Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

Feared Rumours and Rumours of Fear: The Politicisation of Ethnicity During the Fiji Coup in May 2000

In this article I explore rumour and fear as crucial to the politicisation of ethnicity and the attempt of ethno‐nationalists to gain political hegemony during the coup in Fiji in May 2000. I discuss rumours during the Fiji crisis as emotional discourses articulating fears and anxieties that have influenced interethnic relations in Fiji since the indenture of Indian labour. I argue that these feelings of fear and insecurity are linked historically to issues of land, demography and race and investigate how the George Speight Team and Fijian ethno‐nationalists aimed at reinforcing and foregrounding these emotions to mobilise support. I also look at the role of rumours and fear in the silencing of dissent and opposing voices. I ask how rumours were in dialogue with other discourses circulating at the height of the crisis and how they complemented ethno‐nationalist political strategies. I suggest that part of the political success of the George Speight Team stems from their effective engagement of different local, national and global levels to reinforce an old discourse of ethnic Fijian unity and fear of Indo‐Fijian colonisation around which they mobilised ethnically based political support. The effect of this ‘indigenous articulation’ was a polarisation of Fijian and Indo‐Fijian positionings in the nation.     

Drinking to Mana and Ethnicity: Trajectories of Yaqona Practice and Symbolism in Eastern Fiji

This paper sets out a transformational history of yaqona use in Fiji from first contact with Europeans to present times. Trying to transcend the familiar history/structure dichotomy, two relatively separate trajectories of Fijian practice are identified, both incorporating enduring cultural premises, both logically and historically transformative. In the older of these trajectories, yaqona drinking is transformed ritually to promote or block the circulation of mana in embodied Fijian ‘lands’. In the younger pathway, by contrast, secular variants of yaqona ceremonial are invented to ethnic effect as one particular transformation of a modern structure that, against the grain of ritual practice, tends to detach ethnic Fijians from ancestral powers. It is suggested that, whilst, in appropriate spaces, contemporary ethnic objectifications of yaqona are formulated in opposition to other ethnic presences as expressions of ‘authentic’ Fijian‐ness, the underlying ritual transformations of yaqona produce a range of Fijian states that exceed this authenticity and challenge the otherwise hegemonic claims of ethnicity.     

History,Hermeneutics and Fijian Ethnic ‘Paramountcy’

The historical context in which Fiji's Deed of Cession was formulated satisfied the necessary conditions for British annexation and included safeguards for Fijian land rights. Both Fijian and English texts implied that the incoming government would respect Fijian custom. For over 60 years, Fijians benefited from a special administrative status in territorial government, restrictions on land alienation and privileged access to departments of the colonial executive. But Fijian commoners were disadvantaged in education, and resisted payment of head taxes. The tax crisis exposed the inability of chiefs to grapple with reform of local government. Faced with electoral competition in the post-war period, Fijian leadership took refuge in a racial view of political legitimacy, derived from an interpretation of the Deed as a ‘charter’ of Fijian rights.

After independence, Fijian need for reassurances about preferential treatment in a parliamentary democracy was fuelled by commoner dissatisfaction with Alliance administration and by a political party formed by the Council of Chiefs. This faction provided a considered ideology for a racial view of ethnic ‘sovereignty’ in a plural society by ignoring the issue of citizenship and over-emphasising the role of the monarch in the language of the Deed. Other commentaries have also favoured an anachronistic interpretation of the political legacy of the Deed, but none of the post-1987 regimes has adopted its terms in Fijian municipal law. Such a suggestion has been made, however, as a defence of commoner rights against Fijian government agencies on the model of the Waitangi Tribunal.     

Traditional Fijian Apology as a Political Strategy

This paper is a reflection upon tradition in Fiji, taking up the question of a controversial ceremony of apology during the 2000 Fijian crisis. A subject of dispute, as much for the social actors as for anthropologists, the notion of tradition that I piece together appears as just such an object of negotiation — between interlocutors but equally between they and the anthropologist. While stressing articulations between customary and constitutional rights, it also highlights the personal and collective strategies that are hidden behind a conflict said to be ethnic, and in the construction of Fijian nationalism.     

Mixed Outcomes: The Impact of Regional Autonomy and Decentralization on Indigenous Ethnic Minorities in Indonesia

This article examines how indigenous ethnic minorities in Indonesia are being affected by the implementation of decentralization and regional autonomy policies. New legislation transferred responsibility and authority over various issues, including resource extraction and local governance, from the central government to regional authorities at the district level. Members of the growing indigenous rights movement hoped that this decentralization process would allow ethnic minority communities to retain or regain control over natural resources through local‐level politics. Furthermore, some ethnic minorities saw the implementation of decentralization as an opportunity to return to local forms of land tenure and resource management that had been disparaged by the national government for most of the twentieth century. However, these new laws also encourage district level governments to generate income through natural resource exploitation, as they will receive a certain percentage of these revenues. Minority communities could be adversely affected as local governments disregard their land rights in efforts to raise income to cover their new expenses, essentially continuing the practices of previous governments. This article examines the new opportunities, as well as the new threats, posed by decentralization to ethnic minorities throughout Indonesia.     

'You are not a White Woman!'

During her trial for assault in Fiji in 1915, Stella Spencer was accused of improperly associating with and even making love to native Fijians, in such a way as to prejudice the order of the colony. The background to the trial was Spencer's work on behalf of the populist Fijian leader of the Viti Company, Apolosi Nawai. As well as using the trial in an attempt to vilify Nawai as a crook, the European colonists asserted a harsh racial division with regard to sexual conduct between the races. Sexual intercourse symbolised a diminution of white prestige. This article tells the story of Apolosi Nawai and Stella Spencer from contemporaneous reports, the Fijian National Archives and the Colonial Office Archives     

Converging anticipatory geographies in Oceania: The Belt and Road Initiative and Look North in Fiji

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been ‘re-placed’ into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society.     

Missionaries and Cannibals in Nineteenth‐century Fiji

This article examines the controversies concerning both customary cannibalism and missionary ethnography. Focusing on Fiji, it supports the conclusions of Marshall Sahlins about both issues, demonstrating that the attempts of William Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere and others to debunk “cannibal talk” are flawed in several ways. The eyewitness testimony of numerous missionaries and non‐missionaries in Fiji from the 1830s to the 1870s provides an extensive evidentiary basis for examining both controversies. Some of the testimony comes from indigenous witnesses, moreover, including Thakombau, who became known—or notorious—to Europeans as “the King of the Cannibals”. The article briefly recounts Thakombau's role in the processes of conversion and colonization. Two key texts that are closely analyzed as examples of missionary ethnography are Reverend Joseph Waterhouse's The King and People of Fiji and Reverend Thomas Williams's Fiji and the Fijians.     

Tales of Two Fijis: early 1960s Japanese travel writing by Kanetaka Kaoru and Kita Morio

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses impressions of Fiji in 1961, recorded by two well-known Japanese travel writers: travel journalist Kanetaka Kaoru and writer Kita Morio. Their comments on ethnic Fijians' attitudes to work and on encounters with a variety of Indigenous Fijians, including ratu (hereditary chiefs), made the observed people ‘others' informing the travellers' views on post-war colonial Fiji in an era when little was known about Fiji in Japan. Differing views on colonialism underpinned the two authors' views. At the time, Kita and Kanetaka revised but replicated the assumptions of pre-war Japanese writing about Nanyō (the South Seas) and of Western travelogues on the Pacific Islands. While Kita passed blunt and prejudiced judgements, he demonstrated an awareness of colonialism's adverse effects and of concerns also felt by the colonial administration about the place of Indigenous Fijians in the modern world. Kanetaka, seemingly without awareness of her latent prejudice, praised Fiji as a near-perfect colony that benefitted from colonialism.     

Missing or Misdiagnosed? General Paralysis of the Insane,Yaws, and Syphilis in Fiji, 1884–1940

ABSTRACT

General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI) was a deadly disease, once common in Fiji’s lunatic asylum and, by the early 20th century, thought to be caused by syphilis. The conundrum is that the majority of GPI sufferers in the asylum were Indigenous Fijians, considered to have immunity to syphilis. This immunity was probably through the prevalence of yaws amongst Indigenous Fijians. Yaws had symptoms similar to GPI and syphilis with which it was easily confused. Yaws and syphilis also invoked divergent scientific and moral discourses, with implications for how medical and scientific knowledge about the aetiology of GPI and associated moral discourses were transferred to Fiji. This paper discusses European nosology and diagnosis of GPI, yaws and syphilis, asking if GPI was misdiagnosed in Fiji, or if reports of GPI among Fijians and the effects of yaws on the nervous system are missing from tropical medicine orthodoxy.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

The Republic of the Marshall Islands since 1990

Rioting that followed clashes between police and strikers in Suva in December 1959 was interpreted by the authorities and the European minority as being motivated by anti-European feeling. But the racial interpretation of the strike tells us more about the authorities' own fears of solidarity between Indians and Fijians than it does about the strikers actual motivations, which were simply to advance an economic demand. The racialisation of the dispute came afterwards, in the suppression of the strike, and the reassertion of traditional Fijian authority vested in the Council of Chiefs, whose appeal to Fijians was made in specifically anti-Indian terms. The return to traditional authority prevented moves to modernise Fijian society.     

Viti,the Soil from Eden: On Historical Praxis as a Mode of Connecting in Kadavu

Looking at Fijian Methodism and its role in discourses on identity in Fiji leads to the question of the relationship between Christianity and the vanua, the complex notion of land so crucial for ethnic Fijians' traditionalistic identity constructions. How is it possible to retain important dimensions of the vanua within a Christian worldview? An attempt to understand this relationship using the example of a Fijian meke makes clear that specific ways of constructing the past are crucial here. A concept of history as a symbolic form renders these ways of constructing the past understandable as historical — and it is exactly this historical character which opens the possibility of establishing a relationship to the Christian God while retaining essential dimensions of the vanua, a possibility which can provide one experiential background for the plausibility of an ethnic interpretation of Christianity.     

Retheorizing Mana: Bible Translation and Discourse of Loss in Fiji

‘Mana’ has been a key term in anthropological theory since the late nineteenth century, but, as Roger Keesing argued more than twenty years ago, it is necessary to rethink mana theoretically based on its changing usage in Oceanic discourse. Keesing criticized mana's nominalization and substantivization by anthropologists. In this paper I review his criticisms and expand upon his argument, making three related claims based on data from Fiji. First, mana is canonically a verb in Fijian, but contemporary speakers frequently use it in its nominalized and substantivized form. Second, a key reason for this nominalization is mana's use in the Fijian Bible to denote ‘miracles’ as well as homonymous ‘manna,’ the food given by God to the Israelites. Third, in order to understand mana in present‐day Fiji, scholars must consider it in the context of widespread discourse about decline, loss, and diminution.     

‘Sharing the white man's burden’ Nazi colonial revisionism and Australia's New‐Guinea mandate

ABSTRACT

The September 2014 general elections in Fiji resulted in a decisive victory for Prime Minister Bainimarama and his FijiFirst Party. It indicated a desire for stability on the part of the electorate as well as the popularity of measures such as ‘free’ education and the removal of affirmative action programmes for Indigenous Fijians. The Social Democratic Liberal Party garnered a significant portion of the Indigenous vote through appeals to ethnic identity, but will need to broaden its base in future to have any chance of forming a government. The high voter enrolment and participation reflects a hope for more accountability as well as transparency, in contrast to the arbitrariness of the previous eight years. New oversight institutions and a more expansive bill of rights in the constitution offer some ground for cautious optimism in the face of cynicism about the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions.     

The trial of consul pritchard

Abstract

William Pritchard, Fiji's first British consul, quickly became a pivotal figure after his arrival in 1858, negotiating an offer of cession, establishing a court, stabilising relations among the resident populations, and resisting Tongan threats to the power of Cakobau, the leading chief. In 1859 the Fijian chiefs gave him ‘supreme authority to govern Fiji’. His resistance to the Tongan faction put him at odds with Wesleyan missionaries, who influenced Col. William Smythe, who was sent by the British government to investigate the offer of cession. Smythe recommended against cession and campaigned for the government to send a commission to investigate Pritchard's conduct, charging him with financial irregularities and interfering in Fijian native affairs. Pritchard was dismissed from office, but records reveal the commission to have been a travesty. Pritchard influenced events in Fiji at a crucial time, and his reputation and career deserve reassessment.     

Geochemical Characterization of Lapita Pottery Via Inductively Coupled Plasma–mass Spectrometry (ICP–MS)

We have obtained high‐resolution elemental data on Lapita ceramics (3200–2700 cal year bp ) from Fiji, Tonga and New Ireland using chemistry‐based inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP–MS). These data show clear elemental distinctions between Lapita pottery manufactured in Fiji, Tonga and New Ireland, and demonstrate significant elemental variation in Fijian ceramics collected from settlements in close proximity to one another. Therefore, we anticipate that ICP–MS will become an effective technique for tracking the transfer of Lapita pottery within and between different island groups in Oceania.     

The Qawa incident in 1968 and other cases of ‘spirit possession’: Religious Syncretism in Fiji

Abstract

Government medical officers investigating an outbreak among adolescent Indian schoolgirls in Fiji diagnosed mass hysteria and identified the trigger girl. Their school was temporarily closed and parents were advised to keep their daughters quietly at home. The Hindu parents were not satisfied with reassurances, since they believed that their children had been possessed by hostile Fijian spirits of a sacred pool on the edge of the school playground that had been damaged by an Indian bulldozer operator who later died. The girls were taken to Hindu healers and to a Muslim healer with Fijian‐derived powers. The local Fijian chief performed a Fijian ceremony of appeasement at the pool. A Hindu pujari prayed to the Hindu elephant god and, following Fijian ritual, poured yaqona (kava) into the pool and asked the spirits for forgiveness. Finally a Hindu pandit prayed to Hindu gods to exorcise the evil spirits, conducting the public Om Shanti ceremony. All the girls who attended the final ceremony recovered. The Indian and Fijian communities combined their beliefs and rituals to appease the spirits and, as far as they were concerned, to cause the girls to recover and to remove the troubles from the school and to prevent further troubles from occurring.