began. This was in distinct contrast to Methodist services where individuals spoke only as representatives of the church or the vanua. Moreover, it was often women and young people who gave testimony in evangelical churches. Again this contrasted with the Methodist church where it was generally senior men and a few senior women who spoke. On occasions (such as the annual Children's Service on Easter) when younger people spoke in Methodist services they just recited carefully memorized passages of scripture. Interestingly, however, in most evangelical services that I witnessed, the social differences challenged were those based on wealth and educa-

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tion rather than on traditional rank. This emphasis on wealth and education indexed the fact that evangelical worshippers often imagined themselves as part of a larger national and even international community rather than as part of a particular vanua. In one World Christian Fellowship service in Suva, for example, the pastor told his audience that they might be despised by human society as poor and uneducated but the Lord valued them for their faith. Members of the congregation were more concerned with being looked down upon by richer and more powerful people in urban areas and in other countries, than with having a lowly rank within their vanua. Even rural evangelical sermons had similar messages, again showing that Fijians do not take for granted that they are embedded within a traditional vanua but instead define themselves within the imagined context of multiple kinds of national and international communities. The language of evangelical churches also challenged the Methodist conception of a sacred community with each individual playing his or her role appropriate to his or her age and gender. Methodist preachers almost always used the plural pronouns keimami (first person, large group plural, exclusive) and keimuni (second person, large group). In contrast, speakers in evangelical services most often used the first person singular pronoun au, and the first person, dual, inclusive pronoun daru (you and me). This difference in pronoun use indexed a significantly different claim about the church community. Methodist sermons positioned the speaker as the representative of a large group. Similarly, by addressing the congregation with the second person pronoun used for large groups, listeners were imagined as being embedded within larger status categories based on age and gender. In evangelical sermons, on the other hand, when speakers used the first person singular pronoun they were proclaiming themselves to be unique individuals with particular experiences, rather than representatives of communities. When they addressed the congregation with the first person, dual, inclusive form, speakers not only signaled that they were imagining each listener as a unique individual but that they were establishing ties between particular historical individuals rather than members of larger undifferentiated categories. This idea was reinforced by the standard evangelical practice of addressing the congregation as "ganequ kei taciqu" (my sister(s) and brother(s)). The standard Methodist form of address, in contrast, was to "keimuni na turaga, keimuni na marama" (you the men, you the women). The evangelical form of address emphasized the personal relationship between the speaker and those addressed and implied that each person was being addressed as an individual, not as a member of a larger status group. The emphasis on individual identity was, of course, reinforced when people told stories about their own lives in testimony. Sermons and prayers also stressed the ways that people approached God as individuals. Implicit here was an extensive critique of the vanua

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and Methodist church community as forcing people into performing correct actions and, thereby, promoting a kind of empty conformity with no real commitment. Many people commented that the Methodist church was too distant from individuals. They said that people were able to go through the motions of attending the Methodist church without truly applying Christian principles to their lives because the Methodist church placed so much emphasis on groups of people performing their proper role in the community. Evangelical churches implicitly constructed the vanua and the Methodist church.as a false kind of community involving empty ritual, when they stressed the importance of true belief. One World Christian Fellowship service in Suva, for instance, opened with the prayer, We thank you for the free life You have given to each of us this day today. We climb up here together with our different problems, our different burdens, Your loving heart will help us, our Lord. The Lord's message is not for those who are make-believers; it's just for those who are chosen by You. You help us and bless each of them who stand up for this message at the end of this time.

The speaker emphasized the fact that each person approached God as an individual, with his or her own problems. He implied that the faith of the congregation was different from the false faith of the Methodists when he referred to the "make-believers'' whom God would immediately recognize and reject. The frequent opposition of "inner faith" with "empty ritual" in evangelical services, then, is an implied critique of the traditional church and vanua. The emphasis on personal dyadic relationships between God and believers and between members of the congregation is typical of evangelical Christian churches (e.g. Martin 2001). Just as language choice indexed differences between the Methodist and vanua constructions of community, so language choice in evangelical services indexed an imagined community different from that asserted in Methodist discourse. The Fijian Methodist church prided itself in its use of Fijian in all services and texts. The use of English in the Rakiraki area Methodist churches I attended was confined to a few phrases thrown in by the head pastor in deference to me. The head pastor usually explained that he was giving the main points in English for the benefit of "our guests who don't understand Fijian." Evangelical services, on the other hand, involved greater use of English. Songs, for instance, had verses first in English and then translated afterward into Fijian. Often English was used in a token fashion, since the congregation was more comfortable with Fijian. But insertion of key English phrases such as "Praise the Lord" linked the congregation with a worldwide community of evangelical Christians who also used such phrases. Indeed, people

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who belonged to evangelical churches often remarked that their churches had started in America. They also watched videos of American evangelical Christians, commenting approvingly on the intensity of their faith that, some people felt, was much deeper than that of Fijians. The use of English was much more extensive in evangelical services in Suva. I attended one AOG service in Suva, for example, where two men preached together, one speaking in Fijian and the other translating into English. The woman who took me to the church service said that they were doing this in order to accommodate Indo-Fijians who were part of the church. When I pointed out to her that there was, in fact, only one Indo-Fijian in attendance, my host said that the English was also for the benefit of the many urban Fijians who knew English better than Fijian. She claimed that many people in urban areas spent so much time speaking English at work that they no longer understood Fijian very well. While it was true that many urban Fijians used English in their day-today lives, I never met an urban Fijian who no longer understood Fijians very well. There was, however, a common stereotype among Rakiraki villagers, that urban and overseas Fijians often pretended not to understand Fijian very well in order to impress people with how cosmopolitan and well-educated they were. Rural Fijians, as was apparent in the previous chapter, asserted in sevusevu that urban relatives were just "children" out laboring on behalf of those in the village doing the really important ritual work of preserving the sacred vanua. Conversely, urban Fijians who attended evangelical churches asserted through their form of worship that their identity as a member of a vanua was secondary to their identity as part of a worldwide community of Christians. Going along with the emphasis on belonging to a universal community, were various practices that disembedded individuals from the vanua (see also Miyazaki 2004). Evangelical church members, for example, could not drink yaqona. Many people said that they liked to avoid any social gathering in which yaqona was served because if they attended they might be pressured to drink yaqona or might be tempted to do so. The consequence was that evangelicals did not participate in many of the informal social gatherings that formed in people's houses most evenings. Many evangelical Christians said that their religion helped them to avoid communal pressures. One young woman, for example, told student Megan Lee that one of the things that she liked about being a Jehovah's Witness was that she could not drink yaqona so did not sit and gossip with her neighbors the way she used to. She also felt that she was stigmatized by the community for not being a Methodist and so was not as involved in the community as she would otherwise have been. Another young evangelical woman told me that she preferred not to gossip with her neighbors and friends because doing this only caused one to think

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sinful thoughts. Evangelicals, then, viewed their religion as taking them away from the vanua and embedding them in a new kind of community. By not drinking yaqona, evangelical Christians also avoided acknowledging the status hierarchy within the village. People who were in some way dissatisfied with the status quo in the village often joined evangelical churches. In one mataqali where the headman was generally disliked, almost all the young men of the next generation belonged to various evangelical churches and so could never be recruited to perform their customary role of serving yaqona for the headman. I also noticed that many of the cousins and siblings of particularly high-ranking people in the village belonged to evangelical churches. In this way, they avoided having to defer to their relative in cases where the succession had been disputed (which was common). The idea that becoming an evangelical Christian involved being "reborn" into a new kind of community, separate from the vanua, was explicit in one service of the Holiness Revival Fellowship in Rakiraki. A pastor visiting from Suva announced his identity in the traditional Fijian way by identifying himself by his vanua, his yavu, and his vasu (mother's lineage), and by his registration in the Volai Ni Kawa Bula. Then he talked of how his spirit had been freed when the Lord called him away from the vanua and drawn him into a new Christian community in Suva. Yes today I am in Rakiraki so that I can show, I explain to you

my friends about the time I was called to the Lord. I heard the message about being freed in the year 1984. That started my life of freeing my spirit. When I left on my journey from the village it was not a new thing this choosing the Lord, choosing to become a person of the Lord. This afternoon today I tell you, I was raised up here in His family, as we are members here today. This was the start of this journey of my life, when I was called. Now it's ten and a half years. My journey came to here. My name was changed because of the church I belong to.

Here the speaker started out by asking rhetorically why the members of the congregation should need to "free" each other and then went on to spell out the meaning of the term by talking about his own "freeing" from his previous identity. The word sereki (to free or untie) was quite a common one in evangelical discourse and reflected the idea that one must be freed from sin in order to truly receive the Lord. But it was clear that this speaker was also addressing the need to be free from social constraints associated with the traditional vanua when he moved immediately on to telling how he had been removed by God from a traditional vanua and given a new identity in the community of the Lord. Then he

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spoke of how he was "raised up here in His family" to emphasize that his previous social identity had been erased in the transition. He was called from his traditional Fijian family to a new Christian family constituted by the church and in the process was "raised" again, and took on a new name. The overall message, then, was one that linked receiving Christ with freeing oneself from a vanua. Although evangelical Christians stressed the ways that their religion created a new community for them, examining evangelical discourse closely revealed that sometimes the "new communities" were similar in many ways to traditional vanua (see also Miyazaki 2004). For example, I was often struck by the stereotypical nature of people's individual testimony. In one AOG sermon that pastor's wife testified about how the Lord had given her strength to perform her many duties and carry her many burdens in the church. The conception of doing the Lord's work as involving "doing duties" and "carrying burdens" was, of course, also very common in Methodist services. The woman took this very standard Methodist conception and gave it an AOG slant by using the first person singular pronoun, au. This example shows, however, how in many ways the differences in ways of conceiving of the individual in the community between Methodist and evangelical churches were more apparent than real. Evangelical Christianity, like Methodism, also stressed individual humility before God. And, as in Methodism, in many cases this humility was linked to the need to perform one's correct role in a community. A visiting pastor from Suva, for example, told a Holiness Revival Fellowship congregation in Rakiraki about a time when he had strayed from his congregation because of rumors about the pastor. His message was that he had been wrong to stray from the church and go off on his own since lone individuals were preyed upon by the Devil. One must be obedient to the anointed of the Lord, the chosen pastor of the church, rather than acting on one's individual desires. Similarly, evangelical services emphasized the importance of preserving gender roles. AOG and the Holiness Revival Fellowship both had women's fellowships that met regularly to learn women's tasks like sewing and cooking. In a World Christian Fellowship service in Suva the pastor told a long story about how his wife had lent the shirt he reserved for preaching to his brother. The speaker claimed that his wife had violated God's commandments by taking the shirt. The message here, again, stressed the woman's need to be obedient to her husband and to God's commands rather than just doing what seemed to her to be right. Of course, the story also challenged traditional social norms, though, since it involved upholding behavior as virtuous which ran counter to the traditional practice of sharing freely with close relatives.

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Finally, while many evangelicals drew an implied contrast between their own true faith and the empty ritualism of Methodists, it should be noted that Methodist services also involved a great deal of discourse about the need to accept God in one's "inner heart" and to follow his voice rather than attend to other people in the Church. In some ways, the ideas about individual and community conveyed by evangelical and Methodist sermons were similar. Individuals who were for some reason discontent with their place in a vanua, could, therefore, use evangelical religion as a way of rejecting the vanua but, at the same time, embedding themselves in another community that had some of the same properties as the vanua and the Methodist congregation. Both Methodism and other varieties of Christianity allowed individuals to feel that they were deeply communalistic but to portray this communalism as the hard won and freely chosen achievement of an autonomous self. Furthermore, it was clear that rural Fijians imagined themselves as members of different kinds of communities. Through sevusevu ceremonies, individuals located themselves within the vanua; through Methodism, individuals imagined themselves as part of a broader Fijian nation; through evangelical churches, people thought of themselves as parts of international Christian communities. In this way churches offered people a variety of ways to resolve contradictory pressures to be autonomous and to be sociocentric. Interviews with individual Fijians from various denominations, like church services, revealed that there was no single Fijian way of conceiving of the relationship between self and community. As Strauss (1992) suggests is generally true, individuals drew on public ideologies in different ways to construct satisfying senses of self. In the process, they focused on some aspects of religious doctrine and ignored others. Peoples' constructions also showed that they had different associations, as the result of differing life experiences, with the churches. Some saw the Methodist church as strongly associated with a repressive vanua while others saw the Methodist church as fostering a positive sense of community potentially different from the vanua. Underlying these different narratives, however, was a similar set of beliefs. By stressing the fact that they chose to subordinate a willful self to a community, rural Fijians implicitly show that they are not "primitives" but, instead, are just like other people in actively shaping their own lives and making informed choices that spiritual purity is more valuable than material wealth and selfaggrandizement. I examine below accounts of young people. At a point in the life cycle where they are expected to submit to the authority of others and do a lot of the work of the community, young people, particularly young married women, often were dissatisfied with the vanua and turned to various

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Christian churches to achieve a greater sense of themselves as autonomous individuals.

Choice and Community in Conversion Narratives Most people felt that an ideal kind of sociocentric orientation was one that people chose for themselves. Many people, particularly young Fijians, spoke in negative terms about the traditional vanua where there was constant pressure to conform. The shared ideas about community and self were apparent in people's comments on Methodism. Villagers who talked to our students often emphasized the fact that, in Methodism, people were forced to attend church and so never thought about whether they truly believed or not. They were more concerned with what their neighbors thought of them. One young Methodist lay preacher, Dakui, for example, told Megan Lee (1999) that he thought that many people just went through the motions of being Methodist without truly believing in the Bible. This, he told her, was because they were forced to go to church by their parents as children and so did not think about their religion as they would have if they had chosen it themselves. In his remarks on religion, Dakui revealed a robust set of ideas about individual and community. When he had been forced through social pressure to attend church he ended up having no true commitment to the community and making a lot of trouble. It was only through actively choosing to commit himself as a Methodist that he arrived at an internal sense of belief which allowed him to become a good and productive member of the human community and of God's community. Through framing the situation this way, Dakui imagined himself as an active contributor to the community, but also as an autonomous individual who had freely chosen to become a part of that community. Similar ideas were also apparent in the remarks of several young men interviewed by Andy Spitz. One young man commented on the pervasive social pressures in the community. He felt that his friends often tempted him to do bad things and it was only faith in God that enabled him to avoid these pressures. Like many people, he looked to evangelical religion to help him to resist the pressures of this old community and to embed himself in a new kind of community. Another young man echoed Dakui's sentiments in contrasting the "empty" communalism of Methodism and the vanua with the sincere communalism promoted by belonging to the SDA church. This young man told Andy that he felt that Methodist preachers were hypocritical: they just used preaching as a way to order young men around without truly applying Christian principles to their lives. Social pressure in this form had had little effect on the young man, in his view; he had continued to drink, smoke and do bad things. It

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was only converting to the SDA church that prompted this young man to mend his ways. This young man complained to Andy about his treatment by the Methodist elders, The whole of one night I went out diving in my boat to feed these people here. And I came back and saw what was going on. I said, 'Oh fuck, I don't give a damn. I don't want to go to church anymore-just stay home.' That's why I changed. I just stayed home and went back to my own ways. You know Sami? He is Seventh Day. He came to visit because I never go to church. I went back to my old ways, drinking Sunday, walking on Sunday. So he [came to] visit me. He delivered the goods, and I joined.

This young man cast himself as an active agent who had chosen to move from a "bad" community where elders just bossed young men around for personal reasons, to a "good" community where the leaders were truly principled. However, the underlying continuities between the new and old communities were also apparent; the young man, for instance, still looked to wise elders to tell him what was right and to direct his life. He just viewed himself as having chosen a group of elders with valid claims to his respect. In short, he wanted to be part of a community but also wanted to see himself as having freely chosen to become part of this community. The insistence on active agency was particularly interesting in the narratives of young women who had, in fact, joined evangelical churches after their husbands had converted. Thus these young women chose to construe themselves as active agents in situations where they could have easily felt that they were just doing what their husbands had told them to do.' For example, one young woman, Menani, joined the AOG after marrying an AOG man. She emphasized this act of choice rather than focusing on the fact that she had followed her husband into the church. Menani told Stephanie, [My husband] converted first, then myself. . . When he heard God's word, he heard that only one time . . . in New Zealand, ten years ago. He received Jesus Christ in his life. . . . So he received that, received Jesus. He came to Fiji. So [since] we were married, I changed to that religion. . . . It was not very hard [to change]. Because I heard God's word preaching and my inner spirit [was] feeling guilty. So I heard the pastor preaching, [and] I felt guilty like, "He is talking about me." My husband didn't force me. I just heard God's word. . . . [My husband] invited me to church. . . . [I] went one day. I heard God's voice. [Sienkiewicz 19991

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Menani, who had followed traditional gender roles by taking on the religion of her husband, did not construe the situation that way herself. In her story, her husband just invited her to attend the church and she herself chose to become part of it after hearing God's word. She also emphasized the difference between the old community of Methodism where she had participated in the church without ever hearing God, and the new AOG community where God had made her feel that her ways were bad. In casting the story this way, Menani portrayed herself both as part of a community and as an autonomous agent. Dili, another young woman interviewed by Stephanie Sienkiewicz also stressed the twin themes of individual choice and submission to a higher authority. Dili spoke at length to Stephanie about the loss of autonomy that she had experienced after her marriage. She said that her husband controlled even how she dressed and wore her hair, yet himself roamed around freely sleeping with other women. When Dili turned to her own family for help, her mother just told her that she had to go back to her husband and should do everything he said so as to avoid provoking him,. Dili commented, "I just wanted to pack my clothes and go right home to my Mom's. And I did, I went home. He came there and asked me to come back. And my Mom said, "No matter what happens you have to go back because you are married. You have to go back to him. He's your responsibility, not me. You have to go back" (Sienkiewicz 1999). It was clear that Dili resented her loss of autonomy. But, interestingly, Dili did not portray herself entirely as a passive victim. Instead, she emphasized the way she has taken on a burdensome responsibility that she was doing her best to manage. Thus, she remembered her mother as saying that the husband was Dili's "responsibility." People generally emphasized that young women had a "duty" to society to raise their children even if this meant putting up with an abusive husband. Dili, here, spoke of her husband as her "responsibility" rather than as her "duty," casting herself in a more active role as one managing a difficult task. As Dili went on to speak of her participation in the World Christian Fellowship she also emphasized the way that she had actively chosen the church even though, like Menani, she had in fact converted to this church after marrying a man who belonged to it. And she also went on to portray her involvement in this church as a consciously chosen strategy, that she had made despite communal pressure to be a Methodist, in order to help her husband to improve his life. Again, she cast herself as an active agent struggling against obstacles to control a situation. She also emphasized the way that she had taken on the burden of helping her husband to reform even after his own parents had given up on him. Striking in this interview was the way she emphasized her own noble efforts to help her husband. When Stephanie asked Dili what her family thought of her participation in the World Christian Fellowship, Dili replied,

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They say I'm lying. It's not true. [They say,] "You can cut your hair; it's not written in the Bible. You don't have to wear those clothes". . . . It's different from their church. They can wear what they want, short skirts. Before I used to do that too. I used to play netball. . . . And when I came across this church, it is different. You are not supposed to play games. . . . [My husband] is not supposed to wear shorts. I used to talk to him, "Don't wear shorts. If we see someone who goes to church with us and you are wearing shorts, what are they going to think?" You have to cover yourself. No drinking . . . but he's drinking, most of the weekends. I just pray to God to help me, to change this. Like one day he could change this life, [and my husband would] quit drinking and everything. [Sienkiewicz 19991

Here Dili emphasized that way that she had chosen the church despite pressure from others to give it up. World Christian Fellowship women did not cut their hair, claiming that the Bible said that women should let their hair grow to glorify God. When Dili and others resisted social pressures by keeping their hair long, they came to see themselves as having some control over their own fate, albeit if only in a minor way. For Dili, keeping her hair long reaffirmed her sense of herself as a person who acted on inner convictions instead of being controlled by others. She also portrayed herself here as a strong responsible person who was working on her husband to change his ways. Dili returned to this theme later. She stressed the way she had chosen to follow a more difficult but morally superior way that involved giving up many of the fun things, like netball playing, that other women participated in, This village is so different from my village. I don't go to this church on Sundays. In my village I went every Sunday. I had to go into the city to go to church. It is the World Christian Fellowship. The way they serve God is different from [Methodists]. We don't smoke or drink yaqona or listen to all sorts of music. It's different; I can't cut my hair. But before, when I was young, I used to cut my hair. But when I came into this church, I knew it was the truth and I didn't want to cut my hair. The Methodist church, they do a lot of things. You have to cook for someone who's preaching on Sunday. We don't do that. . . . My Mum used to ask me, "Why don't you do this, why don't you do like married women do. Why do you put your hair up. You aren't supposed to put your hair up in the village." They just growled at me like that. But I didn't care; I just put my hair up. When I joined the church I started putting my hair up [and not following the tradition of the village].

Chapter Three They would say, "Take that out. Everything has changed about you: you don't cut your hair; you don't do this." And I said, "It's my church. I have to do what the Bible says." . . . Married women in my village play netball. Their husbands don't stop them. . . . And when I see that, I want to play too. They're married; I'm married; what is the difference? I used to think that way. But I don't have to play. Because we come from different churches. It's different. . . . That's ok with me. When I was in my village, I wouldn't watch T.V. because I was going to church. I just felt like I didn't like watching T.V. Then after we came here and we don't go to church every Sunday, you just feel like watching T.V. all of the time. You forget about the church. When there is nothing to do you just feel like watching T.V. all of the time. [Sienkiewicz 19991 Like other young Fijians, then, Dili saw evangelical Christianity as a way for her to exert some control over her life. She emphasized the way converting to the church allowed her to resist pressure from a corrupt human community where people often did not truly care for others. But, while Dili wanted to see herself as someone with individual autonomy, ultimately she also wanted to see herself as located in a community whose basic precepts were laid down by God not by individual desire. Thus she emphasized in her interviews the way that she was drawn to the church by God speaking to her and the ways that belonging to the church involved her in following many more rules, and having less individual freedom of choice than she had has as a young single woman. When I interviewed Elenoa about her religious beliefs she also focused on the difference between active choice and mere conformity. She, however, configured these dimensions somewhat differently than did the younger people interviewed by our students. Elenoa was an active Methodist; she was one of the few senior women of the village who had attained the status of dau vunau and she was active on the local Methodist church committee. She, however, often expressed skepticism about Methodism saying, like the young Fijians interviewed by our students, that the Methodist church operated mostly through social pressure and, in doing so, produced a congregation that did not follow Christian precepts in day-to-day life. When I asked her, for example, about the relationship between the Methodist Church and the vanua, she responded, the Methodist church supports the vanua and the vanua supports the Methodist church so these two go together. But the problem is that people don't, people don't follow that correctly you see and if they followed that everyone would be righteous doing the right thing, no conflict. But the problem is people just go as a program, you know, accepting church as a program; it's not accepting church as something in reality (KB: like going

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through the motions?) Like if I go to church, like this is what I believe, I have to attend this every morning, you know, be truthful, be faithful with the church. But it's not [like that]. You don't [ever] see a full morning service [as you would if people truly practiced what they said they believed].

She also echoed the sentiments of many evangelicals in arguing that the Methodist church hierarchy was just a human society imposing rules and regulations that reflected the whims and desires of the senior pastors more than God's will. For example, when I asked Elenoa to explain the various positions one could take in the church, she carefully explained the progression from siga tuberi to siga dina to dau vunau. In the middle of her explanation, however, she suddenly injected, Well you see all these things has to be when you [are] joining a Methodist church. I don't know a Catholic or whatever but in the Methodist church it's too much. There are too many steps you have to follow. But you see the members of the church they don't think of that. What I think, that they're just brainwashing, you know, the ministry of the church. It's brainwashing and they have to try and climb up the steps to get to the top. It's like steps. You know the spiritual living is not like steps. You just have to build up the spirituality within you. In a church it's so hard; you have to go in steps each one. It's just like working you know, working humanly like you have to go to school and be taught Class One. It's just like that in the church, no difference. And then [the candidate] fails, [They say] "Oh he's not [ready]." You know whenever I sit in a general meeting and people discuss about these people coming in you know to be, uh, to stand up facing the members of the meeting and then the talatala [senior pastor] questions them, it's just like [they are] small kids. Just like [they are] little kids in school asking them "Ooh just just explain yourself. What have you done with the Holy Spirit? How how did you accept the Holy Spirit you know the first day or the first moment you accepted Him in?" So [the candidate] started explaining and the next one, it's so, it seems ridiculous; it looks childish.

Elenoa complained that the Methodist church "brainwashed" people by convincing them that the senior pastor was an all-knowing authority who could judge someone else's state of spiritual development. Elenoa complained that this reduced people to the status of little children in front of the church officials. She later went on to say that she felt church officials often abused this power, concentrating on getting money from their congregation instead of on spiritual development. Implicit here was the

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view that in reality people were all potentially equal and should approach God as individuals, not through a false human social hierarchy. Unlike the younger Fijians interviewed by our students, however, it became clear in Elenoa's later remarks that this rejection of social hierarchy was confined to the context of the Methodist church. She had a strong sense of legitimate differences in rank within the human community. These differences would eventually be erased as each individual received the Holy Spirit for him or herself; but in their present state, some Fijians were more ready to receive the spirit into their heart than others. The problem with the Methodist church was that they erroneously claimed that these more spiritually pure people were those trained within the Methodist hierarchy; in fact, traditional differences in rank that were often overlooked in contemporary Fiji formed the basis for spiritual purity. Elenoa claimed that her own family had once been the highestranking family in much of northeastern Fiji but that this traditional dominance had been forgotten. In her view, her family's high rank had manifested itself in a kind of spiritual purity that had given them Christian principles before the missionaries even arrived in Fiji. Her family's higher spiritual state could also be seen in the fact that they did not need to conform to the many rules that structured interaction in the Fijian vanua. Elenoa spoke of her greatgrandfather who had seen the arrival of the first missionaries, You see when he was young he understood what happened because he understood that there was no church. There was no church and his parents they were not cannibals. They were not cannibals. They understood that they were not allowed, you know, to eat the flesh of another human being. But they didn't have any church there. . . . So they wanted to put up a missionary there so they said, "That's good. We accept you church because, the people, they don't you know the right thing to do. They are still fighting so that's good we accept that."

Here Elenoa established the opposition between her own chiefly family and ordinary Fijians. Her great-grandfather had known that it was wrong to eat human flesh before the missionaries arrived. But, nevertheless, the chiefly family thought that Christianity might be beneficial for ordinary Fijians who were evil. Elenoa often told me that she felt that perhaps Methodism had played a good role in Fijian society at one time, and perhaps still continued to do so, since many Fijians were not yet spiritually developed and ready to accept the Holy Spirit into their individual lives as she was. Elenoa, then, like the younger Fijians interviewed by our students, asserted in her remarks about religion that being pushed from the outside was not a good thing for her. She later described

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herself as independent and said that everyone should be that way. But instead of completely rejecting the vanua, she imagined herself as a more spiritually developed, active agent within a community of people who perhaps, for the time being, need to be controlled from the outside, if not be the church, than by the vanua.

Self and Society in Fijian Religion Examining church rhetoric and individual ideas about religion has revealed that Rakiraki villagers play with an array of ideologies concerning the relationship between individual and community drawn from evangelical and Methodist rhetoric, mass media sources, exposure to other life styles through migration and contact with Western tourists, and from government rhetoric. Evangelical and Methodist churches offered different visions of the relationship between individual and community. Furthermore, individual believers crafted their own narratives of religious experience in which they created selves that did not conform precisely to the visions of self offered by any of the churches. As Strauss (1992ab) suggests individuals drew on publicly available interpretive schemes to craft idiosyncratic networks of meaning. For Elenoa, individual spiritual communion with God was associated with high rank and with Europeans. Thus she could see herself as above the laws of the Methodist church without rejecting the church outright since she felt it played a useful role in a community comprised of individuals of different ranks. Younger Fijians like Dili and the young men interviewed by Andy Spitz, associated Methodism with a corrupt gerontocracy in the vanua. They did not identify with the high ranking group in the vanua, as did Elenoa, so associated Methodism with all that was bad about the vanua and chose to join alternative churches. All of these constructions, however, had the virtue of suggesting that one could be both autonomous and communal at the same time. Individuals were at pains to prove that they had freely chosen to put cornrnunity and tradition first as a more meaningful way to seek individual fulfillment. They had rejected a communalism foisted on them from the outside because sociocentrism only worked as an expression of inner faith. In this way, people drew together the twin poles of tradition and modernity, communalism and individualism, local and global, by suggesting that these poles were compatible, not contradictory. As Robbins (2004) and Kray (2001) suggest, Christianity may be one of many global ideologies that poses moral challenges to indigenous cultures; but in Fiji, as in much of the Pacific, part of the power of evangelical Christianity has been its ability to "go local," speak to local concerns

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(Davidson 2004), and to be re-imagined by individuals in such a way as to resolve the moral dilemmas of their lives.

Notes 1. While evangelical Christian sects in Fiji and elsewhere are generally patriarchal and emphasize the authority of husband and father, women in many areas join evangelical sects in order to seek more autonomy and more egalitarian social roles (see Frykholm 2004: 100). In Fiji, this greater autonomy resulted from women's ability to escape their obligations to in-laws and the vanua.

Chapter 4

Re-Imagining Sociocentrism In this chapter, I analyze constructions of self and community in life history interviews with several Rakiraki people. Examining these narratives reveals a multitude of ways of conceiving of one's role in the community. As Abu-Lughod (1993), Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990) and Strauss (1992ab) have argued, individuals position themselves differently in relation to public ideologies. Some embrace these ideologies as central to their sense of self while others define themselves as iconoclasts working against the mainstream. Furthermore, public ideologies mean different things to individuals depending on how these ideologies relate to life experiences. Understanding the ways that people position themselves in relation to available cultural ideologies helps to break down the conceptual barriers between cultures and to avoid "essentializing" cultural differences. There is considerable overlap in the strategies people in different cultures use to imagine their lives, particularly in our contemporary global village. Conversely, there are many differences within a single cultural group in the ways people conceptualize their lives. As was apparent in the previous chapter, young married women had little prestige and autonomy within indigenous Fijian society. Like everyone else, young women had been exposed to ideologies praising autonomy and individual achievement; but they had also been brought up in an environment where everyone was expected to play his or her role in preserving the traditional Fijian vanua. Women, like other villagers, were under contradictory pressures to uphold the vanua and to show that they were successful as individuals. They resorted to a variety of strategies in order to resolve these contradictory forces within their own lives and, in the process, slowly expanded the repertoire of ways to be properly sociocentric. 67

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I examine the life stories of four women to show how each authored a different account of a properly sociocentric self. None of these women had won full social acceptance; but each had won small compromises. While each of these individuals is unique, she reflects some general patterns corresponding to the different kinds of constraints on women in this age group. The first two women, Amalia and Sera, were in many ways typical of young married women with few independent economic resources. Like many of the women in the previous chapter, Arnalia and Sera had limited capacity to find employment because they lacked higher education, had to look after children, and faced an economy where good jobs were scarce. Many such women felt controlled by their husband and his family and felt that they received little respect from their husband's extended family while doing a great deal of work. Amelia and Sera were typical of many other women I interviewed in crafting self accounts that emphasized their adherence to the Fijian tradition of sharing and caring. Amelia and Sera, like many others in a similar position, distanced themselves from the ideology that one should play one's role in a sacred, time-honored, Fijian vanua, claiming that those who espoused such views were often hypocrites who failed to live up to true Fijian way of loving and caring for others. This kind of rhetoric was in many ways similar to that of the evangelical Christian women of the previous chapter. The growing popularity of evangelical sects suggests that this new version of sociocentrism, privileging the importance of sharing and caring, had become an increasingly popular alternative used by many people to successfully justifl lifestyles frowned upon in the traditional vanua. A second pair of women, Vani and Ema, took an opposite strategy, more typical of women with some economic independence. These women's economic autonomy afforded them a measure of control over their lives; but they still had to maintain the support of relatives and avoid social ostracism by showing their, sometimes non-traditional, behavior to be in accord with sociocentric values. In contrast to the first group, who had little economic autonomy and tried to win control through emphasizing the value of traditional female activities like caring for children and guests, the second group often tried to escape these traditional activities. Consequently, these women tended to steer clear of the ideology of sharing and caring, and, instead, explain their actions in terms of the ideology of the sacred, ranked, Fijian vanua. They claimed that they, either because of their chiefly background or their professional status, were, like traditional chiefs, above the ordinary laws of the vanua; their role was to remain aloof and give guidance. Furthermore, they often implied that those who claimed to uphold the sacred traditional vanua, were, in fact, corrupt. In this way, these women justified flouting much local convention and leading non-traditional lifestyles. This was also a

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version of Fijian sociocentrism that had won enough social support, particularly among urban professionals, to be at least partially successfid in justifying non-traditional lifestyles.

Amalia: The Importance of Sharing and Caring Amalia, a thirty-six-year-old woman, crafted an account of sociocentrism emphasizing that she truly embodied the Fijian ideal of sharing and caring. Amalia had no independent income so could do little to assert herself against her husband or to distance herself from her relatives who sometimes attempted to control her life. Amalia used her stories to assert that she was a good person, and that the loving bonds between her and her various children and other relatives were more important than were the needs of the patrilineal vanua. Amalia used Fijian values in order to critique those who disapproved of her behavior and to argue against an aspect of sociocentrism that had proved particularly problematic in her life, a system of fosterage and adoption that made children as much the responsibility of an extended network of kin as of parents (Becker 1995; Morton 1996). Adoption and fosterage are common (Morton 1996); children often move through several different households in the course of growing up and extended family members claim the right to remove children from the custody of the parents. Amalia had benefited from this system when she was adopted by her mother's sister, Laisa, after her mother died and later when her relatives had adopted three children Amalia had had before she was married. But, when I talked to her, Amalia felt that the fosterage system was separating her both from her biological children and from her brother's daughter, small Amalia, who Amalia had raised to the age of six. In late 1997, Amalia's brother took his child back, an action that the rest of the villagers supported, although many recognized that this caused Amalia pain and felt sorry for her. Amalia argued that she should not have to submit to the community by giving up her children because, in fact, she more truly embodied the ideal of sharing and caring than did others. The overall thrust of Amalia's account was to argue that, while she sometimes behaved in ways that were frowned upon, she cared more deeply for others than did many of her relatives who were more respectable. Respectability often masked a mean spirited nature incompatible with Fijian values. This construction implicitly critiqued the idea that people should play strictly defined roles in a hierarchical community by suggesting that people often acted out roles without genuine humility and concern for others.

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Amalia's view of herself as a genuinely loving person was apparent when she argued that her husband, Wilsoni, was selfish, hypocritical and uncaring. He tried to separate her from her children, criticized her for sleeping around before marriage even though he had done the same thing himself, and failed to visit his own child born out of wedlock. In contrast, Amalia, was a good Fijian motivated primarily by love for her children. Amalia complained to me that she wanted custody of her three children. In the process she contrasted the truly loving nature of women with the mean-spirited, judgmental ways of males like Wilsoni. She said, But Karen, you know, us, we [women] always love our children. Myself, if I hear [about] something [my children's foster parents are doing to them] I just tell Wilsoni, "I want my children." (KB: It must be hard having your children live with somebody else.) I want my children to stay with me. [I say to Wilsoni,] "If you hit my children you talk nonsense to them the same day too I [will] leave this house. But I can't stay with you if you are bad to my children." Sometimes, Karen, I cry because Wilsoni always talks nonsense to me about my children. Wilsoni always talks nonsense. (KB: What does he say?) [He says that I] go like this like that, have these children. I say, "All the girls. [Do] you see plenty girls [who stay] inside the house and [then] get married, eh? They go like this. They have a baby. Some of them they [have abortions]. But, myself, [I'm] lucky because [after] I came here I [didn't have] any children from you. But I have my children. Three, that's enough for me. They always come to me."'

Here Amalia implicitly claimed that behavior considered improper (sleeping around before marriage) had enabled her to be a good woman by giving her children to nurture. Had she not born these illegitimate children she would have been childless since she and Wilsoni had had no children together. This was part of a broader criticism of the overall system where women were supposed to remain pure and chaste before marriage and then be obedient to their husband after marriage while men were allowed greater license to sleep around and neglect their families. Amalia also emphasized that bonds of love were more important than genealogical ties to patrilineal groups. In this way, she reinforced her attempts to keep her three biological children near her. Arnalia's three children currently lived nearby and she saw them often. But recently her brother had made several remarks about coming and taking the children to his lineage. Amalia tried to justify having the children stay in Rakiraki by talking about how much they were loved by their relatives there. She said that her mother's brother had really wanted to adopt Amalia's youngest daughter because he had no children. Furthermore,

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when Amalia's brother had first attempted to take Amalia's oldest daughter when she was a baby, Laisa had been furious at Amalia for letting this happen and had gone to reclaim the baby. Amalia's emphasis on the paramount importance of true caring for others was also apparent when she described her close bond with her foster mother, Laisa, saying that the sincere affection that she shared with Laisa was more important than the biological ties between parents and children. Amalia said that her mother has arranged before her death that Laisa should take in Amalia because Amalia was sickly and her father was often drunk and didn't look after her children well. Amalia stressed, however, that it had been her own choice to stay in Rakiraki: Laisa had originally taken in Amalia's younger sister, h a , as well but Ana had insisted on returning home. Amalia's point here seemed to be that she shared a special bond with Laisa because she had chosen her as a mother; this bond was superior to the automatic ties of blood between biological mothers and daughters. Amalia emphasized that she had truly cared for Laisa, unlike Laisa's sisters, who appeared to follow Fijian tradition better than did Amalia but were, in fact, judgmental and mean. Laisa's sisters had always teased her about having no biological children but Amalia felt that that was wrong given how much Laisa cared for Amalia and her children, "The way they talk to her, they say, 'You haven't got any kids,' like that because [Laisa's other adopted daughter's] mother she's in Suva. Myself, my mother passed away. I can't talk like that to her like that." Amalia also said Laisa was a really good woman who was never angry no matter what Amalia did. Laisa was genuinely good because she was loving, not judgmental like so many other people. Many women spoke of their mothers this way. The non-judgmental love between mothers and children appealed to women as an alternative to the public emphasis (associated with men and with fathers) on playing one's role in a community controlled by senior men. Amalia argued that, in general, she was more genuinely loving than her more respectable relatives. She spoke, for instance, about the events after Laisa's death. Amalia had offered to bring Laisa's body back to the village in Wilsoni's brown car but Laisa's sisters rejected this offer. They also subsequently gave Laisa's house to another cousin, instead of giving it to Amalia, as she had expected they would. Amalia told me, [Laisa] passed away on Saturday, eh? And Saturday night [while] I was staying here the kids came to see me to go to the talatala's [pastor's] house tell him to go down. Monday, no Sunday, I went back. When I went back, I want my auntie [i.e. Laisa's body] to come in [my] car, the brown car, and one of [Laisa's sisters] said, "No everything is set. You stay here,

Chapter Four look after the house." And I said, "OK thank you." Myself, my heart is not good, eh? It really [caused me] pain because I want my auntie to come in that car. After that I came back again. They buried my auntie on Tuesday. In the afternoon my uncle [Laisa's husband] said, "You can come here and stay with us [and move in to Laisa's house]." I asked Wilsoni and Wilsoni said, "Yes." On Saturday night, that same night, [all of Laisa's sisters] all sat together and said Paulini and Solomoni should stay in that house [i.e. Laisa's house]. (KB: It should be you. Your children are there.) And I know [the aunts did not give us the house] because they [don't like to] talk to Wilsoni. Wilsoni always drinks. Solomoni too always drinks. This time, sometimes they have no sugar, no salt and I say, "OK that's enough for you because I want to come down and you said no, right." And I told my auntie, "I don't want to stay there in Wilsoni's house and eat good food when down there they don't eat good food. The thing I eat, I want everybody to eat too." But they don't want it, eh? You know something is wrong with them. Here Amalia again contrasted her own good, properly Fijian, behavior to the small-minded behavior of her relatives. Even though they rejected Amalia, she stressed that she was willing to share her greater wealth with them. But the aunts rejected Amalia's goodness, possibly because they did not like Wilsoni's drinking, even though the man they chose to move into Laisa's house, Solomoni, also drank. Amalia implied that unreasonable greed on the part of her relatives, and immoral behavior on her husband's part, were preventing her from living up to the ideals of sharing and caring. In short, Amalia selectively emphasized one set of Fijian values (nurturing by a bilateral kindred) over another (sacrificing personal desire to playing one's proper role in a patrilineal vanua). Amalia argued that she should not have to subordinate her individual desires to those of the community by giving up her children because, in fact, she was more truly embodying the ideal of sharing and caring than were others. She attempted to assert some control over her life through nurturing others and through arguing for the importance of such nurturing.

Sera: Striving for Success In 1997, twenty-three-year-old Sera was living in a small house in Rakiraki with her two young children, while her husband, Isikeli, was posted on the other side of Viti Levu. I had many pleasant conversations with Sera, who was more outgoing and comfortable interacting with out-

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siders than many of the other village women. My first impression of Sera was that she was an ideal Fijian. While many of the people who were most interested in talking to me, at least at first, were somewhat alienated from local culture, Sera seemed to me to be entirely at ease with village life and to be the nearest approximation to a sociocentric self that I had yet encountered. Sera loved to talk to people and spent a great deal of time visiting with relatives and friends in the village. She appeared to have no particular desire to be recognized for her personal qualities and a great deal of willingness to foster smooth social interaction. I initially wanted to interview Sera because I thought that she would be a foil for the other women with whom I spoke, as someone who liked village life and was well received by the other villagers. As I got to know Sera better, I retained my initial respect for her social sensitivity. Her sociocentric orientation was also evident in the ways that she clearly thought of herself as embedded in a larger family, whose interests and lives often seemed to be of greater interest to her than her own situation. When I interviewed Sera about her childhood, for instance, she spent more time talking about events in her siblings' lives than in her own life. She clearly thought of herself as part of this larger family group and felt that her fate had been more influenced by her family's position in her village than by her own personal characteristics. But it also became apparent that Sera, while seeming to have endless willingness to be part of a group, was a very clever and capable person who resisted being controlled by others and who had an impressive track record of shaping her own life, within the constraints imposed by her relative lack of education, lack of good family connections, and early marriage. Furthermore, I realized that Sera was deeply ambivalent about village life and preferred living in Suva. Sera desired a Western lifestyle and individual success. She did her best, though, to manipulate public ideologies so as to always portray her own actions as shaped by publicly acceptable values instead of by the desire for individual gain. Sera had had many of the typical problems faced by young Fijians. Sera's father had died just before she was scheduled to sit her Form Six examinations. As a result, Sera did poorly on the exams, and because her father had died, she did not have the resources to repeat Form Six as many other Fijians do. As one of many young Fijians lacking a Form Six certificate, Sera's chances of obtaining a good job in Suva were limited. Furthermore, Sera's widowed mother was worried about the future of her fatherless children and so had urged Sera to accept a marriage proposal from a man whom Sera had met only once briefly before he proposed marriage. But Sera's mother encouraged her to accept the proposal since she feared that otherwise Sera might, like many young girls, get pregnant before marriage and have trouble finding a husband.

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After her marriage, Isikeli had sent Sera to live in Rakiraki. She preferred to live in Suva where she would have the support of her own family. Many of the young women felt that their own families were supportive and helped them to cope with financial and emotional problems while their husbands' families tended to be unsympathetic and primarily interested in impressing upon the young wife the need to subordinate her desires to the reputation and interests of her husband's family. Sera, however, was more successful than many young women in getting herself out of what she perceived as an undesirable situation. She convinced her husband to let her live in Suva by suggesting that the severe morning sickness she was experiencing was the result of jealous villagers trying to prevent his family from reproducing itself. In Suva, she got him to allow her to take a computer course which she then argued ideally qualified her for making money for the family. She managed these changes while working within an ideology of being a subservient wife, intent only on obedience to her husband and looking after her children. I had expected Sera to have the most sociocentric sense of self of the women whom I interviewed and at first my expectations seemed to be confirmed. When I started our interview, for example, by inviting Sera to talk about her earliest memories, she seemed confused by the question and spoke instead of her place in her sibling set. From there she drifted into a series of stories, primarily concerning her various siblings. Sera's eldest sister, Iliseva, had qualified for a prestigious boarding school in Suva but her academic career had been cut short when her father heard rumors that Iliseva had been smoking and going to nightclubs. He refused to allow Iliseva to return to school when she came home for a school break but she had been rescued by her father's sister, visiting from New Zealand, who chastised the father for ruining his daughter's chances to go on to a good job and took Iliseva off to New Zealand for a couple of months. Another sister, who was also doing very well in school, had had her aspirations dashed when she came home with a bad case of boils on her head. Her mother had responded by shaving the girl's head and she had been too ashamed to return to school in that state. Later evil spirits had possessed this same girl after she had taken to drinking kava around with the other adolescents of the village. A brother had married but his wife had mysteriously died in labor and the baby had only been saved through a caesarian performed after the wife's death. Sera seemed to have little to say about herself as a child, remembering only that she had liked to eat a lot and had not liked to work. She laughed as she told me about the brief time when Iliseva had lived in the village before going off to Australia: she had limited Sera's food intake and forced Sera to work. Sera expressed no resentment against Iliseva, however, whom Sera portrayed as reacting naturally toward an exces-

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sively greedy and lazy child. Sera told me this story with her typical flare for crafting a lively story, and allowing herself to become a figure of fun for the entertainment of others. She spoke of how Iliseva used to order around Sera and their younger sister, Lusi, So after [Iliseva] just left school. . . she just stayed a couple of months at home with us. That time, I used to, I can feel she used to tell us, eh? to teach us, eh? me and Lusi eh?, we were still young. . . . So we used to you know, [have a] pit toilet eh? We come and play. We sit down. OK [Iliseva said] "Sera, one of you get the water ready in the toilet in the tin, eh?" There's big tin or big drum there. "One of you go and wash the dish." Especially me ga Ljust] was [supposed to] do everything, eh? Lusi was just small. Ah [I said,] "Oh oh oilei I want to eat." That time I [was], you know just till now, a big eater, eh? [Iliseva said,] "Just finish that then have your food if not." [At] that time my mother go to fishing uh? And father [used to] go to the garden. . . . [Iliseva used to say,] "Do this. Do this." And when my father came, my mother, [I said,] "Mummy, I'm tired." "What?" "Iliseva told me to do this. Iliseva told me to do that." "Yeah because you are elder than Lusi. You're the one eh?" "Tomorrow I will do this again tomorrow? Oh my God, eh?" and my mother said, "You just smart with eating; you're vucesa."-Vucesa [means] lazy, uh?-"Man you lazy to do the work." Like the ideal Fijian described by Ravuvu (1983), Sera presented herself as a humble person willing to laugh at her own laziness. She also showed a willingness to accommodate to others in her efforts to make her story entertaining and to include such information as Fijian words to describe personality traits like "vucesa." I had consistently prompted her to tell me about the terms people used in normal social interaction to evaluate each other's personalities and she was helping out by including this information in her life story. I realized, as Sera continued, that these apparently random stories about her siblings' misfortunes had a common theme to them and expressed something central about Sera's view of her own life. She felt that her whole family had been bewitched by jealous villagers who were envious of her father's success and did not want to see his children go on to good jobs. Sera felt that her siblings could have achieved better jobs and emulated the Western, urban, lifestyle of many other relatives. She believed that jealous villagers stuck in the traditional model had blocked her family's success. These tensions between desires for individual achievement and communalistic values were apparent in a long story Sera told about when Iliseva had been pulled out of secondary school by their father for misbehaving. Sera recalled,

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[My auntie] was angry, really angry [at] my father, really angry [at] my father. [She said,] "Hey, you [are] stopping her? Don't just look onto your nose. Try to look in the future. Why [are] you stopping her? Only this thing. You know [at] this time some of the relatives in the village just want to tempt to put us down you know. You should not stop her. You should let her go. Let her complete her education. So, OK, I'll take her to New Zealand." . . . (KB: So your auntie said those relatives just wanted to pull them down? Your auntie said just spreading rumors?) Yeah that's the thing, Karen. (KB: Which family was this?) My cousins. (KB: On the father's side or the mother's side?) Father's side, my uncle's son he used to come in and out [between Suva and our home village] bringing the yaqona that time. He heard [from some of the villagers living in Suva about Iliseva's behavior while at boarding school. He thought,] "Eh we wonder[ed] why she [was] suspend[ed]; [it must be] because we saw her in nightclubs," just the rumors, eh? That cousin of mine just went and told my father so that's what my auntie thought, eh? [He] just want[ed] to, you know, [didn't] want that nobody no one in our family to go up I mean to [be] well educated. (KB: do you think that that's true that they were like that?) We know that it's true because we know that our, you know not the witch doctor, the ones who used to pray the gift, eh? They have the gift in Suva nowadays, nowadays. (KB: Yeah like the gift from the Holy Spirit). Right. My mother was, uh, when my father passed away we wondering, eh, why? He's still (KB: Not too old?) yeah not too old, so one of our dau masumasu [Christian spirit medium] eh,.we call it dau masumasu, eh, pray for our mother and then like the vision comes from with them, eh? And she said "Yeah see your children, they should have good jobs. They should have good jobs. They should have good houses. They should everything like other like other villages from [your village.] So your husband he passed away because9'-like one of my uncles. . . . [The spirit medium said] "Uh like he's doing these things. They're just trying to not let, not let the one of the children to be come up to be something to be something eh? So [they] will take your husband, your husband to die, because we know your husband is the one who wish[es] to go further with their duties, eh, in the village?" Most of the duties during the vanua, you know, like he used to be the first one ga [always] eh? My father, he's never second to anyone. . . . So they just wanted to make him die because they know that at that time if he will die he will not show the good things in the future ah? This is my father and also to your kids (KB: He was jealous?) Something like that.

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Sera revealed that her stories about her siblings' various misfortunes had not been random but, instead, had been illustrations of the larger pattern that she felt had shaped her life. She and her siblings had failed to do well because of curses from jealous villagers. All of the children had been capable of academic and professional success but had been mysteriously sidetracked from their careers by various events. Sera, herself, had done poorly on her Form Six exams because of her father's death. She had learned from her mother that these misfortunes were not accidental but were caused by jealous villagers. Sera revealed a preoccupation with tensions between individual achievement and a traditional, communalistic orientation. Like Amalia, Sera disliked the idea of the sacred, ranked vanua with everyone doing his or her duty. Jealous villagers tried to prevent others from doing well. Instead, like Amalia, Sera saw herself as part of a nuclear family where parents (particularly her mother) cared for, and nurtured, their children and were later cared for by these children. It was also evident in my various interactions with Sera over the months, that she felt that villages were hotbeds of gossip and witchcraft and that tradition was oppressive. She was also disdainfd of the elders in her natal village who had for many years blocked attempts to create a tourist resort in the area on the grounds that such a resort would destroy tradition. Sera felt that the important thing was to give families jobs and money; the elders in her natal village were just blocking the resort because they were afraid other people would make more money than they would. Sera's ambivalence about the larger vanua was also apparent in her comments on her husband. She told me that she preferred not only to live in Suva but also to live in Indo-Fijian neighborhoods in Suva. In such an environment, she said, Isikeli was a good husband and father. But if he lived in the village, or even amongst relatives in Suva, he was continually pressured to drink and stay out late by the other young men. Sera went on to say that many young wives felt the same way about the village; they did not like their husbands to stay in the village because of the influence of their childhood friends. The only way to make sure that men cared for their families properly was either to remove them from their social networks or to persuade them to join evangelical churches that forbade drinking of alcohol and yaqona. Like Amalia and other young women, Sera clearly also saw bilateral networks of kin as a positive force in opposition to the patrilineal vanua, which she saw in a negative light. This opposition was, for example, apparent in a story Sera told me about her brother's son, Samu. Samu's mother had died giving birth to him and, as a result Sera said, everyone loved Samu because they felt sorry for him. This in itself revealed the importance of mothers to Sera: a child was greatly to be pitied who had

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no mother to look after him. Sera went on to explain how touched she had been by Isikeli's interest in Samu and his suggestion that Sera and Isikeli might adopt Samu if they had no children of their own. It was obviously important to Sera that Isikeli had not cared whether Samu came from his family or from hers. Isikeli loved Samu because he was in need of love not because he came from the right patrilineage. This attitude convinced Sera that Isikeli was a good person. Sera told me that after she and Isikeli became engaged but before they married, Every night Isikeli came . . . and visited us [Samu said,] "[Uncle] Isikeli." [Isikeli said,] "Samu." Isikeli just treated him, like when we told him the story [of Samu's birth] he just felt sorry for him. From that time any time he came and he came back he must buy something for him. . . . Because he got that feeling, maybe Isikeli. Uh I mean, you know, because he cared about Samu before we married. [Isikeli would say,] "Samu," [and then would] hug him. "OK tomorrow you get ready Auntie." [At] that time Isikeli used to play [in the] Rugby league, eh? "You come and watch me in the park." "OK." So he gave two dollars. What can I say? [He was] sooo good. I mean the time we told him this story about Samu, the way he treated Samu was just like his son, just like he really treats [his own children]. Like [at] the time we married, just after two days we were talking. He was telling me about these things that happened . . . [Isikeli said,] "I think it's true that we won't have babies. My brothers they have been married for a couple of years, they don't have babies. We are going to adopt Samu." I was really happy, eh? I bring my relatives-not like [one of Isikeli's cousins who had adopted his sister's child instead of a child on the wife's side].

As with Amalia, Sera's emphasis on ties based on nurture and caring, over those based on patrilineal bonds, help her to resolve contradictory pressures to be autonomous and to be part of a community. She saw herself as being a good Fijian, playing her part in the community, but also as someone who was valued in her own right, as an individual. These desires were also evident in her account of her engagement to Isikeli. Isikeli had decided to ask to marry Sera after only seeing her once briefly. He had made his request in a formal, traditional, Fijian manner by sending his family with a ceremonial request to her family. Yet I was struck in Sera's account of these events by the extent to which she had succeeded in turning this very traditional event into a modern romance. She emphasized, for instance, that when Isikeli had asked her brother to find him a wife among his relatives, the brother had offered Isikeli several choices. He had brought Isikeli home to have a look at Sera, two of

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her sisters, and a cousin. She, Sera said, had immediately struck Isikeli. Furthermore, Sera dwelled on the long period after their engagement and before their marriage when Isikeli had visited her and taken her out on dates. As her story of Samu indicated, she emphasized the fact that Isikeli had come to care for her as a person during this period. Sera's attempt to construe her marriage as one based on love and caring reveals the importance of these ideas for her. She wanted to believe that Isikeli had valued her as an individual. Sera's sociocentric orientation also did not prevent her from actively strategizing to improve her life circumstances. I gained great respect, over the months, for her ability to control her destiny while, at the same time, managing to convey the sense that she was just acting as a proper Fijian wife and daughter-in-law, willing to unquestioningly obey her husband and his family. In 1997, for example, she volunteered a long story about the early years of her marriage to Isikeli. She had been living in Rakiraki with her newborn child and her mother while Isikeli was posted in a nearby town and visited her on the weekends. He had fallen into the pattern of spending all of their money drinking with his Rakiraki friends on the weekends. This continued until their baby became very ill. At this time, Sera yelled at Isikeli that he had to stop his bad behavior because it was making the baby sick. Remorseful, Isikeli had returned to the World Christian Fellowship, an evangelical church that forbade drinking, and became a good family man. Sera also told Steve and I on another occasion that she felt that she was the one who was in control of her marriage and family. Steve had been questioning her on whether she resented being forced into an arranged marriage with Isikeli. In such a marriage, he asked, would a woman feel that she was entirely under the control of the man's family since leaving would bring about disgrace on her family? Sera seemed surprised by this interpretation and insisted that, in fact, the opposite was true. In an arranged marriage, the husband's family was under the control of the wife since if she left then they would be in disgrace. She told a long story of a time she had wanted to leave Isikeli but her mother-in-law had convinced her to stay, saying she was needed to look after her three children. I was struck by the fact that Sera used this story to illustrate the fact that she was in control of her life. She had been placed in a situation where she had to choose between putting up with her husband's abuse and being separated from her three children, including a newborn baby. But Sera focused on the fact that her mother-in-law had promised to reason with Isikeli and that, indeed, Isikeli's behavior had improved after that. To Sera, then, this was an instance where she had been able to overcome her husband's family's normal tendency to side with each other against women married in to the family. This story reveals that Sera, like

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many other villagers, was interested in attaining a more Western life style and wanted to be recognized as an autonomous individual, in charge of her life and valued for her personal qualities. She also did what she could to attain these goals, while continuing to play the obedient wife. Sera, in short, like Amalia, argued that being a good Fijian involved loving and caring, not being obedient to corrupt vanua elders. In fact, vanua elders violated the true spirit of the Fijian way because they were jealous and petty and thought only of their own prestige, instead of caring for others. In emphasizing the bonds of love within the nuclear family, Sera had managed to exert some control over her own destiny and to create for herself a positive sense of being valued as an individual.

Vani: The Autonomy of Chiefs A third woman, Vani, had, like Amalia and Sera, spent much of her life caring for others, first her sick and widowed sister and then, after her sister died, the three orphaned children. But Vani did not portray herself as a nurturing person. Instead, she embraced as central to her sense of self the idea that she was chiefly and thus above the need to conform to communal rules. Like Amalia and Sera, Vani tried to increase her autonomy within the sociocentric ideology; but she chose an opposite strategy for doing do, appealing to the ideology of the sacred ranked vanua where chiefly people were remote from village life. Vani's emphasis on chiefly aloofness was, in part, an attempt to justify that fact that she was by nature a quiet person, who had always been invidiously compared to her more gregarious sister. But Vani's presentation of self was also made possible by the fact that she had economic independence: she received a monthly pension from her sister and brother-in-law who had both died young. She had also been given a small business to run by a richer cousin. Vani could be self-sufficient but also needed to keep most of her meager resources for herself in order to support this independent lifestyle. She needed, then, to justify being remote from the community and normal communal obligations to contribute financially. Vani seldom spoke in these terms, instead tracing her lifestyle to her reclusive personality. But she did also distance herself from the community (and community obligations) by joining the AOG church and, like many AOG followers, avoiding many communal events. Vani was living with her cousin, Menani, in Rakiraki, running a small snack bar at a local wharf, when I talked to her in 1999. Unlike most village women of her age, Vani had never been married; she sported a short, Western-style, haircut, and preferred leggings and loose

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shirts to the standard, "respectful," village attire of an ankle length skirt and modest blouse. The American student whom Vani hosted in 1997 reported that Vani kept her distance from the other villagers. She also spoke very good English and had some European friends. This made her unusual in an area where villagers often ridiculed those who went out of their way to befriend Europeans as being viaviakaivavalagi (wanting to be a European). As Holland et. a1 (1998) point out, language choice, dress and hairstyle index individuals' self constructions as much as do their narratives. I expected Vani to disapprove of Fijian village life since she seemed to spurn traditional ways. Instead, Vani praised traditional Fijian culture but saw herself as an unusual person who stood out from this background. Vani's Europeanized presentation of self seemed to stem from the fact that she symbolically linked chiefly people and Europeans as people who were above the ordinary pressure to conform to the rules (see also Brison 2001b). For example, at one point in our interviews, Vani began criticizing Rakiraki villagers for forgetting the traditional Fijian dress code. She immediately realized, however, that she herself was not conforming very well to this code and interjected that she only wore Western style leggings out of necessity because she had sores on her feet. Vani's sense of herself as someone whose high rank put her outside the normal flow of social life was apparent the first time that I interviewed her. Vani began her life story by saying that her family had been of such high rank that the other villagers had avoided them out of respect. Vani said, Like I recall when I was still a toddler never once had my father told me, "You are from a chiefly family." But then what I can see is whatever my family said. I mean my father and his brothers, eh? Whatever they say goes in the village, see, and like people don't feel free to come [to our house] whenever they want to come unless like there is one special function then they will come. Otherwise, see, that's how we have been brought up, see. . . . Now I could see that like my cousins in the village they don't feel free to talk to me. . . . Even though they are much much older than me, see.

Vani went on to stress how different the quality of interaction was once she moved "outside her household" or went to stay with her mother's family in Rakiraki. Here she became part of what she defined as the normal flow of Fijian village life. She said, "Outside my house it is a different world altogether. See I talk freely to anyone, say whatever I want to say, and people receive it, you know, just like that. It's easy and then that life I don't want it to, you know, get old on me all the time."

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It was clear from Vani's opening remarks that this sense of being remote from village social life because of her high rank was a key component of her sense of self. She went on to say that this was also part of her personality. When I asked, for instance, about whether her sister had experienced the same thing that she had, Vani answered, Yeah well my sister was a lot more respectful. Then they respected her so much. (KB: Why?) I don't know maybe, maybe, because the way she used to treat them, well lots and lots of them, and when she died lots and lots of them says, "Uh she should have, you know, lived and you [were] supposed to go." (KB: What an awful thing to say). But then it's true, see. (KB: How could that be true?) They say it out but then it was OK with me, see. (KB: How was her behavior different?) More friendlier, um, more friendlier they just say that she is good. (KB: what does that mean in Fiji: someone who is really good like your sister?) Well it means that, like, like my sister, you know she treats everyone the same. See like me I'm a bit choosy. I choose my friends. I choose the houses I get into. I choose the things I eat. I don't allow people to come near me see. . . . Like my sister, she eats anything she wants to eat, goes into their houses, mixes around with them and, uh, they said that she is good. Vani started here by saying that she was not as good as her sister who was much better liked by the rest of the villagers and even by Vani's parents. She defined being good in Fijian as involving a lack of strong personal desires: as the definitions of the Pacific sociocentric self imply, the good person is one who accepts everybody and everything instead of acting on strong personal inclinations. Vani felt that she, herself, was the opposite: she had a strong personality, and strong preferences so was not able to fit in readily to any situation. She had developed this sense of herself in an effort to overcome feelings of being rejected by the other villagers who had always liked her sister much better. Vani went on to suggest that her parents, also, had always preferred her sister and that it was this prejudice that had turned Vani into the kind of person she was today: a strong, independent person who acted according to her own desires instead of going along with the social flow, Once I [got] cheeky to my sister [and] my father gave me a hiding. It's like that. . . . One thing I could realize, Karen, like they were so very, I don't know how to explain it, like, you know it happens when she does something wrong, I have to have a hiding. It's pretty tough. Yeah, it is tough. That's how I look at it and you know like they, they, like, their love and

Re-Imagining Sociocentrism care was a bit one-sided. Like it teaches me a lot you know, to be strong, to be able to look after myself, to be able to fight for myself. I mean fight for my rights you see. . . . I mean my inside was a bit stronger than my sister's see and I think that was a good part of it, see, and you know there comes a time when I am like this. I mean I am just alone in my family. There is no one around. Like I don't feel sorry for myself, see? Vani, in short, traced her strong character to the treatment she had received from her parents, who always preferred her sister. She went on to say that this was what had enabled her to survive in a Fijian village while all of the rest of her family had died young. In subsequent interviews, Vani suggested that her strong personality had helped her to get by. As a young woman, for instance, she ran away to escape a marriage that she heard was being arranged for her. She had heard a rumor that a distant cousin was about to bring a ceremonial presentation to her father to ask to marry Vani. Vani pre-empted the request by running away to stay with a cousin working at a resort just to let her father know, she said, that he could not control her and ignore her wishes. Thus the very characteristics that other villagers disliked were ones that had allowed her to survive and control her life. Indeed, unlike Amalia, Vani seldom spoke of herself as the victim of circumstances and of stronger relatives. She portrayed herself as having made decisions that shaped the course of her life on several occasions. For example, she later said that she had formed a relationship with a man while working on a resort and had been on the verge of marrying him. However, she broke off the relationship when he tried to stop her from going to live with her sister to help her when the sister was ill. While Vani could easily have construed these events as a time when she had been forced by circumstances to sacrifice personal pleasure to familial obligations, instead she emphasized the way that she, herself, had chosen to break off the relationship because she did not like her boyfriend's desire to control her. Vani drew on the ideology of chiefliness to suggest that her aloof, autonomous, behavior was compatible with sociocentric ideologies because she was playing her appropriate, chiefly, role. She spoke of herself as an asocial "choosey" person who did not socialize as freely as her sister; but in the same interview she also spoke of that kind of aloof behavior as something to be expected from a very high-ranking family. The villagers, indeed, encouraged such behavior by avoiding her and her family. Vani also stressed that she was the only one in her family who had survived a rash of supernatural attacks by jealous fellow villagers. While she did not explicitly state this, one possible inference from Vani's words

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was that she was stronger because she had a more chiefly nature than did her sister. Ochs (1990) writes that chiefly people in Samoa are expected to be aloof from the social fray. They are not supposed to accommodate to others or participate in the normal social fray but instead should remain distant as befits someone of semi-divine status. Chiefs are also expected to be unusually large and strong because of their semi-divine status. A small, weak, chief might be suspected of being an imposter who did not have the supernatural mana with which true chiefs are imbued. It is not a large leap, then, to infer that Vani felt that she was chiefly by nature and that this was manifested both in her anti-social tendencies and in the strength that had allowed her to live on long after her sister and the rest of her family. She confessed to me later that she no longer feared supernatural attack from villagers because she knew from experience that she had an uncanny knack of surviving such attacks. Vani's sense of herself as someone who had transcended sociocentrism to become a strong autonomous self was clear in her last words in our interview. She regretted the fact that she did not fit in well with village culture and was not as well liked as her sister. But she was proud of the internal strength that allowed her to survive without help from others and to adapt both to village life and to outside, Westernized, life. She spoke of her sister's funeral, I could see, you know, when the time comes for us to take her body to the graveyard, they had buried her, but then people were still sitting around. They were still sitting after one, two, three hours. They were still sitting. That's how I see it. That's how I know that they really felt for her and I was just wondering when my time comes whether these people are going to sit here like this or not. I doubt it (laughs). . . . I told Menani the other day my intention is to start a new life. I believe you know that life starts at forty. . . . Yeah . . . uh yeah you know once a cousin of mine said, "Oh she is good you know she can take whatever comes, you know. When she lives in the village she can afford to live a village life and when it comes up to a different living she can afford it and then the other life she can do it." But then I didn't know that's how they looked at it. But then I could feel that I'm strong, eh? I can live here. I can live there.

The contrast between Vani and Amalia illustrates how people can come to very different ways of behaving, and very different senses of self, while subscribing to a similar public ideology. Vani had embraced an image of herself as someone of very high rank, above the usual social fray, perhaps because she was by nature a quiet, shy individual who was not well adapted to the bawdy joking characteristic of informal social

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gatherings. She endorsed the idea of the sacred order of the Fijian community and saw herself as being sociocentric in fitting in with that order, behaving as a chiefly person should. It was also striking that the three women had entirely different feelings about their place within society, as a result of their different senses of self. While Amalia and many women, felt controlled by their husbands and relatives, Vani and Sera exuded a sense of being completely in control of their lives. Moreover, Vani clearly had a strong sense of herself as someone with a robust personality that she took with her from context to context and which, in large part, determined her destiny. It was also apparent that Vani's emphasis on her individual character was not incompatible with the dominant ideology. In embracing such a sense of individualism, Vani saw herself as going against the grain of local culture and as often acting in ways that earned the disapproval of others. But she ultimately reconciled this behavior with Fijian values through the idea that people only disapproved of her because they did not acknowledge the high rank that made both her personality and her behavior appropriate.

Ema: The Struggle to Maintain a Self Ema, Elenoa's youngest daughter, was a seventeen-year-old student in Form Seven, the final, pre-university, year of secondary school, when we first met in 1997. She was among a small group of Rakiraki teenagers whose grades were good enough to gain them admission not only to Form Seven, but also to Penang Sangham, an Indo-Fijian school thought to be the best secondary school in the area. When I returned to Rakiraki in 1999, Erna was in her final year at Teachers College. By the time I left Rakiraki in May 2000, Erna had graduated fiom Teachers College and had taken up a post, somewhat reluctantly, at an Indo-Fijian school near Rakiraki. Erna had asked to be assigned to an Indo-Fijian school rather than an indigenous Fijian school because she feared pressure to conform to Fijian customs from principals at indigenous Fijian schools. Ema's concerns about pressures to conform reflected her strong sense of herself as an autonomous individual who could only maintain her character and happiness through vigilantly combating social forces aimed to make her conform to village and family culture. Like Vani, Erna thought of herself as having a strong character that went against the grain of village expectations. Unlike Vani, however, Erna had only a vague sense of her character being related to rank. In fact, of all the women I interviewed, Erna had the least well-developed sense of herself as part of a communalistic Fijian culture. She did, occasionally, comment

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that Fijian tradition was a good thing. But she always went on to say that villagers had largely lost this tradition and were now dominated by sentiments of jealousy for those more successful than themselves. But Ema's sense of self was centered primarily on the idea that she had a strong, immutable, personality that determined her fate wherever she went. She was clearly influenced by Western ideologies here tracing her personality to the fact that her Zodiac sign was Scorpio. When I interviewed Ema, for instance, she brushed aside my initial questions about her family to start her account of herself in a manner she deemed more appropriate, Ah, Ok, well first of all I'll speak of my character. I'm very, yeah, I'm a private person, you know, want to be on my own, yeah. I'm an independent person. Sometimes I'm independent too but I want to be on my own and do things on my own. Like if I go around with friends I'll make sure that, like, I feel a bit out when I'm with them because when I go out with them then I like feeling kind of homesick you know and so, uh, I can spend a little bit of time with them and then I'll, uh, spend, uh, more time with my self. . . . And well and when I hate someone when I hate someone, I hate someone or that thing anymore. . . . Because I'm a Scorpion. So you know the character of Scorpions, eh? That's me, my character. Here Ema was expressing a sense that her life history should start with an account of her character rather than with a description of her network of relatives. She defined herself as having an enduring, unique character that she took with her from context to context. Implicit in her words, however, was the recognition that her way of conceiving of herself went against the social norms. Thus she stressed that spending too much time with friends made her feel "a bit out," implicitly acknowledging prevalent social pressures to conform to another way of being. Ema also made it clear in subsequent comments that she disliked what she saw to be pervasive pressure to conform to community norms in Fiji and, instead, asserted that she was a person who liked to choose for herself how to dress and behave and whom to associate with. As I spoke with Ema over the months that I knew her I felt that she had developed this sense of self through an experience of having moved with her family from Suva, where she had lived until her early teens, to the village. Furthermore, Ema felt that other villagers did not like her family. This experience was not uncommon for people who moved to the village from urban areas; several people told me that it was only by going along with everything that local people suggested that they had gained admission to the village. It was partly in response to this ambigu-

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ous welcome and sense of being the object of hostility that Ema, like Vani, had developed the strategy of defining herself as someone whose strong personality allowed her to survive despite social pressures. By doing this, she could turn a negative experience of being criticized and teased by the villagers, into a positive sense that she, herself, was in control of the situation and had actively chosen not to participate in village life. She also had a strong sense that it was her ability to resist social pressures that had allowed her to succeed academically where most failed. Like Vani, then, Erna was a good example of the way that a dominant sociocentric ideology could cause some individuals to form a sense of identity, in opposition to the dominant ideology, centered on having a strong, individualistic character. Unlike Vani, however, Erna had a strong sense that her own resistance to social pressure was justified by the fact that indigenous Fijian society had departed from its ideal order in any case. This idea was also implicit in Vani's insistence that her own family had been unfairly preyed upon by an upstart lineage usurping legitimate power. But Vani did not develop a general critique of indigenous Fijian village culture; she just indicated that she felt that her own family had fallen victim to a status rivalry. Ema, on the other hand, indicated at many points that she felt that village society had deviated from Fijian ideals. Right after Erna spoke on her character, for example, I asked whether it had been hard for her to adjust to village life, given the intensely private and stubborn character she had just described. She responded that she had managed easily to maintain her sense of self by retreating to her room and by choosing her friends carefully. She went on to contrast her own "quiet" and "polite" friends with the typical Rakiraki adolescents, making it clear that the normal "irritating" teenagers did not live up to the Fijian ideals that they purported to impose on others. Erna told me that the local teenagers had criticized her family for building a large, cement block, house for themselves instead of living in a smaller, corrugated tin, house similar to those occupied by the other villagers, Those people in the village, oh the boys are very (KB: What do they do?) yeah they're, like, they tease and all that stuff and like they criticize our family and like and like irritating things like when we came here we're supposed to be started off with a tin house, a corrugated house, and uh uh rather than us starting off with a big house and all because they're jealous, eh? It's what they, it's what they get from their parents and they like talk about my parents. [They say that my parents] want to, you know, uh boss people around like going out to [the Tui Navitlevu's house]. My Dad is sitting with the Tui Navitilevu and all (laughs). Well they didn't know that's their status you

Chapter Four know. They have to, you know. It's very irritating. That's why I changed my school from Nakauvadra.

Here Ema explained that she had transferred from Nakauvadra, a local high school emphasizing indigenous Fijian traditions, to an IndoFijian secondary school because indigenous Fijian students at Nakauvadra continually teased her. She said that these students, following their parents, had criticized Ema's parents for putting themselves above other villagers by building a large house for themselves and trying to "boss" other people around. Ema was clearly ambivalent about her parents' behavior, which had caused her a lot of problems in the village. But at this point in the interview she defended them, suggesting that the other villagers just did not understand that it was her parents' "status" to go sit with the Tui regularly. Villagers, she suggested, claimed to be operating on traditional Fijian values but they were really just motivated by jealousy of those who were more successful than they were. She later reiterated the same point when she suggested that Rakiraki villagers no longer understood or practiced the traditions of respect for those of higher rank. In this passage, as in other parts of the interview, Ema justified her own departure from indigenous Fijian ideals-she went off to an Indo-Fijian school and refused to participate in village social life-through pointing out the extent to which villagers had strayed from the ideals. A similar theme was again evident when Ema went on to talk about struggles that she had had with her parents about participating in village life. She described, for example, a battle she had had with her parents over attending church, So I never, when we came here I didn't even attend church because when I, the first time I attended church was when I was new and, uh, as soon as I entered the church every eyes they were all like staring at me. I feel out and so then I told Dad "I don't want to go to church" and Dad said, Dad has some misunderstanding at that time. [I told Dad,] "I don't want to go to church because, uh, like these people here go to church for showing off their new dresses, a new dress, eh? You know they're not going to church for something." So we had a hard time with that. I had a hard time with Mom and Dad because I want to be, they know that I'm independent. I told them, "You don't have to boss me around here because I'm old enough too." (KB: you were what, thirteen?) Yeah thirteen. Yeah I was thirteen by then and they said, "You are a very, a very repulsive, uh, person." (we laugh) (KB: They were angry with you?) Yeah they were angry with me. They said, "We have to right to, ah, kick you out of this house. No we can kick you out." Just because of what I'm going through.

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Here Ema again justified her own untraditional actions (she defied her parents and refused to attend church) by pointing to the extent to which the village society had deviated from Fijian ideals: villagers just went to church to show off their new clothes and had no true religious faith. Here she voiced the common view that indigenous Fijians had no true sense of community anymore but were just motivated by petty jealousies and the desire to appear better than others did. As was evident in the previous chapter, this view was common among Fijians of all ages. Ema went on in this vein suggesting that it was positively dangerous for her to "mix around" with the villagers because people used "voodoos" to attack those who did better than themselves. Ema had been talking about how people in the village gossiped about her and teased her and I asked her if she had anyone in particular in mind. She responded, Uh, not, not like um, it's like they don't show it. They keep it to among themselves. They gossip behind my back and then they, and then they, you know, talk to me in a normal way as if they care about me. So yeah I don't talk to people here. I don't mix around with them like if they, if [my friends], if they want to, if they want me to visit them, I just tell them you come and call me. I can't go around. (KB: Why?) Because I'm afraid of, you know, the voodoos of the people here. Some of them have bad intentions, eh? And so, Ok, as far as this village is concerned the other side of the village they're very, yeah they don't like us. They don't want anyone from [our village] to get a good job especially for the boys, uh, and I think for the girls too when they hear that someone's promoted, has a good job and stays in the village, they try their very best to, uh, spoil their reputation. Uh that's for the girls, eh? For me I think like I was always like thinking they might do something to me to like marry someone in the village, stick to the village uh (KB: Could they force you to do that?) No they can't but they'll try witchcraft you know (KB: Is there somebody down there who does witchcraft or is it just everybody?) Yes I've heard about that it's a group of young people, youth, they have, uh, uh, a black magic society. It's a group, eh, especially for the boys eh? So it's unsafe. So I just tell them, "If you want to come to visit me," I tell [my friends], "If you want to come and visit me, uh, or if you want me to visit you, you come and call me." Ema went on to talk about how she developed a strategy of purposely hiding her academic successes even from her own family so as to avoid provoking jealous attacks. Even so, she felt in her final year of secondary school that she had gone "a bit slack" because of supernatural

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attacks from villagers. Her response though, had been to consider these attacks a "challenge" and use the sinister scratching at her walls and windows as an incentive to get up at four in the morning to start studying. Like Vani, then, Ema felt that she had developed a strong character in response to challenges from those around her and it was this strong character that had allowed her to do well. Like Vani, however, Ema also expressed some ambivalence about her alienation from her fellow villagers. She described to me how her mother had warned all of her children against mixing too much with the villagers when the family had moved to Rakiraki. She went on to say, however, that it was her mother's influence that had allowed her to do well in school and get a good job where others had failed, That's what Mum told me, you know. Before we came here we got drilled, you know, eh? We were drilled, so Mum said, "Don't go off like that. Don't go. Don't make friends. Choose your own friends." Mum was behind, you know, making me like this. If she was a different lady I wouldn't have, um, come to this stage. I wouldn't have come to this stage. But you know I just thank her for (KB: You think it's good or you think you'd be happier if you were different?) No I I I'm happy. I'm happy with this stage and I'm happy with my being like that because I've know the result and I've known see the consequences seen the circumstance of those people there. Ema then went on to contrast her experiences in the village with those at Teacher's College where she had succeeded in creating for herself a more satisfying kind of community. At Teacher's College, Ema had experienced many pressures to conform to indigenous Fijian culture similar to those that she had experienced in the village. She described, for example, how one of her boyfriends had criticized her for wearing jeans to a party instead of dressing in traditional indigenous Fijian fashion. The same boyfriend had also tried to stop her from smoking. She also felt pressured by the school itself to conform to traditional Fijian ways as an example for her future students. She described at length the Teachers College's philosophy of multiculturalism where each student was pushed to conform to the practices of his or her own culture while at the same time developing tolerance and understanding for other cultures. Unlike the older professionals whom I interviewed, Ema had little tolerance for this philosophy. She commented about herself and her friend whom she characterized as being quite unlike the "typical Fijian" students at the school, "You know, I know I'm a Fijian. I know my culture. I know my custom. But we don't want to be forced in attaining the

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culture and custom. We don't want to be forced into following the culture and custom. So we chose the different road the short cut road." But Ema did find a satisfying sense of community at the Teachers College. She told me that she intended to spend each weekend visiting her various friends posted around Viti Levu because they were people who had chosen each other as friends and who enjoyed each other's company. She even felt that her friends at Teachers College had respected her for her "stubborn" personality and had come to her for advice, So like those people there, my friends from [Teachers College], they always want to know my our personal stuff. It's like in [Teachers College] we are more like friends you h o w and those people there they know myself very well I'm very private and once I've said something I mean it, eh? I never change my mind. Uh uh, if I hate someone, I'll hate them. I'll hate that particular person till I die. But in [Teachers College] I learned to control myself, you know to be patient, control my anger and I found a lot of, you know, like uh, like I come across different people with different characters and, you know, some of the girls they're they they they share their problems with me you know. They say, "Yeah you are different." They always come to me for advice. [I say,] "Man, you are coming to the last person in the world to give advice. I know the good advice but I advise my own self. I don't give advice. You won't understand my advice because it's just within me. I advise my own self." So I used to tell them, "You have to be brave and bold and you know you have to control your emotions, you know, your anger, your feelings."

Here Ema, like Vani, revealed that she had finally felt that people recognized her for her strong personality instead of just rejecting her. And she also showed that within the accepting context of her social group at Teachers College she could relax enough to try to control her own strong feelings. Implicit here was the idea that under the intense pressure of family and village, she needed her strong feelings to resist being controlled by her social environment. But within a more accepting social environment where people allowed her to be herself, she could also relax and try to control her feelings so that they did not get in the way of her relationships. Ema's narrative was interesting both as an example of a positioning toward village culture typical of many professional Fijians and as an orientation typical of many younger Fijians. Like Vani and unlike Amalia and Sera, Ema did not emphasize the "share and care" ideology of Fijian culture. Instead, she stressed the need to be independent and to take care

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of oneself. Erna was clearly attached to both of her parents and attributed her own success to their influence. But Ema's mother, Elenoa, was herself ambivalent about village life and passed this ambivalence on to her children. Thus, Erna did not have the positive experience of being embedded in a community of kin that colored Amalia and Sera's views. Furthermore, unlike Amalia and Sera who had been mediocre students, Ema's academic abilities had opened for her the possibility of attaining a lifestyle, desired by many people, of prosperity and independence. Erna was less enamoured with the ideology of caring for others, and being cared for, than were Amalia and Sera, because her sense of self was centered on her academic abilities-also qualities that were valued by rural Fijians. Furthermore, many people felt that academic success was incompatible with full participation in village life and so allowed people like Erna to withdraw from communal obligations in order to work hard at school. Consequently, it had been easy for Ema, who did not in any case want to participate in village social life, to form a sense of self centered on academic success and career aspirations. Another young woman, interviewed by Emily Sparks who was also a successful student, had formed a sense of identity similar to Ema's. She also spoke about how she did not like village social life since the village was just a hotbed of jealousy and gossip and, instead, was an autonomous individual with a strong character who preferred to devote herself to her studies and to avoid social pressures. Like Vani, and like many professional Fijians, Erna did see value in the Fijian tradition of respect for rank and for traditional practices though like Vani and many professional Fijians, she exempted herself from the need to follow these traditions. But like many younger Fijians, Erna was preoccupied with the problems of being forced by others to conform to tradition, arguing that such intense social pressure was poisonous, motivated by petty jealousies, and that it killed any true sense of community. Like the many younger Fijians quoted in the previous chapter, Erna argued that true commitment to community came only from individual choice. All of these views were the product of Ema's positioning in village society. As a young person who experienced continual pressure to conform to village norms, Erna had the desire to resist the dominant ideology and assert that she was an autonomous person capable of making her own choices. As a professional, she had a stake in an ideology that suggested that professionals were part of a vanguard who safeguarded Fijian culture against the incursions of ignorant and jealous villagers. And like the other villagers, Erna selectively drew on the public ideology in order to craft a story that positioned her as a morally acceptable and valuable individual within the larger Fijian community.

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Pacific Sociocentrisms Examining women's narratives suggests that, as Holland et al. (1998), Ochs and Capps (2001) and others suggest, even relatively powerless individuals have some space to work within dominant cultural narratives to create individual space. Each woman works within a similar set of ideas but brings this "figured world" to life in different ways in order to justify her own life circumstances and to marginally enhance her own autonomy. Contemporary rural Fijian grapple with international ideologies emphasizing autonomy and craft life accounts that win small compromises with local circumstances. These women's ability to control their lives was limited. Amalia did not manage to get custody of her children or to take possession of her adopted mother's house. She did, however, regain custody of small Amalia a few years after her parents divorced. Amalia also managed to carve a place for herself amongst village women at ceremonies and social events. Sera had to put up with many aspects of her living situation that she didn't like but also managed to control her family's money more than her husband's family liked. Vani, similarly, was disliked by many villagers; but she did maintain a small circle of friends and relatives while at the same time holding on to her resources and resisting getting married. Ema eventually distanced herself from the village by joining an evangelical church. None of the women had won complete respect from the rest of the community; yet all had gained a measure of social acceptability and had managed to achieve at least some of their goals. In the process, they contributed to re-imagining ways to be a properly sociocentric, "traditional," Fijian.

Notes 1. I conducted these and other interviews in English. I also recorded various kinds of public events, usually conducted in Rakiraki dialect and translated these with the help of a local research assistant.

Chapter 5

Imagining Modernity in Rakiraki Much literature has examined the ways "tradition" in the contemporary Pacific is "invented" or "imagined" to define present identity and achieve contemporary goals (e.g. Keesing 1989, Lawson 1996, Linnekin 1990). This chapter follows recent literature (e.g. Englund and Leach 2000; Riles 2001; Robbins 2001) in suggesting that the ways Pacific people imagine "modernity" is just as crucial as the ways they invent tradition, to constructing their sense of self. Modernity in the form of increased flows of capital, commodities, ideologies, and images is a state of the world. But as Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001) suggest, modernity is also a local construct, imagined in a variety of ways, just as is tradition, in order to make sense of very particular life circumstances. Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001) both argue that Third world peoples use constructs of modernity to define identities for themselves within local culture. Ferguson (1999) says that his Zambia informants in the 1980s sounded as if they had read 1950s sociology texts on "modernization theory" stressing the need for strong nuclear families to raise independent individuals, able to work hard and try new things, in order to bring about economic development. While social scientists and Third World governments have largely rejected modernization theory, it lives on in the minds of those who grew up under the policies it shaped. Ferguson (1999) suggests that Zambians slip in and out of modernity as a distinctive "style" in order to position themselves in Zambian society, for instance, espousing nuclear families in prosperous times to escape the demands of rural relatives. Riles, similarly, argues that urban Fijian workers in NGOs define their identity within the Fijian community 95

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through an international "aesthetic" of modernity that constructs problems and approaches in terms of international concepts like the need for networks and for "grids" generating goals and plans for action. Both scholars suggest that modernity is constructed in local imagination to create very local identities (see also Englund 2002). Just as global forces and ideologies come together in unique ways in individual lives, so they have idiosyncratic patterns of impact on each location. Fiji, like many other Third World countries was subject to waves of development policy informed by "modernization theory," stressing the need for strong nuclear families to raise independent individuals, able to work hard and try new things, in order to bring about economic development. This theory still shapes the views of many Fijians. For instance, when I interviewed several local teachers, they all stressed the importance of individual self-discipline and strong nuclear families in promoting school success. The teachers attributed the relatively poor performance of indigenous Fijian children in schools to the fact that nuclear families, distracted by communal obligations, did not properly support students. For example, when I asked Mr. D., the secondary school principal why he thought the students performed so poorly. He responded, I must tell you, Karen, I myself was not brought up in the village. I had a single parent and my mother looked after me and I stayed with my grandfather when I was young, very young, and one day when I was after secondary school examination my, my grandfather chased me away from home. He didn't want to look after me. . . . 1972, I left home. I have never been home since. . . . That has driven my character, that wheel. And it's just to get mature. . . . Get mature and say that you have a reason. . . . Then there won't be any problem. The vision is this: if you can make that up in your mind when you are young to try to mature, grow up and mature I think you should be, you shouldn't find any problems and any type of person [can do it]. If I can do it, anybody can do it and I am here now in this position after all these years of hard work. . . . It's by being forced to take that approach, attitude eh [that I succeeded] and the kids here I think uh uh it's probably not in their mind at the moment. With the people in Rakiraki, I see that their parents are well off. They have sugar cane and they harvest sugar cane, and they, and they don't realize that there is something that they should work hard for because they are well looked after by their parents. They get farm and cane money all the time. [The need] to achieve is not there.

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Here, Mr. D. voiced a common view among educators that rural children were not sufficiently motivated to systematically pursue a "vision" for their life since they knew they could just fall back on living off the land. I heard many times that Fijians were content just to live on lease money from land rented to Indo-Fijians and so had no motivation to work hard and succeed, unlike Indo-Fijians who owned no land so knew they must make something of themselves. This was a direct copying of modernist rhetoric that stressed the role of individual attitude and, in doing so, ignored larger structural obstacles to success. Rural Fijians had been discouraged for decades from engaging in cash cropping by colonial policies that required them to grow traditional subsistence crops. Under these laws Fijians had also been encouraged to lease out their land to Indo-Fijians on one hundred year leases for relatively low rents that fell far short of supporting individual village families. Mr. D. and other educators, however, espoused an ideology of success through attitude. This was an ideology that could account for teachers' own individual success but not for the larger economic fate of the Fijian people. As modernization theory went out of vogue in international social science, the assumption that all societies would inevitably industrialize and urbanize was called into question. And this led to a new wave of government policies in Third World countries like Fiji emphasizing the importance of preserving rural traditions. The Ministry of Education, for example, held a workshop in 1997 in the Rakiraki area recommending that rural schools prepare children for a life in the village by focusing on subsistence skills and on teaching respect for tradition, since their chances of making it up into higher levels of education and paid employment were slim. In 1999, I attended a series of workshops offered by the Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) encouraging rural women to use local resources and traditions for "rural self-sufficiency" instead of trying to find ways to make money in town. I heard from many people that communal demands made it difficult to save money and to help one's children succeed in the educational system; many people also said that they would like more freedom to govern their own lives. But it was difficult, if not impossible, to win respect without claiming to be someone who placed tradition and community over individual gain. These macro forces were, however, refracted differently through the particular conditions of each individual life. Below I examine the life stories of two women to show how each authored a different account of self, community, and tradition in order to address the contradictory forces in her own life. I select these two individuals because, while each is unique, they represent two rather common types of people and are not

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entirely idiosyncratic in the ways they construct their identities to justify their circumstances. The first, Mrs. D., a schoolteacher, is a professional living away from her natal community and its demands. But she, like the vast majority of professional Fijians, is in many ways immersed in village life and must win respect within its value system. Elenoa, lived in town most of her adult life but, on her husband's retirement, had to return to his natal village in order to make ends meet without a salary. Like many other Fijians, Elenoa was then faced with having to create a position for herself in a rural community that she had largely neglected during most of her adult life. These two women, then, represent dilemmas faced by many, if not most, of the residents of contemporary Fijian rural villagers caught between urban and rural, wage labor and subsistence. Both women reconfigure tradition and modernity to suggest that the opposites are in many ways similar.

Mrs. D.: Modernity as Tradition I spoke with Mrs. D., the Class One teacher in the village primary school in 1997. As a schoolteacher, and one whose husband was also a teacher, Mrs. D. enjoyed an unusual level of economic autonomy. In fact, she and her husband had used their money to build a house in Fiji's capital, Suva, which they were renting out. Thus they could look forward to an urban retirement and did not have to cultivate ties with rural relatives in order to be able to retire to the village. Mrs. D. was also relatively free from communal pressures since she had been posted outside of her home area, although she probably still received requests from distant relatives for aid and contributions to events in her home community. She was, however, almost completely free from pressures from affines (a major factor in the life of most women) since her husband was alienated from his family. Like other teachers, however, Mrs. D. did have to secure the cooperation of parents in raising funds for the schools and encouraging students to attend school regularly. Rakiraki District School was a community school run, at least in part, by a committee of local residents, so teachers had to secure local approval. To win local approval, Mrs. D. and other teachers had to portray themselves as guardians of Fijian communal tradition even though they, in fact, lived rather non-traditional lives. Mrs. D., for example, worked even though Fijian tradition dictated that women's primary role should be raising children. Furthermore, Mrs. D. and other teachers did not live in their own, or their spouses' vanua and so violated the mandate that each person should play his or her role in maintaining the vanua. Another significant pressure in the lives of local

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schoolteachers was accounting for why rural Fijians children in general did less well in school than urban children and than Indo-Fijian children. Teachers were at pains to point out that this was not their fault, but was due to the behavior of rural Fijian families. These life circumstances generated a distinctive set of problems that Mrs. D. tried to resolve in her account of herself to me. Unlike the majority of Fijians, Mrs. D. experienced a great deal of economic and social autonomy. Thus, while many people tried to convince me that they had control over their lives in face of evidence to the contrary (see Brison 2001b), Mrs. D. was faced with the opposite challenge of justifying the fact that she had more autonomy than most other people and wanted to use her resources to help her own nuclear family. At the same time, she wanted to show the community that she was a worthy person even though she worked and did not contribute to the vanua in any obvious way. Mrs. D. resolved these conflicting pressures through crafting an account that suggested that she and other professionals were in many ways more traditional than rural villagers. She espoused modernist values, which justified her own lifestyle, insisting that parents should focus their efforts on their children instead of being distracted by communal pressures. But she suggested that such views were not Western; instead, they part of Fijian tradition. She implicitly formulated a new vision of the Fijian polity that portrayed the whole nation as a vanua in which educated professionals nurtured the community as chiefs had once nurtured a rural vanua and in which teachers raised children instead of parents. She accomplished this move by stressing the ways that chiefs and parents had fallen away from their traditional roles and now acted from purely selfish motives. She also insisted that she did not act for selfish reasons but had been given her calling by God. This was consistent with the rhetoric of the Methodist church. Mrs. D. and other teachers, then, imagined themselves as part of a collective Fijian tradition but re-imagined the shape of this tradition to highlight the importance of their own role and to allow for greater individual autonomy. Mrs. D. had very modernist views on the importance of the nuclear family and individual initiative in fostering economic success. She stressed, for instance, the importance of parents having a vision for their child and systematically taking steps to bring this vision into reality. She said that she told parents, "You should see that, when you bring up a child, you should try to see, to dream, right then: 'What would become of my child. Uh? I'll just look after her and try to see her in ten or twenty years time."' Mrs. D. also suggested that rural Fijian parents were unable to nurture their children toward success because they were subject to

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many pressures to participate in communal events. Many children, she told me, fell asleep alone at home without seeing their parents after school because the parents were out visiting and attending ceremonies. She characterized her students as "rejected, little people" and argued that she had to take over the role of mother in their life, molding their personal habits as well as teaching them academic subjects. Mrs. D., however, suggested that the communalism of villages was a departure from tradition. For instance, she said of village mothers who went out instead of looking after their children: "But the very thing with us in the village, only our Mum they want to happy, happy here, want to get that lipstick and always walk here, high heels, nice dresses." Here Mrs. D. stressed the non-traditional nature of contemporary communalism by portraying the mothers as neglecting their role in the community, the raising of children, in order to wear lipstick, high heels, and nice dresses. Central to Fijian tradition is the idea that women should always wear very modest, traditional clothing. Mrs. D. also emphasized the way contemporary Fijians had fallen away from their family traditions in a story she told about a girl whom she had taught in Suva, the capital city. The girl was performing poorly in school because her mother often kept her home to look after her younger siblings so that the mother could go fishing. Mrs. D. violated Ministry policy by beating the girl for being absent from school. But when the girl's father came to complain, Mrs. D. emphasized that it was she who was upholding Fijian and not the girl's parents. I told the Dad, "Did you even know, your wife was telling your daughter to baby-sit for her? You didn't care; you kept going on your [own affairs]. I feel that you are not a good Dad. You are not a good father to that little girl. You don't care. Like if you had known the right reason for her being whacked you could have, uh, have agreed, uh. You could have supported me in that and now and on top of that too like everything that the Mum tells you to do, you're the father, you're the head of the house. Why don't you put your ruling?"

Here Mrs. D. suggested that the father had neglected his proper traditional role as the head of the household, looking out for the fiture of his children, and that she had had to take over. She went on to suggest that the problem in the family was that the girl's mother came from a chiefly family and so would not listen to school officials. Furthermore, the mother's family had turned to prostitution. Here Mrs. D. suggested both that Fijian parents were neglecting their proper roles in nurturing the families and chiefly families were also

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corrupt and self-serving and were no longer nurturing society. Educators must step into the gap to put Fijian society back on its proper, traditional, course. In fact, Mrs. D. said that teachers now played a larger role in nurturing children than did their parents. She told me that she often wanted to tell parents, I mean for us, for us teachers, these children here are more ours than yours. They spend more time with us than you. They only come at about 4:00 and you stay with them only for about two hours and they go to sleep and they go off to sleep and you go to sleep and you don't see each other again in that part of the night and again they wake up and eight or nine hours are with me at school and I feel I have that, uh, I have what is it, a claim that they are more mine than yours, see.

Mrs. D. also stressed the way chiefs had fallen away from their proper role in nurturing society in a story she told me about a time when she and her husband had been posted at a school in the interior of Fiji, the most underdeveloped part of the country. She told of how she and her husband and a Peace Corps Volunteer had been transferred away from the school after learning that the chair of the school committee, a local chief, was grafting funds intended for building the school. She and her husband, Mrs. D. emphasized, had been very concerned about the children who had to sit on cement blocks in a cold climate because of lack of proper school facilities. She implicitly contrasted their concern for the children with the selfish attitude of the local chief who, instead of nurturing the children, had stolen funds for himself. Mrs. D. again implied that her work as a teacher was very much in keeping with a traditional Fijian vision of subordinating self to community when she discussed a key moment in her life when she was asked to move from teaching Class Six to Class One. Mrs. D. stressed the fact that this had been a humbling experience for her, requiring her to sacrifice her own pride in teaching advanced subject matter and her lofty position as a Class Six teacher, in order to help others. Mrs. D. remembered having complained that she could not teach Class One to her mother, a Class One teacher, "No, I can't! I can't. I'll get mad [at the children]. I don't know. I can't come from that that high level of English right down to, what will I teach them? I can't teach Class One. You might as well take them from me right to University. Because I've been molding, I've been teaching, these children these

Chapter Five higher language yeah English. . . . No, I can't." [So I arranged to spend two weeks with my mother in her class]. . . . I sat there . . . and she was very smart and she could go down [to the level of the children]. I was disciplining the older ones, eh, but this one, man, I've got to cut myself right down . . . since they come with nothing from home, make them feel the environment, feel at home here so they don't run away to the village again. . . . I saw her, man, going down and they come there they also took things to her at the table eh? . . . Ah and that was where, you know, that was where I tried my best. I mean I prayed and prayed and I know that only God can help me to go right down [to the level of the children]. If not, then one day I might . . . hurt them eh or the other way is I might get mad and right? . . . [I said] "Mum, It's only you that can change me that can help me to bring up these children."

Here Mrs. D. emphasized the way she had had to sacrifice her personal pride and her desire to be in charge in order to help the children. Her story was reminiscent of many conversion narratives I heard from villagers who told me that they had found personal happiness through abandoning desires for personal importance and surrendering themselves to God's will. This construction was consistent with the ideology of Fijian village communalism. In fact, Mrs. D. went on to say that, as a teacher, she followed God's calling. She spoke of the whole Fijian nation as a big vanua in which educated professionals played a role given to them by God designed to nurture and protect an orderly community by producing citizens to play the necessary roles. Education was not, she stressed, just a matter of preparing children to get jobs; it also turned them into "very good citizens" who could play their proper role in villages. She said she told her students, To me I'd rather you be in the village and a very good citizen . . . or if you come to school and you don't go right up to that level, I mean, to be very well educated and to go to university, I'd rather see you as the best in the village, you know. . . . Because not all of us, we won't all be teachers; we won't all be doctors; no, we won't all be Prime Ministers. No and not all of us will all go and do this white-collar job or this other jobs. Some of us will have to stay in the village and look after the village and look after our homes. I'd rather, even me, I always pray to God, if only I could go back and be, and be a very good mother. But the Lord told me, that is your part, I want you to go there. Once I wanted to quit teaching because I have a lot of children and I said, "Lord, how can I go and teach

Imagining Modernity in Rakiraki other children, I don't have time to teach my children." But the Lord told me, "That's my business, not yours. I have sent you to do the work; do it. These children are mine, mine; I'll have to look after them." Here Mrs. D. suggested that teachers were doing God's work of making sure that all individuals played their proper roles within an expanded Fijian vanua that included, in addition to traditional village work, white collar workers, doctors, and so on. In her construction, teachers were, in fact, just as vital to the continuation of the village vanua as they were for the urban labor force. Mrs. D. also implied that her goals were more traditional than those of the parents when she told me about how she had just told her class that their parents were only interested in getting rich and having better houses; they needed to realize that true Fijian wealth lay in the children and that raising children well should be more important than making money. In short, the distinctive pressures operating on Mrs. D. and other teachers led them to craft life stories that suggested that their role in a newly imagined Fijian polity was at once modern and more traditional than that of rural parents and landed chiefs. Mrs. D.'s life story attempted to resolve the contradictions in the ideologies impinging on her life. She justified her own autonomy from communal demands by suggesting that she was, in fact, part of a larger, national, vanua in which she played a role, given to her by God, in nurturing the children of the vanua. This vision of tradition and modernity, however, was one that legitimized a rather nontraditional lifestyle involving keeping distant fiom her own native community, and teaching children the skills to get jobs in town.

Elenoa: Modernity as Chiefliness Rather different life circumstances shaped Elenoa's narrative. Unlike Mrs. D., Elenoa had little economic or social autonomy. She had worked briefly in a garment factory in Suva but had been unable to earn enough money to support herself in town after her husband, Apolosi, retired early and returned to Rakiraki to take up the position of lineage chief. In Rakiraki, Elenoa had tried to run a small business but had been unable to make it work and so was left trying to stretch Apolosi's small pension to feed her family. Socially, Elenoa had had difficulty carving a niche for herself in Rakiraki, at least in part because she and Apolosi had done little to keep up ties with villagers during the many years they had lived away fiom the village. Elenoa also refused to take on the low status role

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that village women accorded to newcomers, who were supposed to enter at the bottom of the social order. Faced with these circumstances, Elenoa constructed a life story designed to assert that she had autonomy despite the obvious ways that her life had been constrained by circumstances beyond her control. But she also wanted to define her identity in such a way as to give herself more importance within the vanua than the local women were willing to grant her. Elenoa's story, then, shows how many individuals use modernist rhetoric to find a place for themselves within very local communities; they draw on global ideologies but are very much wrapped up in local circumstances when they do so. Elenoa accomplished her goals through portraying herself as a modern individual who had voluntarily returned to the village in order to help the ignorant residents to develop themselves. In this scenario, the village women's chilly reception of her seemed to be an entirely natural result of their lack of education and resistance to new ways. In some ways, Elenoa was similar to Mrs. D. and other professional women in portraying herself as a new kind of elite working for the vanua. But since Elenoa lacked education or profession, and because she was primarily concerned with trying to enhance her status within the landed vanua of Rakiraki, she did n i t envision a redefined national vanua as did the teachers. Instead, she traced her authority from the past; she claimed to come from the true chiefly family of the area, a family whose position had been so exalted that they had been similar to Europeans even before first contact. People had forgotten about her family; but her noble essence was evident in her "developing ways." She was, in this version, entitled both to respect and autonomy because of her chiefly descent. In the process of resolving the contradictions of her life, Elenoa reconfigured the content both of modernity and of chiefliness. Elenoa took pains to distinguish herself from other villagers and to show everyone that she was a modem person. Like the teachers, she suggested that villagers were so mired in communal obligations that they neglected their nuclear families. She saw the autonomous nuclear family, in which parents instilled good habits and values in their children, as the key to success. For example, when I interviewed Elenoa about her childrearing philosophy she repeatedly contrasted her own method of keeping her children in the house with her with that of other Fijian women who allowed their children to roam from house and house and were, themselves, generally out visiting other people. She said, You know my treatment of the children. I like them to stay home, just after school stay home and just do the housework

Imagining Modernity in Rakiraki or outside [work]. That's, you know, how I like children. Whenever I call them, they are there, unless they have sports or whatever they can. . . . I think it's from the mother. If I go home, you know, talking, spending my whole time with others, I think they will do the same. Because they know, "Oh this house is empty, the mother gone; I can do whatever I can." Oh that's what I think. . . . So that's my way of bringing the children up. . . . But our village life is different. [In] the village life, they are given a very free life like because we all live in the same village and we are all related. But my point of view, you know, I don't like it. Don't dislike, but I think children have to be taught in [the home]. [They should] not [be] out of the boundary. [If the children roam around] that means the mother is not looking after [them]; she doesn't care. How about if he is run over and then [what]? So you see they are, you know, they are not taught that way. The mothers themselves were doing that also so they keep extending that sort of education to their children. Because you see the mothers are like that too. So it's very hard to teach these mothers the right way. But sometimes we put up a workshop, you h o w , for the mothers, how to bring their children up because that, sort of, you know bringing up the way they are brought up can not be taken away. Because they say, "No we are given independence, so I'll give my children" and it will be embarrassing for the children when they go into another house, take things, do whatever they want to do. It'll be the same that they were not taught. So I would like to teach my children. Here Elenoa, like Mrs. D., subtly implied that her methods were more in keeping with traditional Fijian values than those of the village women. She suggested that village mothers wanted their children to be "independent" while she was concerned with teaching them to act properly, and be obedient to their elders, central Fijian values. She also portrayed herself as part of an urban vanguard ("we") who were trying to help villagers by organizing workshops to show them the error of their ways. In this construction, Elenoa was safeguarding a Fijian tradition that had been lost in villages. At other times, Elenoa allied herself with Europeans, stressing that her unusual ways had come from a childhood spent in a European family where her mother was employed as a cook. Well I lived most with these European people and I was born in that house too because [the gold-mining town where I was born] was just like, you know, a village. This lady usually has her baby in her house and the nurses come over, she has a spe-

Chapter Five cia1 room with everything in it so she told my Mum that she can have me born there. And well that's what I saw and I like extending this sort of education to them. I don't think it's, you know, I didn't say it's nice, but it's just what I'm brought up with. Some people think, "Oh that's not nice. Elenoa you are not supposed to do that you should let the children play with each other." I said, "They can . . . but then when breakfast or dinner or lunch is ready, [they have] to come." . . . But every evening we have to sit together and Apolosi, you know, sometimes he talks to them, giving them advice or asking them, "How is your education." We have to ask them I ask them, "How is school today;" "Do you have any problems?" "No problems." "OK." "Do you have to pay something, your school fees or? Are there any problem?" "No." "That's good." So I think, um, nowadays education is the first priority but, uh, you see other families, you know, Fijian families, no they don't. Here Elenoa allied herself both with Europeans and with educated elites within Fiji. Her description of the prototypical interaction between parents and children within her household almost exactly mimicked the practices the teachers recommended: parents should be concerned with their children's education, making it "first priority," and should stay home in the evening to ask about school and to encourage children to do homework. Elenoa was also obviously concerned in both of these passages with accounting for why she sometimes met with resistance from her fellow villagers. She acknowledged that she was different from them and that they were resistant to new ideas because they had not been brought up this way. But Elenoa, while seeming to ally herself completely with modernity, urban elites and Europeans, in fact saw herself as part of a natural Fijian aristocracy. She was like Europeans because, as someone from a very high-ranking family, she naturally had the same characteristics as Europeans and, therefore, should play the same role in developing her community. She went on to say, however, that her family had been in such an enlightened state that they did not need the rules of the vanua either. They were different from the others (KB: even before the missionaries?). Yes it was different before, even they were on their own but they still believed because their life was a different life. So that's why they're like this, until, until up to this day so they don't believe in uh, in uh, in witchcrafts. Other people they do witchcrafts. . . . They stay in their own, they

Imagining Modernity in Rakiraki stay in their own village. It's not a cult. But that's the way they live they keep on ruling (KB: they were the chiefly ones?) They were the chiefly ones, you know. They send their ambassadors out to see what's happening over there or what. So they send their troupes, you know. They've got warriors. These warriors that go out and . . . like they're peacemakers. You know peacemakers. They go out and talk to the people and then when they're settled they come back. Here Elenoa revealed another key component in her sense of self, that is, that she and her family had more in common with Europeans than with ordinary Fijians. She stressed, for example, that her family acted much as the Europeans had done: suppressing warfare and pacifying Fiji. Her family had also thought that distinctive Fijian customs such as avoiding opposite sex siblings and certain categories of in-laws were as bizarre as many Europeans thought they were. Elenoa then, imagined her identity in the context of a broader international community where she allied herself with Europeans in taking the role of helping ignorant "savage" Fijians to progress. She stressed that her family had not learned these ways from Europeans; instead, her family had already had these ways before the Europeans came, presumably because they were already similar kinds of people to the Europeans. She later came back to this theme, describing herself as a "developing kind of person" who had trained as a dau vunau so that she could spread her ideas to the other, less spiritually enlightened people. She did this, however, through endorsing a Fijian ideology of rank based on the idea that some people are more spiritually enlightened than others. Elenoa then, suggested that modernity was really part of the traditional Fijian vanua. In the process, Elenoa reconfigured both modernity and chiefliness, authoring a distinctive account of self and society that resolved the tensions of her life. Chiefliness was a matter of being in a spiritually enlightened state, close to God. Chiefliness also involved looking after the community. These ideas were very much in accord with Fijian ideology. But Elenoa went on to suggest that true chiefliness involved being very modem: true spiritual enlightenment would mean seeing beyond current traditions and understanding that development and progress required leaving aside outdated traditions for new, more rational ways. She spoke to me at length about the fact that Fijian customs had, in her view, outlived their usefulness and were now preventing Fijians from achieving their true status as a world power. Elenoa accomplished these moves by drawing on contradictory strains within Fijian Christianity: on the one hand, the Methodist church of Fiji supported the landed chiefs, who were accorded a special position

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within the church. On the other hand, like most Christian churches, Methodists spoke of a world community of Christians. It was not a large leap, then, to suggest that chiefly Fijians were more in tune with a world community of believers than were ordinary Fijian believers. And, by extension, it would be logical to see chiefs as naturally modem beings within the traditional Fijian polity.

Conclusion: The Dilemma of Modernity in Fiji I have argued here that individuals use constructions of modernity, just as much as constructions of tradition, to define their identity. Macrolevel concerns about relationships between Fijians and Westerners and ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians lead to identities based on a romanticized version of Fijian tradition centered around "loving each other," ties to the land, and chiefly hierarchy. But individuals live much of their lives preoccupied with defining identity in much more local contexts vis-A-vis fellow villagers, urban relatives and so on. In such contexts, individuals are just as likely to imagine themselves as "moderns" as they are to define themselves in terms of tradition. Elenoa and Mrs. D. both felt compelled to produce accounts of self that endorsed basic Fijian communal values of commitment to community and respect for rank within that community. Conversely, both women felt compelled to show that they were autonomous individuals in charge of their own lives even in circumstances (such as Elenoa's return to the village on her husband's retirement) when the more obvious interpretation was that they were the victims of circumstance. For these two women, like other rural Fijians, modernity is a condition of having to live up to contradictory ideologies that can never be completely fulfilled. But within these contradictions, people make space for a variety of lifestyles.

Chapter 6

Crafting a Community This chapter examines life history interviews with two Fijian men in their late fifties, a time of life when people become more remote from the demands of production and reproduction in the household and more involved in a ceremonial system viewed by all as perpetuating the sacred Fjian vanua. I analyze interviews with Jone and Luke, the host fathers of two of our students, who were interviewed by Emily Sparks and Stephanie Sienkiewicz, respectively. We all found older people to be more resistant to talking about their lives in personal terms than were younger people, although they were gracious about helping in other ways. They seemed much more comfortable talking about Fijian culture and about the ways Fiji had changed during their lives. Several factors could have contributed to this pattern. First, as I suggested earlier, Fijian society was so stratified according to age, stage in life cycle, and gender, that we all felt that the villagers were most comfortable talking to people of a similar age and life cycle status. Our students had most success with people of their own age and gender who opened up to them readily; I found women with young children to be the most willing to talk to me, the mother of a young child. But we had no one in our group who had grown children or grandchildren so had less intimate relations with people in their group although we always found them to be gracious and helphl. I noticed, for instance, that Elenoa, who I had tried unsuccessfidly to interview about her life several times, was much more forthcoming with my mother-in-law, a woman of her own age who also had grown children and grandchildren. Second, it was possible that younger people were more influenced by Western mass media. Many people, for instance, were avid fans of American shows like Party of Five (although

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this was also true of older Fijians) and so had internalized a more Western conception of thinking of their lives in terms of personal emotional experience. But third, I argue here that older people had a much stronger conception of themselves as important parts of a wider community than did younger people. As people aged, they gained more autonomy from parents, spouses, and lineage elders. They received respect from their community for their important work of presiding over ceremonial activities ranging from life cycle celebrations, to meetings with government officials, and memberships in various committees such as school boards. And they had more freedom to do these activities since they were often retired and their children were grown. Consequently, people developed a positive sense of self, linked to their role in shaping the larger group. I suggest that the older people we interviewed were more interested in ethnic, and community identity than they were in personal emotional conflict. And so they were much more interested in talking about their communities, their cultures, and indigenous Fijians as an ethnic group than they were in talking about their own lives. But analyzing Jone and Luke's life stories revealed that neither of these men entirely endorsed the ideology of the sacred Fijian vanua centered around respect for rank and on loving each other. Instead, both, while believing in the importance of community, felt that indigenous Fijians should be able to prosper economically and should throw off the shackles of a national chiefly system that neglected the interests of rural villagers, particularly in the sugar-producing "West" of Viti Levu. These views, to a certain extent, reflected a longstanding regional identity (see Kaplan 1995 for the historical roots of this identity in the colonial period) based on resistance to domination from Eastern Chiefs. The Western regional tradition also had perhaps always involved a greater concern with local autonomy in an area where regional chieftainships were not as well developed as in Eastern Fiji (Kaplan 1995; Norton 1977). But our informants' focus on local strength and development probably also indicated the resurgence of desires for local autonomy inspired by the expiration of long term leases of Fijian land to Indo-Fijian tenant farmers. Men and women, coming into their prime in local terms, were beginning to see themselves as being at the forefront of movements to promote local strength instead of as guardians of a sacred tradition.

Jone and Luke: Building the Strength of Ra Jone and Luke were both cane farmers in their late fifties. The fact that villagers had suggested them as host fathers reflected the fact that both were more financially successful than many of their fellow villagers and

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so they had the large houses with indoor bathrooms that we deemed necessary for our students' comfort.' In fact, the two men were among the more successful indigenous Fijian cane farmers in the area. Much of the suitable land had been leased out on long-term leases to Indo-Fijian cane farmers almost a century before leaving many of the indigenous Fijians land poor. Luke, for example, had to lease out land to farm from another mataqali because most of his own land was leased out to Indo-Fijians. Both men also defied the stereotype, voiced by indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians alike, that indigenous Fijians were too lazy to be successful cane farmers. Therefore, it was perhaps not surprising that these two men both had a strong sense of identity based on the fact that they were hard workers and had been able to do well f&ancially. Jone, for example, spoke proudly of the way that he had made sure that all of his children had finished secondary school so that they could get good jobs. But for both men, this was also not entirely a personal identity; at a stage in their lives where they viewed themselves as community leaders, they also pushed for an overall change in local identity centered around reclaiming land and building up local economic strength. In reading Emily and Stephanie's interviews with these two men, I was struck by how both located their own lives within broader historical patterns in the Fijian community. When Emily, for example, asked Jone to tell her about his life, he started out by telling her how conditions for indigenous Fijians had changed over the course of his life. He said that when he was younger, indigenous Fijians had not grown sugar cane; they had also been restricted to their villages and had had to apply for permission from their local government official to leave the village for more than one night. They were also beaten for violating Fijian custom by doing things like wearing a hat in the village or shouting in the village. When Steve and I went to visit Luke to ask him if Steve could interview him about his life, he started his life account in a similar way speaking of how his own father had been a local government official who had been in charge of enforcing "custom rules" such as making sure that each family grew their set allotment of subsistence crops like taro and making sure people contributed labor to communal projects. Both men were more forthcoming with Stephanie Sienkiewicz, who asked to talk to them about the current government and the eminent expiration of many leases of indigenous Fijian land to Indo-Fijians, than they were in talking to us or to Emily about their personal lives. I suggest that they viewed themselves, at a time of their life when they were highly respected village leaders, as being in charge of the destiny of both their local lineages and of their ethnic group more generally. This was also true of a successful indigenous Fijian businessman of the same age whom Steve interviewed. When Steve tried to get this man to talk about his life, he commented in a perfunctory way about his childhood but then went on to launch into a

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long discussion of where he thought the indigenous Fijian people should go in the future which involved taking back their land and developing large plantations. Both men, then, appeared to think more in terms of the broader history of Fijians as a people than in terms of their own individual lives. When Emily, for instance, asked Jone to talk about the good and bad parts of his life, he commented that all of his life had been good. The only things that stood out were his marriage-which had been a very good thing-and a time when he had gotten drunk and nearly died in a car accident-that had been a bad time. He commented that he had been very concerned with making sure his children were good Christians and that they had all finished secondary school so that they could get good jobs. But he had little more to say on that topic even though Emily knew him to be a devoted father and grandfather. While Jone and Luke saw themselves as community leaders, though, they did not entirely endorse the vision of Fijians as guardians of a sacred cultural tradition worth more than money. Both men clearly felt that the British system had been good in preserving respect for Fijian ways. But both also commented on the ways it had restricted indigenous Fijians economically and allowed Indo-Fijians to get ahead. Luke pointed to the way Indo-Fijians had been able to get way ahead in sugar cane growing because indigenous Fijians had to grow subsistence crops. Both men were also, in some respects, critical of the idea that Fijian tradition was worth more than money. Luke, for instance, was impatient with the idea that Fijians placed more value on social relations than on getting rich. When Stephanie, for instance asked him whether Fijians were interested in making money, he replied, We Fijians, we hardly keep any money because we always share everything. . . . Sure we want to be rich, but we can't do it. I never ask for money back from people who borrow it. I just ask money from my sons [for funerals, etc.]. We can't get rich. The only money we get we just want to get our house, living in a good house. Some of us can't even build our house because we haven't got a source of income. . . . It's our way of living. Some of us with a better education, they want to come and change the rules. But they won't live long. They get their doctor degree from England or from America and they want to change our way of living, to stop sharing. But we can't. The only thing will happen to them, they won't live long. One, or two, or three years, they will pass [away]. Something must happen to them. [Sienkiewicz 1999bl

Here Luke implied that it was fear of sorcery that kept Fijians from getting rich. They had to give everything away because they would die if

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they tried to change things. He also stated flatly that the reason that indigenous Fijians had failed to get ahead was because all of their best land had been leased out to IndoiFijians by their grandfathers. Jone was, similarly, critical in some ways of indigenous Fijian tradition. When Stephanie, for instance, asked him if he thought that indigenous Fijians should take back their land he responded that some indigenous Fijians were too lazy to farm, Only there are people who can't cultivate. If you are lazy, then you can't plant cassava or go out fishing or something else." (Stephanie: Are there are many people like that?) Yeah, you see the Fijian way of life now, most of them are like that. Most people living in the villages, they live on this kerekere (borrowing), begging. No salt this morning or no sugar, go to uncle or Tata Levu [big father; father's older brother] or whoever, go and kerekere the sugar, salt from there. But if people work, everybody works, there will be no problem, no kerekere business. (Stephanie: Is this a bad thing?). Yeah, very bad. Because people work and they get their sugar and salt and everything and some people just sleep and after sleeping go and kerekere there, begging. I see people do that. Because everybody has their hands there, their feet there, the tools they need. Only laziness stops you from doing such things. [Sienkiewicz 1999bI Striking in Luke's words was his concern with building up a strong, autonomous local lineage. He clearly saw this as his mission as a senior man of the group. When Stephanie asked him, for example, whether he intended to renew the leases of his Indo-Fijian tenants he said, We want our land back because it was leased out to Indians seventy or ninety years ago. I wasn't born by that time. I'm only fifty-six now. That land was leased out by my great grandfather to Indian people. Some of us don't have any land at all. We just have a small piece to plant our cassava, dalo [taro] and yams. That's for daily living. And a source of income, to plant sugar cane and other crops to sell in the market, we haven't got any leftover land. Because all of our land is leased out to Indians for a very long time. By this time, their leases, some of them, expire next year. Well, they expire this year. We gave them a one-year grace period for them and the government to find out where to resettle them. Some of us want to give their land back, to lease it out, to the Indians, those who've got more land. But some of us who have big numbers in our mataqali, we want out land back, to use it. Even myself, I am supposed to be in [Village XI now. My great grandfather went over to [Village XI and have a land

Chapter Six there. By the time we stayed there, we haven't got any more land there. By that time, colonial time, my father came back to Rakiraki. But this is not our land. This was his mother's land; we lease out this land. But we haven't got any land here. Our ancestors left Rakiraki and went to [Village XI . . . We haven't got any more land right now in [Village XI except when that land [that is leased] will come back to us, then we can divide among all our mataqali, to have their source of income. He went on to say that his mataqali was divided now because there was not enough land so some people had to lease land elsewhere while others had to go to town and seek jobs there. If they could take back their leased land, everyone in the mataqali could work together and buy agricultural equipment together. He wanted not only to take back leased land but to reclaim Erom the government "Crown Schedule A and B land" that is, land that had been registered as crown property when the land was registered in the early twentieth century because the British felt that it was unclear which mataqali owned it. Luke was interested, then, in building up a strong local polity vis-Avis Indo-Fijians but also vis-A-vis the indigenous Fijian government which he saw as having unfairly taken property out of local hands. He told Stephanie, for example, about a long dispute he had had with the Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC) over some land where the FSC had built a reservoir to provide water for some Indo-Fijian tenant farmers. Luke claimed that the reservoir was on his land and that his group should receive lease money for it. When the FSC had refused to accede to his requests, he had gone and ripped out the pipes that conveyed the water to the tenants and had refused to reconnect them for several years until he was given a payment. Throughout this story he kept commenting to Stephanie that FSC and Indo-Fijian tenants alike had "not known him," that is, they had not thought that he was an important person who deserved attention and respect. This was because he lived with his wife's family in Rakiraki because he did not have enough land to live in his own village. As a result, no one had recognized him as an important man. Central here was the idea that he should be an important person in his own vanua but had been prevented from having this role by the fact that all his mataqali's good land was leased out. There was an image then of potential local power that had been fixstrated by Indo-Fijians and by indigenous Fijian bureaucrats from other areas who had interfered with local sources of strength. In fact, the idea that the local people did not receive proper recognition within the nation of Fiji was strong in both Luke and Jone's stories and emerged in their comments on the 1999 election that had brought Chaudhry to power. Both men were unhappy with the idea of having an

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Indo-Fijian Prime Minister and felt that Chaudhry was likely to favor Indo-Fijians over indigenous Fijians in attempts to resolve the issue of land lease expiration. Luke, for example, complained about Chaudhry's intention to compensate Indo-Fijian tenant farmers whose leases were not renewed with twenty-eight thousand dollars to start a new life. Luke suggested that Chaudhry should give the same amount of money to indigenous Fijians who took back their land but did not have the capital to start farming yet. In these comments, the men revealed that they identified with indigenous Fijians as an ethnic community to a much greater extent than did younger Fijians. Many younger Fijians, for instance, told us and told Stephanie that they had voted for Chaudhry because they felt that it didn't matter what the ethnicity of the Prime Minister was; the only important thing was that the Prime Minister should bring development and good jobs to Fiji, which the previous indigenous Fijian governments had failed to do. Jone, and Luke, on the other hand, said that they felt it was wrong to have an Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. When Stephanie asked Luke if indigenous Fijians were happy with having an Indo-Fijian Prime Minister he replied, I don't think. The Indians too think something will happen. When they announced that Chaudhry was Prime Minister, they all said there will be a coup. If Chaudhry goes with his promises, there won't be a coup. If he tries to grab our land, there will be a coup. . . . Fijians want to be [on] their land. They keep on changing the constitution. They all read the ,constitution; they signed it. The [present constitution] is why there is an Indian prime minister. But the Fijians want a Fijian prime minister. Even from India now . . . they don't want anyone from somewhere else [Sonia Gandhi] to be prime minister, European or part-European. And we Fijians, we give them the right, even from England. [Sienkiewicz 1999b3

But both Luke and Jone also complained about the indigenous Fijian governments that had preceded Chaudhry saying that it was because of the corruption in these governments, and the neglect of the interests of people in the sugar-producing "West" of the country-an area that includes Rakiraki-that many indigenous Fijians had failed to support them in the election. When Stephanie asked Jone if some indigenous Fijians had voted for Chaudhry he replied, Yeah, that is what happened. Most of the Fijian leaders do corruption and things like that. Fijian ministers in the old government have been charged with [stealing] two hundred and fifty million dollars from the National Bank, the government

Chapter Six owned bank. . . . This was happening in the last government. Most of them in the government did that. Corruption in the highest order. [Sienkiewicz 1999bI He went on to say that indigenous Fijian government leaders had only tried to make money for themselves and were not interested in helping the rest of the Fijian people. Furthermore, they had done their best to keep people from the Western sugar-producing regions out of the government even though these areas produced much of the wealth of the country. Jone did not say that he had voted for Chaudhry but he did note approvingly that Chaudhry was from the West. I suggest that both Jone and Luke, while exhibiting a strong sense of themselves as members of an ethnic group and of a community, were committed to an image of local community identity somewhat at odds with the national image of Fijian tradition centered around respect for rank and communal etiquette. Both men were committed to building a community but they wanted this community to be based on working the land, not to support a time-honored Fijian tradition, but to gain money. Both men, for instance, said they thought it was a good thing for Fijians to be educated so that they could earn money and that they disapproved of British colonial policy that had restricted Fijians from making money. While both spoke approvingly of Fijians, in contrasts to Indo-Fijians, as people who cared about each other and valued sociality, both were also ambivalent about some aspects of indigenous Fijian custom. Jone, for example, complained that too many Fijians were lazy because they were content to borrow from others rather than working for themselves. And Luke also suggested that people had to give things away for fear of sorcery. Both men were also committed to the idea of building up local strength and escaping from a corrupt indigenous Fijian national elite who came mostly from other areas of the country. That these men's views of community and local identity were not unusual was shown in villagers' reactions to Speight's coup attempt. I went to visit a neighbor a few hours after the coup occurred to find out if the rumors of the coup were true. I found my neighbor sitting with a bunch of friends around a kava bowl and the radio. The assembled men were happy to explain the reports to me, and to tell me that George Speight, the leader of the coup, was from Ra. Speight one man told me, was a true Fijian, being both from Ra and in the military. He had done what needed to be done: he had stood up to the Indo-Fijians who were trying to overextend their power and had shown them the strength of indigenous Fijians. These were words I heard repeated many times in the following days. Even a young woman who had voted for Chaudhry, after initially opposing the coup under instructions from her husband, was within a couple of days saying that anyone who opposed Speight was just

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a big qauri or homosexual. Another neighbor suggested that Ratu Mara, who had come out publicly against the coup, was not a true Fijian at all: he had straight hair and seemed to prefer to speak English; he must be mixed race, and probably mostly European. Speight, on the other hand, was a true Fijian and a son of Ra. Indeed, Ratu Mara had elected to address the nation on Fiji one, the national television station, in English. He was probably trying to speak, as President, to all Fijians, indigenous and Indo-Fijian alike, sending a message that Fiji was a multiracial nation. But this use of English struck a sour note with my neighbor, convincing her that Ratu Mara was not a true Fijian. Rakiraki villagers' comments indexed the emergence of a kind of indigenous Fijian identity centered on a display of local strength and autonomy. Speight, unlike Ratu Mara, was a true Fijian because he was strong and because he was a warrior. Several women commented to me admiringly on how muscular and fit Speight looked when he appeared on evening news a broadcast. Furthermore, this display of warrior strength was closely linked in people's minds to coming from the Ra province, of which Rakiraki was a part. Ratu Mara, from Lau and perhaps (in the local view) even mostly European, was for Rakiraki people not a true Fijian because he refused to stand up and display strength. Besides he was an old man and not from the military. Ra people were not educated professionals like easterners; but they were the strength of the nation. These analyses were particularly interesting in that they required a very selective way of looking at Speight. Speight, as the Fiji One broadcasts made known, was half-European and had been educated in the US. He was a businessman, not a military man. His ties with Ra, on his Fijian mother's side, were somewhat unclear. One woman claimed that he had grown up in her home village nearby but quickly backtracked when I asked her if she had ever met him. Furthermore, Speight spoke only English, and that with an Australian accent, in Fiji One broadcasts. Thus, he was, objectively, no more obviously Fijian than Ratu Mara. The Rakiraki people's strong desire to regain local autonomy and the image of being a strong region, protecting Fijian rights in a way that southeastern and Lauan chiefs had failed to do for all their erudition and wealth, was evident in the way that they embraced Speight as a military man and true son of Ra despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

Conclusions Examining the stories of older Fijians reveals that they have a much stronger sense of commitment to a local polity and to a national ethnic group than do younger Fijians. However, it was also striking that older adults' views about community differed significantly from the standard

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ideal, embodied in the sevusevu and in Methodist church ceremonies, of indigenous Fijians living by a sacred and time-honored tradition, each playing his or her role in a community based on loving each other and worshipping God. Both of the older Fijians discussed in this chapter wanted their community to remain strong and to work together; but both also felt that local communities should be strengthened by "development" and that indigenous Fijians should be able to make money just like Indo-Fijians. This was, in part, a regional identity, built from feelings of being an oppressed minority within a larger indigenous Fijian polity (see Kaplan 1995).

Notes 1. In fact only a few of our students ended up in houses with indoor bathrooms since such houses were so few and far between in the area.

Chapter 7

Imagining Identity Among Rakiraki Children In the final chapter, I examine the way a group of Rakiraki children construct personal, gender and cultural identity, in order to find a window to the future. When I returned to Rakiraki in summer of 2003 to examine children's play, I found children's constructions of identity to be even more fluid and heterogeneous than those of their parents. Even more than their parents, children blurred distinctions between global and local, urban and rural, and created new kinds of translocal identities (see also Besnier 2002, 2004). Boys drew on the anti-authoritarian associations of the local dialect to locate themselves within an imagined international community of autonomous, "macho," young men that included international sports stars and movie stars like Stephen Segal. Girls drew on the cosmopolitan associations of Bauan to imagine themselves to be part of extra-local international communities of urban professionals and Christians.

Children, Identity, and Language Ideologies Many researchers argue that children are active learners who draw selectively on, and reinterpret, messages from adults (Corsaro 1997; Fine 1987; Gilligan 1982; Goodwin 1990; Maccoby 1998; Toren 1990). Corsaro (1985, 1997) suggests that children attempt to make sense of the adult world in their play but that their interpretations always differ from those of adults because children's views reflect both their cognitive capacities and their life experiences. Adler and Adler (1998: 7) similarly

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argue that, "children's peer groups create their own culture by selecting and rejecting various aspects of adult culture and making cultural innovations of their own" (1998: 206). Through peer culture "children not only reproduce but also challenge and transform the world of adults so as to achieve self-control and a measure of autonomy" (Adler and Adler 1998: 207). As Rogoff says, children's manipulation of social roles in play allows each "age-graded generation [to develop] an ethos that builds on that of the parental generation, at times with an explosion of creativity that recasts values and goals of society, as with the political and social impact of the generation that came to maturity in the 1960s" (Rogoff 1990: 187). Thus children do not inevitably grow to be adults who entirely share the worldview of their parents. Seminal works by Elinor Ochs (1990) and Bambi Schieffelin (1990) argue that children acquire values, emotional styles, and assumptions about the world through "language socialization," or learning to use language in socially appropriate ways and being embedded in typical routines with caretakers. But as Garrett and ~ a ~ u e d a n o - ~ (2002: o ~ e z 346) point out, mass media, migration and other forces have exposed people to an array of lifestyles, ideologies, linguistic codes, and linguistic routines. People use linguistic codes in complex ways in order to situationally define personal identity and group membership.' These insights on community and language suggest that language socialization studies should take into account that children, like adults, are not "faxes" (Strauss 1995) automatically receiving messages imparted by linguistic routines. Instead, children are exposed to multiple and complex ways of defining identity through language. Like adults, children draw on linguistic ideologies and associations to define identity, particularly vis-A-vis a world of peers (see Eckert 1989; Goodwin 1990). Zentella (1997), for example, argues that "Nuyorican" (New York Puerto Rican) children are no longer embedded in unified cultural communities (see also Gonzalez 2001 on South Texas children). The ways children use language to construct identity may differ from their parents' practices. Simple patterns of defining in- and out-group identity and gender identity among adults give way to complex individual differences among children shaped by idiosyncratic properties of individual social networks. For instance, Zentella (1997) argues that Nuyorican girls often have a better command of Spanish than their male counterparts because Spanish is associated with the female domain of family and home. But she also argues that, unlike adults in the same community, these children no longer exclusively view English as an outside prestige language and Spanish as an in-group language. Instead, children's networks include non-Spanish speaking Afi-ican-Americans and children of Puerto Rican

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descent manipulate both English and Spanish in complex ways to index a sense of Nuyorican identity. In the Pacific region, there is also evidence that children use linguistic codes in ways that blur the important "ethnic boundaries" of relevance to their parents and outside researchers. Kulick (1992) says that children in the Papua New Guinea village of Gapun are leading a shift from bilingualism in an indigenous vernacular, Taiap Mer, and an introduced lingua franca, Tok Pisin, to monolingualism in Tok Pisin. Children draw on adult associations of Tok Pisin as a language expressing valued qualities of self-control and reasonableness, and as a language associated with Europeans and men. But children unwittingly transform linguistic ideology and practice when children of both gender choose to use Tok Pisin in order to present themselves as "modern," beings dominated by the favored quality of save, (i.e. self control and reason). Romaine (1992) has also shown the urban Papua New Guinean children speak a variety of Tok Pisin that has incorporated more grammatical and phonological features of English and more English vocabulary than the varieties spoken by adults in the same region.

Language Ideologies and Language Use Among Rakiraki Adults In Rakiraki, the three languages of everyday life, Ra dialect, Bauan, and English were symbolically loaded markers of identity for both adults and children. As has been evident in previous chapters, Ra dialect was an ingroup language, indexing solidarity with the local community, the vanua. Ra dialect also signalled commitment to a local culture and a "macho," independent quality and refusal to bow to pressures from above. Villagers encouraged me, for instance, to use the greeting yadra (good moming, or literally wake up) all day long in the Ra fashion instead of switching to bula later in the day, as was correct, they said, in Bauan. Villagers also encouraged me to replace my "t's" with glottal stops, and convert "k" to Germanic "h" sounds, in order to speak Ra and also to use the Ra versions of common words. Villagers told me that it was important to master the local dialect in order to show commitment to the vanua. This was thought to be particularly important for males in a patrilineal, patrilocal society. One neighbor, for instance, told me that while all her children had grown up in Suva, the capital city, speaking Bauan, her sons had made a special effort to master Ra dialect to show loyalty to their village. She was particularly concerned that her oldest son master Ra dialect as she hoped he would succeed his father as lineage headman and

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wanted him to show his commitment to the local community. Villagers who avoided the local dialect were sometimes criticized as being snobby and thinking themselves above local residents. The symbolic elaboration of Ra dialect to express commitment to the local vanua was evident in the fact that many people who were, for various reasons, more comfortable speaking Bauan, would, for the benefit of fellow villagers, switch into a hybridized version of Ra dialect that played up the superficial differences in pronunciation between Ra and Bau but used little distinctive Ra vocabulary or grammar. One senior man who had spent much of his life outside the village, exhibited the pattern of trying to speak a dialect that didn't come naturally to him when he used the word o 'i, (finished), applying a Ra pronunciation to a Bauan word oti by replacing the "t" with a glottal stop, instead of using the Ra equivalent, d e w . This man was, like many others, using a hybridized, symbolic, form of Ra dialect to express his commitment to the local community. Ra dialect was also used to express the autonomy of the vanua in the face of larger political structures and the independent, autonomous, nature of residents of the Ra province. Bauan was taught in schools and was the language of government and church throughout Fiji. Most villagers above the age of six spoke it fluently. Bauan in some ways fit the pattern of an outside prestige language, used to accommodate outsiders and to claim prestige. Bauan was most often used in prayer and in church. This was part of the pattern of using Bauan to accommodate outsiders, since church members included ministers and congregation members from outside the village who did not speak local dialect. But villagers also commonly switched to Bauan in order to deliver the requisite prayer that almost always followed the sevusevu at any gathering, even if there were no outsiders present. Villagers tended to pray in Bauan even if the event in question involved only close family members. This use of Bauan shows that Ra and Bauan were not purely "ingroup" or "outside" languages. Instead, adults used the two languages to imagine themselves to be part of two distinctly different kinds of community: a local vanua, indexed through use of Ra, and a national community of indigenous Fijians, indexed through use of Bauan The third linguistic code, English, was used rarely in everyday life since few people felt really comfortable speaking it, but was generally associated with those who wished to exhibit education and to demonstrate that they were members of a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, international community, distant from the rural vanua (see also Besnier 2002, 2004). Those who used English went one step further than Bauan speakers to suggest that they were members, not of a national community of

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indigenous Fijians, but of an international community of workers, Christians, bureaucrats, or the like.2 Irvine and Gal (2000) note that languages can take on different associations according to context and this was evident in the use of Bauan in daily life by evangelical Christians. While evangelical Christians used a lot of English in church to distance themselves from the pan-Fijian vanua, they often used Bauan in the home to distance themselves from the local vanua. Families would undoubtedly also have used English at home had more people been comfortable and fluent in English. Thus Bauan symbolized commitment to a pan-Fijian vanua in some contexts, and distance from Fijian-ness in other contexts. In short, adults used the three linguistic codes to signal their participation in various kinds of imagined communities. But the dominant pattern among adults was to use Ra dialect as the primary in-group language. Below I examine the way a small group of children living near me and children attending a nearby preschool used these three dominant codes in order to construct personal and group identity.

Children's Use of Language Children's use of Ra, English, and Bauan was similar in many ways to that of their parents but also stretched the associations of these languages in new directions as children attempted to construct boundaries within their group, define relationships, and to express their senses of self. Children drew on the symbolic associations of Ra dialect with macho autonomy and Bauan with refined urbanity. But children constructed imagined communities that blurred the distinctions that dominated adult views. Boys and girls faced different pressures and so used language differently. Boys were expected to develop ties with the local vanua, and thus were encouraged to play freely in large groups away from parents' watchful eyes (see also Morton 1996 on Tonga). Parents also expected boys to be tough and fend for themselves, expectations that also contributed to allowing boys to roam far from home. But these expectations also in some ways conflicted with requirements for all children, who occupied the bottom of the status hierarchy, to accommodate to the needs and wishes of adults (see also Morton 1996 on Tonga and Ochs 1990 on Samoa). As a result, boys were preoccupied with relative status and with defining an autonomous place for themselves in a world adults often controlled them. In contrast, girls were generally kept closer to home. Since parents thought that many girls would marry outside the village, they were less

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concerned with girls developing ties in the local vanua. As a result, adults were more apt to allow any ambivalence they felt toward local neighbors to shape their daughters' peer group. Parents often prevented girls from playing with people from different religious groups and also with children from families that they just didn't like. For example, my immediate neighbors had a fourteen-year-old granddaughter who seldom played with neighboring children. Her grandmother, who had spent much of her life in urban areas of Fiji, disliked the village and told me numerous times that she disapproved of the local practice of letting children roam around; they should be kept at home to absorb the good habits of their parents and grandparents. Accordingly, her granddaughter spent a lot of time inside the house doing homework or watching TV. Her playmates were carefblly selected by her grandmother from among the numerous grandchildren of the neighboring high chief or from among the grandchildren of the head minister of the Methodist church who lived nearby. The consequence of this adult control was that many girls focused more on outside Christian communities and the world of school than on the local vanua. Girls' distance from the local vanua was also probably increased by the fact that females in general had lower status in local culture. In many areas of the world where this is true, females lead males in the shift to outside prestige language (e.g. Gal 1979) and this seemed also to be happening in Rakiraki. Below I will explore the ways that the distinctive pressures on girls and boys led them to construct gender specific ways of being Fijian that differed from parents' sense of cultural identity.

Boys: A World of Young Males Boys drew on the anti-authoritarian associations of Ra dialect to locate themselves in an international community of autonomous, macho, young men. Like adults, boys used Ra dialect to define an in-group, often switching to Bauan in the presence of girls, and children from other areas. The boys' use of Ra dialect to signal in-group solidarity was illustrated, for instance, one day in a spontaneous game of baseball, when the boys switched to Bauan to address Samu, another boy whose mother was married into the lineage and who visited Rakiraki only occasionally. Samu spoke a variant of Ra dialect, but when addressing the Rakiraki boys he sometimes switched to Bauan and they, in turn, switched to Bauan to address him. This use of Bauan to express a sense of distance and frame Samu as an outsider threw into relief the boys more usual practice of expressing solidarity with each other through use of Ra dia-

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lect. The boys' practice of switching to Bauan when addressing several of the girls expressed and reinforced a similar sense of distance, as I will explore below. But the boys' in-group was not the local vanua but instead was their peer group. This was evident through frequent elliptical references to shared experiences and practices and through use of nicknames for each other. They addressed each other by nicknames, usually anglicized versions of their names, or names drawn from TV shows. One boy was called Mets or Metics after a character on a popular New Zealand TV show. Another was called Bux, an anglicized short form of his name, while a third frequent companion was often called Mr. MG. because he resembled a mongoose character on a TV children's program. Girls said they were familiar with these nicknames but seldom used them to address the boys. These TV nicknames showed the boys' focus to be on a group of local peers with shared experiences of TV viewing, rather than on the vanua per se. Furthermore, the boys located their peer group within an imagined international community of young males, not the traditional local vanua. This was evident in one exchange between two nine-year-old boys. The two boys spoke almost entirely in Ra dialect with each other except to intersperse English words such as "boy" and "winna" (winner). They engaged in an elaborate game of tug of war in which both imitated car noises. A young woman who helped me translate the videotape explained that the boys were imitating a Stephen Segal movie that had recently been shown at the community center in which Segal prevented a car from pulling away by hanging on to a rope tied to the car. The boys also exchanged a series of insults focused around those who (like rural "hicks") failed to brush their teeth, calling each other "yellow bati" (yellow teeth) and "red bati" (red teeth) and claiming themselves to have "white bati" (white teeth). The boys' used of Ra dialect, Bauan and a few English words here was typical of their interactions with each other. As they played tug of war and imitated the Stephan Segal car scene they exchanged insults, with an occasional contribution from three-year-old Paula who was looking on: Tevita: awa awa repairahi mada noqu wa repair ahinia Wait, wait my rope is being repaired, is under repair Jone: champion Tevita yalo bati Tevita yellow teeth is the champion Paula: Tevita yalo bati Tevita yellow teeth Jone: yalo bati yalo bati Yellow teeth! yellow teeth!

Chapter Seven Tevita: h a ni cakava iko h a ni cakava iko! Don't do it; don't do it Jone: wawa Yalo bati Wait Yellow teeth Tevita: red bati u dagena qori red bati dagena qori white bati qoi boy white bati Red teeth on that side, red teeth on that side; white teeth here boy, white teeth Tevita: ooi sesevu iko na bati u qoi white black kei na yellow. Hey yalo bati white bati there Ooi These teeth are white. White, black and the yellow. Hey yellow teeth, white teeth there Here the two boys spoke to each other primarily in Ra dialect with a few English words thrown in. The boys used English color words instead of Fijian equivalents signaling that the reference was to a cosmopolitan outside world of urban life and mass media where English was the dominant language. The use of the word "champion" also signaled that frame. Interesting here was the fact that the boys' attempt to speak English did not lead them to speak Bauan. Indeed in the first sentence, Tevita chose the Ra endings "ahi" and "ahinia" over their Bauan equivalents. Thus English and Bauan clearly had different associations in the boys' mind with a closer association between Ra dialect and English and symbolic markers of identity than between Bauan and English, the two outside prestige codes among adults. The symbolic link between English and Ra, showed that the boys' associations with languages were different fiom those of adults; for adults, speaking English and speaking Ra signaled opposite kinds of identity but for the boys, the two languages both expressed membership in a world of young males. The boys' focus was away fiom the prestige system of the local community and firmly on an international community. This was reflected in the imitation of Stephen Segal, and stars of televised rugby matches, in which people were judged by their cosmopolitan sophistication as shown by things like whiteness of teeth. This focus on outside, international community was also shown by the ways that the boys combined Ra dialect with English words and phrases such as "yellow," "boy," "slow motion," "instant replay," and so on. In short, the boys were using Ra dialect to signal a tough macho kind of masculinity that transcended the local community. Both Ra dialect, discouraged by teachers, and English phrases drawn from TV shows and movies, defined the boys as possessing autonomy from local adults. The association of both Ra dialect and English with rugged independence appeared among the Rakiraki boys in the frequent practice of

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framing a series of English swear words (like "fuck off') in a Ra dialect sentence. During a baseball game, for instance, the mother of some of the younger children came out to watch me videotaping. This woman was not from Rakiraki; she frequently spoke Ra dialect to accommodate to higher status villagers but generally spoke Bauan to the lower status children who in turn accommodated to her by addressing her in Bauan. While she was there, two of the oldest boys, addressed her politely in Bauan but interspersed their remarks with crude insults in Ra dialect addressed at some of the younger boys, such as "look at your big bum," "you're out, how many times have I told you, son of an owl!;" "your face is just like [a handicapped man in the village]," and "your cunt is like a monkey." One boy also exhibited the overlapping associations of English and Ra dialect with rugged masculinity when he turned to his younger brother in the middle of a game and said solia mai hei o iko fuck offfuck offuba (give it here - fuck off out there; in this sentence hei and uba are distinctively Ra pronunciations). These crude insults addressed to younger boys in Ra dialect in the presence of an older women showed the boys' independence and their dominance over younger boys. The centrality of rugged masculinity to the boys' culture was also shown when they started to tease one of the boys for acting like a homosexual. As the boy broke into a little victory dance as he ran to home, the other boys yelled at him: Josefa: h a ni vaqauritiko h a na vafancy iko Don't act like a homosexual. Don't act fancy Kove: a a amu rawa ni cava [He] Can't do anything [because he's effeminate] Josefa: amu rawa mada ga ni lave na matai va amu rawa ni lave nai sele he couldn't lift up a pitchfork or a knife Again, the boys combine Ra dialect (marked by the distinctive worlds amu, the Ra negative marker) and the dropping of the "t" on tiko (marker of progressive action). They criticized their friend for acting feminine and being unable to do masculine things like cane cutting (requiring lifting of pitchforks and knives). Josefa's use of the English word "fancy" in the hybrid construction vafancy also shows the links between these kinds of preoccupations with rugged masculinity (and the lack thereof exhibited by homosexuals) and English. The children's patterns of language use both reflected and transformed adult ways of conceiving of identity. The boys used Ra dialect as a code of solidarity much as the adults in the community did, marking who was in the community and who was not. Boys also picked up on the

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use of Ra dialect to assert independence from authority, for instance, when they swore at each other in Ra and made lewd remarks. While this use of Ra dialect reflected adult associations, it also transformed them by associating Ra with the rugged masculinity of movie stars and sports stars and creating a translocal community of young males. Peter Devine, a Union undergraduate who wrote a senior thesis on tattoos in the Ra area, found a similar attitude among adolescent males and young adult males (Devine 2004). Most young men had several tattoos; these tattoos, like the language of the Rakiraki boys, created a distinctive young male identity by combining allusions to local Pacific kinds of identity with international, and English, symbols. Tattoos were often used for healing sports injuries (through drawing out the "bad blood") and several young men spoke to Pete proudly about how this indigenous Fijian form of healing was much more effective than Western hospital medicine. Some young men also had Maori style tattoos. In these ways, tattoos signaled a pride in a distinctively Pacific, athletic, warrior identity. But tattoos, like language use among the Rakiraki boys, also tied this Pacific masculinity to an international world of young men, independent of the traditional, ranked, vanua where young men were subordinate to older men. Tattoos, for instance, were always written in English. One young man had "freedom" tattooed across his chest and told Pete that this meant that he was free to make his own choices. Tattoos often proclaimed a nickname, all of them distinctly anglicized, that the bearer had acquired on a sports team or at school. All tattoos seemed to proclaim membership in a community of young men (be they school mates or team mates), distinctly Fijian but also distinctly autonomous from the traditional ranked vanua, and often a decidedly translocal grouping together young macho men in an international community.

The World of Girls Like boys, girls used language to index participation in translocal communities. But girls were more likely to use Bauan to locate themselves in imagined communities of Christians and urban professionals. Girls' use of language reflected the fact that adults did not feel that it was necessarily important for girls to be part of the local community. Thus girls were more likely to identify with extra-local communities in ways that were distinctly different from their parents who generally switched between Ra dialect and Bauan. Girls who spoke primarily Bauan often came from families that were for various reasons dissatisfied with their position in the local vanua.

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While parents in such families spoke Ra dialect to fellow community members, their children did so less. One Bauan speaking girl came from a nearby village that also spoke a slightly different form of Ra dialect. Two other Bauan speaking girls came from families belonging to evangelical Christian sects. A group of younger children who spoke Bauan had lived in Suva for a few years, though they had also lived in the village for the last two years. Their mother was from a different area and often spoke to them in Bauan though she knew Ra dialect well. Their father had also grown up in Suva but had learned to speak Ra dialect as an adult in order to show his attachment to the vanua. This family encouraged their only son to learn Ra dialect. These girls7 use of Bauan expressed their sense of distance both from the vanua and from their local peers. The boys used Ra dialect and English to show they belonged to a international community of young males; the girls used Bauan to separate themselves from the macho world of their male peers and to affiliate themselves with a more refined world of church and family. While the boys were concerned with exhibiting autonomy from the adult world, at least some of the girls were more likely to identify with their family and church groups and be uncomfortable the boys' anti-authoritarian style. My teenage neighbor, for instance, chose to attend an Indo-Fijian secondary school in town, rather than the. local high school. She said that she did not like bawdy joking style associated with the use of Ra dialect. The girls7 distance from the vanua was paralleled by their affiliation with other kinds of communities and identities. One afternoon as the boys played touch rugby, for instance, I joined by two girls in a kitchen house where the girls' conversation drifted to school exam scores. Fourteen-year-old Adi generally spoke Bauan but the other girl, Seini (twelve) usually spoke in Ra dialect but generally switched to Bauan when talking to Adi and other Bauan speaking children. As the girls discussed exam scores it was clear that each knew exactly who had gotten the highest and lowest scores in their grades, how local children's scores compared to those of teachers' children, and so on. They were clearly focused on a world of academic achievement in school in a way the boys were not. Adi: o au klassi ono, four hundred forty-four. Me, in class six four hundred forty-four Seini: three hundred seventy-one oooo four hundred forty katolu keitou neitou katolu mada ga four hundred sixty-eight three hundred seventy-one oooo four hundred forty, third. Us our third was just four hundred sixty-eight Adi: keitou neitou highest e four hundred seventy

Chapter Seven Us, our highest was four hundred seventy Seini: four hundred seventy! Nomudou highest! Four hundred seventy! Your highest! Adi: keitou levu sara mai vei Dilagi dd We were higher that Dilagi (a teacher's daughter) Seini: ehh Dilagi eight hundred seventy-six Ehh Dilagi eight hundred seventy-six Adi: oooooo 0000..

.

Seini: lasu four hundred eighty-six kemudou lowest mark vei keitou but keitou sega ni bitaki veratou o Susanna keitou bitaki kemudou Lying Four hundred eighty-six! Your lowest mark than us. But we didn't beat Susanna's class but we beat you guys!

Like the boys, the girls mixed single English words and phrases in Fijian sentences. But unlike the boys, the two girls spoke to each other in Bauan. The girls' use of Bauan here went along with a greater identification with the world of school, where they compared their classes' marks on competitive exams and competed to do as well as teacher's children. The same focus on an outside world was evident in younger girls. I happened upon some of the younger children one day playing house in a small tree in the compound. Five-year-old Meri, who spoke primarily Bauan, had lived in Suva until she was three. She was playing with two sisters, five-year-old Leba, and three-year-old Alisi. Leba and Alisi's parents had both grown up in Rakiraki and spoke the local dialect, but the prevalence of Bauan in these children's lives was reflected in the fact that they both spoke in Bauan to Meri, even though many children as young as Alisi did not speak much Bauan. The girls' use of Bauan was linked to a focus on the "modem" world in which their mother left to work at the hospital each day and the pastor of the evangelical church to which they belonged often flew off on airplanes to visit other countries. Leba: au na qai lako yani I will come later Meri: mai tou lako sa vuka na waqa vuka Come let's go to the airplane, the airplane Leba: au na qai tu sa dua e noda'ou I will just by myself at ours (at home) Alisi: keitou cakacaka We are working Leba: keimudou qai lako mai au sa tu vale Au tu e vale au sa moce tu

Imagining Identity Among Rakiraki Children when you come back home I'll be at home. I am at home sleeping Alisi: au lai cakacaka I am going to work Leba: kemudou qai lako mai vale au sa moce tu raica kemudou qai vaqo You will come back to the house and I will be sleeping - look you two will be like this Meri: sobusobu Alisi get off the plane Alisi. . . . Meri: (high pitched voice) "Hey whose in the house? Eh it's Leba what are you doing in my house ?" au qai lako tale I'm going back Alisi: au sa kaba mada I will perhaps climb Striking here was the girls' use of Bauan combined with the "modern" themes of their fantasy. Like the older girls, the little girls interspersed occasional English with Bauan and used little Ra dialect (although I heard Leba speak in Ra dialect in other contexts). Both boys and girls also code-switched in a distinctively different way from adults also signaling distinctly different concepts of identity from adults. While many adults switched to Ra dialect to show respect for villagers, among the children, accommodation was almost always in the other direction with Ra dialect speakers switching to Bauan for the benefit of children who usually spoke Bauan. In part this pattern resulted from the use of Ra dialect by the local boys to define an in-group: my fourteen-year-old neighbor, for instance, claimed that she tried to speak Ra dialect to the neighboring children but they always addressed her in Bauan, signaling their distance from her. Another contributor to tendency to shift to Bauan was a change in values associated with changing concepts of personal identity. Rural children, following a traditional preference for accommodating the needs of others, often switched to Bauan to accommodate children whom they perceived as not understanding the local dialect. Families who aspired to an urban lifestyle, however, often encouraged their children to be assertive and to "sell themselves" rather than accommodating to the needs of others. One young mother, for instance, commented that her children were siosio vinaka, that is cheeky or insubordinate in a good way. While most other villagers spoke of being siosio as a negative thing, this young woman explained to me that this quality was in many ways a good thing since it led to one asserting oneself and finding opportunities. The result was that Bauan speaking children could negotiate village life by speaking

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primarily Bauan and did not feel the need to accommodate to village children. I noted, for instance, that five-year-old Meri spoke only in Bauan. This seemed curious to me since I knew this little girl to be very bright and verbal and not at all shy. She impressed everyone, for instance, by being able to speak and understand English much better than the other children of her age. After videotaping her playing with children in preschool, and around her home, I found, however, that many of her playmates switched to Bauan for her benefit. This probably expressed a desire to be polite and to accommodate an outsider. I witnessed a similar phenomenon with my own son Jeffrey who lived in Fiji for a total of almost two years between the ages of three and eight without learning a single Fijian word. As with Meri, other children generally switched to English to accommodate Jeffrey so he did not need to learn Fijian. Neither Meri, nor my son, had been socialized into the village ethic of exhibiting respect by accommodating others. So neither child felt any compulsion to learn the dialect of their village peers. Meri's mother had spent much of her life in Suva and aspired for her children to be upwardly mobile urban professionals. She told me proudly that her children were not shy like the village children but would speak up in school and could talk easily to outside strangers, traits she felt would serve them well in later life. Indeed, her daughter was very outgoing and always responded to other children in Bauan, even if they addressed her in Ra dialect. Thus, shifting values, which reflected changing ways of conceiving of self, reinforced a shift to Bauan, but primarily for girls since boys had a countervailing desire to assert autonomy from authority figures of all kinds, including Bauan speaking pastors and teachers, through use of Ra dialect.

Conclusions Rakiraki children used language to construct group boundaries, define relationships, and to define self and other. In doing so, they picked up on associations with Bauan, Ra dialect, and English among adults, but also used these codes to meet the particular needs of their own worlds, and in doing so, slowly transformed group identity and linguistic practice. While almost all adults, for instance, spoke both Ra dialect and Bauan, a small but growing group of children in the village spoke primarily Bauan and identified with cosmopolitan urban life, or Christian communities, over the vanua. Similarly, children who used Ra dialect often did so to express a macho bravado associated with international sports stars and

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mass media action heroes, instead of to show a commitment to sacred Fijian tradition associated with the vanua. Children also used language to indicate solidarity and distance, with a growing distance emerging between a macho local anti-authoritarian identity, and a more veiled style of competition and interaction associated with the outside world. Like the Nuyorican children, Rakiraki children took what were largely in-group, out-group codes among adults, and used them to express new ways of imagining Fijian identity that blurred these boundaries. While adults positioned themselves within a local vanua, a national community of Fijians, and an international community of Christians, urbanites and so on, for children these boundaries were less clear. Boys, for instance, used both Ra dialect and English to construct an international community of young men that transcended the boundaries between Westerners and Fijians, Ra people and Bauan speakers, and instead emphasized the commonalities among young macho men, as distinct from females and adults. Girls followed parents more closely but located themselves in a community that blended urban Fijians and international Christians, again ignoring the local-global distinctions so important to their parents. Children created, in short, distinctive gendered ways of being Fijian that differed from adult cultural identity. Exploring the world of Rakiraki children then indicates the emergence of a multiplicity of ways of being an indigenous Fijian. As Besnier notes of Tonga, the categories of global and local, rural and urban, Islander versus Westerner are breaking down as people imagine new kinds of identities in response to the very particular pressures and circumstances of their own lives.

Notes 1. Numerous recent studies, for instance, have focused on language ideology, or "shared bodies of commonsense knowledge about the nature of language in the world" (Rumsey 1990: 346). As people manipulate linguistic codes to situationally define community and individual identity, so too there has been a proliferation of self-conscious ideologies about languages and social conventions for using them. Irvine and Gal (2000) argue that people often have iconic associations with languages in which the language is regarded as having properties associated with a particular community. Hill (1998) shows, for example, that Nahuatl people in Mexico believe that their local language is a respectful one, just as they see traditional culture as involving more respect for authority than "modem," cosmopolitan culture, associated with use of Spanish. Thus older men in particular associate speaking Mexicano with exhibiting the desired traits of traditional culture. Irvine and Gal (2000) also suggest that language ideologies

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are "recursive" such that oppositions drawn between groups speaking different languages, are then used within a group to define differences. For instance, Nahuatl women use Spanish to define themselves as modern in opposition to older men. In short, the work on language ideology has shown that linguistic codes are subtle and multivalent tools for defining identity. Linguistic codes accumulate new symbolic valences as they are used by individuals in particular circumstances to define identity. 2. Members of evangelical congregations also often preferred the English "Good News" Bible to the translation of the Bible into Bauan used by Methodists. A young woman who belonged to this church told me that this was because the standard Fijian Bible, translated by the Methodists, was written in archane Fijian and was hard to understand. One evangelical pastor stressed that one must read the doctines straight in English so that the message would not be distorted. Another informant (this one a Methodist) also told me that she preferred to read the Bible in English because she felt that English was a much more precise language, which conveyed the meaning of the Bible more clearly. While the linguistic claims here are dubious, these women's remarks reflect their feeling that the worldview conveyed by the Bible was somewhat different from that conveyed by Fijian and that a true understanding of the Bible involved separating oneself from Fijian culture and society. Again this showed that many Fijians looked to the church to disembed themselves from the vanua and create a new kind of imagined community. 3. I videotaped spontaneous play episodes among the children living near me and in a local preschool in July and August of 2003. I transcribed the play episodes with the help of several local people, including several children and the preschool teacher, a Rakiraki woman in her early twenties. My local informants helped to transcribe the speech of the children, commented on their use of language and commented more generally on the children's family background, social networks, and playstyles. The children observed for the most part belonged to a lineage consisting of the children and grandchildren of a group of brothers ranging in age from their early fifties to mid-sixties. These brothers were retired and living in the village. Most of the households attended local evangelical churches instead of the Methodist church but none of the families belonged to the same evangelical domination. In addition, the children frequently played with two brothers, aged nine and eleven, who lived with their mother and grandparents nearby, the grandchildren of the regional high chief, whose compound bordered ours, the grandchildren of the high chiefs sister, and a boy from the high chiefs lineage, who lived nearby. Most of these children belonged to the Methodist church.

Conclusion

Identity in a "Postcultural" World Five years have passed since I finished the first draft of this book and many things have happened: Vani passed away a few months after I left Fiji and we both turned forty. Contrary to Vani's predictions that few people would mourn her passing, she had a huge funeral according to Sera's phone report to me. Sera and her family moved to Suva, then returned to the village after finding urban life lonely and expensive and then moved again to Nadi to be near their church congregation. Ema got married, joined an evangelical church, and seldom visits the village. She and her new husband have visas to migrate to the US. Elenoa left the Methodist church and joined an evangelical church and then left that to devote herself to community service and worship, as she said was proper, in her own way. She became the local head of several national social service groups and now devotes herself to attending workshops and meetings. Amalia regained custody of small Arnalia after her brother and sister-in-law divorced. Mrs. D continues to teach in the local school. I relocated my term abroad to Suva and returned to Fiji with two more groups of Union students, in spring 2005 and fall 2006. On the national level in spring 2001, after a year under an interim government put in place by the military, Fiji held national elections under the 1997 constitution that had led to the controversial election of the Chaudhry government in 1999. This constitution had reserved for indigenous Fijians a share of parliamentary seats greater than their proportion in the overall population. But it had angered indigenous Fijians by failing to reserve for them the office of prime minister, causing them to desert the party that had set the constitution in place, Rabuka's SVT.

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While preserving the 1997 constitution in face of demands to replace it with one reserving the highest office for an indigenous Fijians seemed to be a good sign, the results of the 2001 election suggested that ethnic polarization in Fiji was as bad as it had even been. Indo-Fijians voted overwhelmingly to restore Chaudhry and his Labour party but lost to indigenous Fijians (who had a greater share of the vote) who rallied behind Qarase the leader of the interim government that had taken over after the 2000 coup. Even more disturbing was Qarase's refusal to grant to the Labour party the Cabinet positions to which they were constitutionally entitled as a party that had won at least ten percent of the parliamentary seats, a decision challenged in the courts. In spring 2005 when I was in Suva with another Union term abroad, Fiji was planning for a national election in 2006 and Qarase's ruling party, the Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewe ni Vanua (the united party of the members of the vanua) had placed before parliament a controversial Reconciliation bill suggesting that it is in keeping with both Fijian tradition, and international peacekeeping principles, to suspend prosecution of those involved in the 2000 coup in favor of mediation and reconciliation. When I left Suva in June 2005, friends there were predicting that the main intention of the Bill was to grant amnesty to the coup leaders and that, if the Bill passed, there would be a coup led by the heavily indigenous Fijian military. Indeed, the military publicly declared opposition to the bill saying it was wrong to free people who had displaced a lawfully elected government. Other people I talked to suggested that with such dissension within the indigenous Fijian community, the Indo-Fijian dominated Labour party was sure to win in the 2006 election, and that this too would bring a coup. This, some of my urban friends argued, was not because people were opposed to an Indo-Fijian Prime Minister, but just because they didn't like Chaudhry, who was too "cheeky." But in May 2006 Qarase and the SDL were after all returned to power, only to be displaced by a military coup less than a year later when the Qarase government reintroduced the Reconciliation Bill to parliament, along with another controversial bill, the Qoliqoli Bill that would have returned control over coastal waters to indigenous clans. This coup pitted an indigenous Fijian military commander, Bainimarama, against an indigenous Fijian Prime Minister, Qarase. Bainimarama indicated that he felt that Qarase and his government were unduly promoting indigenous Fijian rights over those of other ethnic groups. When I left Suva, just before the 2006 coup, my indigenous Fijian friends were deeply divided about the incipient crisis. National level events have confirmed my earlier impressions of the fluid and contingent nature of indigenous Fijian identity. Some urban Fijians talked about the importance of maintaining an indigenous Fijian Prime Minister and ruling party. But successful urban professionals also

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talked about the need to free themselves from too many vanua obligations in order to harbor their resources to educate their children (see also Ewins 1998; Norton 2000). One of the Suva host mothers carefully instructed her seven-year-old daughter to avoid making friends with indigenous Fijian children, since they would "drag her down" and prevent her from focusing on her schoolwork. Barber (1997) and many others (Keesing 1989; Lawson 1996; Waters 1995) warn of the dangers of a contemporary global village where people are caught between the equally undesirable poles of being overwhelmed by a homogenized "McDonalds" world culture, and being trapped in rigid, essentialized, re-invented traditions. But examining Rakiraki identities has shown a more fluid and positive situation. The way that international ideologies "imploded" into the local situation (Appadurai 1996) was obvious as villagers discussed the plight of native Hawaiians and the Maori, were influenced by a national (and before the colonial) rhetoric about Fijian communalism, and catered to the stereotypes held by international tourists. But villagers conceive of themselves as autonomous individuals who choose from amongst an array of alternatives ways of embedding themselves in communities. And examining individual narratives reveals that individuals conceive of themselves and their relationship to a larger community in different ways. When people make their choices they configure ideologies in idiosyncratic ways to achieve respect, control and a sense of self-worth. Furthermore, these different imaginings give rise to different kinds of group identity: sometimes villagers feel deeply committed to the idea of being guardians of a sacred, pan-Fijian, cultural tradition. But often they think of themselves as part of international religious communities, or just as part of networks of relatives who love and care for each other (see also Norton 2000; Rutz 1995). Furthermore, villagers re-imagine tradition in intragroup discourse, as Mageo (2001) suggests, in ways which are critical of the hegemonic portrait of the sacred vanua and in ways that creatively make space for new ways of living. This is not a free-for-all of unfettered reflexivity (Giddens 2000); unlike middle class Americans described by Gergen and even international elites described by Appadurai (1996), most rural indigenous Fijians are distinctly stuck in one place arid have limited possibilities for re-imagining identity in an environment that makes autonomy difficult and keeps people dependent on bonds of kinship and village. People must grapple with the hegemonic local ideology of the sacred vanua; but within that rhetoric, they can slowly justify new ways of living by redefining individuality as chiefliness, concern for the nuclear family over the extended family as an emphasis on love and so on. I started by suggesting that a good look at the way individuals and communities configure their lives in our postrnodern world would add

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much to a literature which, at least in Fiji, has tended to focus on national politics ( e g Kelly and Kaplan 2001; Lawson 1996). I conclude by suggesting that the complicated imaginings of personal and group identity in Rakiraki give us a picture that belies the apparent ethnic polarization at the national level. We were frankly disconcerted when Rakiraki villagers rallied solidly behind Speight's coup within a few hours. We toyed with the idea that we had completely misjudged local opinion about the Chaudhry government but then remembered such things as the fact that only three men from the Rakiraki area had gone to a march in Lautoka (just a two-hour drive away) to attend a protest march just a few weeks before the coup. But in hindsight I suggest that such attitudes were by no means inevitable, nor will they inevitably continue in the future. Rakiraki villagers did display deep-seated distrust of Indo-Fijians. Yet many villagers had been willing to tolerate the presence of a democratically elected Indo-Fijian Prime Minister for almost a year before the coup. Moreover, as has been apparent in the previous chapters, Rakiraki villagers had entertained many other ways of "imagining" their nation in the year before the coup other than as a indigenous polity to be defended from foreign LC guests." In some contexts, villagers saw indigenous Fijians as a cohesive group of "host" people with a sacred relationship to the land. They saw this host group as under siege by a crafty, manipulative, Indo-Fijian community intent on wresting economic and political power away from the indigenous Fijians. But on many occasions, Rakiraki villagers were more concerned with their relationship with other groups within the indigenous Fijians community than with Indo-Fijians. Villagers spoke resentfully of people from the southeast of Viti Levu and from Lau who monopolized bureaucracy and government and who claimed superiority over the Western sugar producing regions of Viti Levu. In still other contexts, many villagers, particularly those who were younger and who worked for wages outside the village, spoke of themselves as part of an international community united by religion and/or economy. In this mode, villagers argued that ethnicity should make no difference in politics and that the focus should be on promoting development within Fiji. Villagers also disagreed on the role of the traditional Fijian vanua and their chiefly leaders in the larger nation. Some people argued that chiefs, as heads of sacred vanua should have a strong role in politics while others felt that vanua and national politics should be separate and that the chiefs should not "dirty their hands" by involving themselves in political wrangling (see also Norton 2000; Rutz 1995). Rakiraki villagers had conceived of their selves and their communities in different ways and these complicated views did not disappear with the coup. Martha Kaplan and John Kelly (1999,2001) suggest a move to a dialogic view of the formation of nation-states and cultural identities.

Identity in a "Postcultural" World

139

Ideas about cultural identity and nationhood, Kaplan and Kelly suggest, result from complex negotiations between numerous actors embedded in real situations with real material and political stakes. While some players obviously have more power than others, we cannot assume that these more dominant parties have the power to impose their view of the situation. Nor can we assume that any group even has a single unified view. Instead, each player has the ability to see the situation in numerous ways, and the eventual outcome results fkom an overlapping of interests producing consensus in a particular direction. This model, I feel applies particularly well to the situation we observed in Rakiraki. It might seem that the villagers' support for Speight reflected deep-seated underlying distrust of Indo-Fijians and a widely shared view that the Fijian nation must be an extension of the traditional Fijian landed community, the vanua. However, villagers did not always have that view. It was specific situational factors that produced a consensus behind Speight in Rakiraki. Specifically, I have argued elsewhere (Brison 2002) that particular local circumstances under which the coup unfolded created an illusion of a solid consensus in Rakiraki behind reserving high government office for indigenous Fijians, even though this did not exist before the coup and might well again evaporate as future events bring other kinds of group oppositions to the fore. I suggest, first, the illusion of consensus was created by a wellknown Fijian preference for avoiding public mention of conflict (Arno 1985, 1993). I argue that, before the coup, there had been significant disagreement among villagers about the Chaudhry government and about the Fijian nation more generally, so people had generally avoided discussing national politics. The consequence was an absence of clearly formulated views. However, Speight's actions were so dramatic that it was impossible for villagers to maintain their silence any longer: there was a general need for public discussion in wake of the crisis to help people to understand the situation. Furthermore, a rumor that George Speight was "a true son" of the Ra province of which Rakiraki is a part, made villagers feel enough confidence in other's support for him to venture their opinions in public. This confidence was increased when the Tui Navitilevu, came out publicly in support of the coup. When people began to discuss the issue, the cultural preference for the preservation of public harmony created a tendency for discussions to quickly reach consensus around what seemed to be the safest (that is, most likely to be generally agreed upon) view of the coup. This consensus crystallized around local loyalties since these were the most certain common ground amongst villagers. At the local level, this suggests that Fijian identity and indigenous Fijian views of nation are by no means as rigid as might appear. On a more theoretical level, this suggests that cultural identity and ideas about

140

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nation must always be analyzed not as a product of universal forces but as emergent products of complex local negotiations. A final note on self construction in a world where our informants, particularly those on the margins in places like Fiji, have a robust awareness of cultural differences in ways of conceiving of selves. Like all of us, Fijians find themselves with limited life possibilities and craft life stories to make these circumstances meaningful; unlike us, however, Fijians find themselves assigned a place in a world system as bearers of a quaint premodern culture which makes it difficult for them to imagine their lives in other ways.

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Index

2001 elections, 136 Abu-Lughod, Lila, xv, 10, 67 Abu-Lughod, Lila, and Catherine Lutz, 67 Adler, Patricia, and Peter Adler, 119,120 adolescents (teenagers), xvi, xvii, 88 Ahart, Sarah, xvi, xvii, xviii Appadurai, Arjun, xii, xv, 5, 12, 137 Arno, Andrew, 17,19,23,139 Bahktin, Mikhail, 6 Barber, Benjamin, xii, 4, 6, 137 Barth, Fredrik, 4 Bauan dialect, 14,28-29,30, 34-36, 50, 121, 122; boys' use of, 126; evangelical Christians' use of, 123; girls' use of, 119, 128; outside prestige code, 122; prayer, 34; Bauan social structure, 25-26,3 1 Becker, Anne, xiii, xvii, 9, 69 beliefs about illness, 74 Besnier, Niko, xiii, 8, 39, 119, 122, 133 Bloch, Maurice, 16, 18,23 British colonial government, 3, 97, 111, 116; and construction of Fijian tradition, 25,3 1, 112 canefarming, 110,111,112 Carrier, James, and Aschah Carrier, 19 Cederbaum, Debbie, xvi, xvii Chaudhry, Mahendra, xi, xii, 48, 114, 115, 116, 135, 136, 137, 139 Clifford, James, xv

chiefly structure, 13, 16, 17 20,21, 68; and modernity, 95-108; national, 34; and Westernization, 80-84, 106 childrearing, 9, 104 children, 119-133; gender differences, 14, 123-133; language, 14, 119-133; peer culture, 120-133; play, 14, 119-133 Christianity, 88, 112; fundamentalism, 8; new religious movements, 24; sociocentric self, 66; see also Evangelical Churches; see also Methodist Church community meetings, 15,140 confederacies, 34; Burebasaga, 34, 35; Kubuna, 35 Corsaro, William, 119 coup, 2000, xi, 116, 136, 137, 139 Davidson, Allan, 42,43, 66 Devine, Peter, xix, 128 dispute settlement, 30-3 1,38 dodonu, 18 Duranti, Alessandro, 16, 17, 19,23, 26 Eckert, Penelope, 120 education, 75, 92, 96, 104, 112, 116; attitudes of teachers, 97-98; claim to status, 3 1,34, 52, 68, 69,78,90, 104; girls, 129, 130; Ministry of, 3, 97; secondary school, xviii, 3,24, 76, 85, 87; Teachers College, 85,90, 91 English, 54; attitudes toward, 54, 81, 122, 125, 126, 128, 132; boys' use of, 127-133

Index Englund, Ham, xiii, 96 Englund, Ham, and Jerry Leach, 95 evangelical churches, xi, xiv, 4, 12, 41,42,43,51-65, 135; Assemblies of God, 4 1, 5 1,54, 56, 59, 60, 80; association with United States, 54; Bauan, 129; challenging the vanua, 54,56; egalitarian structure, 5 1;gender roles, 56; girls, 130; Holiness Revival Fellowship, 5 1, 55-56; individualism, 52-53, 62; Jehovah's Witnesses, 5 1, 54; kava, 55; Nazarene Church, 51; rank, 52, 55,58; Seventh Day Adventists, 41, 51, 58; sociocentric self, 57; use of English, 54, 134n; women, 59-63, 68; World Christian Fellowship, 51, 52, 56, 60,61, 79 Ewing, Catherine, 5, 6 Ewins, Rory, 137 Farley, Brian, 9-10 Ferguson, James, 95 figured worlds, 6, 13,94 Fiji Council of Social Services, 97 Fiji Sugar Corporation, 114 Fijian Affairs Board, 2 Fine, Gary Allan, 119 formal speech, 16, 17, 18, 19,23 Foster, Robert, 4 fosterage, 69-72,77 funerals, xv, 4,26,32,33,45,49, 112 Friedman, Jonathon, xii Frykholm, Amy 66n Gal, Susan, 124 Garrett, Paul, and Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, 120 Gergen, Kenneth, 5, 137 Giddens, Anthony, 5, 6, 7, 8,41, 137

Gilligan, Carol, 119 globalization, xii, 4- 6 Gonzalez, Nanci, 120 Goodwin, Marjorie, 119, 120 gossip, 23,24,28, 30,3 1, 54,55, 76,77, 89, 92 Gregg, Erinn xvi, xvii Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson, xii Haag, Amanda, xix Hannerz, Ulf, xii Hill, Jane, 133n Holland, Dorothy, 6, 13, 82,93 Holland, Dorothy, and Margaret Eisenhart, xii homosexuals, 116, 127 illegitimate children, 71 Indo-Fijians, x, xii, xviii, 2,3,7, 10, 11,20,24, 30,32,33,39, 48, 54,77, 85, 88, 97, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 136, 138 Insults, 125 Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal, 123, 133n,134n Johnson, Amber, xvi Kaplan, Martha, 25,34, 110, 118 Kaplan, Martha, and John Kelly, 138 see also Kelly, John, and Martha Kaplan Katz, Richard, ix, x, 15, 18,44, 140 kava, 3, 15, 17,20,22,24,26, 54, 74,140 Keesing, Roger, xii, 7,95, 137 Kelly, John, and Martha Kaplan, 7, 8, 137; see also Kaplan, Martha, and John Kelly kerekere, 113 kindred, 72,77 Kirkpatrick, John, and Geoffrey White, 9 Kondo, Dorrine, 6

Index Kray, Christine, xiii, 7, 8, 42,43, 66 Kuipers, Joel, 17 Kulick, Don, 121 Labour party, 136 land leases, 48-49,97, 110, 111, 113, 115 language death, 121 language ideologies, 120, 121-1 33 language socialization, 120 Lau, 117 Lawson, Stephanie, xii, 7,95, 137, 138 Leavitt, Stephen, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 111,104 Lee, Megan, xvi, xvii, 58 life stories, xv, xvi, 4, 6, 8, 1&13, 139; men, 13,109-1 18; women, 13,67-93,97-108 Linnekin, Jocelyn, xii, 95 loloma, x Lutz, Catherine, 9

149

modernization theory, 95,96,97 Morton, Helen, 9,69, 123 mothers, 71, 77,78 multiculturalism, 9 1 multiracialism, 117 Myers, Fred, and Donald Brenneis, 17,38 Nason, Michelle, xvi, xvii, xvii Newland, Lynda, 42 Norton, Robert, xii, 25,34, 110, 137,138 nuclear families, 77,95,96, 99, 104 Ochs, Elinor, 9, 84, 120, 123 Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps, 6, 13,93 Peace Corps, 101 Pickering, Apryle, xvi, xvii pregnancy, 73 Qarase, Laisenia, 136

Maccoby, Elinor, 119 Mageo, Jeanette, xii, xiii, 10, 137 mana, 18,84 marriage, xv, 7 1, 112; arranged, 73, 78,83 Martin, David, 43,53 masculinity, 126, 127 mata ni vanua, 16,21,35, 36, 140 McHugh, Ernestine, 9-10 Methodist church, xi, 2, 12,20,23, 29,36,41-49,53,99, 108, 117, 124, 134n, 135; history, 44; individualism, 57, 58, 62; rank, 43-45,51-52,59,63-65; sociocentric self, 4650, 53; vanua, 50,56; use of Bauan, 50,53 military, 136 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 47,51,54,56 modernity, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 11, 13, 66, 95

Ra dialect, 13,29,30, 50; associated with vanua, 121, 122 boys, 119, 124-133; macho autonomy, 123; sevusevu, 34-36 rank, 17,21,22,24,25, 116; age, 109, 110; ambiguity about, 25-29, 38, 87, 88; central to indigenous identity, 33; disagreement with urban relatives, 37; fluidity, 17; in Methodist church, 41; regional disagreement about, 34-35; women, 26,69 Ratu Mara, xi, 116, 117 Ravuvu, Asalele, x, 3, 17,43,44, 76 Reconciliation bill, 136 retribalization, xii, 6, 7 Riles, Analese, 95

Index Robbins, xiii, 6, 8,42,43, 50, 66, 95 Robertson, Robbie, and William Sutherland, xii Rogoff, Barbara, 120 Romaine, Suzanne, 121 romance, xvi, 78 Rumsey, Alan, 133n Rutz, Henry, 137, 138 Sahlins, Marshall, 9 Samoa, 10, 15, 17, 19, 39n, 84, 123,140 saturated selves, 5 Schieffelin, Bambi, 120 sevusevu, xi, xv, 15-40,41,46, 50, 57,117,140 siblings, 74-75, 81, 83, 84 Sienluewicz, Stephanie, xvi, xvii, xviii, 20, 60, 61, 62, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 small business, 8 1, 103 sociocentric self, xiii, xiv, 7, 8, 9-13,58,67-93; cultural construction of emotion, 9; partible persons, 9; oversimplified, 9; women, 67-93 Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewe ni Vanua (SDL), 136 sorcery, 24,30,31,38, 75, 76, 77, 84,89,112,116 Sparks, Emily, xvii, xviii, 50,92, 109,111,112 Speight, George, xii, 116, 117, 137, 138,139 spirit mediums, 76 Spiro, Melford, 9 Spitz, Andy, xvi, xvii, 58, 59 Stanley, David, 15-16,3 1,39n 140 Strathem, Marilyn, 9 Strauss, Claudia, xvi, 6, 14n, 57, 67,120,140; and Naomi Quinn, 6 Sylvain, Renee, xii

tattoos, 128 teknonyms, 29 Thomas, Nicholas, xii, 7 Tomlinson, Matt, 42, 50 Tonga, 15,39n, 42,123,133,140 Toren, Christina, 119 tourists, xviii, 15, 19, 3 1, 32,46, 137,140 translocal identities, 13, 119 Turner, James, 17, 18,28 urban relatives, 36 vanua, ix, 6,20,21,22,23,29,30, 37,44,45,46,49,52, 53,54, 57, 58, 65,72,76,77,99, 102, 104, 109, 110; connection to land, 28; women, 68 vasu, 55 Volai ni Kawa Bula, 25, 55 vu, x, xi, 18,21,22,44 warriors, 117 Waters, Malcolm, 6,41, 137 weddings, 35-36

Zentella, Ana, 120

About the Author

Karen J. Brison is associate professor of anthropology at Union College, Schenectady, New York. She received her B.A. degree in anthropology and geography from McGill University (1981) and then received her M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1988) in anthropology from University of California, San Diego. She conducted twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea from 1984 to 1986. Her Kwanga research focused on constructions of local history and identity in village meetings and gossip and resulted in a book, Just Talk: Gossip, Meeting and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village (University of California Press, 1992) as well as numerous articles on gender, mourning, and postcolonial identity. In 1997, she began to do research in Fiji and continued this research in 1999-2000 and in 2003, 2005, and 2006. Her Fiji research has resulted in numerous articles published in Ethos, Ethnology, and Pacijk Studies and examines constructions of personal, gendered, and cultural identity in public and private discourse. She has studied Pentecostal churches, traditional ceremonial speech, conducted life history interviews with rural and urban Fijians, and has examined children's constructions of identity in play. In 2005, she began doing research in Suva, Fiji where she is currently studying preschools and Pentecostal churches.