Performing Masculinity: Body, Self and Identity in Modern Fiji 9781350043343, 9781350043367, 9781350043350

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Performing Masculinity

Also available from Bloomsbury: Food, Masculinities and Home, edited by Michelle Szabo and Shelley L. Koch Making Aboriginal Men and Music in Central Australia, Ase Ottosson The Performance of Gender, Cecilia Busby

Performing Masculinity Body, Self and Identity in Modern Fiji Geir Henning Presterudstuen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Geir Henning Presterudstuen, 2019   Geir Henning Presterudstuen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page.   Cover image © Vincent Talbot / Getty Images   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4334-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4335-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-4337-4   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Modernities, masculinities and the Fijian body: Connections and conceptualizations 2 Performing masculinity through Christian devotion: Methodism and manhood 3 ‘Living in Hell’: Performing Indo-Fijian masculinities 4 Making a living: Land, labour, trade and tradition for modern Fijian men 5 Drinking, hyper-masculinity and insolence 6 Betting-men and bad money: Modern masculinities and consumption 7 Sex, sexualities and the modern body Postscript: Modern masculinities in Fiji and theoretical implications

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Notes Bibliography Index

1 27 49 73 97 117 139 159 169 175 191

Preface Some thirty years after the ‘masculinity turn’ in social science research, the concept seems more central to contemporary discussions than ever before. As part of a zeitgeist in which identity politics has come under renewed scrutiny and the divisions in a number of social justice discourses have seemingly sharpened, the notion of masculinity as a social category has captured the public imagination and has made its way beyond academic institutions. On one level, the notion of ‘toxic masculinity’ is frequently given explanatory power in discussions about gendered violence and sexual assault as well as in other forms of problem behaviours in which men are over-represented as perpetrators. On another level, a bourgeoning field of men’s rights activists and commentators are proffering the notion that men and their masculinities are under sustained and unfair attack from feminists, critical theorists and liberal politicians. In both these analytical narratives, men, of the traditional Euro-American working classes, those whom the sociologist Michael Kimmel labelled ‘angry white men’ in his 2013 publication, have come to represent the frustration and discontent permeating late modern life. Increasingly, it is the discontent of these groups that is seen to fuel local and global conflicts and is harnessed by political forces that see the protection of men’s privilege as central to a broader agenda of defending ‘Western traditions’ and ‘values’ against an ill-defined group of others that includes women, non-Westerners and marginal men of all categories. Despite the Western-centric nature of these discourses, many of the same issues are mirrored in the global south where they emerge in tandem with a series of long-standing structural dynamics that define global inequalities. Still, perspectives from these locales are much less prevalent in popular as well as academic discussions. This book is, among other things, an attempt at showing what anthropological insights about how men construct and perform masculine self-identities in a rapidly changing context outside the Euro-American centre can add to our understanding of gender, modernity and some of the key challenges of our present time. This conceptualization follows the analytical move proposed by bell hooks, the prominent American feminist, in her influential book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre in 1984. Using her own experience of coming of age in an

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underprivileged black community in a racially divided southern town in 1960s’ United States, hooks formulates a strong argument for the need to privilege the views of the marginalized in order to better understand complex social dynamics. Being marginalized, black Americans had a dual perspective on their town and their own circumstances that privileged white people, insulated from their black counterparts by social class and railroad tracks, did not have: ‘We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out’ (hooks 1984: ix). This principle, of building critical theory based on insights from the margin, became the linchpin for hooks’s new feminist theory, and has since been taken up by a number of scholars seeing the scientific value of building knowledge from the outside in. Of particular interest to my project is the work of R.  W. Connell who has continued her groundbreaking scholarship in theorizing masculinities with a sustained focus on Southern Theory (2007) and ‘world-centred thinking’ (2014). These ideas serve as an inspiration for my research in that they emphasize how marginal perspectives deserve to be heard and analysed not just based on a commitment to social justice but also because they provide valuable knowledge we otherwise would not gain access to. In Fiji, constructing and performing masculinity has long been considered a way to ensure mobility from the margin to the centre. Local indigenous elites navigated the demands of early colonists to remain in charge of colonial Fiji through a system of indirect rule, ensuring the continuous authority of local patriarchs. Other natives demonstrated physical prowess and strength to gain access to the British army and rugby football. These institutions are still considered the two most viable career paths for young men and, by extension, the easiest way extended families can secure economic stability. This has recently been accentuated by the success of the Fijiian rugby sevens team, whose gold medal success in the 2016 Olympic Summer Games brought the image of Fijian warriors to a global audience. For Indo-Fijians, the patriarchal smallholding became a ticket to independence early on while today, families hedge their bets on supporting boys and young men to gain a good enough education to migrate overseas. All of these forces conspire to make masculinity, its local meanings and articulations, and the way men insert themselves into global flows and negotiate the demands of late modern society, both timely and important research foci.1 At the same time, it is challenging to frame such a research project. It is indeed unclear to me when the sense of what a study of masculinity in Fiji actually entailed started to emerge for me. For the first few months of my fieldwork, I  worked hard to make connections between my theoretical assumptions and broader research ambitions on the one hand and the data I  gathered on the

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ground on the other. I spent most of my time in the company of other men and quickly filled my notebooks with impressions, descriptions, stories and opinions from new friends and acquaintances. Still, I grappled with the fear that my total body of work would amount to little more than just a Geertzian thick description of the things men did and talked about on a regular basis. A key challenge was that I  found it difficult to engage my interlocutors themselves in discussions that were overtly about gender identities and performances. Concepts such as ‘masculinity’ and ‘gender’ had very little meaning to most of them beyond the taken-for-grantedness of distinctions between men and women, boys and girls that permeated most social settings. This gender order was in many ways seen as a completely natural state of affairs, hardly worth contemplation or discussion. It only occurred to me a bit later that this naturalized state of gender in local discourses was a productive finding in itself, and one of the core reasons why gender is in need of continuous interrogation everywhere. The pervasiveness of gender in social life, its universal cultural significance and political power is reliant upon what Harold Garfinkel (1967) labelled the ‘natural attitude’ with which people approach it. Institutionalized in most contexts, this attitude makes it difficult to challenge the validity of the key tenets of the gender order: binary distinctions between men and women, masculinity and femininity as fixed entities, a clear relationship between genitalia and gender identity and so forth. Thus self-evident gender dynamics, and the power relations they are enmeshed in, often become invisible and unspoken of in their own right, at least for those whose gender identity is settled and fit with dominant gender norms, though at the same time omnipresent in social life. Strikingly in my research context is the extent to which gender is subordinate to race as a social marker in local perceptions of identity. My interlocutors were generally much more forthcoming in discussing what they considered set them apart from each other, indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians or ‘Westerners’ (the largely Melanesian Western division of Fiji) and ‘easterners’ (i.e. the largely Polynesian kinship lines that has dominated Fijian chiefly leadership and politics since the 1800s), and from me. This speaks to the centrality that categories like race and ethnicity has taken on in Fiji and more broadly how the process of colonialism has woven together gender relations and racial hierarchies in a way that they become almost inseparable entities in local identity politics. One aspect that makes urban Fiji a productive research site, however, is the extent to which ethnic others co-relate and interact. Shortly after arriving in the field, I  rented a small self-contained flat on a sugarcane farm located on a small piece of freehold land right between the

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banks of the Nadi River and the village of Cavo on the southern outskirts of Nadi town. There, I was positioned with one foot in each of the two dominant ethnic communities. Sitting on my front porch, I had direct access to my ‘landlords’, an Indo-Fijian family of eight members across three generations who farmed the land and provided the lodgings for myself and my neighbours. Exiting from the backdoor of my flat, I could walk straight into Cavo village whose indigenous inhabitants claimed continued ownership of for over hundreds of years. In addition, I shared a compound with two other households: a small unit which comprised a single mother, an ‘émigré’ from Ono-i-Lau far east in the Fijian archipelago, with her part-European daughter; a busy household which housed a brother and sister originally hailing from Vanua Levu in Fiji’s northern province and their respective families that included seven children of school age, their 24-year-old brother William,2 who became a key interlocutor for me from the very start, as well as a work colleague who hailed from Beqa island. Soon after moving in I was invited to join my neighbours for the first of what came to be many talanoa sessions. Talanoa is at heart an informal social gathering constellated around the tanoa, the wooden bowl (or more often in contemporary Fiji, a plastic basin) in which the dried, pounded root of the kava plant is mixed with water to provide a mildly narcotic drink, but also come to stand for a particular form of sociality centered on storytelling that is common throughout the Pacific Islands. During the course of conversations on this first meeting, I made some polite inquiries about ethnic relations in Fiji and what I perceived to be the unusually diverse living arrangements on the farm we were all staying. The response from William came to be formative for how I approached my research. ‘Race politics belongs in the old Fiji,’ he said. ‘We are modern Fijians, we all live together here and make it as best we can.’ First, this statement made me aware of the forms of socialities that emerged in this social field of intercultural and inter-familial relationship that in many ways cut across some of the classic dynamics of inequality and difference in Fiji. Second, William’s deployment of the term ‘modern’ immediately interested me and came to be a productive analytical term in my future discussions with friends and interlocutors. In its rich cultural diversity, our farm served as a microcosm of my broader research context. While the western part of Fiji has always been a place where Melanesia meets Polynesia and, later, a centre for Indo-Fijian sugarcanegrowing, Nadi and its surrounds has more recently become further diversified through extensive economic migration from elsewhere in Fiji as well as other Pacific islands following the growth of the tourism sector, making it a prime research site to explore social change, intercultural dynamics and

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engagement with modernity. It is therefore surprising that these parts of Fiji have received so little academic attention. While the chiefly confederacies and more homogeneously Fijian eastern islands have been the subject of sustained inquiries by anthropologists and other social theorists for a long time, there has been little interest in the ethnography of western Fiji. Anthropological studies set in Fiji have also largely remained loyal to the anthropological convention of looking at ‘primitive’ or traditional social dynamics and have mainly been located in remote parts of the archipelago (Sahlins 1962; Nation 1978; Toren 1990; Tomlinson 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). With the early exceptions of Mamak’s studies of pluralism in Suva city (1974, 1978) and my own recent work (2010, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2016a, 2016b), the urban parts of Fiji have received little attention. There is consequently very limited published material about the social dynamics of the more modern aspects of Fijian society and the relationship between tradition and modernity in this context. Urbanism in Fiji is not a new phenomenon. From being declared the national capital and from gaining town status in 1881 to the mid-1900s, Suva grew from an area of one square mile to more than six times that size (Nayacakalou 1975: 97). Moreover, by 1945, Suva had a population of nearly 15,000, a figure which trebled over the following twenty-five years. Intra-Fijian migration represented a vast proportion of this rapid population growth of Suva, and by the 1950s, one in four Fijians were living outside their province. This urban drift arguably reshaped Fijian society and put pressure on traditional hierarchies and notions of authority. Most urban migrants were permanent settlers in new urban settings who had no real intentions of returning to their village, or even province, of origin. While undeniably maintaining a strong village identity  – I have rarely met a Fijian who do not know and identify with their local village of origin – these urban settlers lived in communities where modern forms of authority and social order soon became as prominent as traditional, customary social hierarchies. These dynamics of urbanization and social change have been further intensified in recent years. Nearly 425,000 Fiji citizens, approximately half the total population, resided in urban areas in 2010, a number which, for the first time in Fijian history, is larger than the number of rural dwellers, and these figures are valid for both indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Another emerging trend is the increasing number of people residing in informal squatter settlements. In 2009, when I commenced my main stint of fieldwork, the number of people living in squatter settlements, often battling poverty, unemployment and other social ills, was estimated to be approximately 125,000, while recent estimates

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suggest it is closer to 140,000, roughly a third of the total urban population. The significant increase in the urban population in Fiji has thus been coupled with an upsurge in the incidence of urban poverty despite policy initiatives aimed at modernizing Fiji by the creation of more jobs and initiating foreign investments in the urban centres. Market-oriented policies have seemingly contributed to the breakdown of rural, traditional Fiji, much in accordance with the initial fears of indigenous leaders and colonizers at the onset of modernization, while it has simultaneously failed to create sufficient opportunities for economic growth in urban centres. These historical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural and demographic aspects form an important backdrop to the analysis that follows. This monograph is essentially an ethnography of the relationships that emerge in the context of modern, urban Fiji and the circumstances that facilitate them through the analytical lens of gender. I emphasize the construction of masculinity in everyday social practice and focus my analysis on what men do as well as how they relate these practices to gender ideologies. Rather than a capriciously selected collection of stories about different men, the book presents a narrative built from ethnographic vignettes connected by an overarching thematic and theoretical emphasis on masculinities. The men whose experiences are foregrounded are from a fairly contained group of people: a handful of relatively young indigenous Fijians from each of the two villages, here called Vanaka and Cavo, I worked in as well as some of their seniors, two extended Indo-Fijian families who live on and cultivate pockets of freehold land in the surrounding areas as well as their affines and friends, and my neighbours on the farm that remains the focal point for my research both spatially and conceptually. This heterogeneous group of people reflects the broader demographics of Fijian urban spaces, and my main analytical focus is on how social relations are constructed and performed in the particular time-space of modern Fiji. In my discussion, I  move beyond the simplified binaries of urban/rural, traditional/ modern and local/global and attempt instead to sketch how these social processes become intertwined in my interlocutors’ real-life experiences.

The direction of this book Broadly speaking, this book can be conceived of as containing two distinct but interrelated parts. The first three chapters work together in one section to introduce the dominant, ideological constructions underpinning masculinities

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in Fiji. Chapter 1 is predominantly theoretical in nature and does a great deal of work in setting up my later ethnography. By providing a systematic overview of my theoretical and conceptual framework, this chapter serves at once as an introduction and as a roadmap for how to engage with the key ideas that run through the remainder of my analysis. The chapter starts by defining how the concepts of modernity and gender, both theoretically rich and subject to rigorous academic debate, are applied analytically throughout the book. I then move on to discuss the sociocultural construction of masculinity as it pertains to my specific ethnographic context. In closing, I reflect on how these processes are experienced and performed through the human body (to the extent that the body itself becomes a key site for the analysis of social change that follows), and intimately tied up with other social categories such as race, culture, self and identity. The next three chapters build further on the introduction and situate contemporary masculinities in Fiji’s two dominant ethnic communities, indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, respectively, in the broader historical and ideological context. Contemporary Fijian masculinities are constructed and performed in a social context which can be described as at one and the same time modern and deeply traditional. In that sense, they mirror the dynamics Kalissa Alexeyeff observed in the Cook Islands, where social practices (in her case dance and performance art) possess ‘continuity with past practices’ simultaneously as they reflect ‘disjunctures produced by European rule’ (2009: 31). The colonial influences are undoubtedly present in men’s everyday lives in Fiji, but perhaps no more striking than notions of pre-modern social hierarchies, allegiances and ideologies. That much is obvious in the coming discussions about the relationship between rugby union and Christianity (Chapter 2), for instance, or in the way men draw upon kinship categories and local allegiances in context of drinking and fist fighting (Chapter 5). What is most noticeable from a conceptual point of view, however, is how these seemingly conflicting cultural influences are intertwined in contemporary men’s masculine constructions and performances in the sense that, at least parts of the colonial influences, have been adopted as inherently Fijian and inalienable from what it means to be Fijian. At the core of the political projects of modernity and colonialization was an ambition to insert the West into social narratives and discourses everywhere; ‘within the West and outsides; in structures and in minds’ (Nandy 1983:  xi). These processes are, of course, also fundamentally gendered, and a central part of colonialism was to redeploy European understanding and ideologies of gender in encounters with indigenous peoples. There is a burgeoning field of work on colonial and postcolonial masculinities that provide important insights

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on the dynamics of these processes. Scott L. Morgensen, in his work on settler colonialism and Canada and the United States, demonstrates how colonial forms of masculinities ‘arose to violently control and replace distinctive gender systems among Indigenous peoples’ (Morgensen 2015: 38). Brendan Hokowhitu, whose long-standing and important work on masculinities and colonialism in New Zealand and the Pacific I am greatly indebted to, further confirms the centrality in gender ideologies in the colonial project. For him, ‘traditional indigenous masculinities’ were invented through these violent colonial encounters ‘in part to mirror Victorian masculinity so that settler states could better intervene into, could better assimilate, and could better govern Indigenous communities’ (Hokowhitu 2015: 84; cf. also Hokowhitu 2009). Drawing upon these insights, the analyses throughout these two chapters are largely centred on the notions of religion, race and colonialism/postcolonialism as formative modalities through which gender norms and ideals, among other social dynamics, have been historically constructed. But rather than focusing on the diachronic aspects of these discourses, I  focus my discussion on how masculinities in the present are performed in dialogue with cultural constructions such as tradition and modernity through both material practice and reflexivity. In Chapter  2, this is achieved through an exposition of how dominant ideas about indigenous Fijian masculinities are articulated through Methodist Christian ideology and performed through Christian devotion. In Chapter  3, my key focus is on Indo-Fijian men and their perceptions and performances of masculinity. Drawing a historical line from the colonial history of indenture to the present time, I  interrogate the social and political circumstances that have framed Indo-Fijian men’s culturally specific assumptions about gender and masculinity. I  pay specific attention to three key performative aspects of Indo-Fijian masculinities: hard work, Hindu religious devotion and storytelling. In my analysis, I consider these material practices as constitutive of culturally specific masculine identities that are at once embodied and fundamentally gendered. Read together, these two chapters highlight the pervasiveness of race in processes of social identification in Fiji, both as a fundamental social category and also one that most men themselves have deeply ambivalent feelings about. Chapter  4 completes the first section that deals with the ideological and historical foundation for contemporary performances of masculinity. I start off this chapter by analysing how colonial policies created an economic system in which indigenous Fijians were insulated from capitalist production in order to protect their traditional, village-based economy while Indo-Fijians became a landless peasant class. Utilizing extensive ethnographic evidence, I then illustrate

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how this colonial system of differentiation along ethnic lines still operates in Fiji and in the different economic practices and sensibilities particular to the specific groups. The second part of this chapter is driven by an analytical focus on my interlocutors’ engagement in the market economy, largely through wage work in the tourism sector, and how this intersects with their gendered performances and is experienced through the body. On one level, I  focus on the tension between traditional Fijian life and the market economy as it is experienced and articulated by my respondents; on another, I  take these insights further and operationalize the Marxist notion that an economic system of production is just as prominently about the (re-)fashioning of humans through social production as it is about the manufacturing of material goods. In more specific terms, I analyse how, for some of my friends, engagement in the tourist economy has become synonymous with presenting and performing a set of marketized Fijian identities of which their own bodies are the main site of production and are turned into objects of economic desire. The second section of the book moves the focus from dominant discourses about masculinity and modernity to practices that can broadly be defined to challenge these. In Chapter 5, I provide thick ethnography about young men’s consumption of alcohol and the discourses surrounding this activity. Drinking among young Fijian men illustrates several contours of the Fijian social structure, in this case, predominantly through contrast and transgression. As opposed to the strict hierarchical formations which predominate in village settings between young men and their senior male kin, the consumption of alcohol among male youths in urban areas is relatively relaxed. As such, the ‘urban areas’ in which men drink, fight one another and engage in public displays of drunkenness are conceptualized as both physical locales and ideological entities. A key point is how drinking and other forms of insolence become localized performances of modernity. The theme of stylized transgression and performances of modernity continues in Chapter 6. Here, I analyse indigenous Fijian men’s gambling on Australian horse racing as both a social and economic activity. Betting shops are here perceived both as arenas in which men can play out aspects of their masculinity which are subdued in many other contexts, while at the same time generate spending money. Analysing these behavioural patterns in detail, I  argue that gambling can be conceptualized as a third nexus of economic activity that allows indigenous Fijian men to develop culturally specific forms of sociality while also engage with the market economy.

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In the final chapter, I  discuss sexual practices, processes of sexual identification and articulations of sexual moralities in a rapidly changing Fijian society. Discussing the experiences and reflections of heteronormative and non-heteronormative men from both indigenous Fijian and IndoFijian backgrounds, the chapter demonstrates how the body and masculine identity become a salient point for analysis of men’s everyday experience of the relationship between tradition and modernity. In this chapter, the ambiguities associated with modern life becomes startlingly apparent as I demonstrate how young men negotiate a series of competing cultural forces in order to construct their sexual and social identities in context of dramatic social change. As such, this chapter ties together one of the major underlying themes of the book, in general, and the last three, ethnographically driven chapters, in particular: how modern Fiji citizens insert their bodies in social processes such a modernity and globalization through a creative process between agency and constraint. By way of conclusion, I provide a brief postscript in which I suggest some key implications my ethnographic research has for the theorization of masculinities and gender more broadly. This reflects my ambition to insert anthropological insights into larger social and political debates and present ethnography that speaks to issues outside the specific cultural context in which it emerges.

Acknowledgements In contrast to the extreme sociability that characterizes ethnographic fieldwork, in Fiji at least, the writing desk is a lonely place at times. Despite that, it is difficult not to think of this book as the culmination of a collective project of which I merely am the last man standing to take the credit. The list of those I am deeply indebted to for having made a career, of sorts, as an anthropologist and for having completed this monograph includes a mass of colleagues, institutions, companions, partners, friends, foes, punters, drinking buddies, teammates and acquaintances. As well as two very patient parents and three quirky pugs. They all have a place in my heart and I can only apologize for not having the wherewithal or the space to thank them all by name here. Among this multitude there are a few colleagues whose ongoing support and generosity stands out, and Neil Maclean, Mary Hawkins, Yasmine Musharbash, Matt Tomlinson, Rob Stones and Luis F. Angosto Ferrandez deserve a special mention. I owe you all a beer. The same can be said for many friends outside the academy who have been valuable conversation partners and helped me think through what’s important at different stages of this project. Three people in particular, whose open minds, creativity and commitment to ideas never fail to inspire, deserve my heartfelt thanks  – Tim Freedman, Anton Koritni and Phoenix Keating. The initial research that formed the foundation for the book was made possible by the assistance, both practical and financial, of the Norwegian State Educational Fund and the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. I  am further indebted to Western Sydney University for providing the time to conduct my writing as well as the support to continue fieldwork and disseminate my research internationally. In an era where the neoliberal university no longer sees it as its role to provide good academic working spaces, I am grateful for public institutions such as the New South Wales State Library that still do. Thanks also to Miriam Cantwell, Lucy Carrol and the rest of the team at Bloomsbury. I’m grateful to be with a publisher that continues to pride themselves in a strong anthropology catalogue and support original scholarship. I also want to commend Rachel McMahon for her exquisite work with the index,

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as well as Drew Anderson and Dominic Sidoti who were instrumental in getting an early version of this manuscript up to scratch. Their efforts went way beyond what their job description as research assistants demanded. First and foremost, however, this work is dedicated to the people of Fiji, whose resilience in the face of challenging circumstances never ceases to impress me. Standing tall among them is the family of Mr. Rajendra Prakash, who met me as a stranger but never let me feel like anything but family.

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Modernities, masculinities and the Fijian body: Connections and conceptualizations

Modernity, or how people experience being modern, might seem an unexpected focus for an ethnography at this time in history. As an analytical concept, its popularity has always waivered, and at the present moment, it appears to be far down the list of terms that capture the intellectual imagination of most social scientists. Indeed, there are plenty of scholars ready to dismiss such an analytical concept to the historical scrapheap, making way for more fashionable ideas. But when I write this introduction in a time when postmodernism seems to have reached its ultimate political consequence in a discourse defined by postfactism and post-truths, it seems apt to insist on the utility of ‘the modern’ as a framework through which we can analyse people’s experience of being alive in the contemporary world, mainly because it remains an important reference point for how many people view themselves. Seen from the bottom-up, the key dynamics we often associate with the modernist project – such as technological advancement, urbanization, rationalization, surveillance, bureaucratization, professionalization, individualism and progress – still define much of people’s everyday lives. Here I  follow Arjun Appadurai’s reading that we live in a world ‘in which modernity is decisively at large, irregularly self-conscious, and unevenly experienced’ (1996:  3). What we refer to here, however, is not a monolithic modernity, thought up in, and distributed to the rest of the world from, Western Europe in the Enlightenment period. Instead, it is best understood as a set of processes and discourses influencing how the world is organized and perceived, that are nonetheless contested. Analytically, the term modern thus remains useful in that it ‘serves to draw our attention to long-term processes of social change, to the multidimensional yet often systematic interconnections between a variety

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of cultural, political and economic structures’ (Felski 1995: 9). Also implied in these statements is a distinct move from the singular form ‘modernity’ towards the notion of multiple or alternative modernities. Jean and John Comaroff may have been among the first writers who promoted the notion of the multidimensionality of modernity. Their two-volume work Of Revelation and Revolution is a landmark study of how the process of colonialism – and its associated forces such as Christianization, civilization, and mercantilism  – was constructed through dialectical exchange between locals and colonizers. European ideas and forces ‘became embroiled in local histories, in local appropriations and transpositions, and were deflected in the process’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:  6). The result was a series of ‘macrocosmic modernities’ rather than a monolithic one, a concept that has since gained considerable traction in various academic disciplines. The notion of ‘multiple modernities’ was further developed and popularized by Shmuel N.  Eisenstadt in the eponymous book from 2000. Eisenstadt’s conceptualization goes some way in formalizing the processes outlined by the Comaroffs and is attractive in as much as it stresses how the Western, Enlightenment-based model is not the only pattern through which people and societies experience and articulate modernity. Dorothy L. Hodgson’s summary of this position and its analytical implication is worth quoting in full: Despite the global hegemony of the Enlightenment version of Modernity, other powerful modes of modernity exist. Moreover, as people engage these dominant versions, they produce new forms of modernity (sometimes called ‘alternative modernities’), other ideas and practices associated with being modern. Modernity therefore has multiple meanings and logics. It is always mediated by and through local cultural forms and shaped by the actions and ideas of people operating from different structural positions of power, knowledge, and identity. I find it useful, therefore, to speak of the production of modernities. This phrase acknowledges the multiplicity of forms of modernity that emerge through the interaction of local/global processes, as well as the centrality of people’s agency in creatively and actively engaging these processes to produce new and distinct ways of ‘being modern’, within shifting structural (such as historical, political, economic, and social) constraints and opportunities. (Hodgson 2001: 7, emphasis in the original)

Such a conceptualization of the process of engaging with, or making, modernities in local contexts avoids the pitfalls of imposing meta-theoretical constructs onto complex ethnographic dynamics and starting the analysis from a set of preconceived ideas about the context of our interlocutors’ concerns.



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It is in its ability to incorporate local knowledge about culturally mediated understandings of modernity that the paradigm has its most radical potential for unsettling hegemonic notions of progress and development. By identifying ‘multiplicity’ with the cultural aspect, the idea of multiple modernities allows the possibility of culturally different ways of being modern. As such, it is when it is operationalized in specific ethnographic settings that the research paradigm becomes analytically meaningful in ways that go beyond theoretical debates and philosophy. Utilized in this way, it combines well with the classical anthropological method of engaging with local knowledge in order to interpret and make sense of the cultural encounter.

Modern Fiji It is from this starting point that I form the theoretical contention that ideas from the multiple modernities paradigm are crucial to inform my understanding of the lived experiences of the Fiji villagers and urban dwellers with whom I have worked with in the last decade. The people with whom I conduct my research in urban Fiji talk a lot about being modern. That is partly, I think, because their existence for a long time has been embroiled in processes initiated outside their own parameters. Starting with European discovery in 1643 and continuing throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, their own lives have been shaped and recast in sustained contact with ethnic and cultural others. Their narratives about themselves and their place in the world have, in other words, always been constructed in dialogues with the master narrative of modernity. What is discursively perceived as Fijian tradition has developed through a series of such political, social and economic processes and undergone significant transformations through a series of historical processes. In other words, the understanding of Fijian tradition that has come to dominate indigenous Fijian life has been shaped directly in relation with the global process of modernity. Throughout modern Fiji’s complex history, which includes intertribal rivalry, international trade, colonization and integration into the global world system, local elites have showed significant skills in reworking local traditions to fit with shifting social and political paradigms. While tradition and modernity remain pervasive notions through which Fijians make sense of temporal, spatial and cultural differences, this conceptualization coexists with a strong sense of continuation between the two spheres. Most people’s understanding of Fijian tradition conceptualizes it as a

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dynamic set of values, beliefs and practices which have changed considerably over time and which remain in flux in the face of external influences (see the discussion between Fijian land (vanua) and tradition later in this chapter as a point in case). They are well aware that their communities have engaged in inter-island diplomacy and trade for centuries and have a good understanding of the reconfiguration of tradition that occurred during British colonial rule. Throughout this book, consequently, I consider this binary construction between tradition and modernity as a culturally mediated way of making sense of social change, rather than as distinct modalities, and pay close attention to how my local respondents use the notion of tradition as a culturally specific way of negotiating change (cf. Alexeyeff 2009, in the Cook Islands). But this duality also harbours a normative opposition. Often the notion of modernity is framed by competing moral evaluations. Traditionalists invoke the term to deride people who seek a life away from villages and communal family units. Here, ‘modern’ becomes a catch-all term for everything that threatens traditional values and custom as they perceive it, often summarized as ‘the European way’, or bula vaka ilavo (lit. the life of money). For many young Fiji citizens, on the other hand, modernity is considered a desirable state of being that on many levels is distinctly different from traditional village life. Being modern is used as a descriptive label of people, material objects or social practices, and it is associated with a fast-paced life, greater individual freedom and increased engagement in the consumer economy. Fijian modernities, then, are produced through these opposing discourses about social change, as well as a number of everyday social activities. In practical terms, being modern represents several different modes of being and acting of which availability to individuals and communities is determined by economic, cultural, geographical and social factors. Highlighting how spatial and temporal dimensions cannot be meaningfully disentangled in lived experience, modernity is often seen to be geographically located in urban areas. These spaces are at once beyond the reach of traditional authorities while offering access to various parts of the local entertainment industry, as well as more frequent contact with foreign visitors. It is this everyday production of modernity that forms the locus of my analysis. Ethnographically grounded in the urban parts of Western Fiji, I  privilege perspectives and viewpoints from people whose lives are explicitly tangled up in modernity – living urban lives in a continuous relationship with the market economy and the global flow of people, ideas and products. However, the notion of ‘the modern’ is but one of three interconnected concepts that frame



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my analysis, the body and masculinity being the other two. There are a number of theoretical and empirical assumptions that underpin this particular focus. Many of these will emerge in the ethnographic analysis throughout the book, but some key definitions and conceptualizations ought to be clarified upfront.

The body in Fiji It is only natural that practitioners of a discipline as unashamedly human-centred as anthropology have long been interested in both the materiality of the human body and the body as a vehicle for cultural representation and social production. But it is only quite recently that this interest has facilitated a focus on the body as the central object of ethnographic inquiry in itself. For much of recent intellectual history inquiries into constructions and experiences of the body remained firmly in the domain of the medical sciences. A  notable early exception is Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay ‘Techniques of the Body’ ([1935] 1973) that still remains influential. However, it was only in the 1980s that the subfield of ‘anthropology of the body’ emerged and with it a systematic theoretical approach for bringing the body to the centre of studies of human experience in a cross-cultural context. Much of this renewed interest was spurred by fast and wide-ranging changes in systems of production, consumption and distribution as large parts of the world moved from an industrial to post-industrial mode of production. Key theorists such as Mary Douglas (1970), Michel Foucault (1977) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977) were instrumental in demonstrating not only how the formation, shaping and controlling of the body are key aspects of cultural work but also how modern forms of power to an increasing extent became centred on human bodies and married to the project of reconstructing them culturally. An increasing number of anthropologists took to analysing how these systemic changes had a significant impact on how people’s bodies were perceived, organized and experienced in specific ethnographic contexts. Many, including Thomas Csordas, Emily Martin, Aiwha Ong, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Terence Turner, to name a few of the central ones, went on to make significant theoretical contributions that has become significant beyond anthropological scholarship.1 My own analysis builds upon this extensive research tradition and adopts one of its key overall lessons: that bodies, in percept as well as practice, are as much products of their cultural and social context as they are biological entities. Observant readers will recognize the influence of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, as this conceptualization is operationalized ethnographically. Nonetheless, the

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emphasis on the body in this analysis is not merely a result of my own theoretical predilections. Rather, it is driven by factors specific to my research context and the ethnographic realities I  encountered. First, gender is predominantly constructed, performed and experienced through the body, meaning that all ethnographic studies focused on men and masculinities are, by necessity, somewhat body-centred. Second, the politics of difference that has shaped much of modern Fiji has often been focused on bodies and embodied social practice. And while social categories such as race and ethnicity do not reside in physical bodies alone, it is through the body that the Fijian obsession with race as a social and cultural marker is given meaning and written into everyday life. Finally, contemporary Fijians experience and perform modernities through their bodies. In the first instance, and most obviously, this occurs as bodies in increasing numbers move from village Fiji into urban or semi-urban settlements.2 In many cases, this urban mobility is enabled by employment opportunities in a growing tourism industry. Engagement in wage labour, then, has for many become synonymous with turning themselves into modern beings. Work in tourism often involves presenting and performing a set of marketized Fijian identities of which their own bodies are the main site of production, and a process through which these bodies are turned into objects of economic desire. When talking about these jobs, my interlocutors generally did so by emphasizing how work involved a number of conscious corporeal performances; they ‘switched on the bula smile’, ‘flashed the Fiji muscles’, or ‘turned on the warrior’ for the tourist gaze. On one level, I  think this is best understood in context of the centrality of the body in how Fijians partake and experience in social life more generally (see Chapter 4 for further discussion). That the body is important in order to express and affirm social identity is obvious for anyone who observes ceremonial life in Fijian villages. Controlling one’s body and displaying strength and humility are core values explicitly taught to every young Fijian man, and knowing how to position and display one’s body in different contexts is paramount to the social protocol. Asesela Ravuvu noted that ‘postures, gestures and space occupied by various participants’ of both formal and informal public settings in Fiji are important to manifest the ‘structure of relations within and between’ people in Fiji (Ravuvu 1987: 307). The body and its distribution in space has become central to this complex presentation of social order in which any action or positioning is ascribed particular meaning in terms of the larger ethos of respect, authority and hierarchy. Becker (1990) famously also argued that Fijians’ bodies are more a reflection of the larger community than a representation of an individual person’s



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self, findings that are supported by later writers (Williksen-Bakker 1995; Presterudstuen 2010). In the same way, when Fijian men emphasize bodily strength and toughness – through practices such as boxing, rugby or military duty, for instance  – it is often as a communal quality, either to protect their village and chief or as a religious virtue showing loyalty to God and the wider community rather than as an individual achievement (Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016). These notions of the body as part of the collective kinship group rather than the individual property of a person facilitate a strong emphasis on certain bodily practices. Indeed, the bodily and collective mimesis of these practices, gestures and postures are ways of somatizing the social values, inscribing individual bodies with collective identities. The notion here is thus one of a physical body which is not only emblematic of its societal context but also intrinsically linked to its social environment through a continual exchange of meanings and social pressures. It follows from this that the body is at the centre of negotiations, transgressions and social critiques as well. Comparing data from her original research in the 1980s with new research done two decades later, Anne Becker demonstrated the changing nature of Fijian body image as a consequence of the ‘social storm’ of Western influence. While her respondents, namely, adolescent indigenous Fijian girls, had traditional cultural norms and social mechanisms that strongly supported ‘robust appetites and body shapes’, local aesthetics and body ideals were redefined after the popularization of television and other media (Becker 2004:  538). A  palpable consequence was the emergence of ‘an ethos of body cultivation’ that eventually led to increasing problems with body dysmorphism. Since these studies have been done, the ethos of body cultivation has gained increasing cultural purchase and was evident in many conversations I  had with respondents (see further discussion in Chapter  7). Urban Fiji provides opportunities for nurturing new identities and displaying alternative ways of being that negotiate perceived traditional constraints thus rendering the body visible in new ways. One key point in urban Fiji is that notions of what is Western or modern, specifically in terms of the body become informed by outsiders in ways that are unpredictable and sometimes contradictory. While racial dichotomies often defined local bodies as natural and less refined than the better cultivated and more neatly groomed Western bodies, this does not always ring true in contemporary society. Young, white tourist bodies, less neatly presented and disciplined than what is expected

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from locals, present highly contextualized images of what the modern body does, and what it looks like. Still, many young locals shape their performance of modern youth identities in ways that are often based on these very particularized points of reference. They try to form and sculpt their bodies to look modern through dieting or exercise, adorn their bodies with modern hair styles, Western-style clothing and tattoos, or engage in a variety of bodily practices that are perceived to be fundamentally at odds with traditional behaviours – such as Western-style dancing and public displays of romantic affection (see Chapter  7 for further discussion) but also more overtly transgressive ways such as stylized drunken unruliness or fist fighting (see Chapter 6). As a consequence of the latter, urban Fiji is also increasingly perceived to be a dangerous place. Here, outside the confines of the Fijian village, the male Fijian body is often constructed as potentially dangerous, particularly to women and non-Fijian men. I was often warned against con men in urban centres, whose aggressive pushing of souvenirs and tourist paraphernalia often extended into bootlegged media products, cigarettes or other stimulants in the night-time economy. Popular local stories frequently framed these as archetypical villains to look out for – not only dishonest and sneaky but also potentially violent if their moods turned. In Nadi in 2009, I  was told many stories about gangs of young men who burgled residential houses. According to witnesses, a common modus operandi for these men was to strip naked and rub their entire bodies with coconut oil prior to breaking in. Lack of clothing allegedly made their bodies harder to spot in the darkness. Oily skin would also aid them in sliding their way into a house through louvre-plate windows as well as enable them to literally slip away from pursuers in the eventuality they were caught in the act. An acquaintance of mine had a first-hand experience of this kind when she was awoken at night to find two cane-knife-wielding intruders in her living area – oiled up, practically naked, but with black scarves covering the mouths and noses they effectively embodied the stuff of nightmares and the dangers lurking in the urban, Fijian night. It has been these types of social dynamics  – inequality, gendered violence, new forms of violence and crime  – that have framed much of the existing scholarship on urbanism in the Pacific Islands to date. It is also predominantly in these contexts that masculinity has become a key analytical category. A recent collection edited by Aletta Biersack (2016a) follows on from earlier volumes by Taylor (2008a) and Jolly (2008b) that went some way in chronicling work on contemporary masculinities in the Pacific Islands. A key focus in all of the



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papers in these collections has been on the ‘plasticity and contingent nature’ (Biersack 2016b:  197) of local gender performances in relation to broad historical processes such as colonization/neo-colonialism and globalization. In Papua New Guinea the emergence of ‘raskol gangs’ and new forms of violent crimes in conjunction with rapid urbanization, a growing extraction economy and political instability since the 1980s facilitated a spurt in academic interest in men and masculinity (Kulick 1993; Macintyre 1995, 2008; Sykes 1999; Eves 2012, 2016; Zimmer-Tamakoshi 2012). Martha Macintyre provides some of the most sophisticated analyses of the relationship between traditional forms of masculinities, violence and modernity in Papua New Guinea. Her work has particular relevance for my own research in that it stresses how changing gender performances and its associated problems in Pacific Island localities are most effectively analysed as being ‘situated within the contemporary world of increasing economic inequality and mobility, as well as failures of government’ (2008: 181). At the same time, I endeavour to take the analysis of Pacific Island masculinities and modernity a step beyond these major themes of social problems, political failure and loss of culture. In my ethnographic work, I  attempt to work with my interlocutors to tease out the various ways which they also use the trope of modernity to develop new forms of masculine identities and socialities. That way I can avoid reducing modernity and globalization to unambiguously negative dynamics and open up discussions about how everyday people insert themselves into processes of rapid change. It becomes abundantly clear in the rest of this monograph that the people I work in Nadi town see modernity and its associated spaces (cities, streets, markets, online platform) and practices full of potential. In order to set up such an analysis, however, it is crucial to outline the conceptual framework for my gender analysis.

Gendered modernities Dorothy L. Hodgson’s lament that the significant literature on ‘the articulation of global processes like modernity, capitalism, and development with the formation of local individual and collective identities’ pay comparatively little attention to the centrality of gender (2001: 4), remains as valid today as it did in 2001. There are some notable exceptions, including, in the Pacific Islands, Margaret Jolly’s extensive work across the region,3 Kalissa Alexeyeff ’s work in the Cook Islands (2008, 2009), John Taylor’s ethnography of Vanuatu (2008a, 2008b, 2016) and

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Niko Besnier’s extensive work in Tonga (1997, 2002, 2011) and Oceania more broadly (2014, with Kalissa Alexeyeff) that I am indebted to. By taking gender as the central locus of my study of Fijian modernities I also follow Lisa Rofel, who, in her excellent ethnographic work on female factory workers in modern China, argues that far from being a peripheral concern with little impact on overarching cultural, economic or political processes, gender ‘is formative of relations of power in visions of what constitutes modernity’ (1999: 4). That is, arguments about relations between men and women and how their genders are performed and articulated in changing social practices are central to how people conceive of time-spaces such as modern or traditional. The understanding of gender which forms the foundation for my work is that which stresses gender as a social construct, or ‘the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category’ (West and Zimmerman 1987:  127). Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s landmark work, drawing upon a close reading of the social interactionist writings of Erving Goffman, popularized the notion of gender as practice or performance that has since has become axiomatic in the fields of critical theory and gender studies. The notion of gender as a socially constructed category furthermore paves the way for a realization that gender performances are not based on a fixed set of rules, ideas and values but are dynamic processes of social interaction which take place within changing social contexts. To do gender, as West and Zimmerman famously contended, ‘involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures” ’ (1987: 126). These conceptualizations have of course been further developed by Judith Butler, who is often credited with coining the term ‘gender performativity’. Highlighting the performative aspect of gender, Butler seeks to destabilize and denaturalize the gender binary and expose the fundamental artificiality of such categories. At the core of this argument lies the notion that gender identities, rather than being based on an underlying substance or objective biological facts (sex, male/female anatomy), are entirely constructed in social relations through a ‘series of stylized acts’ (Butler 1988: 519). Intrinsically fluid, variable and dynamic, gender thus operates ‘as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts’ (Butler 1990: 15) rather than as a fixed attribute or quality that individual social actors possess or obtain. Butler’s radical social constructivism consequently also facilitates an understanding of how normative notions of gender, and what is constituted as acceptable performances of



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masculinity and femininity, change across time and space. A key strength of this theorization is that it highlights how gender norms are constructed in a constant interplay between individuals’ embodied performances and the social and cultural expectations framing these, what in theoretical terms can be simplified as a dialectic between agency and structure. As gender identities are performed in various contexts, to new audiences, their meanings become renegotiated through the process Butler, following Jacques Derrida, labels interability. During this process, gendered performances create spaces for variations and types of resistance that can both explicitly subvert dominant gender norms while also reproducing the prominence of gender as identity markers and social categories. While this performative model acknowledges that gendered subjects have the ability to adopt or resist dominant societal norms, personal agency to construct gendered identities and performances are significantly tempered by the way social institutions and the community at large constitute and police gender boundaries. Drawing upon Foucault and other postmodern writers, Butler pays distinct attention to how social institutions serve to reinforce and legitimize social expectations of gender on the personal and individual level. It is in these institutions culturally specific meanings about social categories such as gender are produced and they are instrumental actors in the process of socializing subjects into particular gender systems. Following this conceptualization, gender becomes a set of performances based on the embodiment and internalization of dominant social scripts and norms. But no individual gender performance is identical to any other, and gendered ideals are never copied perfectly. Instead, various gendered subjects create their performances within certain institutional frameworks where behaviours become praised, reinforced, critiqued, censored or adjusted through various means. In other words, there is always room for a slippage between ideals and actual behaviour in which subjects can subvert and challenge the status quo. Nonnormative gender performances may unsettle the stability in gender systems by making alternatives to dominant norms and performances intelligible and are thus subject to various forms of social or legal-rational punishments. According to Butler, however, these judiciary responses has a paradoxical effect – by writing new forms of gender performance into legal or everyday discourses, they merely reconstitute and validate them rather than censoring them and, in the process, making alternative, non-normative performances of gender intelligible options for new subjects.

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The locus of any study of gender is consequently in the social realm, and gender itself is a historically and culturally specific performance of a set of social practices related to one’s sex. This social interaction is arguably fluid with ‘configurations of practice generated in particular situations’ being reciprocal and thus inherently relational (Connell 2005:  81). Social agents use these practices then, not only for constructions of self-identities and personas but also to construct differences between men and women, or boys and girls, categories which invariably have been attributed essential qualities.

Men being men: How masculinity is performed The most prominent result of this system of gender differentiation is the seemingly universal prevalence of male domination over women through many different means in various aspects of life. Feminist theorists and researchers, such as Moore (1988, 1994), Acker (1989), Butler (1990) and Pollert (1996), have documented the widespread male control over governments, corporations, media, family life and social organizations, and how these systems, which I will henceforth identify as patriarchal structures, are maintained through direct, physical as well as structural violence and how its domination is entrenched in literature, ideologies and politics (Connell 2005: 41). The material pay-off of these structures is what Connell (1996) has labelled the patriarchal dividend. However, the relationship between men and women is not clear-cut in a negative-dominative relationship. Not only are a number of men engaging in practices and activities which respect women, negotiate power with women and advocate equality between the genders, different groups of men are also subject to internal differentiation and hierarchical contests. In short, the patriarchal dividend is neither shared equally between all men, nor are all men equal parts of the patriarchal organizational structures. A consequence of this for my research is a rejection of the singularity of masculinity in favour of the plural form masculinities; a paradigm that signifies that there are indeed wide spectres of different masculine performances which are constructed in particular cultural and social contexts. Connell furthermore argues that gender identities are inherently relational, and that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are categories that only exist in contrast to each other (2005: 68). However, while all masculinities seem to have common features which distinguish masculinity from, and generally express superiority over, feminine gender performances, the different masculinities at play are subject to their own



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hierarchies, and ‘being a man’ is not necessarily an empowering trait in itself. In fact, as Michael Herzfeld amply demonstrated during his fieldwork in a Cretan mountain village, while being born male may be a static biological identity, being good at being man is ‘an unambiguously active condition’ which needs continuous reaffirmation through complex social performances of appropriate masculinity in a variety of contexts (1988: 47). Far from being a fixed quality or trait available to any man at any time, masculinity is consequently a fluid set of practices and ideas which men draw upon to assert their identity in relation to other men or women in a variety of situations. It follows that gender performances are most effectively understood and analysed through ethnographic research. Such inquiries into specific locations are not only able to locate the ‘complex dialectics of power’ in which masculinities are created and played out (Alexander 2000:  236), but they also confirm the point that the masculinities hierarchy is part of a larger social structure of gender relations. This structure has different social impacts depending on local contexts but appears to follow a largely uniform system worldwide. In simplified terms, this system implies that while white, middleand upper-class, heterosexual men in the global north are enjoying the fruits of patriarchal structures, power and male-domination, men who fall outside these criteria belong to subordinated masculine categories that are subject to the social practices of racism, misogyny, homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, or made powerless through social hierarchies, economic marginalization and heavy manual labour. Classic ethnography has always involved extensive research on men and men’s practices, largely conducted by other men, but for a long time there was very little interest in masculinity (Jolly 2008a). A  notable exception to this that is worth highlighting in this context is Gregory Bateson’s [1936] 1958 publication, eponymously titled Naven after a series of ritual practices performed by the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea. Bateson’s analysis of these rituals, during which participants change genders and perform both femininity and masculinity, highlights the contingent nature of gender among the Iatmul and has since been described, together with Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament (1935), as a starting point not only for the theorization of gender constructivism in Melanesian ethnography (Strathern 1988: 70) but also for what has come to be an extensive interdisciplinary field of gender and masculinity studies more broadly.4 Still, the so-called men’s turn in gender studies, leading to a burgeoning interest in men and masculinities studies across the social sciences and humanities, did not eventuate until the 1980s. Since then, there has been a more sustained interest

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in the ethnographic study of manhood and men’s experiences, though many of these works have had limited impact because of their lack of clear definitions of what is understood by ‘masculinity’ in context of more general gender theory. In fact, while it is R. W. Connell’s (1987, 2005) multiple masculinities paradigm that has facilitated many of these informative and challenging academic inquiries into men’s gendered practices, its application has lacked consistency. This has in turn led to contradictory and varied presentations of masculinity as an analytical concept in the field of gender studies. Connell’s plural model of masculine performances borrows its validity from a superstructural creation of hegemonic masculinity;5 ‘a largely symbolic, though legitimate, ideal type of masculinity that imposes upon all other masculinities (and femininities) coherence and meaning about what their own identities and positions within the gender order should be’ (Howson 2006:  3). Hegemonic masculinity is thus created in opposition both to femininity and alternative masculinities  – namely complicit, subordinate and marginalized ones  – and comprises a number of perceived, archetypical masculine feats which configure a foundation for prevailing social and political domination. However, while hegemonic masculinities hardly exist as a fixed type of gender performance, their power lies in the fact that they often serve as ideal type models that ‘articulate loosely with the practical constitution of masculinities as ways of living in everyday local circumstances’ and are simultaneously engaged with, and contested in, any social context (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 838–9). These dominant notions of masculinity and manhood consequently serve as points of reference for men’s behaviours and inform social agents’ constructions of self in actual social settings, influencing not only how every man constructs their masculine persona but also defining the prism through which masculine performances are viewed and judged socially by other men. Since Connell introduced the concept in the 1980s, this schematic model of the masculine hierarchy has gained a dominating position in academic studies on men and gender relations involving masculine performers. However, its ubiquity in contemporary discourses on men’s identities has also lead to an inconsistent and often misguided usage of the conception of hegemonic masculinity as referring to a fixed type of masculinity. Correspondingly, the application of the model of multiple masculinities can too easily be reduced to a static typology, not taking into account the fluidity of gender as a social category. While there are examples of merited ethnographic studies rebuffing these tendencies by identifying a variety of real-life masculine (or feminine) constructions of masculinity which do not readily fit into Connell’s



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major categories, most prominently Gutmann’s anthropological work in Mexico ([1996] 2007; see also Herzfeld 1988), my own work is of the same ilk while also stressing that men at various times move between the different categories of the scale from hegemonic to marginalized rather than fit into one specific category at all times. The importance of such an approach has previously been alluded to by Miller (1998a, 1998b), who pointed out that a possible weakness of the framework of multiple masculinities theory was that it too often facilitates research outcomes that failed to take into account fluid and ambiguous male subjectivities whose position in the gender hierarchy cannot easily be determined. As an example, Miller argued that it was highly doubtful that the concept can provide insights into the masculine identity of retired Australian rugby league player Ian Roberts, who on one side performed hegemonic masculinity by showing off a muscled body and displaying notorious toughness on the sporting field while at the same time ‘coming out’ publicly as gay and thus being marginalized in the masculine hierarchy. This point has already received some attention, with Connell and Messerschmidt arguing that ‘the complexity of the relationships among different constructions of masculinity’ is greater than what the original formulations of the theories acknowledged (2005:  847). However, while they conclude that future research ought to follow a ‘ “dialectical pragmatism” to capture different masculinities’ reciprocal influence on each other, so typologies like “hegemonic masculine patterns” may change by incorporating elements from the others’ (2005:  847), I  propose to reformulate the theoretical application of these categories more thoroughly to focus on masculine subjectivities’ discursive use of gender norms in their own self-construction in social contexts. In order to be able to make sense of different masculine typologies and the relationship between them in lived experience, I consider it imperative to understand the notion of hegemonic masculinity as an exclusively normative one. Indeed, the relationship between hegemonic and subordinate or marginal masculinities may best understood as corresponding to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous understanding of the gender binary; men as subjects and women as the other (1953). Implicit in this order, according to de Beauvoir, is the notion that women are always constructed, characterized and understood in relation to men and never in power of their own individuality. As the last thirty years’ intense focus on studies on men has shown us that the notion of a singular masculinity is a fallacy, it is clear that similar relations also exist within a hierarchy of masculine typologies based on practice. Hegemonic

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masculinity, then, is a normative performance of practice which embodies ‘the currently most honoured way of being a man’ and requires ‘all other men to position themselves in relation to it’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 832). As such, hegemonic masculinity is more a historically, culturally and situationally specific masculine ideal against which men’s performances and appearances are judged, than a set performance one can master, obtain or achieve. Very few men can live up to the idealized versions of masculinity at any given time and place, but are often caught between these normative constructions and their own struggle for self-definition. Any localized study focusing on men and masculinities would benefit from a historically grounded understanding of how the construction of gender norms and ideals, something I turn my attention to in the next section.

Masculinities in Fiji The salient moment to start any inquiry into constructions of gendered subject identities lies within the social relations where gender is actually performed and played out, to look at gender as an everyday practice intrinsically linked to other social factors. In the Fijian context, that undeniably means engaging with the overarching discourse about ‘race’, in particular the relationship between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians and how this has come to be articulated in legal, political and cultural terms. Indo-Fijians, a combination of descendants of indentured labourers brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 and later free settlers, today account for about 35 per cent of Fiji’s total population and are consequently the second largest ethno-cultural community in the country after indigenous Fijians. Managing this biculturalism has been a central preoccupation for leaders of Fiji since the arrival of indentured labourers. Drawing upon racial theorizations characteristic of the time, British colonialists implemented a social system resembling total segregation of the two ethnic communities (Younger 2010: 167– 8), affording indigenous Fijians exclusive rights to land ownership and de facto control of key institutions, while Indo-Fijians effectively became second-class citizens with limited rights. A  key justification for this was to maintain and protect indigenous Fijian traditions from the potential dangers of capitalism and modernity. Although a century of coexistence in a small island nation has facilitated significant cultural exchange between indigenous Fijians and IndoFijians, and considering that recent legal changes have removed many of the



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formal dynamics of ethnic division, the concept of race remains pervasive in everyday and political discourse in Fiji. Members of the respective communities continue to view themselves as distinctly and intrinsically different, and construct their gendered identities within a social context in which race is a key distinction. Social life among most indigenous Fijians is arguably marked by an extensive set of codes on how to acknowledge authority, show respect and signify social ranking which both reflects and reinforces a hierarchical social structure (Toren 1990). The chiefly system remains the focal point in Fijian life, is embedded in every level of Fijian society and arguably comprises notions of both tradition and identity. A respondent in Rory Ewins’s field work on traditional politics in Fiji emphasized this all-encompassing nature of the social hierarchy: Our traditons and customs, culture as a whole . . . stabilise our patterns of relationships with each other from day to day . . . Political relationships, right from our individual relationship with each other, from [the] extended family system, from the clan or the tribal relationships, and from relationships with tribal kingdoms, are really governed by our traditional hierarchy, customs, traditions, vanuas. And this governs and stabilises our way of life. (quoted in Ewins 1998: 53)

Traditional ceremonies and rituals were also generally reserved for male participants. Asesela Ravuvu (2000: 1) notes that the most powerful and sacred form of Fijian wealth, the tabua (a tooth of a whale which holds particular significance in Fijian tradition), was mainly presented to male authorities by male presenters. The bases of these cultural perceptions of Fijian identity are found in the long-standing chiefly tradition. Early Fiji consisted of a collection of different chiefly states, which were eventually united under the rule of the Bauan Ratu Seru Cakobau in the 1870s. These societies were categorized by a rigid social structure which drew a clear dividing line between chiefs and commoners in terms of status and authority, and resulted in practical politics in which these power structures were inherent. Williams ([1858] 1982) observed that traditional Fijian men kept their weapons near them at all times and thus embodied the martial nature of early Fijian social traditions. Their leading position in precolonial Fiji appeared to be reliant upon spiritual life and social structures in which certain types of physical power, aggression and gender performances were embedded and celebrated. While these aspects of Fijian tradition arguably ‘were all transformed by the elimination of warfare’ (Turner 1997: 370–1) following

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the unification under Ratu Cakobau, the notion of a Fijian masculinity composed of physical and military strength appeared to be confirmed and reinforced throughout the colonial era, and, I  argue, institutionalized within fiscal, political, martial and spiritual hierarchies in the modern Fijian nation state. The deed of cession, when Cakobau ceded power over the Fijian kingdom to the British crown in 1874, emphasized an equal amount of loyalty to the Chiefly system, God, and the Crown of England. As a consequence, Fijian power become institutionalized within an imperialist military organization and ultimately led to considerable numbers of Fijian soldiers fighting under the British flag in both the First and Second World Wars (Kaplan 1995; Teaiwa 2005: 205). Rigid physical standards, close links between British Colonial Administrators, church leaders and native Fijian chiefs, and a general perception that Indo-Fijians were not loyal to the British effectively established and maintained the Fijian armed forces as a predominantly indigenous Fijian institution and contributed to the creation of a Fijian hegemonic masculinity composed of notions of physicality, ethnicity, morality and status which excluded Indo-Fijians. Vijay Naidu has commented that ‘there is something immoral and sinister about the arming and training of one ethnic category in a multi-ethnic community’ (1986: 13–14), and it seems apposite to argue that these advantages have ultimately been utilized in order to maintain indigenous Fijian power on several occasions, most notably during the military coups of 1987 and the putsch in 2000, which may serve as interesting case studies for how Fijian hegemonic masculinity has been operationalized politically in quite recent times (cf. George [2008] for a discussion on the coups in relation to Fijian masculinities). While the motivations, causes and effects behind these events continue to be contested and disputed, they undeniably served as effective reminders of how native Fijian martial dominance could, and quite obviously would, be used to secure indigenous hegemonic power in wider society. Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who spearheaded the 1987 military coups and later installed himself as the Minister for Fijian Affairs, was supported by an impressive physique, high social status, chiefly connections, a high military rank, good education, flawless communication skills, a long indigenous Fijian lineage and an arsenal of polemical statements as well as, perhaps most importantly, a welltrained and well-prepared army when he marched towards the speaker’s chair in the Fijian parliament. Although a commoner himself, Rabuka claimed he had a traditional obligation, known as the bati ideology, to protect the traditional chiefly system on behalf of his provincial clan (Teaiwa 2005: 212) and stressed that he acted upon a mission given to him by God, to claim back Fiji from



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Indo-Fijian governance and secure the prevalence of Fijian political dominance. The coup was thus a spectacular performance of masculinity, drawing upon a link between Fijian tradition, military power, Christianity and the chiefly system in order to justify the ousting of an Indo-Fijian dominated government lead by a native Fijian layman. The rhetoric about Fijian unity, respect for chiefs and Fijian paramountcy was crucial also in 2000, when businessman George Speight fronted a civilian coup with supposedly strong support from elements of the military. The intricacies of this coup d’état also remain under much scrutiny in legal and academic institutions, but it seems pertinent to claim that one of the main reasons it was ultimately unsuccessful was that Speight failed to gain the necessary support from the institutional network of the native Fijian nationalist movement. It is worth noting that Speight was neither of chiefly status nor could he claim a pure Fijian bloodline or a strong affiliation with the Methodist church. Hence, he failed to embody the prevailing notions of Fijian identity that I argue constitute the hegemonic form of masculinity in Fiji. Winston Halapua (2003) has presented a thorough discussion of these composite constructions of hierarchies in Fiji. His account of the powerful trinity of Fijian turagaism, the notion of inherent chiefly rights to leadership, lotu  – which is the Fijian Christian ideology – and militarism as the pinnacle of Fijian ideological hierarchies is a compelling read and provides a useful framework for studies of the historical roots of Fijian power structures. However, Teaiwa has rightfully observed that Halapua fails to ‘elaborate more fully the cultural categories’ underpinning these ideological structures (2005:  203), and I  must add that the lack of reflection on the masculine culture which buttresses these structures is a significant flaw in his analysis. For my purposes, to understand these deeply rooted cultural factors, it is necessary that I carefully outline how Fijian history during the last two centuries has facilitated a concentration of power among a particular masculine, elite. Indigenous Fijians traditionally identified themselves very closely with their land, and there was a longstanding tradition of regulation of land ownership in the precolonial eastern parts of Fiji, which derived from a narrative about the people of the land, itaukei, who, as a powerful chiefly elite arriving from the sea, seized political leadership but remained in communal control of land under rightful supervision (Sahlins 1985; Kaplan 1995: 100). This relationship between indigenous Fijians and their land is encompassed in the concept of vanua that arguably permeates all Fijian social relations. Linguistically, vanua may be directly translated as land, region, place or spot (Capell [1941] 1991: 255), but

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has far wider connotations, socially, culturally as well as politically (Ravuvu 1987:  14–15). It signifies larger groups of people who recognize social or political allegiances and their relationship to the land. It thus ‘embodies the values and beliefs which people of a particular locality have in common’ (Ravuvu 1987:  14–15). More so, the relationship between Fijians and the vanua is allencompassing and sacred; often summarized by the notion of I cauviti, meaning ‘[o]‌ne does not own the land: the land owns him. Man and land are one’ (Tuwere 1992: 34). In the Fijian conceptualization, tradition is understood through the concept of cakacaka vakavanua, often translated as ‘acting in accordance with the land’ in this extended sense (Toren 1988: 712). Contrary to Western perceptions of tradition then, it refers to culturally appropriate behaviour rather than a notion of ‘objectified structures’ in the past (Toren 1988: 696). Hence, just as ‘events and the presence of past events in the present are determined by the way a group or an individual is related to the past in an ongoing process of symbolic mediation’ (Dickhardt 2005: 344), tradition is understood and constructed in contemporary Fiji as praxis which is beneficial and in accordance with the vanua. An attempt was made to preserve this traditional notion of indigenous land rights when the British colonial rulers developed a structure for land ownership. The first colonial rulers assigned local chiefs to outline ‘the traditionally recognised rights to land’ two years after the colonization of 1874 (France 1969). However, as it appeared that no such universal principle existed, the colonial rulers imposed a system of communal ownership based on a notion of mataqalis (lit. clans).6 These notions of native land and communal property rights through chiefly clans were paradoxically employed both to secure the continuity of the traditional Fijian social order that could help secure a stable political situation, and to pave the way for modernization (Overton 1993: 45; Rutz 1995: 76). Later formalized in the Native Land Trust Act of 1940 (now the ITaukei Land Trust Act), these policies served both to safeguard indigenous Fijians against alienation from their tribal land and to transform the concept of vanua from a culturally uniting concept into an economic and legal entity that was to be a cornerstone of Fiji’s modern market economy. Here, land came to be viewed as indigenous Fijians’ contribution, ‘analogous to the “labour” of Indians and “capital” of Europeans’ (Rutz 1995: 76), to the development of Fiji (cf. Presterudstuen 2016a). While the Eastern Fijian chiefs, predominantly men, consequently became economic elites in terms of their control over the means of production in a largely agricultural economy, non-Fijians, commoners and women’s access to



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economic control similarly became marginal. Indigenous Fijian, chiefly control has thus remained almost total, and comprises the most important institutions of politics, economy, law, religion and social life. Likewise, the political links between rugby, the significance of which as an arena for fulfilment and celebration of certain aspects of aggressive masculinity is discussed further in Chapter 2, and formal institutions in Fiji are strong. It is of course well established that sports such as rugby can be formative in the construction, performance and maintenance of masculinities. With its emphasis on strength, toughness and bravery as well as composure under pressure, discipline and teamwork, it developed as a crucial part of the socialization of British elite men and soldiers (cf. Stoddart 1988; Presterudstuen 2010). It followed from that tradition that it had a central place in the colonial project and British Empire-building. In the colonies, rugby became an ideal way to not only civilize the unruly bodies of native men but eventually also harness their strength for the betterment of the empire (cf. Hokowhitu 2004, on New Zealand). This was particularly successful in the Pacific Island where the game became a way of operationalizing, and thus validating, racial discourses about the intrinsic physicality (but limited intellectual ability) of native men. Local elites in turn embraced rugby as an ideal way to gain status, prestige and respect in ways that were valorized by the colonial regime and it has since become a key arena for the construction and celebration of masculine, national identities throughout indigenous Oceania. In Fiji, rugby’s centrality in the construction of local perceptions of masculinity is obvious at once in that practically every indigenous Fijian grows up playing rugby, adulating international rugby stars and aspiring to emulate their idols. The same can be said throughout much of Oceania. Consequently, following the influential scholarship on Brendan Hokowhitu on Maori masculinities in New Zealand, rugby union has come to be a leitmotif in analyses of men and masculinities in this region (cf. Presterudstuen 2010; Besnier 2014; Clément 2014; Dewey 2014; Molnar and Kanemasu 2014; Schieder and Presterudstuen 2014; Besnier and Guinness 2016; Calabro 2016).  There is no denying the relevance of this particular focus, but it does run the risk of providing a total body of work that rather reductively emphasizes the athletic and physical aspects of both rugby as a cultural phenomenon and performances of local masculinities over other aspects, and reinforce the same stereotypes writers such as Hokowhitu and others have gone to great pains to challenge. In this book, I choose to move away from the rugby field as the most prominent site of analysis of gender in this ethnographic context in favour of other, emerging

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sociocultural arenas. Instead, I propose to treat rugby as merely one of the ways through which masculine norms as well as binary categories such as tradition and modernity, ethnicity and race, inequality and difference, are articulated (see further discussion in Chapter 2). Historically, these processes have been played out at the highest level of Fijian society. Ratu Kamisese Mara was traditionally the president of the Rugby Union as well as being the prime minister between 1970 and 1987, while Sitiveni Rabuka obtained the presidency of the newly established Fiji Rugby League during his reign as prime minister after the 1987 coups. Today, Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama, holds the presidency of Fiji Rugby Union; something which perhaps is an ‘indication of the complex articulations of hierarchical social, cultural and political interests in Fiji’ (Teaiwa 2005: 214). With its rigid physical demands, rugby has been a sport which has generally attracted native Fijian male athletes, while Indo-Fijians and other ethnic groups have traditionally played soccer, and women, until very recently,7 have been confined to netball. The Fijian elites have nurtured rugby union as a national sport, and it has become a crucial device in facilitating Fijian nationbuilding and promoting Fiji internationally (Teaiwa 2005:  213). Rugby is seen to epitomize a Fijian identity that promotes a distinct form of masculine performance which is deeply rooted in a notion of tradition and policy, and is thus used as much to exclude and subordinate contesting masculinities as to unite the nation. It appears that rugby union encapsulates the holistic structure of the Fijian hegemony which is composed of literally all aspects of Fijian society and marginalizes everyone who cannot prove they possess the right gender, right ethnicity, chiefly loyalty, social status, strong physicality, strong Christian beliefs and sufficient rugby abilities to the fringes of institutional society.

Internal divisions in Fiji However, it would be inappropriate to claim that all Fijians identify themselves entirely in this way and fully accept the current social order, or that all Fijian men willingly subscribe to the social codes of the ruling class. Brij V. Lal (1986), Ralph Premdas (1995) and Isireli Lasaqa (1984) provided early works problematizing the relative homogenous nature of indigenous Fijians and questioned whether the perceived harmony between the values of native Fijian elites and the commoners was due to submission or consent. Michael Howard (1991) as well as Robbie Robertson and William Sutherland (2003) have modified these arguments and provided more thorough class analyses of Fijian society in order



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to explain ethnic tension and political violence in Fiji; they make similar claims focusing on the chiefly elites’ deliberate policies to prevent egalitarianism and social equality in order to stay in power. There have been a number of different political movements or outspoken personalities throughout Fijian history representing political dissent and social resistance against this power hegemony. Few had lasting and significant impact, however, and modern Fijian political history has generally been dominated by a few chiefly dynasties that successfully converted their traditional positions into political power. Some analysts suggest the rise of the current political leadership, while originally established through military intervention, represents a significant breach with this political tradition (Lane 2012; Fraenkel 2015; Norton 2015; Ratuva 2015). The rhetoric of the Fiji First Party and its vociferous leader, current prime minister Frank Bainimarama, is certainly based on ideological attacks both on certain aspects of established Fijian tradition, including the traditional chiefly office, and formal connections between the Methodist church and political leadership at the time. Bainimarama typecast himself as the champion of equal rights for commoners and non-indigenous Fijians against existing political elites, though doubts remain about how broadly this vision is shared throughout his powerbase, which includes the military and certain chiefly confederacies (Lal 2014). Much of the rhetoric has, however, come to fruition in a new constitution that includes flagship reforms such as the revocation of institutions such as the Great Council of Chiefs, the introduction of full common franchise and prohibition of racially divisive political campaigning. What has become clear throughout this process is that although the once relatively homogeneous hegemonic bloc of indigenous Fijian cultural, social and political dominance has become fragmented (Ratuva 2015), much of the foundation for indigenous Fijian dominance  – militarism and physical strength, for instance  – remains central aspects of securing and maintaining leadership. Much of the public posturing and rhetoric surrounding the internal Fijian political game takes the shape of a contest in machismo between strong personalities such as Bainimarama and the current opposition leader, Sitiveni Rabuka. Some theorists (Halapua 2003; Ratuva 2006) have identified the root of this specific aspect of Fijian official life deep in ‘the Fijian male-macho psyche’: ‘Fijian men are groomed from an early age to be confrontational, tough and uncompromising to ensure upholding of one’s status as a tagane dina (real man). To back down is to be labelled “lamulamu” or coward’ (Ratuva 2006: 2). Ratuva further proposes that this ‘uncompromising machoistic streak’ is at the crux of contemporary conflicts in Fiji, emphasizing the importance of the

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construction of a Fijian, hegemonic masculinity in the complex articulation of power and authority in Fijian politics. With few exceptions, women and substantially alternative masculine performers have long been mere bit-players in the macro-political realm, and political discourse has consequently become typified by rigid and belligerent macho contests between powerful exponents of similarly constructed masculine ideas. Given Fiji’s modern history of biculturalism, the most prominent group against which these dominant forms of masculinity have been constructed are Indo-Fijian men. In opposition to the largely hierarchical social institutions of indigenous Fijians, Indo-Fijian men are culturally less homogenous and generally organized ‘by voluntary association on the basis of specific interest or by ethnic loyalties’ (Norton 1977: 29). And while they share their native Fijian counterparts’ sway over women in Fiji, Indo-Fijian men consequently perform masculinity and claim masculine power on substantially different grounds. Their dominant position in sugarcane farming and commerce has generally been the foundation of their Indo-Fijian share in the patriarchal dividend and sometimes facilitated more systematic challenges to the Fijian hegemonic elite. For instance, in the sugar strike organized by A.  D. Patel in the 1940s, the prolonged labour union conflicts in the 1950s (Norton 1977), or later in the popular elections in 1987 and 1999 where the Indo-Fijian collective vote was instrumental in the popular surge of the National Federation Party and Fiji Labour Party (on both occasions the response from the indigenous was immediate and militant). In gender-theoretical terms, however, one can say that Indo-Fijian men have constructed their masculine self-identities in a position that is subordinate in the Fijian masculine hierarchy. This is often seen to be based on their inability to comply with the physical and ethnic standards associated with being a man in dominant Fijian discourses as well as their relative powerlessness within the traditional, hierarchical structures which continue to be the foundation for leadership in Fiji (see Chapter 3 for further discussion). These historical, legal and political aspects form an important background to my own ethnographic explorations of modern Fijian society. I do, however, make a concerted effort to move my research gaze away from macropolitical processes in favour of the day-to-day experiences of people in their local communities. In the ethnographic explorations that follow, I  utilize a gendered lens in order to analyse how the everyday relations between men in villages and settlements around Nadi town are articulated and constructed in the modern context. Relations between different men and masculinities are dynamic rather than fixed, and intersect with other social categories



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in numerous and often unpredictable ways. One central aspect that makes modern, urban Fiji a fruitful research context to analyse these processes is that urban life makes the porousness of racial and social borders visible. While indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians have always been sensitive to each other’s cultural proclivities and there is considerable cultural diffusion between the two communities, the urban geography of towns and cities intensifies and normalizes interethnic socialities dramatically. Continuous contact with an array of ethnic others is also facilitated by the growing modern economy, mass tourism and the ongoing consumption of global culture. In these settings, Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians are, to a greater extent, drawn together in a common world where they share ambitions, desires and opportunities.

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2

Performing masculinity through Christian devotion: Methodism and manhood

If Fijian masculinities have had its moment on the global stage, it would have been on 11 August 2016. Having just beaten the Great Britain team to secure the gold medal in rugby sevens in the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games in spectacular fashion, Fiji’s twelve-man squad huddled together with their coaches in a victory prayer in the middle of Rio’s Deodoro Stadium. More than the match itself, dazzling as the sporting display was, it was the aftermath that came to provide one of the popular, lasting visuals of Fiji’s first major success in the Olympics. The image of the physically imposing athletes locking arms, consumed by emotion, some with tears streaming down their faces, and proceeding to harmonize the chant ‘Eda sa qaqa, E na vuku ni dra, Kei na nona vosa’ (by the Blood of the Lamb and the Word of the Lord, we have overcome) captured the imagination of audiences everywhere and made the perceived humility, sensitivity and grace of Fijian men a brief talking point in global media. Arguably, this event and its popular interpretation belie a more complex reality of the role of rugby in Fijian society. Although widely acknowledged as the country’s national sport, it is deeply entangled in racial politics and gender relations, with women and Indo-Fijian men being limited to supporting and not participating (Molnar and Kanemasu 2014; Besnier and Brownell 2016), as well as local power struggles between key institutions such as the army, the police force, politicians and chiefly confederacies (cf. Presterudstuen 2010; Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016). Still, the emotional performance of religious devotion that immediately succeeded the famous win provide a telling image of the dominant ideology about rugby union that exists in Fiji and the relationship most indigenous Fijian men, in particular, nurture with the game. In Fiji, the post-match prayer is a well-known feature, more or less part and parcel of the game itself, and serve as a clear signifier of a spiritual link between

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ethnonationalism, Christianity, masculinity and rugby that play a foundational part in local identity construction. For young Fijian men, rugby might be said to be religion in more ways than one. Practically everyone plays the game, at school, at home and for the local club, and it is through rugby that key moral and ethical lessons are instilled in young men. International players are adulated and idolized, and a career in rugby has overtaken a military posting as the main life ambition for most. Still, what I found most intriguing when talking to my interlocutors about their relationship to rugby was the very literal sense in which playing and preparing for a game, no matter how significant or minor, was linked to their spiritual well-being and religious commitment. Partly this involved embracing certain biblical verses that become personal ‘lessons’ or ‘mantras’ to be meditated on before games and displayed either tattooed on to the body or inscribed on jerseys, football boots or strappings. Psalm 18 was currently much used for these purposes. My friend Simon, for instance, proudly showed me a tattoo reading Ps. 18.2, referencing ‘the lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold’, soon after I  arrived in the field, while another player later trumped this by inscribing the words of Ps. 18.32, ‘it is God who arms me with strength’, on the left side of his chest. For others, the physicality of the game and the exertion involved in training were devotional acts themselves  – like Sika, whose ‘personal relationship with God’ was predominantly ‘through training and playing’. Rugby, here, becomes religion, becomes devotion, in much the same way the Olympic sevens team viewed their performance as a show of devotion and spiritual strength. What these examples also show are different techniques Fijian men utilize rugby in order to operationalize social ideologies, including perceptions of gender and ethnicity, through the body. From this viewpoint, rugby emerges as merely one part of the coloniality complex1 that underpins local processes of identity formation and meaning making. In the remainder of this chapter, I take this insight seriously in that I move away from the specifics of rugby in order to see it in context of religious devotion more broadly. In doing so, I  interrogate how historically constructed masculine ideals are perceived, performed and embodied in the ethnographically present and how it links to the growing scholarship on masculinity and religion. More specifically, I  demonstrate how my interlocutors make explicit links between the social constructions of their masculine identities and Christian Methodist devotion through a series of narrative and bodily practices.2



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Masculinity and Christianity Masculinities, as I conceive of the term, are not only constructed, performed and negotiated in culturally specific settings; they also emerge in intersection with social and ideological structures. Indeed, different organizations, institutions and religions celebrate diverse types of gendered ideals and thus have the potential to produce substantially different performances of masculinities. The last decades have consequently seen the emergence of a strong field of studies with specific focus on the relationship between Christianity and gender in a variety of cultural and ideological contexts. A key theme for much of this field of research has been that Christianity promotes male domination as well as very particular types of masculine ideals. What Ruether (1983:  53–4) has defined as ‘male monotheism’ sanctions male superiority based on a depiction of the Christian god as a male warrior god who combines an exalted soul and moral purity with martial, masculine strength to wield absolute, self-sufficient power over humankind. This heavily masculinized deity is universalized as the apex of a divine, hierarchical order with men closest to divinity by association, followed by women, animals, vegetables and animals (Boyd 1993:  325). While the justifications and theological reasoning behind this ideological construction are varied and sometimes more sophisticated than this simplified representation, most structures of Christian authority continue to mirror this pyramid of power which is highly gendered. Christian masculinities are shaped and reshaped in specific social, political, cultural, historical and geographical contexts, and religious doctrines pertaining to gender intersect with a number of competing discourses about social organization and identification. This becomes evident in colonial and postcolonial societies where local ideals about gender are constructed and reconstructed in relation to the larger projects of colonialism, modernization and Westernization. Such processes highlight the intersections between religion and masculinity, and create the need to acknowledge that specific Christian notions of masculinity take on different meanings in different contexts through negotiations with pre-modern gender discourses which are as creative as they are capricious. Jean and John Comaroff ’s comprehensive writings on the Tswana of Southern Africa (1991, 1997) are landmark works on the complex and unpredictable ways Christianization and pre-modern power regimes become interconnected through the colonial project, and my research is greatly indebted to their

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insightful analysis of the process of conversion. Similarly, Andrew Lattas’s (1998) and Bruce Knauft’s (2002) work on modernity and Christian conversion in Papua New Guinea, whose relative geographical and cultural proximity to Fiji perhaps makes it an useful comparative case in this context, provide compelling analyses of how colonialism altered local masculine ideals and practices. These works are part of a dominant academic discourse on colonialism and Christian conversion which emphasizes how these processes displaced traditional masculine power structures and diminished many men’s bodily and social capacities (Wilde 2004). The key points of these studies have been that acceptance of Christianity implied a rejection of particular local institutions and practices crucial to the public display and affirmation of men’s power, leaving men ‘lacking in ways to socially constitute their masculinity’ (Clark 1989: 19). This narrative of the emasculating effect of Christianity is contrasted in much of the literature on the emergence of Christianity in Fiji, which suggest a strong complicity between local, masculine power structures and Christianity (Sahlins 1985; Ryle 2005, 2010; Newland 2013). Christianity arrived in Fiji in the midst of significant upheaval and intertribal rivalry, and thus became intrinsically linked with political aspirations and power struggles from the outset. Ratu Seru Cakobau, the high chief of Bau in Eastern Fiji, considered conversion to Wesleyanism, whose missionaries arrived in Fiji under the protection of the Kingdom of Tonga, a feasible way to secure the allegiance of Tonga’s powerful King Taufa’ahau in their ongoing struggle for Fijian paramountcy (Ryle 2010: 64).3 Hence, the emergence of Christianity was instrumental in the Bauans’ efforts to consolidate their power and establish their traditional, masculine hierarchies as the foundation for Fijian rule. As a result, the Methodist church ‘became shackled to dominant power structures and figures of power’ (Ryle 2005:  63) and unified Fiji came to be defined by the tripartite unity of vanua (land and people), matanitu (chiefly authority) and lotu (Christianity) (Garrett 1982: 114; Halapua 2003). It is through these principles that the particular Fijian brand of Christianity continues to be both discursively and practically linked to notions of ethno-Fijian masculinity.

Indigenizing Methodism By utilizing the theoretical framework of colonial mimicry, I  argue that the Christianization of Fiji, and particularly the Methodist church’s continued impact on the social organization of modern Fijian society, has been reliant upon



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its collusion with pre-modern Fijian4 notions of gender, power, consanguinity and social organization. The imitation of British Wesleyanism in an indigenous Fijian cultural logic has created a social practice in which Christian ideas and premodern notions of Fijian authority and social protocol are deeply intertwined. Notions of new and old traditions, modernity and origins are typically shaped in ‘collusion between indigenous patriarchy and colonial power’ (Prakash 1992:  12), emphasizing not only that women’s enunciatory subject positions were entirely effaced from these discussions but also that competing discourses about masculinity and manhood were intrinsic to them. It is nothing new that ethnonational identities are masculine constructs celebrating culturally specific notions of manhood and male domination over women. The point in this context is of a different nature. The collusion between an indigenous patriarchal elite and male colonial power, both in the historical past and the present, is founded on their common interest in constructing a history in which women, as well as alternative masculinities, are, if not powerless and invisible, then, at least, subordinate and silent. It is their respective share of this patriarchal dividend which is negotiated, as the competing traditional discourses favour one masculine construction over others. In the Fijian case, this occurred not so much between pre-Christian Fijian tradition and British modernization and Christianity but as a negotiation between the parts of the new way which could be appropriated by ‘the Fijian way’. Indeed, by ‘filtering European discourses through their own orders of meaning’ the eastern Fijian elites at once ‘limited the potential of those discourses to rule effectively in the service of colonial power’ and utilized them to strengthen existing social hierarchies. This paradox is a common one in colonial contexts; the power of the Christian-European narratives is negotiated by the colonial recipients through their ability to appropriate the message to ‘suit their own cultural logic’ (Larson 1997: 970–1). Through such ‘active engagement with the intellectual material of colonial discourses, imperial subjects constrained, limited, and transformed the cognitive culture of the foreign and politically dominant’ into something familiar (Larson 1997:  971). What has been labelled ‘the new orthodoxy’ (France 1969) in Fiji consisted of namely colonial reconstructions of the Bauan Fijian social system, and eventually this culturally specific way of defining tradition made indigenous Fijians able to claim ownership over newly adopted practices. One way of doing this was to ideologically forge a bond between the chiefly office and the newly accepted God. This was perhaps initially facilitated by early missionaries as way to smooth the process of conversion but appears to

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have quite early developed into elaborate narrative strategies, some of which I will discuss in more depth shortly. In practical terms, it was also by installing Christianity as a sort of veneer on top of existing ancestral spirits and animistic deities. Old places of devotion was not so much torn down and replaced but repurposed to suit a new spiritual regime, and for converts the Christian God was invoked ‘not as “the only god”, but as “the only god who is served” ’ (Toren 1995: 166). In this sense, Christianity was recognized as a spiritual source that was embodied by chiefs and exercised through familiar institutions of power and authority including the traditional class of male warriors, bati, whose role of protectors of everything Fijian soon came to include responsibility for the sanctity of God’s word. While some contemporary accounts of Christianity focus on conversion as the acceptance of social practices and a divine message exterior to Fijian cosmology, it is clear that its integration into the vakavanua created a cognitive space in which Christian belief could be interpreted as intrinsic to the Fijian way. This particularly Fijian discourse is a definite break from the ‘master narrative of rupture’ (Jolly 1997:  156) that has been so prominent in societies where conversion to Christianity signified the advent of modern transformations, and appears to be a central ideology on which Fijian Christianity is constructed. In order to sustain the proposition that Christianity and Fijian custom had a historical and ideological link prior to the mass conversions of the 1850s, it was necessary not only to Christianize Fijian social rituals but also to alter, rather than uncritically adopt, the missionaries’ presentations of Christian rituals so that they reflected a Fijian way of performing them. It is in the analysis of these formal and informal rituals the concept of colonial mimicry becomes useful. The continuation of the ritual presentation and drinking of yaqona in the era after the arrival of Christianity is an obvious example of how Methodist teachings were negotiated with the local elites in order for the new beliefs to gain a foothold. Yaqona5 is the dried root of the Piper methysticum plant which is pounded into fine powder, strained through a muslin cloth and mixed with water. The resulting mixture is a mildly narcotic drink which has been attributed with ritual, medicinal and symbolic properties in Fijian tradition for myriad purposes (Aporosa 2011). Early missionaries initially viewed these ceremonies as inimical to the Christian teachings and initially ‘the Fiji Methodist Synod made strenuous efforts to persuade its congregation to pledge abstinence from yaqona-drinking’ (Toren 1994: 156). The call was largely unsuccessful, however, and Methodism’s rapid spread among the Fijian population is at least partly indebted to their retreat to a more accommodating stand on this issue where



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‘they asked only that ministers limit themselves to strictly ceremonial drinking, whereas ordinary church members could do as they please’ (Forman 1982: 114). This followed the relatively rapid indigenization of the church and escalated the hybridization of Methodist practice in Fiji (Wood 1978). While the church itself remained under foreign administration until 1964 when it became an independent entity, the everyday theological and ceremonial functions were surrendered to local clergymen, lay preachers and chiefs at a very early stage. Consumption of yaqona is particularly interesting to consider here as it was perhaps the most blatant example of an ironic compromise between the new Christian teachings and pre-modern Fijian custom, and one that can be quite clearly observed in present Methodist practice. Yaqona very rarely has a place within the church or as a part of formal Methodist sessions, and there are examples of Methodist officials who facilitate and support the banning of yaqona in villages. However, the claim that ‘kavadrinking and Methodist rituals intersect problematically’ (Tomlinson 2004a: 6) must be qualified. I  attended a great number of prayer sessions, scripture readings and other semi-religious events that took place outside the formal institutions of the church throughout my fieldwork, and these were generally accompanied by ritual presentations and the drinking of yaqona (cf. Aporosa 2011). Some prominent Methodist leaders have also articulated the view that yaqona is integral to Fijian Methodist devotion. One prominent preacher in Nadi told me once that a practice which is so crucial to the vanua has to be right in the eyes of God. Others have taken this logic further and argued that and that yaqona is a ‘gift from God and people [are] morally obliged to drink it’ (Degei 2007). The acceptance of yaqona in these contexts as well as reports of frequent social drinking among Methodist leaders and devotees throughout Fiji is often a point of criticism from other denominations in Fiji. The function of yaqona in the Fijian cultural setting is manifold, and the tanoa, the carved wooden bowl in which the mixed drink is served, is the focal point of most formal settings where it is used to ‘lend gravity to the formal discussion’ (Tomlinson 2004c: 664).6 While yaqona as a cultural entity remains associated with pre-modern practices and, in certain instances, with witchcraft and demons, it is believed to possess certain ritual properties which make it a cultural symbol deemed inalienable from Fijian authority (Aporosa 2011). What is more, the consumption of yaqona, at least in the formal settings which I am predominantly concerned with in this chapter, is a predominantly masculine enterprise which adds formality and authority to the gendered power hierarchy. In short, yaqona is a central aspect of public displays and the ritual confirmation

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of men’s authority in general and the chiefly office in particular. The integration of yaqona in Christian domains was, therefore, important in order to add legitimacy to the Methodist beliefs within Fijian customary cultural logic and to secure the continuity of traditional Fijian power structures from an early stage. This has remained so in accordance with an ethos in which Methodism and the vanua are inseparable entities from which ethno-Fijian identity and authority is derived.7 This ideological and ritual coupling seems to be at the core of the Fijian understanding of the relationship between tradition and Christianity. The latter emerged as a natural progression and moral improvement of the first, and indeed provided knowledge and insights that eradicated unfavourable parts of traditional customs (such as cannibalism, widow sacrifice and tribal warfare).8 The legitimacy and efficacy of the church is at least partly reliant upon a coexistence with elements from pre-Christian Fijian rituals, especially those that are crucial to uphold a social structure based on the patriarchal chiefly system. The hybridization of rituals from two different ideologies is thus not merely a side effect of cultural negotiation; it is central to Fijian’s acceptance and embrace of Christian teachings, highlighted by how colonialization was often conceptualized as a union between chiefs, the British Crown and God. This worldview also had a significant impact on the creation of a Fijian national identity as it allowed for the construction of a hyper-masculine notion of Fijian ethnonationalism based on strength and authority despite subordination to the British colonizers. When yielding some of their power, namely that drawn from the ancestral spirits and pre-Christian deities, Fijian traditional leaders simultaneously accepted Christian ideology as a new legitimizing ideology for their position in the social system, reinforcing the patriarchal nature of the Fijian social structure. Chiefly legitimacy as leaders of the vanua, then, is simultaneously derived from pre-Christian narratives concerning the inherent power of ancestry and the authority of Christianity. These principles are commonly articulated through discourses that position Christianity as the real source of mana (power or efficacy) of chiefs and men more broadly. Telling, retelling and discussing these narratives are an important aspect of contemporary Fijian men’s Christian devotion, serving to practically link their own understanding of manhood and ethnic identity to Christian values. Such formulations are best understood as a continuation of what has been a dominating theme throughout modern Fijian history. The pan-Fijian unification project was often reliant upon explicit links between particular aspects of Fijian traditional organization with a Christian



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ethos stating that ‘God gave the Fijians their customs and chiefly system to distinguish them from other peoples’ (Norton 1990: 9). What is perceived in a Western-centric historicity as dramatic ruptures, then, are in Fijian epistemologies understood as hybrid moments where old narratives are not substituted by but advanced and invested with new meanings through foreign influences. The nature of the vanua, its internal dynamics and the relationship to the spirit world does not change per se, but its functions are determined by social, cultural and spiritual practices. Hence, the relationship between missionaries and chiefs was always one of ‘conjoined cooperation and rivalry’ (Tomlinson 2004a: 7), emphasizing their mutual need to legitimize their respective authority. Christian idioms were utilized actively in this process just as much to strengthen as to transform Fijian cosmology and ritual practice. Again, it is pertinent to draw parallels with Pier M. Larson’s study of the highland peasants of Madagascar. Larson argues that it is necessary to ‘understand Malagasy conversion to Christianity not as a transformation from something Malagasy to something essentially different and alien, but as the creation of a new religious consciousness and practice from various familiar and familiarized cultural resources and traditions’ (Larson 1997: 979). Theoretically, this links to the concepts introduced earlier in this chapter. For Homi Bhabha, this is the great paradox in the relationship between colonial powers and the colonized: the fact that no transmission of cultural traits or ways of living can be perfect but is shaped by the dualism of power which sees cultural practice being formed both by the original provider and the receivers who can adopt and imitate it. The European colonizers, then, arguably exercised their power in preaching, teaching and imposing their message on the colonized, but just as importantly, the colonized Malagasy and Fijians, or at least their elites which collaborated with the colonizers, took control of these messages and narratives at the very moment they accepted them as part of their social life. Indeed, while colonial Christianity is a series of imitations and mimicries, the paradox is that no mimicry is ever completely successful in replicating the original, but becomes inscribed with the agency of the imitator. Following Bhabha, we might say that the Fijian discrepancies from the colonial performance demonstrate the capacity of power which is implicit in any act of cultural adaptation. Emphasizing the potential agency of the colonial subjects to ascribe new meaning to and alter learned practices Bhabha holds that mimicry is a disruptive force with significant implications for power relations (2004). As imitations of a dominant idea, cultural practice in the colonial context ‘demands an encounter with “newness” ’ which cuts through the historical

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binary of past and present to create a ‘sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation’ (Bhabha 2004: 10). Such an act ‘does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent “in-between” space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present’ (Bhabha 2004: 10). Early Fijian Christianity, then, was British Wesleyanism, but not quite. It developed from this starting point in a direction which makes Fijian Methodist performance a distinct feature of colonial mimicry, a social arena comprising a series of ironic compromises between a Fijian ethos with deep roots in precolonial social systems and the modern world order.9 The flavour of Fijian Wesleyanism is thus undoubtedly different from that found elsewhere.

Methodist practice in modern Fiji Christianity remains a cornerstone of most Fijians’ lives, and through the course of my fieldwork, I regularly attended church services in different settings and denominations. There are myriad churches and denominations in contemporary Fiji, but by its sheer numbers and its close links to the chiefly establishments, Methodism remains the dominant one. The discussions that follow are therefore based largely on research conducted in four village-based Methodist churches in Western Viti Levu in 2009. It is evident that religious practices and rituals in themselves are both understood and performed differently in Fiji than in the west; and the church room is itself one of those spaces where ‘the colonial text’ is repeated, and thus rewritten, mimicked, and thus changed, until it ‘emerges uncertainly . . . split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference’ (Bhabha 2004: 153). While a strong emphasis on congregational hymns is a cornerstone of the Wesleyan liturgy throughout the world,10 the importance of communal singing and the inclusion of song and music into prayers and covenants in the Fijian sermons I  witnessed is an example of ‘the same, but not quite’. Fijian church services were typically led by local lay preachers, carefully presented in white shirts, dark tie and a suluvakataga, a loin cloth with pockets and a buckle which has been the choice of Fijians for formal occasions since colonization. The services consisted of, in addition to the readings from the Bible, hymns and chants based on scriptures which are ‘set to distinctive Fijian music with interweaving chromatic counterpoint in voice parts’ (Garrett 1992: 392).



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Similarly, Fijian composers have integrated Christian messages and prayers into traditional dances like the meke throughout modern times. Most meke routines involve accompanying performative dance moves accentuating the words of a text, often referred to by the English-derived word korosi (chorus), sung with the enactment. These korosi are often explicit about their Christian message and aimed at making specific links between pre-modern Fijian culture and social life and these ideologies. Michael Dickhardt (2005) translated one korosi when completing his fieldwork in a village on the southern Fijian island of Kadavu, which serves well as an example of such religious practice: Edodonu sara me da sa reki Ko Viti na qele mai Iteni Ko i au na kai Jerusalemi Na vanua tabu nei Manueli Autubu e na kawa Isireli

It is right indeed that we rejoice Viti, the soil from Eden I am a man from Jerusalem The vanua tabu of Manuel I grow from the offspring of Israel

The symbolic importance of this meke for Dickhardt is that ‘it points to an interesting possibility of retaining the vanua as an essential part of a Christian worldview’ through historical praxis (Dickhardt 2005:  343). Since the vanua is said to encompass everything Fijian, this is naturally an important process in order to maintain and strengthen the validity of the Christian ethos among contemporary Fijians. Joeli, a Methodist official that I frequently spoke to during my fieldwork, made this point even more strongly when he argued that ‘it is the role of the Church to make sure the vanua remains strong and united . . . because the vanua is what God gave Fijians’. As religious texts, these hymns also emphasize one of the crucial points of Fijian historicity as understood by many contemporary Fijians and frequently mentioned both by the clergy and members of the laity:  that the biblical message and teachings of Christ have always been entrenched in the Fijian way and that Western missionaries ‘did not violate indigenous cultural practice but revealed the inherent Christianity of the Fijian people’ (Toren 1988: 697). Such a selective appropriation of Christianity, evident not only in Fiji, is arguably ‘testimony to the porousness of the linguistic, cultural, social, and class frontiers across which cultural practices commonly flow in a globally connected world’ (Larson 1997: 995–6), but it also effectively points out the reciprocity of cultural transformation and enables us better to understand particular cultural constructions of Christianity in settings like Fiji. Historically, the significance of Christian discourse in Fiji was cemented in this ‘space of interpretation and misappropriation’ that emerges between ‘the

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Western sign and its colonial signification’ (Bhabha 2004: 135), in the sense that it enabled the local elite to consolidate their traditional social hierarchies with the authority of the new colonial order. The spread of Christianity in colonial contexts did often happen so rapidly that the European administrators and missionaries were not always able to establish authorized ways of interpreting and practising the religion. In practical terms, then, early Christian movements often developed through complex hybrid articulations, drawing upon both alien and pre-existing deities. In Fiji, this seemed quite apparent, at least to the extent that the acceptance of Christianity was directly associated with the ability of this new belief system to be integrated into the overarching social system and protocol.

Narratives of Fijian Christianity Framing these religious practices are a series of discourses through which indigenous Fijians continuously integrated Christianity into their own concept of tradition. A key discursive move is the creation of a narrative in which the relationship between God and the vanua is presented as predating the arrival of European missionaries. These narratives were prominent when I  talked to contemporary Fijians about Fijian Christianity and the chiefly system. For instance, when I  discussed the matter with a contemporary chief, he asserted that ‘[his] forefathers were always governed by the lord . . . in the heart’ although the arrival of Methodist preachers made a significant practical difference because they brought ‘the scriptures that proved their righteousness’. These articulations should be understood as part of a rather complex historical argument, where the arrival of the Wesleyan missionaries by sea is viewed as a sign showing the rectitude of Bauan chiefly rule over the vanua on behalf of God. One example of such divine proof of the righteousness of eastern chiefly rule, according to this chief, is found in the biblical Prov. 21.31, stating that while ‘the horse is prepared for battle, the victory belongs to the lord’. This particular understanding of causality sees the unification of Fiji under Bauan rule as a prerequisite, a preparation, for the arrival of Christ in Fiji. From this point of view, missionaries were merely ‘prophets’ emerging in Fiji to consecrate the actions of Bauan chiefs when they had unified the Fijian islands through warfare. Another related narrative about the inherent Christianity of Fijian chiefs, which was commonly told in the congregations I visited, locates the origin of



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the Fijian chiefs in the ancient Middle East. ‘The first Fijians’, my friend, who was both a chief and an ordained Methodist minister, explained, ‘are described in the Bible as being driven out of Israel . . . and later came across the seas to settle in Fiji’, and should thus be considered among ‘the first true Christians’. Missionaries, then, were significant because they brought Fijians the Bible, which was not a new book about a new belief but rather their own long lost narrative of origin, belonging and spiritual meaning.11 Indeed, Christ is the one who ‘brought mana to the vanua’.12 While these myths are present throughout the Pacific Islands and, by some believed to have been created by missionaries attempting to ‘account for the special attributes of the Islands people’, it appears unique to Fiji that they have become standardized history through storytelling and ‘the officializing process’ (Friedman 1992: 196). Variations of this narrative were presented to me on more than ten different occasions during my fieldwork. Each time, it was during or after the semi-official welcoming ceremony which includes yaqona presentation, suggesting that the stories themselves and the retelling of them to visiting outsiders have taken on important social meanings in contemporary Fiji. These may perhaps be seen as examples of what Dickhardt (2005) labelled ‘historical praxis’ which made the links between the vanua and Christianity possible. Yaqona, as discussed elsewhere, has ideological and traditional properties which are used to lend legitimacy and integrity to a social setting and what is actually being said across a talanoa. Any Fijian event, independent of formality, often involves strict observance of social order. Positional organization and the order in which one is served is generally based on social rank according to hereditary position, age and marital status, with the highest ranking individuals seated at the top, closest to the yaqona bowl, and served first, with importance declining the further away from the top one is situated. Whenever I was invited for a Fijian yaqona session, I  was seated among the more senior participants and served second or third, emphasizing the notion that as an official guest I was treated with more respect and formality than my social rank generally would suggest. Besides the obvious ritual part of these occasions, which in most cases were limited to my offering a symbolic gift, a sevusevu, of dried yaqona root to the chiefly establishment of the village or senior man of the urban household, reciprocated by the official presentation of yaqona to me, the main purpose of the sessions was to share stories. Conversation was structured in a sort of ordered informality; while still social and often free-flowing, it remained obvious that ‘[t]‌he privilege of commanding an audience is correlated with one’s social

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position, so that when a high-seated drinker begins to talk, lower drinkers tend to fall quiet and listen’ (Tomlinson 2004c: 658). The structure of these events also gave the impression that the important stories were the ones told by the highestranking speakers. The fact that the stories about the origin of the Fijian people in general, or often specifically the people from this particular area, were descended from early Christians in Israel who migrated across the Indian Ocean, were generally told from people positioned in close proximity to the tanoa, that is, the wooden, ornamented bowl from which yaqona is ceremoniously served, suggests that the presentation of the story was one of significant importance. Since it seems obvious that all other participants were intimately familiar with this origin myth, it served as an almost ritual articulation of Fijianness to an outsider, equal in cultural importance to the yaqona which it accompanied. In a similar vein, by linking the telling of this story to the more or less formal presentation of yaqona to me as an invited guest, these Fijians seemed to reinforce the idea they sought to convey:  that Fijians have always been Christians and that all things Fijian, belonging to the vanua, are parts of Christian devotion. As such, the telling of the story is a way of attending to the origin myth and thus making it valid, just as giving attention to the storyteller signifies his social status and rank. Telling these stories and revealing the origin myths of indigenous Fijians was, at least in my experience, the exclusive domain of men of certain seniority. As such, these events became central to the performance of a localized form of Christianity that was integral to the construction of masculinity and male authority. Sermons in the churches I visited also frequently drew upon this mythology in order to link notions of Fijian customs and ancestry directly to the methods of Christ. Taking place in church halls that were ornamented by images of missionaries and depictions of historical sermons in the village, most prayer meetings made references to particular historical dates of significance. In similar fashion, current challenges faced by the villagers, whether practical, material or spiritual in nature, were often explained by elaborate analogies to the early missionaries and the relationship between villagers and church officials in the past. This was epitomized by one preacher’s frequent catchphrase that ‘the one decision that really matters was already made in the past’, alluding to their ancestors welcoming missionaries and their message. These contemporary constructions of history which place Christianity at the centre of Fijian tradition, even prior to European contact, could inadvertently reflect a project of early subaltern theorists: ‘a desire to retrieve the autonomous will and consciousness of the subaltern’ from the domination of Eurocentric



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historicity (Prakash 1992: 9). By refuting the Western ownership and origin of Christian morality and making it intrinsic to Fijian tradition and cosmology, these respondents have, at least on one level, made Fiji, as opposed to Britain and Europe, ‘the radiating center around which others are arranged’ (Prakash 1992:  10). While being careful not to overemphasize these claims, and bearing in mind that their theoretical implications may be stronger than the intentions behind them, it seems obvious that they serve a dual purpose: at once consolidating Christianity as crucial to Fijian social organization and placing it at the centre of the ethnonational identity project. While Wesleyanism ‘posits egalitarianism of the soul’ as a governing principle, actual Fijian social practice asserts rigid hierarchies (Toren 1988: 699). To negotiate these overtly conflicting principles, it was necessary to maintain certain elements of pre-Christian cosmology, particularly the benign ancestral spirits that affirmed the divinity of the chiefly system and the hierarchical kinship system empowering the chiefs. However, these spirits are considered to be under the sway of the Christian God much in the same way that Jesus Christ is often considered to be elevated to the top of both the formal, social and spiritual hierarchy in the village and in the cosmos. The notion that Christ is the head of earthly as well as spiritual dwellings is frequently articulated both in formal, ritual and everyday contexts. Deities, as well as chiefs and other traditionally perceived authorities, derive their efficacy from devotees’ attendance to them. Any public display of Christian devotion, then, is not only a necessity in order to empower the Christian God; it also serves as a way to actively undermine the pre-modern Fijian spirits, whose continued existence in the spiritual realm few people doubt and their powers (Presterudstuen 2014b). It is thus important on a personal level for affirming one’s belief, but also as a performance for others. In cases where illness or misfortune has struck a community, individuals or families who have consistently failed to attend to the Christian God can be blamed for empowering the evil powers of ancestral spirits, claims which obviously have serious ramifications in a sociocultural context in which religion is part of almost every level of action. Most importantly though, this conceptualization of the coexistence between pre-Christian spirits and the Christian deities emphasize that religious practice, as opposed to faith, forms the basis of Fijian Christian devotion. The religious sphere may in fact be understood as a series of hybrid moments where preChristian Fijian practices and contemporary Methodism merge. The mimetic properties of Christian practice are obvious, as conversion by definition involves adopting foreign practices and emulating their original expression.

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What is equally clear in this case is the Fijian understanding of this process and their ability to construct an ideological space where Christianity is, cakacaka vakavanua, or action according to the land (Toren 1988: 702). Moreover, the ideological link between institutionalized Christianity and the vanua, the overarching concept that defines social relations and tradition in Fiji, facilitates a sociocentric view of religious devotion. On an ideal level, Fijians ought to focus their actions on providing services for others in the community, to the extent that the self is realized by ‘being attentive and complying, and respectful to those who hold traditionally defined authority’ (Ravuvu 1983: 103). Attending to religious belief is consequently defined as a way to subdue the self in order to allow communion with one’s kin. Attention to God, then, is at once an important way to honour one’s commitment to and affirm one’s place within the communally based, social order which forms the locus of ‘the Fijian way’ of life. During my fieldwork, I  found that many took these responsibilities very literally. Many of the young men I  spent most time with, for instance, considered themselves to carry their geographical and social identity on their bodies as signifiers, so their spirituality was embodied. Their religious faith was similarly played out, performed and practised rather than simply experienced on a personal level. Indeed, rather than being defined by creed and personal conviction, the essence of Fijian Christianity is often found in how these beliefs are played out and performed.

Performing religious dedication through the body Crucially then, faith and devotion are media ‘through which Fijians come to an understanding about the relationship between themselves and communities’ (Brison 2001: 456) and need to be displayed publically. The notion of Sunday attire may be long gone in most parts of the Western world, but in Fiji, uniformity of dress when attending church functions remains important. While the majority of women wear bright, ankle-length dresses, their dress code appears less rigid than that of men. Men and boys are generally expected to wear a formal suluvakataga and a neat shirt when attending church, an attire at once signifying the formality of the occasion, showing respect to the church and the community and serving as a physical statement of belief and devotion. One respondent confirmed the importance of this practice by explaining how ‘people roaming the streets on Sunday, in sports shorts and work shirts’ were ‘lost’, a



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notion suggesting both a lack of Christian belief and a failure to know their place within the social hierarchy. The weekly Methodist program seems to be almost uniform and fully established throughout Fiji, with important prayer meetings on Wednesday mornings, Saturday nights and Sunday both morning and night, in addition to the full weekly sermon on Sunday. Walking through a village or through an urban street around these times, it soon becomes apparent who are Methodist believers on their way to a function, and those who are not. Wearing the assigned dress and carrying a bound Bible under their arms, Methodist men clearly displayed their Christian devotion. The word of Christ is thus not only accepted, attended to and understood; it is carried around on the body as an emblem of devotion, being an intrinsic part of, as well as adding meaning to, the public presentation of Fijian manhood in terms of the suluvakataga and the bula shirt. It is important to note here that the postures, gestures and space occupied by various participants of both formal and informal public settings in Fiji are important to manifest the structure of relations within and between people. The overt symbolism of clothes and accessories has become central to these complex presentations of the social order in which any action or positioning is ascribed specific meaning in terms of the larger ethos of respect, authority and hierarchy. In the church room as well as in other formal Fijian contexts, clothes and apparition combine with the body as a symbolic entity to both express and perform social relations. Merely observing the configuration of a room and how people are positioned within it can thus provide a number of significant cultural and social clues in a manner effectively described by Asesela Ravuvu: [T]‌he separation of different interest groups and cohesion of common interest groups, the centrality and/or height and/or forward placing of leaders, and the proximity of followers in descending order of status, the segregation of the sexes and of adults from children, the relative significance of those who stand or sit or speak on bended knees, as well as the more subtle expressions of body, face and hands which are not so easily seen. (Ravuvu 1987: 307)

These multifarious articulations of the Fijian traditional social system have been directly integrated into the Christian sphere. The Methodist church rooms themselves display these relations even more clearly. While the church buildings are generally constructed as single-room halls, they are separated according to sex along the middle, with the pulpit at the top of the aisle flanked by a pew for the choir on one side and a pew for children on the other. The pulpit

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is often elevated from the seats of the main congregation together with more pews behind or along the side of it that are reserved for chiefs. Chiefs, elders or prominent visitors generally enter the buildings from a side door reserved for their and the church minister’s use. Here, the spatial configuration of the church room is instrumental in displaying and affirming the position of chiefs as bearers of tradition and natural authority even though they do not necessary hold any position within the church hierarchy as such. While the church is considered an independent organization, its structures and practices are intrinsically linked to traditional social hierarchies (Halapua 2003: 69–70). These links are constantly played out and acted upon, and the practice of acting like a Methodist is informed and determined by a notion of acting appropriately according to traditional Fijian protocol. Religion, then, becomes an all-encompassing practice which cuts through the entire social field and is integral to most social activities, and is equally prominent outside the formal spaces of the church.13 Indeed, these structures underpin the entire social scene in Fiji. While Methodism has become an integrated part of life for the majority of Fijians, it is simultaneously a practice which must be pronounced and played out in everyday life in order to be effective. For Fijian men, the notion of manhood is deeply rooted in this religious practice. Two interesting manifestations of this integration of devotion into everyday performances of masculinity were found outside the church room, where young men frequently perceived their engagement in training, sports and other forms of physical contests in religious terms (Presterudstuen 2010; Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016). For many, playing sport and practising Christian belief were not simply compatible factors that comprise their identity. Instead, a diverse range of physical practices were considered crucial parts of their active devotion. One interlocutor explained that ‘looking after my body and using the talent God gave me is how I praise the Lord and show my devotion’, sentiments echoed by a young friend of mine from the village who was studying to become a Methodist preacher while also playing representative rugby. For him, training the body was even more directly linked to the religious experience itself: he claimed that learning to ‘know, use, and feel’ his body gave him a heightened and ‘more real’ religious experience than what he could achieve through prayer or scripture studies alone. These dynamics are perhaps similar to what Bell labelled the ‘spiritual mastery’ possessed by ‘ritual bodies’ (1992: 107) and what Ryle, in the context of Fijian charismatic Catholicism, calls embodied ‘spiritual agency’, in the sense that they are ways people engage physically and bodily in religious



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devotion (2010: 173). In any case, they show a direct link between notions of being a man and being a devoted Methodist. Of all the virtues achieved by devotion to God, strength is the one which appears most highly valued and emphasized by Fijian men. This is arguably one of the reasons why rugby football has taken on particular meanings as way to practise devotion and why players had a liking for Psalm 18 of the Bible as discussed earlier. These and other extracts from the Bible were actively used as discursive tools both to signify the link between Christianity and the Fijian traditional social protocol as well as to prescribe emotive and ideological meaning to certain everyday behaviours and activities, including playing rugby. Both the selection and interpretation of Bible verses were thus culturally determined, as these men affirmed sections of the scripture which perceivably reinforced Fijian values and practices. Christianity was consistently understood in a way where contemporary constructions of masculinity found justification, encouragement, and guidelines in the religious ethos. This notion of using physical strength to prove Christian devotion was not limited to the sporting arena but appeared to be a crucial part of the Fijian cultural logic in which strength, toughness and courage are not only valued as intrinsic qualities of proper manhood but also as highly valued skills needed to maintain the social order. Fist fighting was a relatively common practice for young men from the villages to engage in, and these forceful altercations were often ascribed spiritual meaning. Sakkariah, a young man who frequently ended up in fights in town, explained that his actions on these occasions were entirely means of maintaining social control; as ‘these guys were out of line’, presumably meaning that their actions had violated accepted social protocols between members of kinship groups. The explanation for these altercations were thus derived from a notion of ‘doing the right thing’ in terms of the larger social ethos, and, as Sakkariah explained to me, with reference to Prov. 28.1, ‘while the wicked flee, the righteous is bold as a lion’. The biblical notion of righteousness takes on more elaborate and wider meanings in these contexts; Sakkariah interpreted it as a justification for using physical strength to enforce social protocol. To ‘stand up to’ and challenge insults, physically punish inappropriate behaviour and fight were doubly valourized, both as culturally appropriate responses to deviance and as Christian virtues. There seemed to be an assumed divine justification for any act which could be traditionally condoned, a point emphasized by the way some of my respondents used Ps. 46.1, ‘God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble’, in association with fighting. At least one respondent interpreted this as God

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giving him strength to justly use when he was in trouble, and the fact that he had the strength to deal with an issue was consequently evidence of the divine approval of the act. Showing weakness, backing down, or even losing a fight or a physical altercation was, from this quasi-religious justification, evidence of a lack of just cause, effectively putting the moral responsibility on the losing side in all conflicts. The clue to understand this usage of religious logic is in looking at the way Christianity has become completely integrated into dominant discourses of Fijian tradition and communality. Sakkariah and his mates only engaged in fist fights when these were perceived to be related to a larger ethos of traditional duty towards kinship groups, and consequently utilized the same narrative techniques of linking discourses about Fijian tradition directly to Christian morals that I  discussed earlier. Fist fighting, then, just like training, appeared to be constructed as intrinsically religious acts, publically displaying devotion to God.

Negotiating Christianity, tradition and modern masculinities Christian belief and devotion has undeniably become a central aspect of Fijian men’s self-identity and at the locus of discourses about Fijian tradition and custom. In that sense, it is little doubt that the colonial transmission of Christianity as a belief system must be considered a successful one. However, the understanding of Christian ideologies in Fiji and the way Christian devotion is practiced in the Fijian cultural context is markedly different from the original ideas initially introduced by British missionaries, highlighting Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry as a process of appropriation. Christianity became integrated into Fijian culture through a historical process of negotiation rather than through a sudden conversion. Indeed, the remarkable success of Christianity in Fiji appeared to be heavily reliant upon Fijian elites’ ability to make sense of Christian ideologies in their specific cultural context and ultimately utilize the new belief to reinforce traditional, pre-Christian value judgments. This type of cultural negotiation has been particularly successful in merging culturally specific notions of gender and male domination, such as the chiefly system, with Christian authority. It is also clear that Fijian Methodist men routinely make connections between traditionally condoned performances of masculinity and Christianity which serve at once to justify their relative power positions and give credence



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to a variety of bodily practices through religious references. These practices are ultimately examples of Bhabha’s ironic compromises between the colonial ideology of Christianity and culturally specific notions of tradition, spirituality and masculine identity. This direct link between masculinity and Christianity is also one of idiosyncratic aspects of Fijian Methodism, as Christianity has often been perceived as an emasculating force in other ethnographic contexts. Such processes of cultural negotiation are parts of an ongoing project, however, and people experience, articulate and perform devotion in context of broader social change. While Methodist belief and Biblical symbolism remain important aspect of many young men’s self-identities, some of my interlocutors also actively sought out ways to redefine what it meant to be Fijian in the time of modernity. In some cases, that included challenging traditional authorities and seeking out alternative ways of defining the relationship between masculinity, Fijian-ness and Christianity. Other times it meant a more direct rejection of established religion altogether in favour of new forms of sociality centred on a more outward-looking worldview. Whichever way they perceive of the future, however, Fijian men continue to construct their masculine performances in dialogue with a strong cultural narrative rooted in tradition. In what follows, I  focus on what it means to navigate tradition and modernity in practice.14

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‘Living in Hell’: Performing Indo-Fijian masculinities

A key point throughout my analysis is that urban Fiji is a site for sustained, continuous interaction between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, as well as between these groups and visitors from elsewhere in the world. This is true in the urban centres of the Western division, Nadi and Lautoka, where I conduct most of my research. A significant majority of my indigenous Fijian interlocutors here are as fluent in Hindustani as they are in English, something they consider a necessity in order to create a livelihood in urban Fiji. Not only are these western towns more densely populated with Indo-Fijians than elsewhere in Fiji, IndoFijians also dominate the small-scale commercial sector and service industry, and Hindustani has for a long time been considered the language of business and trade. But interethnic interaction is not limited to workplaces and shopfronts – developing social relations across the ethnic boundary is increasingly becoming an everyday aspect of modern life. That is not to suggest that race is disappearing from everyday discourses. It is obvious from my discussion in other chapters that race still holds considerable purchase as a signifier of difference to the extent that it is necessary to think about the construction of masculinity in the two different ethnic communities as somewhat separate from each other. And although recent political reforms have made explicit attempts at removing formal inequality between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, including those pertaining to political representation and access to social services, many factors that serve to distinguish the two communities remain. In religion, language, work, cultural taste and social organization, they generally experience themselves so differently that an ostensibly essentialized understanding of race remains pervasive. In what follows, I  turn my analytical focus on the everyday construction, performance and maintenance of Indo-Fijian masculinities in modern, urban Fiji. My analysis here is twofold. First, I  provide a brief outline of the

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ethnohistorical context in which the Indo-Fijian cultural identity has emerged – namely the history of indentured labour and subsequent long-standing political marginalization in colonial and independent Fiji. Second, I focus my attention on how these formative political realities has facilitated a set of cultural values and assumptions and how these are played out in contemporary social life. I  pay specific attention to three key performative aspects of Indo-Fijian masculinities: hard work, Hindu religious devotion and storytelling.

The making of girmityas Indo-Fijians are a direct product of colonialism. Between 1879 and 1916, over 60,000 South Asians were brought to work in Fiji’s sugar plantations as indentured labourers, or ‘coolies’. They soon called themselves girmitiyas, derived from the English root word ‘agreement’, or girmit which was their ‘vernacularised version of it’ (Mishra 1992: 1), in an ‘act of self-appellation’ that rendered the indenture experience ‘a memorable subaltern category’ (Mishra 2005:  15). The British intended them to be a labouring class in place of the Indigenous Fijians, who, for their own protection as it was framed, were insulated by colonial policy from the workings of the capitalist market. Life in the coolie line was harsh and notoriously brutal, with squalid and confined living conditions, lack of food and health provisions and ‘slave like’ (Tinker 1974) working conditions under ‘wicked overseers’ (Lal and Shineberg 1991). Mayer argued that labourers in the plantations ‘were as often as not grossly overtasked; corporal punishment was used to get the work done, and there was inadequate supervision by the Inspector of Immigrants appointed by the Government’ (1963: 164). The plight of the indentured labourers had a significant impact on the religious and social life of the Indian migrants. Indeed, the term narak, most commonly referred to simply as ‘hell’, became intrinsically linked to the girmit experience. The indenture experience ostensibly changed the Indian workers’ subjectivities and reconstituted their identities ‘by a transaction that took their labor power to be their total nature and made it into the first organizing principle of their social life’ (Kelly 1991: 29). This came to be the foundation of specific Indo-Fijian identities. Emerging from the physical place of the indenture lines in Fiji, symbolically in narak, these early Indians in Fiji positioned themselves as girmityas, reflecting how cultural identities that may have referential points in the distant past can be articulated and constituted in the present.



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As Sudesh Mishra has pointed out, there were ‘no girmityas before the time of girmit’ because this is a ‘self-nominating subject with a name that induced a host of affects while designating a journey, and odyssey as well as an ordeal’ whose very echo ‘constitutes an entire inexhaustible archive’ of experiences (2005: 31). It is from the hardships and tribulations of the indenture line then that the IndoFijian subject position must be viewed and understood, a point which is evident in the high premium contemporary Indo-Fijians put on labour, hard work and economic independence. In fact, I argue that the notion of labour power, as the chief organizing principle of social life in indentured life, has become an integral part of Indo-Fijian subject-identities and has shaped the understanding of what it means to be Indo-Fijian. The indenture experience also served to wipe out many of the existing social differences between girmityas. Their caste classifications were all but obliterated shortly after arrival in Fiji, their last faint traces today being in the practice that only members of the Brahmin (priests) castes are utilized to officiate in the most important religious ceremonies. This defies the general pattern of Hinduism in Fiji, however, as ritual purity in general is no longer seen as a virtue by birth and solely associated with Brahmins as a class but rather an achievement which is available to any individual whose religious devotion is impeccable (Grieco 1998). The relative democratization of spirituality has been instrumental in the creation of a more egalitarian Indian community in Fiji than seen in many other contexts. While social difference is overdetermined in the Indian societies in which contemporary Indo-Fijians have their ancestral roots, they are similarly underdetermined in their village life in Fiji (Brenneis 1987a:  238–9), and a distinct, overt egalitarianism has become a central aspect of the distinct IndoFijian ethnocultural identity that developed in Fiji post indenture, a point I shall explore further below.

Contemporary Indo-Fijian identities The Indo-Fijian identity is created in the transitory moments between an Indian past, the traumatic indenture experience and a long history of relative social and political marginalization in Fiji. From Fiji, but not being Fijian, labelled Indians but not being from India, the defining characteristic of the Indo-Fijian cultural identity is to be found in a distinct, hybrid moment between these very different and sometimes conflicting cultural influences. For most Indo-Fijians today, the links to India remain on a spiritual and emotional level, as a cultural reference,

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namely through religious texts, images and rituals, music and Bollywood movies, or through the stories that survived from their ancestors. Of all the places in the world where they have close family or they themselves aspire to migrate to, India is generally not one of them. Similarly, while India had a certain presence in the social, cultural or political organizations of the Indo-Fijian community up until the 1980s, they have largely deserted this scene now, as current Indian efforts to foster stronger relationships with a thirty million strong diaspora community across the world remains focused on émigrés to the developed world and have thus largely ignored Indo-Fijians. It is consequently both useful and necessary to treat Indo-Fijians as just as different from subcontinental Indians as from Fijians. That is not to say that it would not be useful to make comparative observations between cultural and social practices in the regions of India in which most of the Indo-Fijians have their ancestral origins and those of contemporary Fiji to understand how the ‘Indian-ness’ of the diaspora has been renegotiated in a new context. Such a broad comparative analysis is, of course, beyond the scope of this book. VoigtGraf ’s tentative study focusing on Indo-Fijians in Fiji and Australia as well as subcontinental Indian migrants to Australia and their families in India found that Indo-Fijians had developed Pacific cultural identities and ‘constructed a transnational space around Fiji as the new centre largely excluding the cultural hearth of India’ (2008: 81). This rings true to me as well. In accord with the argument outlined above I  have treated Indo-Fijians as an ethnocultural group in their own right and relied on their own understandings and definitions of ‘Indian’ cultural and historical practice as points of references. I make this analytical move in order to acknowledge that Indo-Fijian culture ought to be considered a unique ethnocultural entity, quite separate from the cultural tradition from which it is derived. Uprooted and dislocated from the physical context which made sense of their worldview, the girmityas of Fiji adapted their cultural background in specific ways to develop a new cultural identity in a new homeland; a process characterized by fragmentation and reconstitution (Mayer 1963; Voigt-Graf 2008; Younger 2010: 4–9). Despite these relatively numerous academic works on Indians in Fiji, the ethnographic work to date on Indo-Fijians has been fairly limited in scope. Much of the focus has remained on the interethnic relationship with Indigenous Fijians and on the political organization that structure these dynamics, while very little has been said about power relations within the Indo-Fijian community. More specifically, gender studies in this community are very scarce, with the



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few existing examples often focusing on women’s issues and femininities (Leckie 2000; Reddy 2000). As gender is a social field underpinned by power relations, it becomes especially interesting to look at how notions of manhood, masculinity and men’s power survived and was renegotiated in a community like the IndoFijian one, that emerged in context of social and political marginalization by both the Fijian host community and the British colonial power. In this chapter, I  demonstrate that the specific ways masculinity is constructed and played out in the Indo-Fijian community are deeply rooted in this historical process, and that contemporary masculine performances among Indo-Fijians are to be understood as a negotiation between gender as a collective, socio-historical construct and the individual’s personal aspirations for status and social standing. More specifically, I argue that Indo-Fijian men’s gender identities are centred on an ideological legacy from the girmit experience, where ideals such as independence, autonomy and hard work have become core values which IndoFijian men embody and construct their masculine performances on. I further demonstrate how these ideologies are played out in a series of public contestations over very subtle notions of honour and respect, which at once reinforce the overtly egalitarian ideology which underpins the social field and provide room for the individual negotiation of manhood. It became clear during my fieldwork that while social relations are characterized by egalitarianism rather than strict, formal power hierarchies, power among Indo-Fijian men is contested and negotiated through performances of Hindu devotion and storytelling, two constitutive practices which run through Indo-Fijian men’s social life.

‘Cash crops and hard work’ – making a living in modern Fiji After completing their indenture contracts and leaving plantation life behind, few indentured labourers had sufficient money saved to afford the voyage back to India and the majority ‘became independent sugar growers of a sort, their income suspended between the land rents they paid to indigenous Fijians for three- to twelve-acre plots and the prices they received for the cane they grew’ (Kelly 1992b: 98). A great number of Indo-Fijian farmers would thus rightly be considered peasants in the most direct sense of the word as they were, and to a great extent remain, landless farmers with limited socio-economic and political power. However, by individualizing sugar farming rather than selling their labour to plantation owners, the liberated Indians drove European companies

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out of the sugar market and created a place for themselves in the emerging capitalist economy. This resistance to the established colonial system of labour and economic organization became central to the Indo-Fijian ethos in which independence and hard work remained prominent aspects. John D. Kelly has demonstrated that these notions rest on Gandhian ideology that interpreted labour as a devotional reality and equated the concept of ‘bread labour’, understood as every man working for his own food with his hands, as devotional sacrifice (Gandhi 1957:  66; Kelly 1992b:  108). The early girmityas were understood to have epitomized this ideal, both through the hardship in the indenture lines and later when building their lives as independent farmers and raising a family through hard labour on the fields. Working hard on the land in the present, then, appeared to be understood by many of my Indo-Fijian respondents as crucial to their cultural identity, and it was considered as much a personal virtue as a central aspect of Indo-Fijian manhood. Most Indo-Fijian men showed considerable pride in the hardship suffered and strength displayed by their ancestors, both in the coolie experience itself and in the struggle to establish a livelihood for themselves and their families in post-indenture Fiji. These narratives typically focused on their male ancestors’, grandfathers or great grandfathers, diligence, resilience and independence, and by ‘[e]‌voking their historically articulated link to Fijian land and soil through indentured labourers, they lay claim to the right to labour and live off Fijianowned land’ (Trnka 2005: 356). Such claims have for a long time been challenged by the political and legal reality of land legislation in Fiji. Indigenous Fijians often express their sole right to lay such empirical, symbolic and authentic claims to a close relationship with the land based on their solidly institutionalized inalienable ownership to it. Besides a small number of farmers or urban settlers who have managed to obtain crown or freehold land, Indo-Fijians have no legal rights beyond those of tenants on the Fijian land-owners’ land. Moreover, during the last decades, many agricultural and residential leases have expired and these relationships between native land owning units and residential farmers have become more strained. The displacement of Indo-Fijians has created specific ideological articulations about the relationship between Indo-Fijians and the land and soil in Fiji based on both the Indo-Fijian girmit experience (Mishra 2005) and Hindu spirituality, and intensified the symbolic relationship between contemporary Indo-Fijians and their ancestor’s land. Farmers like Raj and Virend spoke vividly of how their grandfathers had ‘broken this land’ and ‘built this house from nothing’,



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and that it was their duty to continue their ancestors’ hard work. Furthermore, these relationships were given spiritual premium and understood in a symbolic as well as physical sense. This happened by, for instance, performing prayers at the same spot that their fathers and grandfathers had performed them, or sacrificing fruit to evoke spiritual protection of a particular piece of land and contributing to the perceived relationship between self-identity and the physical land they occupied. However, Indo-Fijian men were constructing and articulating these identities while their right to make a living and work off the land continued to be disputed in the larger ethno-national discourse which has dominated national politics in Fiji since colonization (Trnka 2005). Despite its internal dynamics of idealized equality and egalitarianism, Indo-Fijian social systems function within a larger sociocultural context that is both hierarchical and profoundly disproportionate. Although a number of recent constitutional changes have been implemented to remove overt racial discrimination in terms of political representation or access to broader citizenship rights, indigenous Fijians remain in control of the vast majority of land and have long dominated positions of political leadership as well as key institutions such as the military and the police force. Post indenture, the economic sector consequently became one of the very few available avenues where Indo-Fijians could counter the Fijian power hegemony. Indeed, if it is true that ‘Fijians came to view the preserving of distinctive traditions as a compensation for the disadvantages they suffered in the economy’ (Norton 1993: 746); the domination of the free economy came to be Indo-Fijians’ compensation for the deprivation of political control and land ownership. At the same time, this kind of material work took on spiritual value, making it doubly valourized. Even though, as documented by both Kelly (1992b) and Trnka (2005), political power and dominance are aspects of modern life many Indo-Fijians are willing to forfeit and sacrifice for the sake of national stability and respect for native Fijians’ claims, opportunities to occupy the land and make a living under the protection of the nation state threshold are considered non-negotiable rights. Many Indo-Fijians consider themselves as having taken primary responsibility in building Fiji into a modern nation, especially through the roles taken by their forebears as indentured labourers This history, coupled with their own and their contemporaries’ efforts to improve the land and contribute economically to the growth and prosperity of Fiji is at the core of Indo-Fijians’ claim to belonging in Fiji. Trnka documented how Indo-Fijian discourses about the Fijian nation state were structured around

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imagery linking their own bodies to the land, focusing either on the ‘physical investments in the nations’ made by themselves or their ancestors in the indenture lines, or ‘equating Indo-Fijians with the lifeblood that runs through Fiji’s veins’ (2005: 363). These notions lay claim not only to a right to occupy the land but also to a deeper connection with the land which goes beyond what is often considered, by indigenous Fijians, for instance, to be their perception of land as merely a commodity (Abramson 2000). What is more, working the land, sweating and bleeding on the soil, is at once considered a religious virtue for most Indo-Fijians and the foundation for their sole legitimate claim to remaining on the land under the legal, political and economic protection of the modern nation state. Many Indo-Fijians today have either moved away from sugarcane farming to become wage earners or are supplementing their farming with an income from commercial work. Still, the rural lifestyle and small-time farming remain strong aspects of the Indo-Fijian ethnic imaginary. Even urbanized Indo-Fijians typically cultivate small patches of vegetables and fruit and keep chickens or goats for their own use, or to exchange with friends and neighbours. This has obvious practical benefits in terms of relative self-sufficiency in certain products and is in turn an integral part of the Gandhian notion of resistance against colonialism, which became a central aspect of the construction of the autonomous, Indo-Fijian identity in the early years after indenture (Kelly 2011). Small-scale farming also represents certain culturally nostalgic properties, emphasizing the historical and ideological importance of small-time farming for Indo-Fijian identity construction. In addition, for some Indian farmers, their status on the fringes of the Fijian economy serves as a source of independence. Rohnil, a semi-retired sugarcane and vegetable farmer in his early 1970s that I occasionally helped out by bringing his goods to the market in Nadi town, expressed great pride in the fact that he had ‘never worked for anyone but [him]self ’ and had raised a successful family on ‘cash crops and hard work’. These ideals can clearly be traced back to the Gandhian notion of ‘bread labour’ as sacrifice (1957; Kelly 1992b). A  related principle, the notion of ‘being your own boss’, was also mentioned as a desirable prospect for other Indo-Fijian men contemplating leaving the paid workforce to take up farming. Obviously, this also emphasizes Indo-Fijians’ celebration of independence and personal integrity as more important achievements than loyalty and social hierarchies. One characteristic of sugarcane cultivation is the relatively sporadic periods in which the crop needs intense attention. Planting of the cane is restricted



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to fairly short periods between March and May during which the hot, humid weather provides ideal growth conditions for young cane. As the plants at this age are sensitive to unfavourable weather patterns  – too much rain will soak and rot the roots of the cane plants while lack of rain will dry out the land and stop the growth process – the planting is conducted with some urgency as soon as ideal weather prevails. This is all done by manual labour, albeit the land is nowadays ploughed and made ready by tractor, and the entire extended family is often involved in a process which appears to have altered little since Mayer (1963: 39) observed ‘men wielding their choppers on the seed, and quite small children covering it with earth’ half a century ago. After planting, the cane requires little work, leaving the farmer time to attend to limited livestock, namely chickens, ducks or goats, or vegetable patches which are kept for self-sufficiency or for producing market goods. Fertilizing the cane field every second month and occasional weeding is generally all that is required until the fully grown cane is cut some fifteen months after planting. The independence associated with farming thus remains an ideal for many Indians, both as an actual way to negate economic hardship and to limit the dependency on the Fijian ‘landlords’ and the Fijian state bureaucracy, which is often perceived to be dominated by and swayed in favour of Indigenous Fijians. Indo-Fijian interlocutors often stressed independence as a core aspect of their self-identity. It stems from the high value put on personal autonomy but also emphasizes the egalitarianism which buttresses much of the IndoFijian social scene (Brenneis 1985; Kelly 1992a, 1992b). While I return to this concept later and discuss more thoroughly how it is used discursively and negotiated in men’s identity formation, it is worth noting that a blind focus on egalitarianism among Indo-Fijians, that has been perpetuated in much scholarly work on Indo-Fijian social organizations, undermines the important point that ‘the ideal of the patrilineal extended family’ is retained and remains strong, leading to a pattern where egalitarianism is generally reserved for men (Jayawardena 1980: 436). Not only did the Indo-Fijian labourers come from a social context in which patriarchal structures were strong, the girmitiya women were dramatically outnumbered by their male counterparts and suffered doubly from the pollution of life in the indenture lines, and the crowded barracks which served as the girmityas living quarters (Gillion 1962). Working life was similarly difficult for women; underpaid and overworked, they were treated, as an early missionary account expressed it, like ‘dumb animals’ (Gillion 1962: 107). Female labourers were often viewed as ‘loose characters’ of low caste who were prone to

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immorality even before migration, and ‘racial prejudice and male power often combined to put a “veil of dishonour” around the face of girmitya women’ who became scapegoats for moral decline, social problems and religious pollution during indenture (Lal 2000: 195–211). Life in the indenture lines thus facilitated the iteration of a worldview that implicitly viewed men as purer than women, both in the moral and the spiritual sense. Many things have changed, and some dramatically, in Indo-Fijian family life post-indenture, but Brenneis’s observation that men ‘do not consider women their equals’ (1985:  399) still rings true in contemporary Fiji, and men continue to enjoy more independence, power and authority than women. Such systematic gender inequality is reflected throughout social life. Both informal and formal social occasions among Indo-Fijians generally display a quite rigid gender division, as men and women tend to spend time separately. Men often gather outside soon after arrival, sitting around a freshly mixed basin of yaqona on the porch, telling stories and discussing current events or day-to-day issues. Women, in contrast, spend more of their time gathered inside, preparing food, talking or watching television. While such a partition is common social practice, it is not justified by any religiously mandated prohibitions of contact between genders or sexually based taboos. Nonetheless, it remains consistently observed as a central concept in both religious and secular settings, emphasizing male authority over the household as well as the public domain.

Negotiating masculinities – public displays of Hindu devotion Public social life among my Indo-Fijian respondents is consequently a thoroughly male-dominated arena, where notions of manhood and masculinity are played out and contested on a regular basis. The removal of caste and the concept of inborn purity from the majority of religious ceremonies has also made Hindu devotion a more public performance and, by extension, a male domain. It appears clear, as Halapua has pointed out, that ‘for a majority of IndoFijians, religion and life is inseparable’ (2003:  43). Religious morals underpin most aspects of day-to-day life, and religious icons and symbols are important aspects of the large majority of Indo-Fijian households. Religious festivals are closely observed, and the characteristic puja (prayer) places, typically marked by a red flag raised on a tall, erect bamboo pole in honour of the Hindi deity Hanuman, clearly visible in most compounds make it easy to identify an IndoFijian homestead.



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In his account of differences between the Indian diasporas in Guyana and Fiji during the 1970s, which is as famous as it is puzzling, Jayawardena found weekly prayer meetings were ‘infrequent’ and ‘unnoticeable’ in Fiji, and there was very little communal hymn singing and few public temples, leaving him to describe Fiji Hinduism as a ‘private, familial, almost unobtrusive activity’ (1980:  435– 6). This, Jayawardena claimed, proved to be a major difference between the nature of religious devotion as practiced in Fiji and Guyana. However, although the presumed privacy of Hindu devotion has proved somewhat persistent in literature on the topic (Halapua 2003; Younger 2010), it is very difficult to find support for these findings in contemporary Fiji. In fact, it seems directly contradictory to the notion of life and religion as inseparable entities of subject identity and at odds with my observations of the way Indo-Fijian men play out and perform their religion on a day-to-day basis. There is nothing private about performances of Hinduism in Fiji where I  conduct my fieldwork in settlements in and around Nadi town. During my various stays in Nadi, I have attended upwards of forty public pujas, and turned down invitations to at least twice as many. Within a 10 kilometre radius from my research base outside Nadi town, I  could stroll past eight temples during my evening walk, and, contrary to Jayawardena’s (1980) findings, ‘the forest of bamboo poles’ erected to commemorate a major, annual offering to Hanuman was certainly a striking part of the skyline in this part of Fiji. Spirituality and religious devotion is an intrinsic part of the Indo-Fijian masculine performance and one of its most obvious publicly displayed aspects. The conspicuous nature of many Indo-Fijians’ religious celebrations is a characteristic trait of their cultural performance. Religious icons are displayed both inside and outside the home, in the car and carried on the body as accessories or tattoos with various spiritual connotations and significance. Through the strict observation of Hindu celebrations, this religious devotion is furthermore played out as a performance of spirituality. Throughout the year, Hindu devotees in Fiji mark a variety of holy dates in the Hindu calendar by participating in privately arranged prayer gatherings which, while varying depending on the landmark being celebrated, usually include reading from the Ramayana, the most prominent Hindu holy book among IndoFijians and one half of the Sanskrit Itihasa, singing of holy songs, communal prayers and food offerings to Hindu deities. But rather than being narrowly focused on religious devotion, these events also seemed to serve various social functions and be particularly important for Indo-Fijian men’s social authority, self-expression and, indeed, male bonding.

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Prayer meetings regularly attract numbers varying from 10 to more than 100 participants and spectators, mainly consisting of friends, family and neighbours but sometimes also including guest speakers and persons of relatively high social stature in the community. Indigenous Fijians from local villages commonly attended at least part of these festivities, relishing the entertainment as well as the food and yaqona provided. The actual performance of the prayer, including chanting, holy readings and playing of rhythmic instruments is generally an exclusively male enterprise, while women participated as quiet observers.1 As a cultural field, the Hindu religion, at least as it is constructed in Fiji, is thus intertwined with the gender order. The various celebrations were each devoted to different aspects of elaborate sets of moral and practical guidelines as it is set out by the holy scripts, including, of course, the regulation of relationships between men and women and between men. This moral code then served, as my respondent Raja explained, ‘as a guide for how to live our life and treat other people’. The fact that moral didacticism has become the central aspect of Hindu devotion in Fiji is a reflection both of the growth of the reformist movement Arya Samaj and their notion of sikca, or instruction, as a central teaching, but also of post-caste egalitarianism which emphasizes every devotee’s equal opportunity to pursue secular as well as sacred knowledge (Jayawardena 1980; Brenneis 1985; Kelly 1992b). The consequence is not only an obvious democratization of religious achievement but also that the performativity of spirituality has become an integral part of the social field in which status and standing is negotiated and contested. It is well known that ‘religious practice is one important form of social activity through which status and “proper” behaviour can be expressed in hierarchical social systems’ (Vertovec 1990:  146). For Indo-Fijian men, knowledge, competence and flair in expressing and performing religious rites and ceremonies are consequently highly valued skills intrinsic to the notion of being a successful and ‘good man’. When Indo-Fijians place such high premium on spirituality and religious devotion, with religious practice often a sphere reserved for men, it follows that active and visible participation in religious celebration is closely connected with masculine affirmation, power and status. One respondent’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that ‘the bigger the ego, the bigger the puja’ is perhaps telling for the relationship between Indo-Fijian men’s spiritual life and social standing. While this is obviously a gross simplification, it points to the palpable truth that visible religious devotion is enmeshed in the social hierarchies through which Indo-Fijian men negotiate status and authority.



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But the hosting of prayer meetings is merely one aspect of the value of displaying spiritual prowess. Intimate knowledge of Hindu cosmology and the ability to recite sacred Hindu texts in their original Sanskrit are highly valued skills to which great prestige is attached, both because it signifies a high level of religious devotion and because these abilities are in great demand as necessities at any prayer meeting. Often these readings are coupled with singing and chanting of religious texts accompanied by rhythmic instruments. While the status associated with participation and competence in these kinds of rituals may to some extent stem from recognition of musical talent and performative skills, the interplay between the social performers, both instrumentalists and audience, during these sessions also suggests they are implicated in a more complex contestation of status and prestige. Religious singing is ‘one of the few areas of Fiji Indian life in which overt criticism or praise are possible without disturbing the delicate balance of social relations’ (Brenneis 1985: 401), and it follows that highly acclaimed singers gain particularly high standing in the community. They are the centrepiece of the assembled performers in most prayer settings, and are often in total control of rhythm and pace as well as the length of each performance. As such, they are also held accountable for the quality of the performance, and receive the bulk of the praise or criticism that may follow a recital. While the musicians’ setup more clearly reflects the overtly egalitarian ethos of the larger Indo-Fijian community – they are typically all seated next to each other or in a circle on the ground  – the different musical instruments clearly hold different status. ‘While everyone can play basic rhythmic instruments, the tabla or phakavaj [traditional Indian percussion instruments] and the harmonium require proper talent and devotion’, my respondent Bijendra explained, emphasizing the idea that some musicians are more highly regarded than others, both in terms of their talent per se but also because the mastery of the instrument is deemed proof of religious devotion, a sort of acquired purity, which is a great source of respect and status. Similarly, there was a distinct sense among Indo-Fijians that there is an intimate relationship between success, wealth, happiness and religious devotion. Rohnil’s suggestion that since his neighbour was ‘praying a lot he must be getting very rich’ is a jocular suggestion of a principle which is embedded in many IndoFijian’s worldview. Prayers and offerings to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, are, for instance, at the centre of the most prominent annual Hindu celebration in Fiji, diwali.

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Overt egalitarianism and masculine contestation While religious purity and evident spiritual prowess are sources of respect, status and authority in the Hindu community, these markers are fluid and contextual, and hardly able to contain stable hierarchical social categories across the social field. Instead they form an important part of the mosaic which constitutes Indo-Fijian men’s social status, alongside notions of a ‘good name’, rightful living, material wealth, a strong work ethic and education level. However, individual status is always negotiated within the larger community’s emphasis on egalitarianism, and while some men may achieve recognized status as ‘big men’ (bada admi), their status is always under stress, ‘as obtrusive attempts to assert authority or to intervene in the problems of others abuse the autonomy of other men’ (Brenneis 1984: 489). There is no disputing the fact that the ideology on which social organization is based is overtly egalitarian. Actual social relationships, on the other hand, are constructed in a social field in which status, rank and authority are important reference points for interaction. As Brenneis found in his study of an Indo-Fijian settlement on Vanua Levu, the strong emphasis on equality paradoxically creates social tension, and ‘there is a delicate balance between those who should be equals’, namely adult men, as ‘concerns for individual autonomy and reputation underlie much of social interaction in the village’ (1985:  399). While egalitarianism prevails on the ideal level and hardly any Indo-Fijian man would openly claim superiority based on caste or any other formal social signifier, it is obvious that social ranking and contestation of power is integral to nearly all social settings and is certainly an important part of male social relations. Social life among Indo-Fijian men is generally centred on the practice of talanoa, a type of sociality based on the flow of conversation around a bowl (tanoa) of kava common throughout Oceania. Donald Brenneis argued that talanoa should be deemed a specific genre of communication which is considered an ‘important type of verbal art’ (1984) in the Indo-Fijian village, and that successful mastery of both proper style and appropriate content of this type of speech are important skills in men’s social sphere. This seems like an overly technical and too narrow definition of talanoa, and I prefer to define it as an informal all-male social meeting in which storytelling, joking and debating are important social skills.2 Still, it is clear that its simultaneously competitive and cooperative construction makes it an arena for rigid and frequent status negotiation.



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However, by focusing merely on talanoa as a verbal activity with its stylistic features, Brenneis ignores the fact that the focal point of many settings is the tanoa, the basin of yaqona. Among the cultural folklore connected with yaqona and its many properties, it is a common assumption that it facilitates talking and joking, makes you more talkative and open, and it can thus be seen as a vehicle for encouraging flowing and good communication between the participants. But to reduce the meaning of kava in such as way would be to ignore the fact that drinking, and indeed getting ‘doped’, in itself is important for the talanoa, and just as important a social marker as the ability to participate in the discussion. Talanoa stands out as an important arena to study interactions between Indo-Fijian men based on its ubiquity and prominence in their social lives. Most Indo-Fijian men partake in a talanoa session daily, and it is, moreover, incorporated in nearly all other social or cultural events, including most jobsites, family celebrations and prayer meetings. Talanoa is thus the dominant arena for male bonding and everyday social interaction between men and a key social performance to establish male authority. Talanoa is a Fijian loanword, and the practice of consuming yaqona is also borrowed from Fijian tradition. Among indigenous Fijians, the preparation and drinking of yaqona has numerous ritualistic and formal functions in a variety of social settings and is a practice deeply entrenched in the larger social ethos (Ravuvu 1987).3 For Indo-Fijians, it generally does not have any such formal connotations, but is entirely a social and recreational practice. However, it is the nature of the drink that it is preceded by a distinct process of preparation, and is consumed according to certain procedures. The dried root of the yaqona plant is pounded until it is reduced to a fine, light brown powder. This powder is then packed in a muslin cloth and dissolved in running cold water until it is the desired strength. The full tanoa, or, just as frequently in the contemporary context, a plastic bowl or metal pot, is then placed with the host who sends around a bilo, or cup, of the drink to all participants at regular intervals until the basin is empty and the company dissipates or the host makes a fresh mix. While the hierarchical nature of Fijian customary life is clearly evident during drinking ceremonies in their villages, the more subtle expressions of status and hierarchies which are characteristic of the Indo-Fijian community are also present when Indians gather to drink yaqona. Although Indo-Fijian talanoa is characterized by its overtly egalitarian structure where all participants sit on the floor with an equal opportunity to talk, joke, tell stories, gossip and so forth, it is simultaneously a social field in which social positions are negotiated and challenged. Since drinking yaqona is

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predominantly reserved for adult males, the presence of a basin of grog mixed and ready for drinking is in itself an important social signifier of status, rank and authority that clearly draws up important social demarcations. The notion that Indo-Fijian men do not consider women their equals is certainly played out in this setting, as is the concept of seniority where elders hold significant sway over junior males. This system of authority is generally evident in most social events with younger boys assigned various duties similar to those of women, such as serving food or tea and running errands, and typically excluded from sitting down on the floor and participating in talanoa. The relationship between age and status is not without tension. While it is obvious that seniority is equal to increased respect, the lack of formal initiation rituals into adulthood leaves the field open for contestation, and there is regularly social tension due to disagreements about this, and more often than not this struggle can centre on the basin of grog. Failing to make room in the circle around the basin or not extending the bilo to younger men during a round of yaqona are powerful means of social control and obvious ways of communicating perceived superiority of status, although this rarely escalates to open verbal conflicts. One of my respondents directly expressed his frustration that despite being included in a talanoa session with older men, they consistently addressed him as beta, literally meaning ‘son’ but frequently used when elders address children and adolescents who are not yet of an equivalent social status, independent of blood relations, leaving him feeling inferior and disrespected in the setting. Similarly, during my first fieldwork, conducted when I was in my mid-twenties, I often experienced that my level of education and status as a foreign guest afforded me greater respect than the local men my age. The acknowledgement I gained from men my senior was consequently often coupled with great suspicion and disapproval from peers, who felt overlooked and deprived of respect. In order to be fully accepted and respected in a talanoa session, one often has to prove oneself, both in terms of ability to contribute to the storytelling and, perhaps equally important, one’s aptitude to drink yaqona. In fact, the ability to stomach large amounts of yaqona in one sitting is an important achievement for a proper man, and the talanoa setting is often an arena for strong, albeit friendly, competition for status and toughness. Drinking a strong mix, a full bilo or lasting through many basins before getting ‘doped’ is valued and talked about frequently. On several occasions I have witnessed a grog session starting with a challenge, in the sense that one participant proclaims he is confident he can take more yaqona than anyone else present, and he dares them all to prove him wrong. Indeed,



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to ‘have the [symbolic] championship belt’ in consumption gives men certain bragging rights within the circle of yaqona drinking men, although I  am not suggesting this is a status marker which is transferable to other social fields. It has been observed that in order to make sense of social performances like these described above we should understand them as situations in which social actors ‘display for others the meaning of the social situation’ (Alexander 2004:  529). The purpose of the display is at once a quest to reaffirm social collectivity and belonging and to claim a position for oneself in the social setting. Hence, ‘the meaning may or may not be one to which they themselves subjectively adhere; it is the meaning that they, as social actors, consciously or unconsciously wish to have others believe’ (Alexander 2004: 529). Social actors, then, present themselves as being motivated by and toward existential, emotional and moral concerns, the meanings of which are defined by patterns of signifiers which referents are the social, physical, natura and cosmological worlds within which actors and audiences live. One part of this symbolic reference provides the deep background of collective representations for social performance; another part composes the foreground, the scripts that are the immediate referent for action. What Alexander defines as the deep background for social performances are actions that are informed and influenced by external values, expectations and rules which the individual has internalized through processes of socialization and cultural learning – what Bourdieu (1977) refer to as the habitus. All present action is at once a negotiation of this social factor and what Alexander calls ‘the foreground’, individual action informed by personal interest and individual motivation. In the Indo-Fijian context this becomes evident in talanoa which is at once an arena where behaviour is regulated by a notion of tradition and what is socially acceptable, as well as an arena where individuals can play out their role within the social setting to various degrees. Michael Herzfeld, in his compelling work on manhood in a Cretan mountain village, provides further elaboration on this complex relationship between individual selfhood and social collectivity as it is played out in everyday performances of masculinity: [I]t is clear that the successful performance of selfhood depends upon an ability to identify the self with larger categories of identity. In any encounter, the skilled actor alludes to ideological propositions and historical antecedents, but takes care to suppress the sense of incongruity inevitably created by such grandiose implications; as with virtually any trope, the projection of the self as a metonymical encapsulation of some more inclusive entity rests on the violation of ordinariness. (Herzfeld 1988: 10)

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In other words, and this is as true for Indo-Fijian men’s talanoa sessions as it is in the Cretan coffee houses Herzfeld frequented, being good at being a man rests equally on the ability to understand, comply with and manage social expectations and the ability to maintain a unique, independent position within the social order. In fact, ‘the constant struggle to gain a precarious and transitory advantage over each other’ which is a central tenet of life among Cretan men (Herzfeld 1988:  11), is equally evident in Indo-Fijian men’s talanoa sessions. Symbolically the talanoa is organized along strictly egalitarian principles. Participants are generally situated in a circle or small group on the floor or the ground, and every participant has in principle an equal right and opportunity to speak. How each participant chooses to take part differs, however, as does the motivation for engaging in the conversation. If it is true that talk is ‘at once the stuff of quotidian social life and a rarely straightforward, but nonetheless crucial, practice through which selves are shaped, revealed, represented, and transformed, provides a revelatory juncture between positionality and the personal’ (Brenneis 1999:  530), every social researcher ought to pay close attention to what people talk about, how they do it and how both content and style is shaped by the context in which it takes place. Socio-verbal interaction is at the crux of Indo-Fijian social life, and my ethnographic research in Indian settlements in Western Fiji provided a number of opportunities to engage in talking and talanoa with my respondents. Throughout my research, two styles of talking dominated conversation, one of which was characterized by indirection and obscurity when talking about others while the other was characterized by candidness when talking about oneself. Looking more closely at these two verbal styles, it becomes clear that they are both closely related to the overarching principle of overt egalitarianism which underpins Indo-Fijian culture. Brenneis (1984) found the ambiguity and indirection with which men spoke about their peers was a striking characteristic of Indo-Fijian verbal communication, and described gossiping in a village on Vanua Levu as a highly stylized exercise in which speakers and audience had equal responsibility to decode the core meanings of the stories. For Brenneis, these communication patterns are direct consequences of the particular type of overtly egalitarian, post-plantation society in which his respondents were situated, and reflect a culturally specific aversion to criticising someone directly:  ‘People are concerned to maintain their own standing as “equals,” and perceived affronts by others pose serious threats. There is, in addition, a heightened emphasis on one’s



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own political autonomy and that of others, whether as target or as something to protect’ (Brenneis 1987b: 501). The strong emphasis on egalitarianism and the lack of formal social hierarchies appear to have had a profound effect on Indo-Fijian social life, particularly in the type of everyday social performances I am discussing here. Gossiping, back-chatting or criticism was very rarely presented in direct terms and forms but remained unclear and hidden, something which was achieved through a variety of linguistic and verbal means. Albeit not noted as frequently, praise and acknowledgement of others were not generally communicated openly and upfront but alluded to much more subtly. In other words, the emphasis on autonomy and equality appeared to facilitate a certain weariness about how one talked about others  – whether it was fear of denigrating someone’s good repute openly, making one’s own reputation vulnerable to attack or retaliation, or subordinating oneself to others by explicitly praising their achievements. Another striking aspect of Indo-Fijian social performances, not only in talanoa but also in other socio-verbal settings, is the emphasis speakers put on their own achievements or social position and the ease with which they talk up their own credentials. What could possibly be considered inappropriate bragging by many outsiders is intrinsic to Indo-Fijian storytelling – whether the focus is on achievements in business, personal life, sport or education. Indeed, it appears that social position is to some extent reliant upon the individual’s ability to market their achievements and to establish status through storytelling and bragging. Vijay, for instance, had no problems presenting himself as ‘a genius in my [his] field’ of maritime mechanics and, moreover, claiming that the fact that he was a ‘thinker’ and a ‘man of the world’ made him stand out from most other Indo-Fijians. Similarly, Rikesh introduced himself to me not with his name, but the fact that he was ‘a wealthy fella’ and ‘a resident of New Zealand – I own two houses and three mechanic garages there’. Another acquaintance, Hari, a local tradesman, explained to me on our first meeting how he had more than twenty men working for him, though he expected the number of employees would soon increase to approximately forty, before he gave details about the financial state of his business. Biman and Aziz on their side did not focus on material wealth in their selfrepresentation but on a series of sports achievements – the former on his soccer career which, according to him, included scoring Fiji’s only goal in a match against Australia in the 1970s, and the latter on a career as street fighter and boxer of which the crowning achievement was nearly gaining a title match some

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thirty years earlier. Both defined themselves as ‘best in Fiji’ during their career, and explained that this was subject to praise and respect in the community, while simultaneously lamenting the point that they never had received the necessary support ‘to make it big’ on the international stage. While this kind of bragging obviously is not an exclusive Indo-Fijian social phenomenon, it takes on an important function in social systems which are overtly egalitarian and lacks formal, hierarchical status markers, such as that of the Indians in Fiji. The status associated with these stories may not always withstand social scrutiny and remain valid across the social field, and the narratives are not sufficient in themselves to secure a high social standing in the community. They do, however, exist as an important part of the mosaic which constitutes Indo-Fijian social hierarchies. Good deeds and actions, spiritual prowess, religious purity, educational level and material wealth are all social signifiers which may contribute to a person’s social standing, but these practices also need to be played out and emphasized within a rich variation of socioverbal settings, often by the persons in question themselves. Although in a rather subtle manner, these dynamics take the shape of verbal contests. These are not necessarily expressions of direct hostility but rather, as Ong has suggested in another context, ritualized combats which are crucial to establishing and proving selfhood (1982). While talanoa is obviously a group activity that reaffirms the participants’ group identity, and mastery of the style is important to achieve a position within the collectivity, the role of the individual within the group is to a large extent determined by his ability to claim status through ‘big talk’. It is through this type of ritualized contest that ‘the participant is able to establish identity – and particularly sexual identity – in a public way’ and these ‘individual displays can become invested with public meaning’ (Parks 1986: 440). As in any performance, verbal interaction, whether competitive or not, is created in social convergence between performers and audience. Moreover, if ‘[t]‌he ongoing organization of talk, and of performance more broadly, is also an emergent structure of enacted relationships among its participants’ (Brenneis 1993: 296), audiences and performers are often jointly responsible for providing the contents, meaning and social implications of what is actually said. The directness and openness shown by my respondents when blatantly boasting about their own achievements and abilities may at first glance seem directly divergent from the indirection and discretion demonstrated when they talked about others. On the contrary however, it is more precise to consider the two verbal styles as mutually supportive and natural consequences of the high premium placed on equality and autonomy in the social system as a whole.



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Difficulty in receiving praise or recognition publicly, coupled with the lack of formal channels for social acknowledgement and the reluctance to talk about others, makes boasting one of the few means through which one can claim or realize the potential social value of good deeds, material success or religious prowess. Therein also lies the limitation of this specific type of self-acclamation; it is a practice intrinsically entangled in a complex set of social valuations, and is only successful if supported by a number of more substantial qualifications discussed above, such as wealth and seniority. Indeed, all the respondents I  found engaging in this practice were middle-aged, middle-class men, while the younger respondents never engaged in this kind of bragging. Put simply, in order to brag you need to have a socially established justification, and the success of the social performance is thus intrinsically reliant upon its resonance among its audience. [W]‌ith the heightened recognition of ‘audience’ as potential co-author and with the concomitant realization that, whatever performers’ goals and strategies might be [the rhetorical model as out- lined in Abrahams 1968], it is equally necessary to consider questions of audience evaluation, interpretation, and reaction, the notion of social aesthetics [Brenneis 1987:  237] seems useful. What does the audience draw upon in their response? What expectations, assumptions, local theories and premises are involved? At the same time social and aesthetic, this idea is intended to capture at least partially shared, recurrent but transformable views of the beautiful, the valuable, and the socially coherent. (Brenneis 1993: 295)

Valued social performances, then, consist of what Bauman in his landmark work on performativity and verbal communication labelled ‘communicative competence’ which in turn ‘rests on the knowledge and ability to speak in socially appropriate ways’ (1977:  11; Bauman and Sherzer 1989). These categories are obviously gendered, as what is appropriate for men and women are generally defined and understood differently. These stories should be understood as part of a larger social aesthetics where storytelling itself is valued and highly regarded, and the ability to present your own achievements and experiences favourably is paramount to being regarded as a good man. However, the balance between maintaining the social ideal of discretion and at the same time letting other’s know of one’s skills is consequently somewhat delicate. It also calls, as Herzfeld found in his Cretan village, ‘for a finely tuned sensitivity to what constitutes an appropriate time and place’ (1988:  207–8) for bragging or recounting one’s own achievements.

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Similarly, while I have no reason to suggest that many respondents lied about their personal achievements in sports or business, the stories themselves fitted into a larger oral culture where the relationship between truth and a personal narrative is blurred. The same stories would be told and retold in a number of settings, and their contents and the narrator’s role in the story would often change to fit the context and the audience, emphasizing that the verbal contest for status is a process where the individual challenges collective values, and, as Herzfeld put it, lies are accepted means ‘to be employed creatively in the creation of the self ’ (1988:  207). Telling stories, then, is a constitutive practice which serves both as an important masculine contest for social position and status and as a testing of social values. In fact, as practice, it is a complex negotiation of personal bravado and social expectations, and even ‘the most inventive displays of male self-regard must prove acceptable if they are not to backfire, but the truly skilled performer tests and stretches the tolerance of his peers to the limit’ (Herzfeld 1988: 232). These dynamics become even clearer when I  consider another style of storytelling which appeared to be relatively common among the Indo-Fijian men I encountered. These are stories where the narrator gives the impression of demonstrating humility and self-irony by narrating a story where he has engaged in practice to his discredit, while in fact attempting to draw attention to aspects in his life story he can brag about to his fellow men. One interlocutor exemplified when he told a story about how he had nearly become involved with a prostitute in Sydney’s Kings Cross when he mistook her for a fellow patron who simply had taken a liking to him. When telling his story, he explained how he had been drinking hundreds of dollars’ worth of alcohol, bought the female in question expensive cocktails and how they had gone from club to club together. While the story seemingly put the narrator in a bad light and thus demonstrated his great self-irony and humility, the audience was much less interested in the potentially embarrassing punch line to the story than the fact that he had been to Kings Cross and had such large amounts of money to throw away on drinks and women along with his ability to stomach such vast amounts of alcohol. Vijay’s story was similarly constructed and concerned his youthful stupidity when he had been offered a professional contract to play soccer in a Sydney club, but was too involved in ‘partying and girls’ so he chose instead to take a labouring job that better suited his lifestyle. While he started the story by presenting it as a tale of ‘the biggest mistake of his life’, the story was centred on his implicitly superior soccer skills as well as his numerous female companions



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and upper-class parties, and it was these aspects which created follow up questions and conversation among his audience. The point about these types of storytelling seemed to be that they complied with the expectations of modesty and indirectness implicit in the overtly egalitarian social system, as well as representing an accepted forum for a specific type of expressed self-regard which appeared central to many men’s performance of manhood and intrinsic to their assertion of power and position. As a gendered practice this is an interesting phenomenon to study, as it provides a certain insight into how one individual’s gender project is connected to gender socialization as a collective practice. The stories not only reflect how the respondents here define manhood and understand the social expectations associated with masculinity; they also stand out as a method for the individual to configure a gendered self in a social context and discursively draw upon different aspects of hegemonic notions of masculinity in order to obtain and maintain personal status. The shifting emphasis on themes and achievements in different stories told at different times gives an indication of how the notion of the masculine self is shifting, and how men are ‘being forced to exclude and expel versions’ of themselves which are not accepted or valued by the dominant cultural force (Boule 2004: 4). The content of these narratives also provides some clues about the modern desires underpinning contemporary constructions of masculinity. Social mobility, success in business and personal accumulation, ability to travel overseas and engage and succeed in a world outside the confines of village Fiji are key ingredients in most Indo-Fijian men’s representation of their biographies. The discourse on contestation and the challenges of social values may seem inappropriate in a social context which so deliberately discredits open conflict and direct criticism as interactive strategies like the Indo-Fijian one. However, it is useful to remember that ‘verbal contest merely embodies in a particularly rarefied and explicit form an aspect of the interactive context frequently assumed in other, non-dialogic works that would not at first blush appear to be contestual at all’ (Parks 1986: 456). The fiercest masculine contestation among Indo-Fijians emerges within socio-verbal frameworks which at first glance seem harmonious and non-competitive, such as the practice of talanoa. If gender at its core is little more than a social performance, the way men talk and conduct themselves during verbal contests and other social interactions, given its importance for gendered self-construction and subjectivity, should perhaps be defined merely as parts of a larger performance of manhood, as mere bricks in the overarching puzzle of gender identity. However, I propose that these types of storytelling are examples of historical praxis which serve to negotiate

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modern masculine identities with historically developed ideals of manhood and status among the Indo-Fijian community. In form they follow socially important notions of egalitarianism and indirectness, while their content tends to emphasize and reflect the importance of independence, hard work or material prosperity – social features which have taken on strong symbolic value in the specific Indo-Fijian context.

4

Making a living: Land, labour, trade and tradition for modern Fijian men

I used to be impressed by the efficiency with which William, my neighbour, confidante and occasional translator, managed to get himself ready in the morning. Despite usually oversleeping and then having to help feeding his sister’s three children and get them dressed for school, he managed to transform himself from a state of sleepy, hungover disarray to a well-polished, immaculately presented resort worker just in time for when the driver from his employer, a well-established five-star resort on Denarau Island just outside Nadi, came to pick him up. I did my bit to help by providing a daily cup of Nescafe, prohibitively expensive for many locals, and offering him the use of my shower on a regular basis to save him waiting his turn among the ten people sharing his abode next door. In return, I often asked to soundboard some impressions from the previous day’s fieldwork with him or get some linguistic clarifications from my notes. Soon I  started to see the value of this pleasant morning routine from an analytical point of view. Observing William’s morning routine, I was fascinated by the meticulous corporeal labour involved in getting ready for service work in a luxury resort. As he put on his carefully ironed uniform, a black sulu vakataga, leather sandals and a colourful, collared shirt emblazoned with a company logo, and turned his unruly curls into a neater combed-back style, there was also a notable change in his demeanour. More than just a new ‘look’, he took on a new way of carrying himself, a certain comportment appropriate for work that was more subdued and composed than his usual self. The voice hit a lower register and his expressions were less prominent. The careless saunter from days off on the farm was substituted with a more purposeful stride, his back more rigid and head held higher. I commented on the remarkable transformation involved in getting ready for work once, upon which William responded that ‘every day going to work for the

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tourists is like a near death experience’. Although expressed with a grin, it was a surprisingly emotive response, and one which perhaps unwittingly channelled Orlando Patteron’s famous description of slavery as ‘social death’. Although it was difficult to probe William for further elaboration of what he meant by the phrase, probably intended more as an off-hand comment than a comprehensive social analysis, it was obvious to me that it was an informative insight into the emotionally ambiguous and bodily taxing nature of many of my interlocutors’ foray into the market economy. I subsequently became more aware of how many of my respondents working in similar jobs referred to their work in negative or satirical terms. Often this was by emphasizing how work involved a number of conscious corporeal performances; they ‘switched on the bula smile’, ‘flashed the Fiji muscles’ or ‘turned on the warrior’ for the tourist gaze. Analytically, I started to treat these self-reflexive statements as indications of a changing perception of bodies and (gendered) selves occurring under the conditions of waged labour in the tourism industry and used this as a starting point for a broader reflection of how my interlocutors negotiated their masculine self-identities in the market economy.

The Fijian way and the way of money Fijian communities have engaged in capitalist trade since the 1700s, but the notion that Fijian traditions and customs are ultimately incompatible with money-making remains pervasive. Many Fijians still subscribe to an ideology known since the outset of colonization, which claims that engagement in the modern economy is an incongruous and morally awkward enterprise for indigenous Fijians. While the deed of cession in 1874 and the arrival of the first cargo ship with Indian recruits on Fijian shores in March 1879 undeniably marked the emergence of capitalism as the key mode of production in Fiji, indigenous villages remained in a cultural sphere largely independent and separate from these modern dynamics until, quite recently, ‘insulated by colonial policy from the workings of the capitalist market’ (Kelly 1992:  98). The national ethos underpinning this system was articulated as the threelegged-stool on which Fijian development was to be founded  – comprising European money, Indian (Indo-Fijian) labour and indigenous Fijian land.1 Under these provisions, Fijians’ traditional economy and subsistence-based village lifestyles were to be protected from capital forces, while the imported Indian labour class would bear the brunt of manual labour and production



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work. Fijian land, consequently, became inalienable by law and came to be viewed by native Fijians as their guarantee to economic prosperity as well as political supremacy. The infirmity of this model in guaranteeing political stability and economic prosperity has since become clear. While these political strategies were originally both embraced and partly drawn up by the local chiefly elite in tandem with colonial authorities, their main purpose was arguably to secure a viable economic output for the colonial authorities. These ‘imperial notions of cultural superiority and paternalism’ consequently underpinned the construction of the modern Fijian nation state in which ‘racialist values legitimised divergent forms of social and economic discrimination’ (Emberson-Bain 1994:  82), deeming indigenous Fijians unsuitable for modern life and structurally limiting IndoFijians to a system of agricultural tenancy and low-waged labour work. Emberson-Bain has further argued that the political project of protectionism in Fiji served as an excuse and justification for an exploitative economic system. Industrialists and colonizers argued that the maintenance of village life and the traditional social structure would not only secure ethnic Fijians access to subsistence cultivation but also take care of their social, spiritual and healthcare needs so companies did not need to worry about setting up such systems for their native workers (1994: 54). In her informative study on the rise and fall of goldmining in North-Western Viti Levu, Emberson-Bain has similarly exposed the extent to which the eastern chiefly hierarchy was complicit in developing these strategies, providing a rare example of structured indigenous engagement with capitalism at an early stage. In contemporary Fiji, the relationship between Fijians and the dynamics of the modern economy has remained ambiguous and conflictual, based on an ideology which draws a distinct dividing line between Fijian traditional practices and ‘the way of money’. Discursively this point has often been used to make distinctions between Fijians and other ethnic groups that occupy or visit the islands. In the local imagination, different approaches to money and trade follow racial and ethnic boundaries to the extent that groups of people are often characterized according to their economic practices, a decisive factor of Fiji’s multicultural economy. The accumulation of wealth for personal use, the ‘way of the money’ that is said to govern European and Indo-Fijian thoughts, is considered un-Fijian and in conflict with the ‘Fijian way’ of living ‘in the manner of the land’, because it removes Fijians from their traditional life, both spatially and ideologically (see further discussion of these dynamics in Chapter  6 on gambling as a social and economic practice).

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Although most Fijian villagers today are in recurrent contact with market forces, the traditional economy and parts of the commodity market still constitute two distinct economic spheres in Fijian discourse, often following the ‘Fijian way’/‘European way’2 dualism. However, in practical terms, these two spheres are largely continuous in the contemporary context I encountered, as increasing numbers of villagers have taken up waged work and village produce is to a large exchange traded on the market. Market commodities and income, therefore, have to be consistently integrated in the traditional system of reciprocity and communal duty, and for most waged workers a big part of moneys earned ends up in the communal economy. These processes of channelling money back into the traditional economy is a way to negate the moral ambiguity experienced with waged work and negotiate what is perceived as the corrupting effects of capitalism and urban lifestyles which are commonly said to kania nai lavu  – literally ‘eat up money’. More importantly, spending ‘personal income’ in the communal economy purifies the money and gives moral credence to the actor, because, as Christina Toren has pointed out, ‘the moral value of money changes according to the construction they place on transactions in which it is included’ (1989: 144). The key concept in the traditional ideology applied here is one commonly referred to as vakaturaga, best translated as ‘acting in chiefly manner’. This is arguably the most important normative concept among indigenous Fijians irrespective of their status as it encompasses and regulates all aspects of social behaviour, including respect, humility, reciprocity, helpfulness and forgiveness (Ravuvu 1987: 18). Vakaturaga becomes an especially powerful discursive tool when used to sanction economic activities and distinguish between proper Fijian and un-Fijian ways. Working together on village land for the benefit of all is a classic deployment of this concept, making the link between morality and economic practice explicit. In the contemporary context this is best epitomized through the practice of bringing money from the outside into the communal village economy. Put simply, the potential dangers of engaging in the market economy can be negated by circulating commercially attained money through the traditional exchange economy. Money is thus no longer necessarily considered a social ill in itself but can oscillate between moral extremes based on how it is utilized or distributed. However, there is an increasing slippage in these communal economic systems. Growing numbers of Fijians are moving towards urban centres, lose sustained contact with their extended kinship groups and live in domestic arrangements more centered on a small nucleus of close families  – situations



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which demand more access to fast cash and facilitate new ways of organizing personal economies. For many modern Fijians, access to the market economy promises attracting new forms of self-realization. In order to explain, justify and make sense of such socio-economic changes and their own engagement with them, many actively seek to redraw moral boundaries pertaining to money and economic behaviour. It is often within these discourses the notion of ‘being modern’ gets articulated most explicitly, and practices such as work, consumption, trade and exchange are thus at the centre of social change. In this chapter, I  trace some of these changes with a specific focus on how my interlocutors, predominantly indigenous Fijians, articulate and perform ethnic and gendered identities at the intersection of the market and traditional ideologies about economic behaviour. Given that male domination and masculine self-identities have often been centred on men’s assigned roles as breadwinners in families and tribal communities, and, in modern societies, the ability to make money, Fijian men are often the ones who most immediately must face the challenges associated with the move from a traditional to a modern economy. Senior men and men of high rank, in particular, often considered it their responsibility to maintain a cultural scepticism toward the market and were quick to invoke the colonial discourse about the need to protect Fijian tradition from the dangers of capitalism. That is perhaps natural given their own positions of power were often tied up in the traditional moral economy (Presterudstuen 2016a). Younger men seemed more willing to embrace new opportunities outside their villages and look for opportunities to engage in the modern economy.

The village economy Modern Fijians often articulate their ambitions and aspirations through a desire for the modern at the expense of tradition. While the traditional power structures provide status and authority for the higher strata of chiefs, clergy and elders, I encountered many young Fijian men, in particular, whose experience of the traditional village system was that it could not provide opportunities for developing the competency and capital necessary to succeed in modernizing, urban Fiji. They struggled to negotiate the traditional expectations associated with manhood in modernity, often experiencing traditional responsibilities as constraining them from fully participating in contemporary settings. The rapid modernization of Fijian society and the growth of primary and secondary industries has made it increasingly difficult for Fijian men to remain

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content with a traditional Fijian way of life that strictly limits their market participation. The rhetoric of pride in the ‘Fijian way’ as opposed to Europeans and Indo-Fijians who presumably ‘worship money’ rings hollow when many Fijian men find that material paucity and financial hardships jeopardize their ability to partake in modern leisure activities, fulfil traditional village roles or look after their family. Urbanization has accentuated these processes. In town, ‘low wages become even more depressed owing to the costs of food and accommodation’ (Chapman 1991:  273) making urban centres the spatial location for the consumption of money and resources. There is no doubt that many Fijians have both internalized and embraced the racialized colonial assumptions about their suitability for engaging with the market and their willingness to complete work and conduct labour in a timely manner. The distinction between ‘Fiji time’ and ‘European time’, for instance, is commonly articulated, and explained as being a fundamental aspect of a set of culturally specific reasons why Fijians perceive themselves at odds with modern labour processes.3 Upon showing me around the village when I  first arrived, my friend Joe explained how visiting teachers from the United States who were placed in their village school for six months as part of a development programme had to rely on ‘European workers’ to complete their living quarters, because he and his village comrades were unable to complete it in ‘European time’ rather than ‘spend five, six months . . . doing bits and pieces here and leaving it for a while . . . while we do other bits and pieces’ according to Fijian time. The Fijian labour pattern was often displayed in both villages I conducted research in, where a group of men frequently spent the entire working day completing a very limited amount of practical work. Masi explained this by the notion that village life was often organized around a principle of ‘doing what’s necessary today, and everything else tomorrow’. Having caught enough fish or gathered sufficient vegetables for one day’s consumption, the men involved in the task would then spend the rest of the day drinking yaqona or relaxing. Similarly, the racialized notions of lazy native Fijians are selectively used to affirm manhood and male power in Fijian village settings. ‘In Fiji, the man is the boss’, Samuel proudly proclaimed, ‘so while we discuss matters and have yaqona, the women have to do the farm work and cooking’. Similarly, in my main village, some of my male respondents pointed out how they were napping during the day while their women completed their housework or other domestic duties such as weaving or cleaning, and teased me with the point that ‘European women make you guys run around’ completing chores. The colonial perception of laziness, or at least reluctance to do hard manual



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work, enabled them to construct a notion of the unreliable native Fijian. This, in turn, was embraced and selectively utilized by Fijian men as an emblematic symbol of male power. That is not to say that Fijian men in villages sit and do nothing most of the time. The point is rather that they often engage in activities that that can be considered immaterial production – including maintaining kinship and other social relations, emotional labour or other forms of cultural work. Matti Eräsaari (2017) has made the similar observation and argues that resting, ‘slowness’ and ‘time-wasting’ are valourized social practices that take on highly localized meanings as essential cultural activities in Verata in Eastern Fiji. Elsewhere in Melanesia, Paul Sillitoe, based on his fieldwork among the Wola of Papua New Guinea, points out that in these traditional settings many men spend equally significant amounts of time and energy on socio-political and cultural exchange as on paid work that provides material goods:  ‘Men experience considerable stress in meeting their transactional commitments. They often talk about their worries and the immense efforts they are making to find sufficient valuables to meet forthcoming obligations. It demands effort to build up both wealth and relationships, and secure one’s status’ (Sillitoe 2006: 142). Traditional ceremonies, known locally as veiqaravi vakavanua, are crucial work for reaffirming social relations and status hierarchies in villages and kinship groups in Fiji. The number of such social obligations and the extent of material goods needed for particular occasions and rituals in one’s village was one aspect that made regular participation in waged work appear both difficult and undesirable to some village-based indigenous Fijians. At the same time, in contemporary society, fulfilling these obligations is increasingly reliant upon access to money with which to purchase essential goods. ‘With rising prices of food and kerosene, even the most basic veiqaravi is difficult to meet’, my respondent Waqa explained, and elaborated that after village and church commitments were catered for, there was literally ‘nothing left to spend on family and entertainment’. Similarly, even traditional artefacts such as the tabua (an ornamental whale’s tooth) and yaqona were now becoming priced commodities to which increasing monetary value was attached, making it difficult to maintain all but the basic social relationships that were based on reciprocal presentations of gifts. Many of my respondents consequently had an ambiguous relationship to waged work. This was particularly true for those who remained closely tied to their traditional village or had a significant position in kinship hierarchies to maintain. On the one hand, waged work was time-consuming and usually meant

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that working men had to spend prolonged periods of time away from their villages, something which they not only associated with less time to spend with family and friends but which also jeopardized their status in the community. Maciu, a mining worker in the Vatukoula gold mines who only returned to his village for short visits, explained that so much time away from the village made him estranged from village affairs and he felt he lost both respect and connections. This was also due to him missing out on a lot of ‘important village work’ and consequently ‘not doing his share of looking after the place’. On the other hand, however, the economic requirements associated with maintaining one’s family, church and village needs in the modern Fijian village were so high that waged work outside the village economy was becoming a necessity for many of my interlocutors. Within the village boundaries, Fijian men have little room to spend time freely. For many, the work of Alfred Gell, who famously denied that there is such a thing as free time at all, would ring true. In Gell’s view, ‘[S]‌omething is always being “produced,” even if it is only “conversation” or “sleep” ’ (1992: 211). While the time men in the village used to actually produce material goods or generate money was often very limited, they invested considerable time and attention on less labour-intensive activities. Sharing a bowl of yaqona in the shade under a palm was, for instance, constructed as an important part of not only producing authority and status, but also intrinsic to the process of reproducing masculine behaviour and initiating younger men into the customary ways of performing masculinity. In a similar fashion, problem-solving and mediation between conflicting parties were important processes in which considerable time was invested. These activities are, in principle, not very different from those undertaken, for instance, by lawyers, politicians and civil servants in the bureaucratic market economy, inasmuch as they do not generate material outcomes but are considered both important and valuable for the social system at large. On top of that, the benefits of resting and gaining strength were lauded in their own right both in everyday and official village discourses. The social constructions of laziness, napping and drinking yaqona emphasize these practices as important markers for playing out and reinforcing the gender hierarchy in the village. People, Gell has taught us, ‘are never doing nothing at all’ (1992: 211), although what is being consumed and produced is sometimes difficult to define. On these occasions, however, it appears that Fijian men are producing status and domination by seemingly doing nothing, a gendered practice which naturally only makes sense when juxtaposed with women’s very evident and productive work, namely cooking, cleaning or craftwork.



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Men’s status in the village is consequently partly reliant upon what Sahlins, a prominent Fiji scholar, in a different context labelled ‘primitive affluence’ (1972). That is, Fijian men take pride in a village economy and lifestyle which they can achieve without working unduly hard or producing commodities. I once asked a wood carver with a market stall in Lautoka, who at the time was lying in the sun behind his market stall, why he did not take a more active interest in selling his products to tourists who were browsing in the market. His response was that if he sold too many souvenirs, it only meant that he would need to work hard carving new ones all night, something he was not quite interested in. From a modern capitalist point of view, there is a certain level of absurdity attached to such a statement. Given the fact that the reason he and many other Fijian villagers found themselves in the marketplace in the first place was in order to earn some much-needed cash supplements for the village, one could assume he would be keen to sell some stock. But it does reflect how important the articulation of laziness and detachment from the market economy are for many Fijian men. Put differently, even though they are to an increasing extent forced to engage with modern demands of productivity and commoditization, the ideological notion of ‘primitive affluence’ remains a strong reference point for male authority and ethno-Fijian manhood. This is interesting because it was reiterated and brought up in many different contexts of my fieldwork; some Fijian qauri (self-identified homosexual men, whose experiences I  discuss in more depth in Chapter 7), for instance, explained that they felt that articulating their homosexuality had deprived them of their masculine identity partly because they were no longer included in such ‘sittings’ with other men in the village. Other times I  heard younger boys complaining that they were forced to ‘run around like children’ in the village, something which signified a lack of status and respect.

Trade and waged work – negotiating the market Although, temporally speaking, it is assumed that modern life is gauna ni lavo, ‘the time of money’, many Fijians maintain that traditional structures, spaces and ways of living continue to serve as a bulwark against the most ruthless and competitive effects of the market economy. In contrast, they consider IndoFijians as intrinsically talented and at home in the business sphere. In such discussions, money often came to symbolize everything that was not Fijian and thus everything which was morally questionable in the Fijian context. While

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village life is considered affluent, in touch with nature, harmonious and free of conflict, based on communalism, respect and reciprocal exchange, the ‘way of money’ that allegedly characterizes the lives of Indo-Fijians and Europeans is seen to be driven by greed and selfishness, to be exploitative and associated with a life-style full of stress and moral contamination. What is described above is very much an idealized narrative and does not always reflect the reality of modern Fijians’ life experiences. Although the process of attaining money in a capitalist system, through practices such as being employed full-time and receiving a pay check from waged work, was often described as undesirable and morally detrimental by many of my respondents, having money ‘in their pocket’ on occasions, was often both enviable and increasingly a necessity in order to get by in urban Fiji. In one of my field note extracts, written shortly after I first arrived in the field, I recalled a conversation I  had with two cousins from my adopted village that had accompanied me to town for me to conduct banking and buy some supplies for my new home. After observing my spending, they criticized my Western way of always ‘chasing money’ as ‘shallow and wrong’, in marked contrast to their own village-based righteous parsimony and communalism. Having completed this moral disparagement, they soon turned to me and requested $20 in order to buy takeaway food and beer prior to us going back to the village. My amusement in the circumstances was derived from the fact that my friends failed to see any inconsistency between their moral positioning and pragmatic relationship to money and consumption. Situations like these turned out to be a common occurrence during my fieldwork, particularly when I spent time with interlocutors outside the village setting or outside their home. At times I inquired about the moral viability of such a practice based on their frequently articulated ethical reservations about making money, and it was explained, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, that ‘Fijians know money is gonna do no good’ and that was why they did not want to fill the pockets ‘on regular basis’. Joe, after obtaining $10 from a generous, and generously intoxicated, Australian tourist, told me he ‘better rid [him]self ’ of them fast before they were lost, and maintained that he was glad he did not have access to cash very often because when he did he ‘got into bad habits . . . drinking beer, playing pool and roaming around town’ (see further discussion about the dynamics of ‘bad money’ in Chapter 6). By associating money with an un-Fijian, Western aspect of modern life and viewing spending money as intrinsically detrimental to their own Fijian values, these men paradoxically afforded themselves a license to freely spend



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cash they obtained in town on goods and practices they themselves labelled problematic. This practice was only acceptable because of the fluidity of the money and because they did not ‘normally chase money’, and as a result of their articulated aversion against ‘filling [their] pockets with cash’. Although, as Matt Tomlinson argues, the majority of indigenous Fijians are ‘thoroughly Protestant’, there is little resonance with the Weberian protestant ethic to use success in business as a personal, moral barometer in native Fijian discourse. Instead, material success and notions of being good in business are determined by how a person’s ‘handling of money benefits his or her kin group, church or other emblematic social institution’ (Tomlinson 2004a: 194). A major point also appeared to be that money that did not enter the village circulation had only limited ability to do moral damage; indeed, money appeared to be considered a negative force only when they began ‘to consort promiscuously, erasing in the shuffle the many boundaries between kinds of persons and kinds of relationship that people have worked hard to create through their exchange’ (Robbins and Akin 1999:  7). In other words, these moral judgments are not necessarily fixed to specific situations but can be manipulated discursively both politically and in everyday practices, a point I return to in Chapter 6. One common pattern in contemporary Fiji, however, is that people mobilize these criticisms and direct them against chiefs who failed to act according to their position. This was often exemplified by their perception of the chiefs’ mismanagement of communal funds and self-enriching enterprises at the expense of the wider vanua. Cash dividends yielded from land leased for tourism or industrial purposes were sometimes not used to benefit the vanua, but instead it seemed to go ‘right in the pocket of the chief ’ as one respondent claimed, symbolizing the deterioration of chiefly integrity in modern Fiji. The chiefly role in Fiji has traditionally been centred on the concept of vakaturaga, best translated as ‘acting in chiefly manner’, which has been described as ‘the most important concept depicting ideal behaviour among Indigenous Fijians’ (Ravuvu 1987:  18). The turaga, the chief, is responsible for, and holds authority over, every matter related to the vanua, and the efficacy of his governance was at least partly based on his ability to know his place in the community and act on this authority appropriately (Nayacakalou 1975; Halapua 2003: 111–12). At the core of these notions was the idea that the chief would act selflessly according to the interests of his people, and the concept of vakaturaga ideally embodies ‘respect and deference, compliance and humility, loyalty and honesty’ (Ravuvu 1987: 18). A strong sense of the

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righteousness of these ideologies remained among the respondents I  have met throughout my fieldwork, but I have been equally struck by the strength and intensity of dissatisfaction with the current state of the chiefly office in many villages. Others have observed that a central aspect of post-independent Fiji is the collusion between chiefly authorities and foreign capital to the extent that chiefs, particularly from Eastern Fiji, have emerged as a hegemonic ruling class controlling vast amounts of resources for their own benefit (Crosby 2002:  366). Indeed, according to Halapua (2003:  113), modern turagaism ‘rests on the exploitation of the indigenous Fijian traditional system within a new socio-economic and political situation, in order to serve the interests of the new indigenous Fijian elite’. For many Fijian commoners in the village, this moral decay of their chiefs is associated with their engagement with modernity or Western culture, both at a spatial and cultural level. As chiefs have, to an increasing extent, migrated towards the urban centres, many commoners such as Sefa, experienced, a ‘lost connection . . . [and] have no longer any idea what’s happening in the village’. Moses, a farmer who had moved away from my host village to set up his own smallholding on freehold land at the outskirts of Nadi, argued that his chief could no longer serve them well because ‘he [was] never [t]‌here to listen’ but was preoccupied with ‘money issues and politics’ in Suva. Similar complaints were articulated while several of my interlocutors, who claimed the chief would ‘shoot off as soon as lease money comes in [from leaseholders in the tourism and sugarcane industry]’ and was only in the village for ‘ceremonies and presentations’. The common theme in these narratives was one of decline and disruption, where the chiefly office and the concept of vakaturaga have both been spatially removed from the traditional setting by modernity and urbanism, and ideologically contaminated by capitalism. Williksen-Bakker has written insightfully on the importance of the spatial metaphor of business as a path followed by non-Fijians, located outside the village, in Fijian discourses (1997: 220). In my experience, however, these complaints went beyond mere metaphor, having a foundation in the increasing social reality of the absence of chiefs from village affairs, because they were pursuing business in Suva or sometimes overseas. Many see this as emblematic of the moral deterioration of traditional Fijian society and a root cause for social problems that emerge in the contemporary village. While, as Tomlinson has argued, modernity in the spatial sense can be evaded and negotiated by, for instance, shunning IndoFijians and European traders and capitalism or simply not bringing money into



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the village (2004a: 191), this urban outmigration of chiefs and other leaders are experienced in terms of lasting consequences such as internal conflicts over succession or lack of political leadership and material investment in the village. In a practical sense, this lack of chiefly authority forces other representatives into the capitalist sphere to provide basic supplies for the village, such as fuel, kerosene and sugar. More importantly in this context, however, as I have discussed elsewhere (see Chapter 2), a chief ’s efficacy is derived from the attention he receives from his subjects. This is played out in most practical settings, as the chief is sitting at the top of the room or in front of the tanoa (the wooden bowl in which yaqona is mixed and served) so everyone can face him and thus attend to him in any ceremonial or social setting (Toren 1988, 1994; Tomlinson 2004b). An absent chief cannot be attended upon, something which helps explain the frustration many commoners feel about these issues. Iko, a villager from a small agricultural village outside Nadi where I was a frequent visitor, lamented his chief ’s absence in this matter, claiming it made it ‘impossible to keep up traditional life and obligations’ and difficult to ‘solve problems and make decisions the right way’. Ideologically, it is also clear that chiefly authority loses some of its power when removed from the traditional setting and integrated into the competing cultural sphere of the market economy and the ‘way of money’. By indulging in practices which are seen as benefiting themselves at the expense of the greater vanua, many contemporary chiefs were deemed both immoral and un-Fijian. What is apparent in these discussions is that dominant Fijian discourses are still founded in the colonial ideological construct that positions engagement in the modern economy as both a practically and ethically incongruous enterprise for indigenous Fijians. Modernity, here epitomized by the accumulation of wealth for personal use, was considered un-Fijian and in conflict with the ‘Fijian way’, as it served only to remove Fijians from their traditional life, both spatially and ideologically. However, it is becoming increasingly complicated to practise these ideologies in contemporary Fiji, and for many of my respondents, some engagement in trade or waged work became a necessity in order to fulfil their traditional obligations towards kinship groups, family and church organizations. These undertakings in the market place were ideally constructed as communal activities in order to gain necessary cash for the community. At the same time, there were also a number of people that used these discourses to position themselves outside what they considered the constraints of tradition. For them, engaging in waged work and marketing offered a path to reshaping themselves apart from village life and also prospects of obtaining personal material wealth.

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Marketing culture and identity The paradoxical nature of Fijian’s relationship to money and the modern economy was moreover highlighted by the peculiar ideas and practices displayed by Fijian market vendors and souvenir traders. An increasingly common way by which some Fijian men engage with the tourist economy is through the production or, more commonly, the resale of basic artefacts and woodworks. These are normally offered commercially in market stalls, urban shopfronts, village stalls or by directly approaching tourists on the streets. These vendors, especially the ones operating at street level, have been subject to much discussion among tourists as well as Fijian administrators during the last decades, largely because they were perceived as misleading and forcing tourists to buy souvenirs. Nonetheless, hawkers of this kind were manifold and visible in most areas where tourists were centred, especially in central Nadi, during my time in Fiji, and their casual way of approaching possible customers were strikingly similar to how Miyazaki aptly described local traders of carved, wooden swords operating in Suva in 2005: With the greeting ‘Bula’ (loosely translated as ‘Hello!’), the swordsellers, usually in pairs, offered their hands and attempted to initiate a conversation. They rarely tried to sell anything right away. Rather they first asked tourists where they were from. If the tourists responded that they were from Australia or New Zealand, the swordsellers asked further questions about Australian or New Zealand rugby teams. Tourists from the US were sure to be asked how President Clinton was doing these days, and the swordsellers might even experiment with their limited knowledge of the Japanese language when they encountered Japanese tourists. (2005: 281)

After such casual and jovial introductions, the vendors either tried to directly entice tourists to enter a shop and ‘have a look around’, invited them to share a bowl of yaqona or sometimes offered a ‘gift’ on the spot. Eventually, generally after being offered several gifts, some with names or initials already engraved into them, the tourists were asked to pay for all the products, reportedly at a much higher price than more established, formal establishments charged. In the end, most tourists ended up in quarrels or uncomfortable bargaining situations before they left the shops carrying several ‘gifts’ having parted with $30 or $40. Local Fijians have often considered these products shoddy and lacking authenticity as Fijian cultural artefacts (Sikivou 1980: 99), and those involved in the tourism industry have been particularly concerned about these street



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vendors harassing tourists into making purchases (Miyazaki 2005). For many people, these techniques of deception and unfriendly behaviour are seen as violating both the trademark Fijian hospitality, which is central in contemporary advertisements of Fiji as a tourist destination, and common decency. On a deeper level, they are also considered to be contrary to the traditional Fijian ethos, and the culprits are invariably taken to epitomize the dark side of modernity. A common way to refer to these products is ‘bullshit stuff ’ and the manufacturers and traders as ‘con-men’, two terms that invoke a rich set of associations and anecdotes for most locals. These notions are tied to an underlying discourse about tradition and cultural authenticity. It has been noted that cultural artefacts are often valued on the basis that they are ‘authentic representations of “centuries-old” traditions’ (Parker 2008: 61). What is more, as souvenirs, these artefacts are also valued according to ‘the conditions of its acquisition, that is, the experience that it frames’ (Harkin 1995:  660). In other words, consumers who acquire cultural artefacts from Fijian market vendors and handicraft stores do so in the expectation they are buying original and authentic ‘real Fijian products’. While, as far as I was able to validate, products sold by Fijian street and market vendors were generally produced within Fiji, the majority of them originated from large, foreign-owned and operated, commercial sawmills which mass-produced a variety of artefacts. However, most vendors concealed this fact and instead attached more romantic narratives about village hardship and more small-scale production lines to their souvenirs. A common story was that their products were made by children in their inland village in order to raise necessary money for schooling or living expenses. This emphasizes a well-proven point that convincing oratory skills about ‘suffering and survival’ (Notar 2006: 79) and performances of stereotyped and expected indigenous identities (Sikkink 2001) are instrumental skills in the construction and distribution of cultural artefacts as souvenirs. It was on the basis of these dubious selling techniques, just as much as the nature of the goods in themselves, that most informal street vendors in Fiji were labelled ‘con-men’. This and similar labels were often reiterated by taxi drivers and representatives of the tourism industry, and reinforced by the newly initiated ‘Tourist Police’ in Nadi. Paul, police officer in his late twenties originating from my main village, explained that the shops merited the attention of police because of their practice of ‘misleading advertising’, as well as more serious offences such as overcharging and in some cases threatening tourists if they were unwilling to complete a transaction. One story published in local newspapers during my fieldwork concerned a Canadian couple who had bought a hardwood tanoa (a

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carved and ornamented wooden bowl used to serve yaqona) in Nadi during their visit, only to realize upon their return home that the bowl had in reality been made in poor-quality wood and crudely coloured by shoe polish. Despite their seemingly very friendly and accommodating introductions to tourists, these vendors were remarkably reserved when confronted by questions about their trading. During my visits I have, however, developed a professional relationship with some of these traders. Tom, who worked from a centrally placed store in Nadi, was reluctant to talk about his products and where they came from but somewhat guiltily maintained that ‘everyone’s gotta make a living . . . and it’s tough for locals in Fiji’. He further explained that trading in souvenirs and handicraft work on an independent basis was a ‘perfect job’ because these relatively flexible mercantile ventures enabled him to maintain close ties with his traditional village and the obligations associated with family and mataqali: I work in town only when it’s busy tourist times . . . and go back every fortnight anyway. So I  spend some weeks in town, some weeks in the village all year round. I can look after my family and the farmland, support the chief there and also bring some cash and things back from town . . . it works out for everyone.

While engaging in the capitalist economy and the tourism industry was acceptable in order to provide necessary supplies and cash for himself, his family and village, it was not desirable. The job as an independent vendor, then, was constructed as a required negotiation between the necessities of modern life and the traditional view of the ‘Fijian way’ and village values not only as separate from modern, urban life but also as more important and desirable. This reveals a much more pragmatic view towards market engagement in general (and deceptive business practices in particular) than what dominant village discourses promote and one that in my experience is symptomatic of how many urban Fijians position themselves in the contemporary context where waged work, especially in the tourism sector, is becoming a key site for the production of modern Fijian identities.

Tourism The type of souvenir trade described above, particularly the ones that utilize more coercive or deceptive sales tactics, remain relatively marginal economic activities on the fringes of the broader tourism economy. One of the few economic sectors where indigenous Fijians have more or less enthusiastically taken part in modern



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capitalism is in the tourism and hospitality sector. Communal entities and landowning units are increasingly eager to lease land for tourism development and strike deals that go some way towards guaranteeing local employment as part of the bargain. In Fiji, as has been observed in general, tourism has arguably become ‘a major internationalized component of Western capitalist economies; it is one of the quintessential features of mass consumer culture and modern life’ (Britton 1991: 451). Second only to sugarcane production, tourism is now a major sector of the Fijian economy, providing close to 35,000 people with waged or salaried jobs and bringing in more than FJ$350 million on average per quarter in 2016/17. Indigenous Fijians are the preferred employees in the Fijian tourism industry, emphasizing that Fiji as a brand is marketed as a desired article for consumption. Engagement in waged labour, then, has for many become synonymous with presenting and performing a set of marketized Fijian identities of which their own bodies are the main site of production, and a process through which these bodies are turned into objects of economic desire. Advertising campaigns and tourism brochures focused on stylized images of smiling, friendly and forthcoming Fijians, alongside picturesque lagoons, swaying palms and azure blue coral reefs. Some elements of Fijian tradition, such as the yaqona welcoming ceremony and the meke dance, have become central to this branding; elements hardly any hotel or sightseeing tour was without when I did my fieldwork in Fiji. Entry into the capitalist market through tourism is thus controlled not only by the communal nature of commodification but also through what Fijians often perceived as a carefully crafted Fijian product, with Fijian tradition and communalism promoted as the selling point. At a four-star tourist resort on their village’s leased land on the southern coast of Viti Levu, Simione and Joel performed yaqona ceremonies for tourists every night. The same resort regularly hired local dance groups and the local church choir to perform for tourists, and claimed (that) 90 per cent of their staff came from local villages, one of which I maintained a strong connection to throughout my fieldwork. Resort staff from this village that took part in entertainment for tourists expressed an ambiguous relationship to these tasks. On one level, they relished this opportunity to ‘present Fiji’ to visitors while also ‘providing a life [livelihood]’ for their families and clan-members. But at the same time, they remarked feeling uncomfortable about aspects of how they and their presented Fiji in this commercial setting. Waged work in the tourism industry arguably goes deeper than just turning a person’s labour power into a commodity. Britton, for instance, argues that ‘the behaviour and qualities of the waiter, room service person, tour guide, or

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steward are as important as the physical labour service they undertake’ (Britton 1991:  459). This highlights how engagement in these service industries has included a commodification of Fijian identities and social protocols as well their labour, and, as Yoko Kanemasu argues, the capitalist marketing of place combines with colonial legacies to create expectations that hotel workers appear and behave ‘as willing subordinates, eagerly smiling and anxious to please’ (2008: 116). Providing services in these settings, then, where the emphasis is as much on showcasing a marketable image of Fijianness as much as completing the specified labour tasks, makes hotel workers ‘commodified bodies  – gazed upon, sexualised, or simply judged against yardsticks of “good service” ’ (Gibson 2009: 531). While it is neither difficult nor maladroit, according to traditional social protocol, for Fijians to smile and be forthcoming to visitors, some of my respondents working in the tourism industry found that the ‘roles’ they had to take on in their respective positions in hotels and resorts conflicted with their own ideas regarding their self-identity. Taka, working as a porter at a major Coral Coast resort, for instance, found that his day-to-day tasks forced him to subdue his personality by being ‘quiet and submissive’, and was concerned with how this presented a distorted image of both himself and Fijian men in general. He was particularly concerned about being perceived as ‘fishing for tips’ and ‘working only to pick up coins’, as he was ‘proud to be Fijian . . . and not chasing money’. Other times the concerns were about how service work involved a number of corporeal performances that felt ‘put on’ or fake, including those introduced by my friend William and his colleagues in the quotes at the start of this chapter. The latter dynamics were also prominent for many young Fijian men who occasionally provided dance performances for the tourist market. The meke is a traditional ceremonial dance, a survivor from precolonial Fijian tradition, which is performed for a variety of purposes depending on context. The version that is most commonly performed for tourists is an enactment of tribal warfare where young men challenge the opposition and demonstrate their strength and martial superiority through highly stylized and rhythmic moves, often involving spears and clubs. Wearing simple wrap-around cloths and face- or body paint but barefoot and with naked upper bodies, the dancers represent the popular images of muscular and physically imposing Fijian masculinities. In village settings and more traditional forums, the dance still has traditional significance and potency as many villages have their specific dance routines, but under the gaze of Western tourists, the shows often took on different meanings and arguably played up to the colonial notion of exotic and sexualized others.



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Some performers I encountered during my time in Fiji found this problematic and lamented the fact that tourists ‘sometimes view performances almost like a pop concert . . . where the dancers are sexy and stuff ’ rather than acknowledging the specific cultural context of these dances. The point that presentations of fierce masculinity and strength were transformed into sexualized entertainment displays in modern settings was a recurring concern for these men. Ione, for instance, found ‘the stage unsuitable’ for these performances, as he thought ‘spotlights and discolights’  – used to make the stage shows more visually appealing in many resort settings ‘changed the looks of us . . . [to be] more like actors than Fijian warriors’. Another dancer, Sulu, explained after a separate performance, that he felt uncomfortable about taking centre stage when the meke ‘should be more about Fijian culture . . . values . . . and not about four big men dancing’. This discomfort with the exposed body is quite unusual for Fijian men, and it appears directly associated with the space, both physical and ideological, in which these dances are played out. Becker (1990) has argued that Fijians’ bodies are more of a reflection of the larger community than a representation of an individual person’s self. Williksen-Bakker supports such a conceptualization and moreover argues that the Fijian body takes on symbolic meanings and acts as communicational devices for broader communal values that in ceremonial contexts ‘merely happens to lend itself for that specific purpose, representing something beyond itself, a social phenomenon of a more general nature’ (1995: 225). The centrality of the body is obvious for anyone who observes Fijian ceremonial life. Controlling one’s body, showing strength and displaying humility are core values explicitly taught to every Fijian young man, and knowing how to position and display one’s body in various contexts is paramount to the social protocol. While different ceremonies are played out differently, the Fijian’s ability to sit quietly in the same position for extraordinarily long periods, along with the ability to ignore discomfort and pain, is important to most of them. When the body is ‘off-duty’, that is, when ‘there is no relationship to establish, build up or repair’ through ceremonial or customary actions, Fijian men appear little concerned about being exposed or gazed upon in public (Williksen-Bakker 1995: 225). It is not uncommon to see Fijian men taking a nap on the roadside while waiting for the bus or on a public bench in a busy urban street. When I did research in bookmaker shops or kava salons, my respondents would frequently pull out a bench and roll themselves out for a nap in between horse races or pool games.

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On hot days, Fijian men often rolled up their t-shirts and exposed a bare stomach or took their shirts off completely whether they were out shopping, in a bar or at work. This is by no means viewed as embarrassing or out of place and was never considered deserving of comment. For Williksen-Bakker (1995: 226), Fijians are comfortable with exposing their body to the public gaze because they have an unconditional trust and belief in communality. From my perspective, this practice also appeared to be part of the general idea that exposing oneself in vulnerable positions shows humility as well as testifying to the ideological ability to remove one’s own body from individual self-consciousness. In the same way, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016; see also Chapter 2 in this book), when Fijian men emphasize bodily strength and toughness, it is generally as a communal quality, a part of the local habitus and body hexis, either to protect their village and chief or as a religious virtue showing loyalty to God and the vanua, rather than as an individual achievement. Traditionally, these ideas have been embodied and played out through various war dances which are specific to the respective clans or villages, most famously the Bauan cibi which gained significant prominence as an integrated part of the national Fijian rugby team’s official performances or, as the focus is here, the meke. Such dances are always performed by groups of men whose bodies are marked and ornamented for this purpose. The appearance typically involves using minimal clothing for the purpose of accentuating physical strength and the idealized picture of the big and muscular Fijian warrior. This image is further augmented by the application of body- and face paint and warrior clubs or spears as accessories. The dance itself consists of a series of stylized and synchronized moves symbolizing martial combat events, such as a charging attack, close combat or the clubbing of an enemy, evidence of one of its original uses as a challenge to opposing tribes or celebrations of success in war upon return to the village in pre-modern Fiji. While this dance, known as the meke-ni-valu, has come to be synonymous with meke for visitors to Fiji, the word itself is a compound term comprising a vast variety of dances used for a myriad of different purposes. In the contemporary village setting, such meke are commonly integral to many crucial social ceremonies, such as marriages or chiefly welcoming ceremonies (see also Capell [1941] 1991: 145, for explanations of various forms of meke). The performances themselves, including the appearance of performers and the moves they engaged in, had few variations from the village setting to the commercial hotel stage. Nonetheless, many respondents expressed discomfort about the nature of the performances when they were contextualized outside traditional village locales,



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arguing that they appeared misplaced under commercial lights and the tourist gaze. The source of these perceptions is located in the fundamental dichotomy I have reiterated throughout this discussion: that between the bula vaka vanua (the life of the land), or ‘Fijian way’, and that of ‘the European way’, often referred to as bula vaka ilavo (the life of money). Symbolically, these two spheres are constructed as diametrically opposed, a dichotomy which takes on both spatial and ideological meanings. While the bula vaka ilavo is performed in an urban market place and centred on material gains, selfishness and individuality (Williksen-Bakker 1995:  220), ‘the Fijian way’ is played out in the village and the vanua, and represents ideas and values such as respect, care, love and selflessness (Ravuvu 1987). On this specific point, the last aspect appears particularly interesting, as it provides an avenue for understanding the ways in which the body as a symbol changes meaning from one cultural sphere to the other. In the communal village surroundings, an individual’s body, as I  have outlined above, merely forms a part of the veitauriliga (lit. ‘the joining of hands’), meaning the community as a whole. This is profoundly changed in the market setting, especially when the embodiment of Fijian manhood has become a product which is not only bought and sold but is also manipulated to fit into a commercial setting. Consequently, by commodifying bodily practices to suit the tourist market, the bodies of the performers have become individualized and removed from their collective context and thus laid bare to an unpleasant gaze that sits uncomfortably with Fijian men. The main point here, however, appears to be that the commercializsation of the meke, according to some performers, took away some ‘authenticity’ from the dance as a culturally significant expression of Fijianness and the local warrior culture as it is articulated in the construction of modern identities. Moreover, these dancers expressed discomfort at being viewed as mere stage performers, as their experience of the meke had much deeper, ideological roots. Ultimately, while the meke and similar dance performances remain significant as a representation of the celebrated Fijian warrior in traditional Fijian settings, its appropriation as a marketing vehicle in commercialized tourist settings sits uncomfortably with many of its performers. ‘The bati [traditional warriors] is a core element of Fijian culture,’ Ratu Tevita, a chiefly authority with strong links to my village, explained, ‘not suitable for light entertainment in a hotel lobby.’ Tevita expressed similar concerns about the inclusion of yaqona ceremonies in commercial settings, proclaiming that ‘yaqona can be very dangerous when used inappropriately . . . beside protocol’. As a ‘sacred ritual marking the connection

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between the people and the vanua, yaqona should only be prepared and served by suitable people in the right way’. This was something he doubted could be guaranteed when commercially sold or prepared for display purposes. These concerns are not entirely new, but are arguably rooted in early colonial discourses about the dichotomy between capitalism and traditional Fijian values. They have re-emerged more recently and are often at the centre of local discussions about the cultural impact of tourism in Fiji, especially with the onset of commercial tourism in the 1980s (Miyazaki 2005). In the present, these familiar dichotomies between Fijian/European, traditional/modern, money/land are remade and rearticulated to fit a context where Fijian culture is increasingly becoming entangled in the market through the commodification of people, practices and artefacts.

Money and the tension of modern life Fijian engagement with the market economy not only has practical implications on village life but may also be considered contaminating for important cultural practices. Throughout my research, my respondents continued to allude to a perceived ideological divide between traditional, village-based ways of living, ‘the Fijian way’, and a modern, ‘Western’ lifestyle centred on money, which were seen to be in direct conflict with each other. Fijian men’s relationship to waged work and money can thus at best be described as complex and ambiguous. The village setting remains the focal point for most Fijian men’s social lives, and village identity is perceived as crucial to men’s self-identification. Hence, while the financial circumstances in the villages I conducted my research put pressure on men to take up waged work outside the village, most of my respondents had strong reservations about engaging in this, largely because it was perceived as jeopardizing their status in the village. In short, it was difficult to make a decent living while simultaneously ‘being good at being a man’. It appears quite clear that contemporary chiefs’ engagement in the capitalist economy, for what is largely seen as personal gain and ambition, undermines the credibility and status of the traditional chiefly office as an important institution. However, what seems to be a paradoxical situation, the fact that traditional chiefs, by attempting to cement their hegemonic power through economic and political means, are simultaneously losing status and respect in traditional Fiji, is also an effective example of ideas about hegemonic masculine hybridity. Although their traditional power has been weakened in the modern



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context, traditional leaders appear to have successfully renegotiated their power positions by drawing upon other hegemonic notions of masculinity, such as economic prosperity and political prestige, which are highly valued in the larger, non-traditional ideological sphere. These are in many ways men that are still drawn towards an idealized version of ethno-Fijian identity. For many others, particularly younger men or those who had relocated to town in order to set up a new life outside their ancestral villages or family homes, the allure of modernity and what city life had to offer far outweighed the potential damage represented by engagement in the money economy. Not only had many of them moved to Nadi to seek out jobs in the tourism or entertainment industry, they also often had a critical distance to life in the village and the social constraints associated with Fijian tradition. What often struck me in conversations with them was how they inverted the dominant discourse about essential differences between the Fijian way and the European way in order to present themselves as modern, outward-looking subjects. The complexity of these engagements, the various relationships people had to money and work and the many different ways they articulated their life stories in context of modern Fiji are what I  am mainly concerned about in the following chapters. These are also the factors that made Nadi such a productive research setting.

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Drinking, hyper-masculinity and insolence

We had been sitting on a blue tarpaulin sheet at the southern edge of the village drinking strong kava for most of the afternoon. The men in the village took pride in their homegrown yaqona (kava), the potency of which was often described as mirroring the toughness of its growers and the strength of their ties to their vanua (village land). I was generally considered part of another village on the other side of town, but its ancestral links to this village that we may call Vinaka1 dictated that I was always a welcome visitor there and, moreover, entitled to be treated in a manner of a tavale, that is a particularly close relationship between cross cousins or their honorary equivalents. Such relations imply certain levels of hospitality and loyalty, combined with an ability to play jokes and challenge each other in both verbal and physical ways.2 These factors, combined with my growing reputation for handling my share of kava on level with the locals, made sure the tanoa, the kava bowl, had rarely been allowed to go dry all day. As the day went on, the grog was mixed progressively stronger, and by sunset we were consequently experiencing the type of jovial docility that is symptomatic of being affected by kava. Eventually, the common consensus in the group was that we needed a ‘wash down’. Kava was often described as leaving an undesirable cloggy sensation in the throat and mouth, and it is common folk belief in Fiji that a washdown with a few beers afterwards will not only cleanse this sensation away but also ‘clear the head’ from the slightly narcotic effects of yaqona. As Christina Toren has pointed out, a washdown is ‘represented by young men as being an inevitable physical demand’ after drinking yaqona, just as eating food is necessary when one is hungry (Toren 1994:  160). For young Fijian men, especially those with relatively easy access to nearby towns, it is therefore commonplace to defy the practice of their seniors, who generally go home to sleep, and bring the kava session to a close outside the village parameters in search of alcohol and new drinking buddies. In many cases, this meant turning the night into a prolonged drinking binge. On the particular night that I  am

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recollecting here, there were merely a few token protests – easily dismissed by labelling the perpetrators lamulamu, or coward, a classic putdown between young Fijians – before we all made our way to Nadi’s entertainment strip. The nightlife in Nadi is usefully divided between what people refer to as ‘tourist places’ and ‘local clubs’. The former of these are targeted towards the tourist market and generally charge higher prices for refreshments as well as food. This is somehow offset by the fact that they offer amenities of a higher standard and are decorated in more elaborate ways. Many appear as caricatured Pacific-themed clubs in the typical tiki style that came to prominence in the 1960s’ American surf culture and can now be found in different inceptions across the tropical fringe. The dominant aesthetics in these establishments consist of hula skirts, wood-carved masks, coconut palms and other stereotypical tropical imagery. Others appear in a style that makes these clubs practically indistinguishable, at least in terms of aesthetics, from night clubs in places such as Sydney or Auckland:  faux leather seats, polished iron bars and tables, spot lighting and otherwise minimalistic décor. Though most of these establishments rely on local employment and encourage the patronage of young, local urbanites that can mingle with tourists, the reality is that very few locals are in the economic position to consider these venues seriously if the purpose is to have a few drinks and spend an evening out. There are, however, also several night-time establishments that cater largely for local patrons. The differences between these and the upmarket tourist clubs are often striking. The one I attended together with my tavales from the village was typical. Located on the first floor of a large commercial building on the outskirts of one of Nadi’s busier entertainment areas, the club consisted of one large, dimly lit and sparsely furnished room. A  spacious dance floor, flanked by wooden benches and tables of the type more commonly found in outdoor recreational areas than entertainment establishments like these, dominated the room. Leaning against wooden pillars throughout the room were a few taller, round tables surrounded by wooden bar stools. At the far end of the room was a hole-in-the wall counter from which one could purchase a limited selection of alcoholic drinks, mainly stubbies of local or imported Australian beer and locally produced spirits, as well as premixed bowls of kava and soft drinks. Arriving at the club, the mood had shifted subtly in our group. Being outside the village and the gaze of chiefs and older relatives, combined with the promise of alcohol, our group seemed looser, with fewer inhibitions. The lazy chatter around the tanoa was substituted with louder laughter, stronger language, shouts as well as pushing and shoving. I received a heavy slap on my shoulder and soon



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after found myself in a brief headlock. The atmosphere was friendly between us but I sensed that we were building up to something. Ascending the stairs up to the club we could hear excited shouting competing with the tunes of remixed reggae tracks that typically dominate the playlists at these local clubs. The first impression upon entering the club was that it was filled to the brim with people, the majority of which were young, indigenous Fijians. Scanning the club one soon noticed that the impressive crowd, surely well exceeding the numbers that are legally acceptable and safe for the premises, were comprised of several, smaller groups of partygoers, most likely constellated in much the same way as ours, that is based loosely on village or kinship ties. While the atmosphere was loud and jovial and distinctions between groups were not necessarily sharply drawn – people mingled, danced, drank and talked across these soft social borders – all interaction seemed to be undergirded or mediated by local knowledge, cultural categories and social scripts. People rarely appeared as one. Rather, groups met groups, and I noticed that when I got up to buy a round of Fiji Bitters some of my mates got up to come with me, while the rest of our group kept an eye on us. Oppressively hot, the atmosphere was also heavy with a sort of anticipation, charged with energy, oven-proof Bounty rum and the increasing bravado of an animated crowd of which at least three quarters were young men. We seemed far removed from the subdued talk around the kava bowl, and the time between each drink soon became shorter and shorter. As soon as one bottle was drained I had another one in hand. Empty glass bottles were collected and carried off by dedicated floor staff as soon as they were put down on the table, a common precaution, so that there were to be no potential weapons available if the mood suddenly turned. Here, as in most local bars, furniture was bolted to the floor or secured by metal chains for the same reasons. I soon realized the aptness of these procedures as two fights seemed to break out almost simultaneously. It might have been an indication of the atmosphere in the room and the size of the crowd that I was inadvertently in the middle of one fight in front of the stage without noticing that the dancing had turned into fisticuffs until I was dragged out of the melee by one of my companions. I was told none of the brawls had anything to do with us so we stayed well clear of them. Both dissipated relatively quickly but that was far from the end of it. Within the next hours, several fist fights flared up and dispersed a number of times, and it felt like just a matter of time until our group would get involved. Eventually, a spilt drink escalated to a heated exchange with the group standing by an adjacent table, and soon Simon, a usually mild-mannered though

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high-spirited youngster and promising rugby winger, threw a punch. The ensuing scuffle involved the entire groups of people. I both received and handed out some punches myself while struggling to keep abreast of the situation and get myself out of harm’s way. I recall thinking this was hardly the sort of situation appropriate for a researcher and not something I had anticipated in my ethics application. Shouts competed with the thumping music in a chaotic soundscape, fists and arms seemed to be everywhere making it impossible to distinguish between friends and foes. While the fight barely lasted a minute or two before dispersing after Simon had hit the main offender to the ground, it was in many ways the defining moment of the night. We regrouped, finished our drinks and left shortly after. Once outside, I  received a couple of supportive slaps on the back and was embraced by a friend who wanted to know if I  was alright, an intimate gesture that at once contrasted with and seemed intrinsically linked to the violence that had occurred moments earlier. The punch-up and the hug were perhaps two expressions of the same intense carnal sociality that characterizes many young Fijians’ engagement with the night-time economy. This was merely one of many evenings that followed remarkably similar trajectories and involved some sort of physical altercation. Still, I do not wish to argue that this type of inter-group violence is in any way institutionalized or situated deep in some local, masculine psyche. On the contrary, rather than essentializing these practices, I think it is important to interrogate how fighting, as well as other forms of carnal socialities with which it coexists, become intelligible in the culturally and historically specific. In what follows, I take a step back from my own intimate experience of such dynamics in order to seriously consider my local interlocutors’ analyses of these events in the context of a broader discussion about how they conceive of and engage with the notion of modernity. By privileging these local perspectives, I highlight how fist fighting, alcohol consumption and public displays of insolence emerge as interconnected social practices that are at once integral to the performance of masculinity in modern Fiji, and to the reaffirmation of existing social connections and divisions.

Alcohol and transgressive masculinities Much of my earlier discussion has focused on discourses about and performances of masculinity that lie close to the dominant, normative perceptions of masculine behaviour. However, the relationship between elite constructs of gendered identities and grassroots ideas of the same concepts is not necessarily one of



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concomitance. In fact, the relation between articulated, official discourses and the ‘structure of feeling/experience’ or ‘practical consciousness’ of everyday life is often one of divergence rather than harmony (Williams 1977: 130–2). While, as discussed at length in preceding chapters (Chapters 2 and 4, in particular), elite discourses on Fijian manhood have become embedded in a relatively wellorganized social system where social hierarchies and collective identities remain strong, it is obvious that many men engage in practices that are at odds with socially accepted gender norms. This chapter thus utilizes ethnographic data to discuss alcohol consumption and what I label stylized insolence as important examples of social practices used by many men to challenge traditional notions of masculinity in contemporary Fiji. Paradoxically, while hyper-masculine traits, such as strength, courage and toughness in war are celebrated in the construction of Fijian masculinities, village life provides few outlets for corresponding behaviours. It is instead characterized by strict social protocol and demands for obedience and respect.3 Socialization into the strong, male identity is conducted within this highly controlled framework and always coupled with an emphasis on the hierarchical social system underpinning Fijian identities. The sites for hyper-masculine behaviour, then, are not only located physically outside the village but also belong ideologically beyond the cultural ethos of traditional Fiji. Sporting fields are at first glance arenas where masculine traits such as competitiveness and strength are played out without the constraints of social protocol. Competitive boxing and rugby are arguably two examples of activities where Fijian men can showcase and measure these qualities without concern for the complex rules of status, reciprocity and social regulation. At the same time, however, both rugby and boxing are central parts of the controlled socialization process in the village and considered ideal for instilling particular values and qualities in young men. Both activities are understood to be intrinsic to Fijian tradition (see further discussion in Chapter  2) and encompass notions of the culturally specific understanding of manhood that has become entrenched in the construction of the ethno-Fijian national identity. Moreover, while not overtly embedded in rigid Fijian social hierarchies, both sports are highly controlled arenas for playing out masculinity and provide little room for men to transgress the cultural importance put on silence, control and respect (Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016). There are few arenas in which these relatively rigid sociocultural conventions pertaining to comportment and behaviour can be effectively challenged. Such opportunities largely emerge in the context of urban settings located beyond the geographical and ideological

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domains of the vanua and are perceived to be part of an alien and modern lifestyle which ultimately threatens and undermines fundamental Fijian authorities and tradition. The social practice of drinking alcohol is one such activity that is seen to epitomize the modern cultural sphere that is demonstratively at odds with traditional custom. As a consequence, drinking has long been a central aspect of both local and academic discourses about social change in Fiji. Christina Toren, in particular, provided a compelling analysis of the local politics and practice of drinking and drunkenness in Sawaieke village on Gau island in the 1980s (1988, 1994). Given the historical, geographical and cultural distance between Toren’s fieldwork and my own research context, significant differences are obvious in these respective analyses. Still, much of the underlying cultural values and discourses about alcohol’s position in Fijian villages remain the same, and in what follows, I often consider my own data in dialogue with Toren’s analysis. It would, however, be far too simplistic to say that everyone deems all consumption of alcohol to be a dramatic deviance from the proper norms of Fijian village life. One senior chief did, for instance, explain to me that when established, married men or chiefs and village authorities drink alcohol in privacy or ‘in a gentlemanly way’, it is never talked about or made out to be a problem. The implication seemed to be that only men of a certain standing had the ability to use and enjoy alcohol in a socially valorized way. These dynamics were also found by Christina Toren, who explained that ‘the behaviour of married men who got drunk was never a matter of public lecture’, while young men’s drinking was frequently criticized (1994: 158). In fact, the social problem of alcohol and drunkenness is discursively attached to young, unmarried men who are seen to indulge in alcohol because they have yet to come to terms with their role in the social structure and, perhaps, utilize drinking to protest against peremptory village norms. Hence, drinking was rarely viewed as problematic or subject to village gossip except when it was young men who engaged in it. On the same token, for these young men, drinking consequently emerged as a way to, at least temporarily, display defiance of established cultural norms and, as I demonstrate in what follows, perform modernity. During my fieldwork, the majority of drinking sessions involving young men were framed in terms that labelled them contrary to ‘village custom’. As a consequence, they generally took place outside the view of village authorities. Groups of young drinkers generally gathered in a public place, club or a hotel, or, in more remote areas, in a carefully chosen area of relative isolation, such as in the bush outside the village or elsewhere where they were both symbolically



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and physically apart from the traditional setting of village life. This process of distancing these sessions from village protocol also had an impact on the practical application of administering and consuming drinks. Participants often made an elaborate point to make certain the drinking session happened in a deliberately informal and disorganized manner. This served both to set the tone for debauchery and the stylized rejection of village rules of appropriateness but also, more importantly, contrasted drinking alcohol with the formality and ritualistic structure that characterizes consumption of yaqona, where every aspect, including seating arrangements, the preparation of the drink and the order of drinking, is determined by formal social protocol and notions of status and seniority. This play on formality, status and ritual is a central aspect of drinking as a social performance and provides a hint to what makes drinking a socially meaningful activity. For many contributors, a key motivation to partake in drinking sessions was that the practice served to, if not modify, then at least assuage social hierarchies and provide an arena where egalitarianism and unrestricted social interaction was made possible and promoted. Drinks were generally served from a long neck bottle of beer or a bottle of local spirits and passed around from drinker to drinker in a small glass which was expected to be emptied in one go. While this arguably mimicked the way yaqona is consumed, alcohol lacks the cultural properties that make yaqona ceremonies formal occasions. The structural similarity in how these different beverages are consumed was thus used to highlight the point that consumption of alcohol was a modern practice that involved the deliberate transgression of village protocol. At the same time, however, it can be perceived as a deliberate attempt to create an alternative commonality, based on egalitarianism and mateship rather than distinctions and hierarchies, centred on drinking as a social activity. By adopting some elements from the traditional yaqona ceremony and twinning it with a modern social practice such as drinking, these social drinkers construct performances of modernity that can be construed as distinctly Fijian. On Friday nights, I occasionally took part in drinking sessions with a group of offshore hotel workers who had returned to Viti Levu for a week-long break. Most of them were young, unmarried men who had recently received their pay check for a month’s work in conditions where consumption of alcohol was forbidden, and who were now about to return to their village for a week. To stop by at the local club to drink beer was a common event under these circumstances, because they could afford it, because they had not drunk since the previous month and because it was their only chance to indulge in this

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before they returned to the social scrutiny of their village or family home. For many participants, these drinking sessions were considered a ‘natural part of going home’, ‘something that always happens’ and indeed ‘what boys need after hard work’. While some drinking groups remained vaguely determined by kinship ties or village identities, they were just as frequently based on modern constellations such as work collegiality or sporting teams and, as a consequence, were often heterogeneous and culturally diverse, drawing in members from different geographical locations and ethnic backgrounds. This highlights how modern arenas provide facilitate forms of socialities that cut across what has often been represented as a racial divide in Fiji. Apart from the growing number of permanent urban dwellers who frequented these establishments, it was commonplace for Fijian villagers who were doing wage work in the urban centres, off shore islands or tourists resorts to stop by for a drinking session prior to returning to their village. While this is, of course, a fairly common recreational use of alcohol, it also signifies the social meaning these places take on in the Fijian context – as arenas for unrestricted social interaction outside of the traditional system, as well as the notion that alcohol is largely outlawed from most villages. Urban spaces such as hotels or clubs, in which these sessions were often played out in contemporary, urban Fiji, are deemed social settings where habitual social protocol is set aside on a regular basis. Best described as loosely organized, drinking sessions of this kind could most accurately be defined by their inherent unpredictability in contrast with the sense of formality and structure that underpin many village- or communitybased social occasions. The order of drinking did not generally resemble a status hierarchy, a practice crucial to any consumption of yaqona even on informal and merely social occasions, but promoted a sense of egalitarian companionship where the only articulated status was given to the one who had paid for the alcohol consumed, guests from the outside or potential participants who displayed an ability to stomach vast amounts of alcohol. The size of the drinking group similarly varied and was often solely determined by the amount of alcohol available, as generally no one considered there being any point in drinking unless they could get drunk. Moreover, it was not uncommon that the group grew significantly as the session progressed, as new participants were recruited from passers-by or latecomers, or as attempts were made to entice friends to supply more alcohol and join the party. Drinking sessions were generally organized on an impromptu basis and not usually organized to celebrate any specific occasions, so the practices and activities



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associated with them varied. However, singing, shouting or narrations of jocular stories, many risqué in nature, practices that would have been considered transgressive in more traditional villages or family settings, appeared to be inherent to any proper, drinking session. An important part of this often restrictive view on alcohol in Fijian villages is that not only is it perceived as both alien and, at times, conflicting with Fijian cultural practice, but also that it is perceived to facilitate undesirable behaviour. Alcohol and drunkenness, a local chief explained to me echoing colonial discourses, is considered to be a ‘part of “the European way” . . . and unsuitable for the Fijian mind’. Although this view was somewhat stricter than the norm among my interlocutors, it was a common assumption that Fijian men under the influence of alcohol were, as I have discussed, uninhibited and, thus, unpredictable, and consequently potentially harmful to village protocol and the general social order. Alcohol, moreover, often remains associated with disorder, wife-beating and sexual licence (Toren 1994: 156–7).

Drinking in village Fiji While it is becoming increasingly common in urban Fiji for girls and women to drink alcohol and attend establishments serving alcohol, the practice is still deemed particularly unsuitable for women by many Fiji citizens across the various ethnic communities. There are several reasons for this. Mainly, alcohol, although generally socially condemned, is sometimes perceived to serve a social function in the socialization of young men through their stylized confrontations with their seniors in the village, a point I  will elaborate on later. Second, the behaviour usually associated with getting drunk comprises a set of hypermasculine expressions of defiance and insolence which are never considered appropriate for girls or women regardless of social context. Finally, Fijian men influenced by alcohol are often presented and understood, even by themselves and their seniors, in terms of a racialized discourse of Fijian manhood which emphasizes physical strength, violence and misogyny, as oversexualized and dangerous, especially to women. Alcohol was intrinsically linked to men’s sexual drive and desire for female company, and drunken men were thus deemed unpredictable and potentially dangerous company for women. Indeed, the idea that a drunken man needs a woman is a notion which was often brought up during my fieldwork. Upon leaving clubs or hotels, taxi drivers often asked me whether I needed them to

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‘fix me up’ with a girl on the way home, perhaps confirming recent reports suggesting that taxi drivers and hotel or nightclub staff in Fiji ‘frequently act as prostitution facilitators’ (US Department of State 2010; see also my discussion about sex and sexualities in Chapter 7). It was also commonplace for some of my respondents to spend considerable time on their night out either chatting up girls or attempting to arrange meetings after the completion of drinking sessions, often based on the implicit understanding that drunkenness and sex are intimately linked. Alcohol is often blamed for cases of sexual violence or rape both in the villages and urban settings; dynamics that Toren claimed, based on her fieldwork in Eastern Fiji in the 1980s, were part of a ‘Fijian male folklore of drunkenness’, suggesting that ‘when drunk one has to have a woman and that this urge cannot be denied, that it is not under the control of the man concerned’ (1994: 158). In local practices of victim-blaming, women who willingly expose themselves to drunk men are consequently considered at least partly at fault for their own misfortune should they fall victim to drunken men’s violent desire. The implicit sexualization of drunken men has to be viewed as part of a larger understanding of masculinity. The ‘over-whelming sexual urge’ associated with drinking is, as Toren pointed out, generally ‘ascribed only to young men’ who are not settled within a marriage and lack the strength of character to reject European ways of partying (1994:  158). These notions are neatly intertwined with two important narratives of Fijian masculine identity: the strict hierarchical notion emphasizing seniority, rank and status as instrumental in shaping proper Fijian men and the idea that modern, “European ways” represent a significant threat to the well-being and continuity of the vanua. Moreover, it emphasizes a sense of moral decay and historical decline centred on the power of traditional Fijian authorities and a decline of the significance of rites in a modern context, which has become an important narrative in many Fijian social settings (Tomlinson 2004b). Both these discourses are underpinned by the relatively rigid distinction between young and senior men of the village, and are used to distinguish not only ‘proper behaviour’ from displays of deviance but also seniority from youth. This conceptualization is articulated very clearly in the dominant discourse about alcohol. While alcohol may be consumed by many senior Fijians, the vast majority of church leaders and chiefs officially proclaim that alcohol is intrinsically at odds with proper Fijian behaviour and thus rarely make a public display of consuming alcohol. What underpins this is the belief that in the power of their seniority they should ‘embody in their own behaviour “the Fijian way” ’ (Toren 1994: 160). Younger men, on the other hand, are perceived,



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as a generalization, to possess a ‘desire to be Europeans, and this accusation is always a contemptuous one since it virtually always refers to perceived aspects of European behaviour that are either amoral or highly immoral in terms of Fijian conventions’ (Toren 1994:  160). In other words, when young men drink, it is deemed a deliberate act to defy Fijian custom. Being unruly and loud in the village is contrary to village protocol, but after large drinking sessions, young men will sometimes return to their village, displaying their defiance of such customs in often stylized performances including fighting, bickering, singing and shouting. On one level, this is part of a type of drunken comportment that is almost universally known, but it can also be understood as a culturally mediated practice that takes on particular meanings in the Fijian context. When observed by Christina Toren in Sawaieke village on Gau, these overt displays of drunkenness were characterized by more bluster than belligerence and seemed to largely serve the purpose of advertising the condition of the participants in order to provoke a reaction from the village inhabitants (1994: 160). This behaviour completed the almost ritualistic event of drinking alcohol, a performance which was considered ‘an almost perfect antithesis’ to ‘the Fijian way’, the latter being exemplified in older men’s yaqona drinking (1994: 160–1). For young men, just as much among my interlocutors as among Toren’s youth, drinking alcohol appeared to constitute a sort of ‘ritualised rebellion’ (Toren 1994: 160), while for the chiefly and senior establishment it serves as an important distinction between alien and proper Fijian behaviour as well as a marker of seniority, a practice through which, as my respondent Kia claimed, the notion that ‘boys and men drink and socialise in distinctly different manner, and being a Fijian man needs to be learnt and achieved’ could be effectively demonstrated. This was also mirrored in young men’s own articulations of drinking as part of a transition stage in early manhood which they all acknowledged would cease when they had grown into following the cultural conventions and become married, senior members of Fijian tradition. It seems clear, then, that in these village settings alcohol served the purpose of establishing hierarchical social relations and reinforcing cultural conceptions of manhood, masculinity and identity. That is evident in how drinking sessions were routinely followed by these staged social confrontations between young men and elders which were important symbolic events to consolidate the mutual moral and traditional ground. While often presented as an actual threat to traditional authority, alcohol drinking did not generally challenge the status quo, ‘but the conditions under which it is allowed and its associations with

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the “wildness” of young men make it into a challenge that has effectively been institutionalised’ (Toren 1994: 165). While the different mode and setting of drinking between younger and older men remains important, the social scene in which these differences are played out are a major difference in contemporary, urban Fiji. Because the urban settings provide new social spaces for drinking, displaying drunkenness and recovering from the moral pollution of consuming alcohol, men’s relationship to alcohol has been significantly altered.

Modern drinking Modern arenas for consuming alcohol are generally situated within what I, following Gerald D.  Suttles (1968), define as ‘no-man’s land’ or ‘impersonal domains’, non-residential areas that are not subject to the surveillance, domination or command of any group or individual. This does not simply imply that power and authority over these arenas are open to constant contestation and negotiation between patrons. The fact that the policing of these areas are in the hands of ‘impersonal authorities who are acting on behalf of someone else’, such as bouncers or patrolling police officers, undermines the social liabilities of the patrons contesting these spaces (Suttles 1968: 25–8). Urban dwellers or villagers whose homes were in close proximity to a commercial centre, who were discouraged and prevented from drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and displaying disorderly behaviour within the territorial boundaries of their own village, could easily find liberation from these social restrictions in public, impersonal domains. Similarly, if drinking is in fact a sort of ‘ritual rebellion’ against the strict restrictions of traditional village life, this can be played out in public without the intervention of elders and relatives that naturally follows transgression within the village. Consequently, roaming in town streets or drinking in nightclubs were ways to negotiate a rigidly structured social life and let go of socially imposed limitations, without directly challenging or confronting traditional authorities or ‘get a bad name’ in the village or extended family, a concern which was commonly articulated among young male respondents. While access to alcohol in the remote villages of Fiji, such as Sawaieke, often remained very limited and sporadic, being reliant upon infrequent air- or- shipfreight from the mainland or the occasional family visitor, processes such as rapid urban development and an expanding tourism industry have made bottle



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shops, hotels and clubs fairly commonplace in the urban centres of Fiji. In addition, urban and semi-urban dwellers situated in proximity to these areas were generally in a better position to access alcohol regularly. Many of them were engaged in waged work which both provide them with more spending money than most villagers and enabled them more easily to keep personal money away from the village economy. They were also in closer proximity to the growing informal economy as well as new social spaces considered appropriate for alcohol consumption. As a response to village hierarchies often explicitly banning alcohol or, at the very least, ‘giving drinkers a hard time’, men who were getting drunk in urban Fiji were often seen roaming in town rather than returning to their villages following the consumption of alcohol. Many were arguably reluctant to go back to their village after the city establishments were closed for fear of the inevitable social sanctions and repercussions in the village, an opportunity the more remotely located respondents of Toren, for instance, did not have. In many other cases, there were, as one of my respondents explained, ‘no village to go back to’, because the men in question were living in urban, freehold settlements or in temporary housing organized by their workplace, a phenomenon common among civil servants, soldiers or policemen. Similarly, while drinking groups in smaller communities may be composed of close-knit cross cousins and kinship groups hailing from the same village, drinking in contemporary, urban Fiji occurred in much less formally organized groups of men who would call different villages or ethnic communities their home. Returning to the village to confront seniors would then mean breaking up the party completely and leaving good drinking buddies behind, an often undesirable option. Instead, it was common for young men to either continue drinking at a suitable location, move to one of the many local ‘billiard salons’ which are, in reality, small sheds of corrugated iron and rough woodwork covering a pool table and bowls of cheap, pre-mixed yaqona, to start a new session. Alternatively, they roamed around town until they had either sobered up sufficiently to return to the village without being singled out or until the clubs and hotels had re-opened. During my early fieldwork visits, I  frequently observed and spoke with my respondents during drinking sessions on Friday night, before taking my leave and returning to my accommodation by midnight. I would then often bump into the same group again the following day, when they were still drinking or searching for supplies for another drinking session. A consequence of these patterns of consumptions was that the public displays of drunkenness, insolence and bravado associated with young men’s drinking

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were extended to public hotels, clubs and urban streets, rather than being limited to the village. Accordingly, these displays became inscribed with new meanings. While the youngsters of Sawaieke discussed above appeared to use alcohol to challenge a strict village order and manifest solidarity between young, unmarried men, with the senior establishment reciprocating by using such performances of transgression to articulate and emphasize social distinctions crucial for the overarching social order, I found that the habitual confrontations that were previously crucial to establishing the social meaning of drinking have been removed from the village setting and replaced by more formal altercations with impersonal authorities whose legitimacy was derived from legal-rational concepts outside the traditional Fijian realm. The main point here is that while the state apparatus can successfully punish undesirable behaviour in public, this rational-legal authority is often viewed as completely inefficient and unsuitable as a contribution to proper socialization and educating of young men. At the same time, however, since displays of drunkenness and defiance were moved from the village context to public places, the direct confrontation between drunken young men and their seniors, chiefs and religious leaders which provided an opportunity to consider what constituted proper, Fijian behaviour in villages such as Sawaieke (Toren 1994), was no longer in place. While the importance of this distinction was a recurring theme among my respondents, it was rarely more succinctly explained than by Pete, a senior village authority and lay preacher:  In the village, the hand that punishes is also the hand that pushes you in the right way, and the voices that scold you will also tell you the truth . . . tell you how to find your way . . . The police will just beat them and lock them up, not teach them, it’s not good, it doesn’t change them.

Policing was often considered a part of the ‘non-Fijian’ cultural sphere mainly because it based its authority solely on structures outside traditional Fijian life, and did not have the efficacy or mana, that is, ‘the power to do good or ill’ (Ravuvu 1987: 23) or (the) ‘supernatural qualities’ (Capell [1941] 1991: 1935), of the traditional power structures. Furthermore, in many of the villages I visited during my fieldwork, the reservations against police authority were often based on more recent and pragmatic reasons. After the latest military coup d’etat in 2006, the police force were perceived to be put almost completely under military administration and was increasingly felt to represent a government which many of my respondents considered ‘bad and wrong’, ‘illegitimate’ and ‘un-Fijian . . .



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without chiefly authority’, though others, particularly Indo-Fijians, arguably supported these moves. The militarization of everyday life has, however, been perceptible in urban Fiji in the last decade. Collaboration between police and armed forces has been evident in a variety of contexts during this time, including in criminal crackdowns against the production and distribution of marijuana and campaigns against illegal prostitution as well as in emergency responses or in the implementation of social housing initiatives or land clearing. For better or worse, it has increased the presence of uniformed representatives of the state in public spaces that were previously regulated largely through kinship or customary social systems, making urban locales in the present arenas where difference is performed and status contested. The rebellious properties of displaying theatrical or exaggerated drunkenness remain, albeit in a transformed mode. In contemporary Fiji, these contests are more often played out in clubs or city streets and sometimes explicitly directed towards a state apparatus which, following years of political instability, many consider have limited legitimate authority to correct or rectify behaviour. From this perspective, these urban displays of drunkenness signified the increased division between, to use an Althusserian term, the oppressive state apparatuses and disenfranchised Fijian young men who attempt to reaffirm their masculine identity in public. For instance, Sammy and Joni were part of a group of young men whose drinking sessions I  was able to take part in on several occasions during my fieldwork. Together with six to ten friends they met at a club on Friday afternoons to drink ‘longnecks’ of Fiji Bitter and dark rum until they were out of money. None of the men in the group had stable personal incomes but relied on casual work as handymen in tourist resorts, security work for local clubs or market vendors for pocket money, and their consumption of alcohol was thus limited. These sessions would more often than not end with an exaggerated display of drunkenness, which included not only loud shouting and singing upon leaving the premises but also frequently the smashing of empty glass bottles in the street or against brick walls, the uprooting of ornamental plants and, on two occasions that I witnessed, destruction of a public phone booth. This unruliness seemed not only unnecessary and stylized, but profoundly different from the pushing and shoving characterized by ‘more bravado than anything else’ that has been observed when drunkenness is played out in the village (Toren 1994: 161). It also appeared to me to have more belligerent undertones than the rather innocent mischief that led to confrontations with the village establishments.

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These behaviours enhanced the performance of drunkenness and served to underline sentiments of apathy and detachment from the public domain which were often articulated when drinking in urban spaces. Joni’s explanation that he did not ‘give a shit’ about what he did or what reactions he got from officials were not unique to these settings but rather reflected a general ethos among these young men. Indeed, when discussing drinking, getting drunk and behaving in an unruly manner, many of the young that eked out their existence on the fringes of the urban economy constructed these activities as fundamental aspects to the performance young manhood in contemporary Fiji and ‘important things to do when you’re young’. Confrontations with authority appeared to be intrinsically linked to this project of drunkenness, and while provocation of officials was never expressed as the purpose of destructive behaviour after drinking, it certainly seemed to be the expected end result. A loud row with club bouncers, security officers, shop owners, city officials or police officers appeared to be a natural, if not necessary, culmination of successful drinking sessions. There is obvious parallels here to other literature on urban masculinities in the Pacific Islands. Martha Macintyre, for instance, found that the young men she researched in Port Moresby saw public drunkenness as a way to assert themselves outside the constraints of norms and rules as well as challenge new forms of state-based authority (2008). Both there and in Fiji, drinking alcohol became a form of ‘conspicuous consumption’4 through which young men could demonstrate economic achievement and construct and perform gendered identities at odds with established custom as well as new power regimes enforced by state agencies and workplaces. At the same time, it was clear that these situations were not unambiguously negatively loaded but, on the contrary, also provided opportunities to develop and experience forms of socialities that were considered profoundly modern while simultaneously being grounded in local social relations. It is obvious to me how forming tight-knit drinking groups that emphasize kinship ties, local allegiances and pride in a sense of Fijian identity seemingly served a number of purposes in the context of the modern, urban setting. First, it makes participation in modernity more affordable in that participants develop a shared economy where whomever has access to cash chips in to a collective pot of money. Second, it provides safety in numbers. This was deemed important as the urban locations are often associated with a number of risks pertaining to personal safety, both in terms of being subject to violence as well as being stranded cashless and without means to make it back to the village or accommodation. These



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fears were increasingly centred on the notion that the police and military are becoming more vigilant and likely to victimize people for minor transgressions. On a deeper level, these group mentalities also appear to be ways these men create new socialities in an uncertain, new context and perform modernity in a recognizably Fijian way – emphasizing communalism, brotherhood and pride in their local identity while partaking in modern social fields. Albeit drawn from and building upon customary Fijian ways of thinking about kinship and belonging, these new social formations were constituted in ways that resembled what Victor Turner (1969) has labelled communitas. Communitas might be understood as a specific form of community spirit which is based on feelings of social equality and togetherness. Importantly, these social relationships are forged based on a shared sense of liminality, the transitional stage in between two social system(s) or temporal stages, and a common experience of what Turner considered a rite of passage (1969: 95–7). The relevance of these conceptualizations in this specific context is obvious. Modernity is, as discussed earlier, itself signified by a doubleness where the pursuit of newness is inextricably coupled with a sense of loss and rupture. For young Fiji citizens, this ambiguous process is experienced directly as they move between the village and town, ‘neither here nor there . . . betwixt and between’ (Turner 1969: 95), in a time-space that is more liminal than settled. That displays of hyper-masculinity through physical altercations emerged as one of the central activities in these contexts is not surprising. Much research on masculinity and violence recognizes these dynamics as central to the personal projects of men negotiating status and belonging in rapidly changing social setting (Macintyre 2008). These are the dynamics that are evident in the field anecdotes that set the tone for this chapter. Here, fist fights become part of the social work necessary to maintain and sustain not only friendship and togetherness but also a sense of ethno-Fijian self-identity in a rapidly changing context, rites of passage through which modernity is shaped, performed and experienced carnally. And the body becomes the key site for negotiation and production of new identities as well as the mode through which individuals insert themselves into processes of social change. It is telling that both alcohol consumption and the unruly behaviour associated with it is distinctly centred on the body, here at once understood as an agent of social action and as a medium for communicating new cultural forms. Performing drunkenness becomes a way many of my interlocutors play out some of the tensions and insecurities they experience first hand. The site for these stylized form of rebellion were invariably the urban areas they traversed between workplaces in the entertainment strip and their villages at home, and

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for many it also seemed to take on symbolic value as an act of ‘breaking free’ from the disciplinary regimes they were subjected to in both of these settings.

Social changes in contemporary Fiji These changes are deeply intertwined with the general development and modernization of Fiji, which has seen growth in the trade and tourism industry and subsequently increased Fijian engagement in the capitalist economy. The Fijian way of village life and communal agriculture was always considered vulnerable to pressure from modernization, and these dynamics are now putting considerable strain on the traditional way of life. Increasing numbers of Fijians thus live outside their vanua, at least for part of their life. It is, of course, also hard to ignore the political changes Fiji has undergone during the past twenty-five years. Since the 1980s, Fijian society has experienced four coups d’état and more or less continuous sociopolitical turmoil. As a consequence, indigenous Fijians have arguably become increasingly fragmented as a racial group. The stability of the vanua and the authority of the chiefly system also appear to have been hurt by power abuses and the subsequent intensified social divisions between certain chiefs and Fijian commoners and the IndoFijian minority. Physical, geographical and ideological shifts away from village Fiji and traditional protocol have become a characteristic of contemporary Fiji while strengthened and formalized military presence in public life appears to have, perhaps paradoxically, weakened respect for the rule of law and undermined traditional Fijian power structures. The same period of time has also seen an alarming increase in registered cases of poverty, urban drift, violent crime, gender violence and suicides, suggesting a developing disenfranchisement and alienation among many Fijians (Bryant-Tokalau 2012, 2014). Since young people’s consumption of alcohol and other types of uncustomary behaviours that, as discussed above, chiefs, elders and church leaders consider problematic are seen as practices which only exist outside the sphere of Fijian culture, this perceived weakening of the vanua and the ties between urban dwellers and village customs is often seen to facilitate more frequent and more widely distributed social problems. Most importantly, urbanization and modernization are social processes having properties that are regarded as leading to profound changes in the relationship between individuals and traditional protocol in Fiji, particularly in terms of dealing with social problems.



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For example, when some of my respondents from one village I  frequently visited in Western Viti Levu became involved in an episode of looting and robbery late on a Saturday night, elders in the village lamented the fact that they had never been able to confront the young men in question about the dangers and downfalls associated with drinking because ‘the boys had never played up in the village’. According to this discourse, there was an implicit direct link between drinking alcohol and committing the crimes in question, a notion derived from the common distinction between Fijianness and ‘European behaviour’ (Toren 1994), but also a sense that village authority was losing effectiveness and power because problems to an increasing extent occur outside the village perimeters. Although it encompasses a great number of actual, concrete behaviours, rituals and practices, ‘the Fijian way’ should be seen as a normative rather than a directly descriptive term, inasmuch as it implies a type of moral infallibility. Acting in the manner of the land is by definition the right way to act, and whenever individuals or groups are perceived to stray away from these ideals, their actions are implicitly linked to un-Fijian behaviour and, more often than not, associated with youth’s perceived obsession with ‘becoming like a European’, meaning engaging in practices alien to Fijian custom and often symbolized by the drinking of alcohol. More importantly, the lack of actual confrontation between young, unruly men and their village seniors was seen as a problem, emphasizing that becoming a Fijian man is necessarily a reciprocal negotiation between young men’s desires and rebellion and the established notions of what constitutes ‘acting in accordance with the land’. By taking their alcohol drinking elsewhere, and engaging in weekend-long binges rather than one-night sessions on the outskirts of the village, these young men had failed to engage in the cultural negotiation which is perceived as crucial to learn and understand what is expected of Fijian men. By disconnecting drinking from the village confrontation, modern drinking sessions have created a rupture in the narrative about the village structure as the underlying point of reference for proper, masculine behaviour. In a social system where the efficacy of traditional power structures is reliant upon the symbolic as well as the physical attention to authority, the avoidance of such ritual negotiation of identities and custom can potentially undermine the notion that elders are instrumental in the coming-of-age of proper Fijian men able to act in accordance with the land. While the alleged decline of traditional authority and respect for Fijian custom is often blamed for social problems and crime in contemporary Fiji on a symbolic level, it is obvious that these ideological concerns are connected to

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actual changes in social practice. A desire for a ‘Western’ or European way of life is considered detrimental to the organization and efficacy of Fijian social protocol because it has altered social interaction within the village. What these simplified discourses ignore, however, is the extent to which the young Fiji citizens emphasized in this analysis are active agents in the production of social forms that are as ‘Fijian’ as they are ‘modern’. Far from uncritically embracing products, ideals or practices associated with a Euro-American lifestyle as they are introduced, my interlocutors in Fiji insert themselves in the current time-space in order to become modern in ways that are inscribed with local meaning. Their desire to reshape their selves through modern practices and products are tempered not only by a critical engagement with what this entails but also by a commitment to localized forms of sociality and interaction, dynamics that will be discussed further in the next chapter that focuses on another aspect of the modern entertainment economy, namely horserace gambling.

6

Betting-men and bad money: Modern masculinities and consumption

Since it first emerged in 1964, betting on Australian thoroughbred horse racing has become an increasingly common pastime for Fijian men. Bookmaker shops offering running odds on Australian races and international sports have opened in all urban centres, and the activity has a significant appeal among Fiji’s growing number of urbanites.1 Whichever weekday I went to town for errands or field observations I generally popped by the shop, and I never failed to find it buzzing with activity. A  key characteristic of the betting parlour was the relatively ethnically diverse crowd it attracted. Many of the frequent gamblers were workers in the service industry whose workplaces, mainly governmental or financial institutions, were located in town. They often came by the shop briefly to place their bets on their way to work in the morning or in their lunch break and only returned at the end of the day to check results or collect winnings. On busy market days – namely, Fridays and Saturdays – they were joined by a large contingent of market vendors who often spent an afternoon, as well as a chunk of their morning profits, ‘on the punt’. Although these groups were arguably the ones that had most financial power and spent the greatest amount of money on gambling, they spent limited amount of time in the betting shop. In many ways, their relationship to gambling was merely transactional rather than social. That set them apart from those who could be considered regulars in the shop. For many, it served as a central meeting place during the daytime, and a few of my key interlocutors could be found in their regular spots here without fail. Rather than being big gamblers, many of them came here to gossip, catch up with friends and socialize outside the confines of their villages or families. Still, the moniker of ‘betting men’ was used to describe many of them, a label that had an intriguing array of connotations attached to it but that many carried with some pride. During my fieldwork, both the Fijian village ‘family’ and my Indo-Fijian friends and landlords often questioned my frequent visits to the gambling

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shop. Their respect for my privacy and my work prohibited them from openly criticizing or moralizing about my everyday doings, but when I  brought the topic up, it was clear that they all thought I should spend my research time more usefully and focus on more worthy aspects of life in contemporary Fiji. These views were mirrored by many in the local community that utilized religious, moral and economic discourses in order to label gambling, or just frequenting the betting shop, as an intrinsically negative pursuit. Gambling is no different from other social behaviours in that it derives its meaning from the contexts in which it occurs, with the obvious implication that gambling behaviours, experiences, motivations and meanings vary significantly from one place to another. Most societies maintain a differentiation between gambling and other, less speculative economic activities based on the notion that gambling involves wagering a stake on an event with an uncertain outcome in order to gain a material prize (Brenner 1990). However, attitudes to gambling as well as preferences for certain types of gambling have been found to differ significantly between cultural groups (cf. Hallebone 1999). This reinforces the need to focus on how gamblers invest cultural meaning into their various gambling pursuits in particular ethnographic contexts. Such an investigation of gambling, through ‘the meanings purported by players upon play’ (Istrate 2011:  50) rather than through the medicalizing or moralizing discourses that dominate academic inquiries into betting, enables its theorization as a culturally specific set of practices embedded in social life. Similarly, broadening the analysis to include local political discourses about betting proves not only that gambling, as a practice as well as an industry, intersects with a number of other social factors but also that competing understandings of gambling can frame political debates on a series of levels. It follows that gambling practices must be studied in the larger sociocultural context of the specific societies in which they emerge and that any analysis of local relationships to gambling ought to include a clear focus on people’s everyday gambling practices as well as an analysis of the various ideological discourses that frame them. In this chapter, I  focus on urban Fijian men’s gambling on international thoroughbred races in order to demonstrate that this type of betting gives an important insight into local engagements with global capitalism and what I refer to throughout this book as modernity. I  analyse the increasing popularity of gambling among urban Fijians not only as a sign of the growing ‘materialism’ emerging as a consequence of urbanization and the move towards more sustained engagements with the market economy but also as a signifier for a mounting discontent with traditional norms and structures in favour of notions associated



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with the modern. My key argument is that gambling simultaneously represents a ‘material’ way to make money available for personal consumption and a symbolic way of constructing and performing modern Fijian masculinities that are in explicit opposition to social and gendered norms as they are conceived of in traditional discourses.

The Fijian gambling scene Besides being an increasingly common way that young men, in particular, spend their time and money, gambling has taken on a central place in local Fijian discourses about tradition, modernity, morality and money in the last decade. In 2011, the Fijian government started seeking out potential international investors for a casino to be constructed in the Denarau Island precinct west of Nadi town. Initially, an operating license was granted to One Hundred Sands Ltd, a US-based company with a long-standing interest in gambling operations, albeit with dubious fiscal credentials, only for it to be revoked as the company failed to get the construction project up and running for several years. In June 2017, the exclusive license to operate a casino in Fiji was granted to the Fiji National Provident Fund, a locally owned superannuation provider that already operates some hotel resorts and financial companies, on the promise that construction was to commence shortly. While the casino has yet to materialize, the government’s intention to develop such an establishment facilitated a renewal of nationwide debates about the impacts of modernity on traditional Fijian life which have long featured in popular Fijian discourses. Largely driven by faithbased organizations, these debates are centred on gambling as a by-product of capitalism and are founded on a long-standing scepticism about the impacts that external cultural and economic influences have on Fijian culture and the well-being of the vanua. As such, these discourses about gambling are part of a larger paradigm that frames much of urban Fijians’ everyday lives – one which holds that modern life, spatially located in urban locales and signified by ‘the life of money’ (bula vaka ilavo), is dichotomous to traditional Fijian life and detrimental to the community. Gambling on Australian horse racing coexists with other commercial gambling options such as international sports betting, national lotteries run by Fiji Tattslotto and various instant ‘scratchie’ tickets, as well as a number of unofficial, illegal gambling options that include card games, billiards, dice games and cockfighting. Horse-race betting is only possible in one of the licensed bookmaker shops (ten

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in 2018) operated by the Grant’s Waterhouse Group, a locally registered company, with long-standing ownership and operation links to prominent Australian bookmakers, that monopolizes sports betting in Fiji. In these shops, sizeable groups of men gather daily to listen to live radio broadcasts of three or four thoroughbred meetings in Australia and place various cash bets on the outcome. For analytical purposes, the betting shop is best considered as simultaneously a commercial space and a social arena where people negotiate values and construct identities in a social collective. This implies that while the shop has a specific social organization pertaining to the commercial activity of gambling, it is also a site for a number of different social practices or encounters, many of which are not economic in nature.2 The shop consists of a mixture of formal and informal elements which conspire to set it apart from the traditional Fijian sphere epitomized by the village. The betting operators wear simple uniforms consisting of black trousers or skirts and white polo shirts with a small company logo. They are seated in front of their computers, located behind protective iron bars at the far end of the room, facing the entrance and with a full view of the space occupied by punters and social visitors. This public space is open and unfurnished except for some simple wooden benches which lined the walls. In each corner of the room hangs what is the centre of attention for most of the race day: a small wall speaker in black painted casings. Except for the annual Melbourne Cup race on the first Tuesday of November every year, no races were broadcast via television in Fijian betting shops, presumably because of the costs involved in obtaining screening permission. Instead, Sky Racing Australia’s daily racing transmission on radio was played over the sound system. Approximately every quarter of an hour, when a scheduled race was about to commence, the bookmaker’s assistants announced the impending start and turned the radio’s volume up to the highest level. This facilitated a flurry of activity as some punters hurried to place last-minute bets while others compared their selections or, most commonly, vied for strategic positions in close vicinity to the loudspeakers. These activities were always accompanied by loud talking, shouting and playful pushing and shoving. In the early stages of the race, many punters would loudly cheer if the race caller mentioned their horses, although this was often discouraged by other gamblers and the shop attendants. Towards the concluding stages of the race nearly everyone’s attention was focused on the radio broadcast, and no boisterous noise was tolerated from fellow punters. Unless the result was so obvious that the race caller could call out the first three horses in the correct order immediately, the silence could last for minutes until the official results were confirmed in writing.



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During the corresponding lulls, I would have the opportunity to appreciate the setup and layout, which was the same at all four betting shops I attended. Four chalkboards dominated the wall spaces, two on each side wall, and these commanded most punters’ attention before and in between races. On these, a nominee of the bookmaker, sometimes a paid employee but just as often a regular, trusted punter, would write the starting order and odds of each horse in the upcoming races from four major meetings each day, typically from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, based on notes copied from the Australian Totalisator Agency Board (TAB) website accessed through the bookmaker’s sole computer. This display of odds is important in the process of legitimizing and formalizing the gambling transaction. However, the chalkboard’s effectiveness in this regard is mitigated by the operating code of the bookmaker in Fiji. Local investments in any race have no bearing on the prices offered for the respective horses, and odds correspond directly to the Australian TAB figures, which continued to fluctuate because of the international market. Because of the time involved in accessing, copying down and reproducing racing information onto the chalkboards, the odds displayed failed to give more than an indication of the market confidence in the respective horses. This is particularly true for prominent races, typically on Wednesdays and Saturdays, which attract substantial investments on and off course in Australia near the commencement of the race. Invariably, this causes significant fluctuations between the opening odds of any given horse (which remain the advertised odds in Fijian betting shops) and the actual paying dividends post-race, which follow the fluctuations in the Australian market. As a consequence, the price actually paid out to Fijian punters once the race and all post-race formalities are completed may differ significantly from what they anticipated when making their wager, which was based on the odds displayed on the wall prior to the race. This becomes a potential source of conflict and helps to reinforce the notion, frequently expressed by gamblers, that the proceedings in the betting shop are ultimately determined by circumstances beyond the reach of the local punters.

Gambling as a lucky game The material setup is intrinsic to the ethos of the betting shop as a social arena governed by, and understood in terms of, a particular discourse about formality and power. A key aspect of this is an understanding of gambling as distinctly

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separate from the social dynamics which pervade most other aspects of Fijians’ lives. The actual horse races, as well as the economic system that surrounds them, is understood as being both geographically and ideologically removed from Fijian society and thus beyond the realm of influence of the punters (cf. Pickles 2013, on slot machines in Papua New Guinea). The use of computers and chalkboards reinforces this, as does the lack of visual broadcasting and most punters’ very limited access to relevant racing information prior to gambling. This practical and symbolic distance contributes to an understanding of gambling on horse races as a chance-like game where the punters’ preparation, knowledge or prior skills are inconsequential to their success. My respondent Joe echoed many of his compatriots in the betting shop when he described horse racing as ‘like a lottery, like picking numbers’. Another gambler elaborated on this by explaining that because they never actually witnessed horse races, live or visually broadcasted, and did not ‘know anyone’ in the horse-racing business, they could ‘only really play it like a lucky game’. The conceptualization of horse-race betting as a ‘lucky game’, always using the English phrase, directly informed their attitudes to gambling and betting practices. In English, ‘being lucky’ is formally defined as being ‘successful through causes other than one’s own action or merit’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2009)  and closely associated with the notion of chance. In everyday Englishlanguage usage, the notion of luck is used more loosely to describe good fortune or favourable circumstances. The term frequently emerges in gambling contexts worldwide with various meanings. Mark Neal’s research in Welsh betting shops, for instance, showed that punters frequently blamed losses on bad luck, although they approached gambling systematically by using rational criteria to judge the chances of the respective horses (1998). Similarly, Rebecca Cassidy observed that ‘How’s your luck?’ was the standard opening greeting in the London betting shops where she conducted fieldwork (2012:  140), even though most punters emphasized knowledge and skills rather than chance as key determinants for the outcome of a placed bet. In a Melanesian context, the growing literature on gambling and laki (Tok Pisin for ‘luck’) in Papua New Guinea highlights that local understandings of luck cannot automatically be conflated with the English meaning of the word. Although evidently a loanword from English, laki takes on new meanings in local ontologies where it becomes connected to magico-ritual practices (Mimica 2006; Mosko 2012). While exogenous practices and their conceptualizations are similarly negotiated and subject to local analytics in Fiji, ‘luck’ did not appear to have any such direct connections to ritual and spiritual categories in Fijian betting



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shops. My contacts explicitly rejected this notion as preposterous when I asked if success in gambling could be associated with their mana: ‘not at all, gambling is just modern’, they explained to me. This lack of magico-ritual underpinnings did not denigrate the worth of the game, nor did it suggest that it was not a socially meaningful activity. Instead, it showed that gambling was consistently understood as oppositional to traditional Fijian power dynamics and part of a separate social sphere. The use of the English term ‘lucky’ is important in this social logic, as it immediately served to label a practice as non-Fijian. The categorization of horse racing as a ‘lucky game’ also signified a specific way of constructing this gambling activity which emphasized unpredictability and chanciness over strategies and skills. This does not imply that Fijian gamblers are completely oblivious to the competitiveness of horse racing, that is, that a variety of factors, including a horse’s bloodline, fitness level and preparation, as well as the suitability of the jockey engaged, the state of the track and other external influences, have significant impacts on the results of a race. What is clear, though, is that my interlocutors, with very few exceptions, generally dismissed the idea that Australian horse racing was something they could successfully understand and predict, because the required information was unavailable to them. As such, horse-race betting was framed as a distinctly different activity to other types of gambling they invariably engaged in, such as billiards and a variety of card games, as well as unofficial cash betting on local or international rugby games, in which success was often attributed to talent, conscientious application or considerable ‘know-how’ of the game. This became particularly obvious when Fijians compared their own betting experiences against my approach to gambling. The fact that I had been a recreational gambler on horse racing in Australia for a few years prior to commencing my fieldwork enabled me to relatively effortlessly tune into the specific jargon and practices involved in gambling as well as display some contextual knowledge, which I  initially thought might give me status and credibility in the Fijian betting shop, as it did in Australia. I  noticed early on, however, that my relative competence in Australian racehorses, tracks, trainers, jockeys and racing conditions afforded me little respect as an expert on gambling. Instead, it was frequently used as a way to set me apart from the groups of local gamblers I enjoyed betting with, a dynamic I shall return to later. In fact, what first struck me when observing my interlocutors’ gambling was their apparent lack of gaming strategies. In a manner which  – based on their general approach to economic matters – was uncharacteristically rash and – given their relatively precarious socio-economic circumstances  – reckless, gamblers

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would generally wager on every race available for betting despite having neither the means nor the interest to study form lines, bloodlines, race conditions or other relevant statistics. At the moment one race was concluded, regardless of their wins or losses, gamblers were by the counter again to place a wager on the following race, seemingly uninterested in collecting any winnings. This process was repeated until they had run out of cash. Only then would they show a serious interest in the financial consequences of their activities as they handed over their tickets to the bookmaker’s operator and waited in excitement as the tickets were scanned for potential payouts. In most cases, the pursuit ended in financial loss. Unless all money was lost and there was no payout at all, however, no one appeared particularly disappointed or upset about losing a sizeable chunk of their pay cheque to the bookmaker. Indeed, several of my respondents made it clear that they kept no tally of how much money they had lost as long as they managed to take some ‘spending money’ with them when they left. Phrases like ‘You win some, you lose some’ and ‘You can’t expect to win’ flourished in the betting shop and were often utilized by my friends to display overt indifference towards the outcome of a race and an understanding of the unreliable nature of gambling as a financial pursuit. My respondents often laughed off a loss by labelling it ‘impossible to pick’ and sometimes shook their heads at my disappointment at seeing one of my favourite picks go down, adding a comment like ‘It’s all a game, you can’t expect to get rich’. For them, this signified a key difference between their own gambling and how Europeans, Indo-Fijians and Chinese gambled. As foreigners, we were ‘in the game for the money’ and ‘expected to win’, while they were not. Consequently, whilst losing money on the races was arguably undesirable, it was both an expected result and considered as a natural consequence of betting, if not part of the point of the exercise. Gamblers generally expected that a sizeable amount of cash brought into the betting shop would be lost before they left the premises. It was this situation which initially triggered my main interest as an ethnographer. I asked myself, rather naively, that if winning and accumulating money were not the main purposes of betting, what could potentially compel these men to risk the best part of their available cash on a game they were not particularly skilled in playing? Common articulations about essential differences between Fijian and non-Fijian mentalities, like my respondent Joe’s assertion that ‘we Fijians are not obsessed with money like you Europeans . . . for us the game is more important’, appeared too simplistic. The obvious answer was, modifying Joel’s statement mentioned above, that it was the social play in the betting shop that had value for my respondents,



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and that the economy of gambling was merely an accompanying cost. Similar points have been proposed by researchers who have utilized Clifford Geertz’s (1973) findings about the importance of the social aspects of cockfighting in Bali to argue that for many gamblers the economic aspects of the activity are an incidental rather than instrumental reason to participate in them (Walker 1992; Binde 2013). For me, this distinction is in itself an artifice. For one, there is always a social aspect to all economic activities, making it impossible to analyse them in isolation from their societal context, as Geertz made plain. This point is perhaps aptly illustrated by the case of horse racing, a sporting activity set up primarily to facilitate cash gambling. Here, a social event (the horse race) generates an economic activity (gambling) which in turn facilitates the development of a microcosm of social relations and institutions (race tracks, bookmakers, betting shops) which intersect with a number of other social factors (such as class, gender and race; Cassidy 2002). As much was obvious in Fiji, where the betting shop provided a social space in which my respondents drew upon aspects of their social and behavioural repertoire which could not be expressed elsewhere. Crucially, these behaviour patterns, although not always directly connected to the act of betting, were facilitated by the fact that gambling was associated with a set of social practices and spaces located outside the traditional Fijian domain and thus governed by a different set of norms. Drawing upon these understandings of how my respondents linked the economic and social aspects of gambling, I found that gambling emerges as a significant practice through which Fijian men reimagine their social, ethnic and gendered identities at the interface of modernity and tradition. By using gambling as a way to unsettle an economic system where money normally flows from individuals towards the communal village economy, these Fijians challenge the traditional social order in which urban-village economics are ideologically and practically entangled. Indeed, gambling appears to be a key activity through which these Fijian men perform modern masculinities and the betting shop has emerged as a social arena where a series of identities are constructed and performed.

Gambling, masculinity and ethnic differentiation Being a feature of the modern, urban lifestyle scene, betting shops, like nightclubs and bars, are social arenas that stand out as places where indigenous Fijians engage in sustained interaction with ethnic others. It is also a rare example of

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indigenous Fijians participating in an activity which is explicitly understood to belong to the non-Fijian sphere and at odds with their own expressed aversion against financial pursuits. Still, the gambling shop is marked by an overt racial polarization, largely based on the notion that indigenous Fijian gamblers have substantially different relationships to the dynamics of gambling compared to their Indo-Fijian or local Chinese counterparts. Non-Fijian gamblers typically displayed more interest in and knowledge about horse racing as a sport and consequently arrived at the betting shop better prepared to win. Most of them carried form guides printed out from Australian websites and had written down their selections prior to arriving in the gambling shop. They commonly invested larger amounts of money and frequently preferred exotic bet types like quinellas (the first two placegetters in a given race in any order), exactas (the winner and the runner-up of a race in the correct order), trifectas (the first three runners of a race in the correct order), doubles (the winner in two consecutive races at the same track) or quadrellas (the winner in each of the four last races in a given race meeting), which most Fijian punters never showed any interest in. These bet types often provide opportunities for higher returns on a bet, but they also require more attention to detail and knowledge both about the chances of the respective horses and about the practical aspects of placing a bet. Importantly, while Fijian gamblers generally spent the whole day, from half an hour prior to the first race to the conclusion of the last, in the betting shops, non-Fijian gamblers showed what Fijians often called a ‘businesslike’ approach to gambling; they arrived early, put all their bets on and then left for the day only to return to check results and potentially collect their winnings at the end of the day. This lack of interest and investment in ‘the game’ as ‘entertainment’ coupled with an emphasis on monetary gain was seen by my Fijian gambling friends to epitomize the essential difference between non-Fijians and Fijians. The practice of betting simultaneously serves to construct ethnic identities as well as distinguish between everyday constructions of modernity and tradition. In other words, money used in gambling is not considered differently economically speaking but is ‘put to use differently, in shaping social spheres and tracing the boundary between groups’ (Tremon 2012: 2119). By focusing the rest of my analysis of behaviour in the betting shop on these points, and their conflagration, I demonstrate how gambling becomes a constitutive practice in how Fijian men reimagine and perform new social identities that challenge Fijian orthodoxies.



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Gambling as insolence and transgression My ethnographic approach allowed me to follow many of my interlocutors as they negotiated their ways between a number of social contexts, and this book has largely focused on my Fijian village compatriots, a few tavales from other villages, and a few of my Indo-Fijian friends ‘related’ to me via my host family. I consequently knew many of the betting men quite well, and this was something that made me acutely aware of the idiosyncratic behavioural code which governed the betting shop. As a social arena, the betting shop provided a space in which men could interact on the basis of overt egalitarianism, disorder and, at times, unruly behaviour. Shouting, swearing, joking, teasing, pushing and shoving are relatively commonplace between punters, especially during a race and immediately after its completion. These practices can be seen as ways of competing for attention, status and social standing in a context where the usual formal status hierarchies based on age, kinship or consanguinity are suspended. According to Fijian village protocol, this type of horseplay is generally condoned only between cross-cousins within the same village-based kinship group (mataqali) or between certain kinship groups with close relations that are traditionally perceived to be connected through common ancestry or history. In this sphere, social status is considered a fixed, non-negotiable entity. There are few arenas in which these often rigid socio-cultural conventions can be challenged, and they are always linked to activities associated with improper and ultimately ‘un-Fijian’ behaviour. Such activities are generally played out in urban settings beyond the geographical and ideological domains of the vanua and are perceived to be part of an alien and modern lifestyle which ultimately threatens and undermines the fundamental power of the Fijian authorities and traditional institutions. The sites for hyper-masculine behaviour are located not only physically outside the village but also ideologically beyond the cultural ethos of traditional Fiji. The betting shop emerges as a counterpoint to these relatively rigid sociocultural conventions and become a central arena in which men can play out aspects of Fijian masculinity that are usually censored or subdued. Every gambling parlour is undeniably a masculine domain. In my regular visits to betting shops, I never witnessed a woman put a bet on, though they accompanied male friends in the premises on rare occasions (employees of the betting agencies, however, were predominantly women). Betting behaviour, in its broadest sense, is consequently gendered in a number of ways. For regulars in the betting shop,

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the ability to tell a well-appreciated joke or an interesting anecdote, preferably at someone else’s expense, and thus display contextually appropriate disregard for social barriers, is particularly highly regarded. These jokes were often peppered with sexual connotations and innuendo, reinforcing the “blokey” nature of the setting. Such teasing and bickering are integral parts of the stylized disorder which underlines this social arena and provides a foundation for presenting masculine performances which are markedly different from the normative ideals of subdued behaviour maintained in traditional discourses. The betting shop provides space for the performance of masculinity and the negotiation of masculine power among men who are otherwise marginalized in the Fijian gender hierarchy on the basis of status, consanguinity or seniority. Masculine contestation, in Fiji as elsewhere, generally takes place in everyday situations and public places. Important insights from a number of ethnographic contexts have analysed gambling as a social practice implicated in these processes and in the construction and performance of masculinity in general. Clifford Geertz’s seminal work on cockfighting in Bali is famously rife with double entendres alluding to the point that fighting roosters symbolically represent their masters’ manhood more than anything else. It is indeed these aspects which make the practice of Balinese cockfighting an example of ‘deep play’ (Geertz 1973). Ulf Mellström, in his informative ethnography on masculinity, power and technology, found gambling to be an ‘essential and almost inevitable feature of the masculine character’ of Malaysian men (2003:  129). Similar dynamics are evident among the Gende in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where gambling on card games has been found to provide young men with the opportunity and the means ‘to demonstrate their readiness to take on the responsibilities of manhood’ (Zimmer 1987:  22). Initiative, spontaneity, risktaking, audacity and recklessness, characteristics often attached to gambling practices, are qualities that correspond well to normative discourses of men as tough, strong and willing to make decisions. Indeed, a series of studies have concluded that men are drawn to gambling and other types of ‘edgework’ in order to play out parts of their gendered identity. As an exogenous practice, recently introduced in Fiji, and geographically situated in modern, urban spaces, gambling is also considered part of a ‘colonial cultural baggage’ associated with non-indigenous Fijian ways of living. Such demarcations between the local and the global are particularly important in Fiji where the distinction between traditional and modern is understood both spatially and ideologically (Williksen-Bakker 1995). Village life and culturally appropriate behaviour are frequently summed up in the phrase na i vakarau ni



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bula vakaviti, ‘the Fijian way of life’, which represents everything traditional and morally commendable. This creed exists in direct opposition to na i vakarau ni bula vakailavo se vakavavalagi, meaning ‘a way of life in the manner of money or in the European way’, which covers alien and thus undesirable practices (Toren 1989: 142). I have previously discussed how the notion of ‘the Fijian way’ is best understood as a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, notion used to discursively construct a set of values and behaviours as desirable and acceptable (see Chapter 6). In normative discourses, acting in the manner of the land is by definition considered the right way to act. Whenever individuals or groups stray away from these ideals, their actions are implicitly linked to un-Fijian behaviour, and more often than not associated with the young (people’s) perceived obsession with ‘becoming like a European’: engaging in practices alien to Fijian custom, often effectively symbolized by drinking, gambling and other types of conspicuous consumption. As a social and economic activity, gambling consequently faces widespread condemnation and is often explicitly associated with moral pollution, social ills and an alleged weakening of traditional Fijian values. Dominant discourses construct humility, selflessness and communalism as key values associated with Fijian tradition, and gambling is by many perceived to facilitate and represent behaviours which are directly oppositional to these ideals. I spent one or two days every week during my fieldwork in a village I have called Vanaka, for the purposes of this study, just outside Nadi. While there were many ‘betting men’ in the village, Peter, the matanivanua (traditional herald and spokesperson for the chiefly establishment), encapsulated the traditionalist ideology when he labelled gambling an ‘extremely selfish and egotistical’ pursuit which was largely ‘unwelcome in the village’. He was particularly concerned about how the allure of gambling seemed to ‘pull young boys away from tradition . . . and disrupt their village life’ in the sense that they became more interested in ‘spending time and money on themselves than contributing to everyone’s well-being’. Gambling here becomes central to what Tomlinson (2004a) has labelled ‘metacultural complaints’ about the eroding effects of modernity, capitalism and Westernization on village custom, and a key symbolic practice used to distinguish between the village establishment and those who are seen to challenge it. Despite such frequent and complete devaluation of gambling in dominant discourses, a series of gambling practices have also been normalized throughout the last decades. This is especially true among young, unmarried men between eighteen and thirty years of age living in the growing urban population on Viti

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Levu, who often embrace gambling as an exciting social activity. Many of these men consider gambling a signifier of social change in the sense that it can be utilized to draw demarcations between traditional and modern lifestyles and between urban and rural localities. While there are other activities that serve similar purposes  – for instance, partaking in the night club scene or wearing American ‘street attire’  – gambling is a unique way to reject the traditional lifestyle in a way which is still distinctly Fijian in that it also offers participants economic agency. Rather than dismissing that Fijianness is a positive value and core element of their self-identities, gamblers seek to reshape what being a Fijian man implies in the context of modernity. These dynamics are evident in how indigenous Fijian gamblers involve in a stylized, deliberate negation of traditional social protocol while at the same time emphasizing how Fijians play the game differently from other punters. Gambling as a liminal and ethically questionable practice is neither new nor exclusive to Fiji; it has been discouraged and depreciated as an economically unsound and morally polluted social illness throughout the world from biblical times (Brenner 1990), through the European Enlightenment (Dunkley 1985) to current moralizing and medicalizing discourses about problem gambling (Binde 2009; 2013). During the course of the colonization project, the Protestant ethic and the modernist ethos towards production and progress positioned betting ‘outside the domain of work and earning’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 295) and detrimental to economic growth. This was supported by localized religious discourses labelling speculation and gambling as an anathema to virtue in many colonial contexts. Brenner (1990:  viii) suggests that gambling is often seen to epitomize unwanted social change. When social orders were threatened by dramatic or rapid change, ‘some people’s greater willingness to gamble and to speculate was viewed by others as a symbol of chaos’. At the same time, gambling in its various guises appears to have been one of the aspects of the market economy most readily adopted and appropriated in a great number of cultural contexts. This is certainly true in the Pacific Islands, something which is documented by Maclean (1984), Pickles (2012) and Zimmer (1986) in Papua New Guinea, and Goodale (1987) and McMillen and Donnelly (2008) in indigenous Australian communities. While the cultural and economic dynamics of these contexts vary, the ubiquity and social importance of gambling, despite its denunciation in many hegemonic discourses, highlight that gambling is ‘situated simultaneously in the center and on the margins of post-colonial society’ (Sallaz 2008: 17). This paradox is at the core of contemporary Fijians’ dealings with gambling, and it is this ambiguity that makes it such a fruitful activity to analyse within



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the modern/traditional matrix. As traditional contrasts between ‘the Fijian way’ and ‘the European way’ combine with everyday moralities governed by increasingly evangelical Christian discourses, the notion of gambling as ‘the epitome of immoral accumulation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:  295) is frequently articulated both in public and in private. Many villages prohibit gambling explicitly, and apart from state- or community-run lotteries, sports betting via Grant’s Waterhouse has been the only federally legalized form of gambling since 1964. Religious leaders, chiefs and other senior Fijians offered ready justifications for anti-gambling policies. ‘These activities make [sic] great damage in the communities,’ one respondent explained, ‘spiritually and also economically, because it takes the mind off what is important and the hands away from honest work.’ The same sentiments were reflected in the assertion that gambling ‘is a bad use of time and [a]‌worse use of money’. Gambling is here constructed not only as morally corrupt but also as a diversion from more useful activities. At the same time, the popularity of gambling, particularly among urban men, is undeniable. It is precisely because gambling takes place in a liminal social and ideological space, between virtue and its transgression, that it has such a powerful appeal. The moral condemnation of the economic aspects of gambling constructs it as a social practice with the potential to unsettle the traditional Fijian order and mark its participants as modern. The combined effect of a rapidly growing informal economy, significant urban drift, a steady influx of tourist money and the increasing influence of ‘global culture’ (cf. Featherstone 1990) creates an economic climate where more and more Fijians develop material desires and cultural consumption patterns that cannot be met by the communal village structure and customary lifestyle. Instead, they are drawn to the modern economic sphere of which gambling is both an intrinsic part and a potent symbol. The fact that betting shops are characterized by a lax behavioural code and the breakdown of many social mores which are otherwise clearly pronounced simultaneously reflects and reinforces the nature of the economic activity which takes place there. Non-traditional arenas of social practice and social interaction that are associated with the capitalist economy and modern, urban life, such as gambling but also ‘nightclubbing’ and excessive drinking (see further discussion in Chapters 5 and 7), are often understood as unordered, informal and ultimately uncontrollable both by the people partaking in them and by their critics. That is part of the reason why they become attractive means through which traditional mores can be challenged and new identities shaped. If Fijian villages are sites for

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regulating and disciplining bodies in order to create efficacious, docile subjects of the village economy, many urban spaces provide room and opportunities for Fijian men to be consumers, more concerned with personal pleasure than communal responsibility, positioning themselves firmly in the modern social and economic sphere.

A third nexus of economic activity Most betting men I  spent time with were frequently partaking in other recreational and work activities within the ‘non-Fijian’ realm of urbanism and commercialism, predominantly in commercial tourism. They regularly found themselves in a social and economic sphere far removed from the traditional village setting, an oft-problematized position in Fijian discourses. Many Fijians still subscribe to the ideology, known since the outset of colonization, which claims that engagement in the modern economy is an incongruous and morally awkward enterprise for indigenous Fijians. The accumulation of wealth for personal use, the ‘way of the money’ that is said to govern European and IndoFijian thoughts, is considered un-Fijian and in conflict with the ‘Fijian way’ of living ‘in the manner of the land’, because it removes Fijians from their traditional life, both spatially and ideologically. While most Fijian villagers today are in recurrent contact with market forces, the traditional economy and parts of the commodity market still constitute two distinct economic spheres in Fijian discourse, often following the ‘Fijian way’/’European way’ dualism that I have discussed earlier. However, in practical terms these two spheres are largely continuous in the contemporary context I encountered, as increasing numbers of villagers have taken up waged work, and village produce is to a large exchange traded on the market. Market commodities and income therefore have to be consistently integrated in the traditional system of reciprocity and communal duty, and for most wage workers, a big part of money earned ends up in the communal economy. Spending ‘personal income’ in the communal economy purifies the money and gives moral credence to the actor, because ‘the moral value of money changes according to the construction they place on transactions in which it is included’ (Toren 1989: 144). The key concept in the traditional ideology applied here is one commonly referred to as vakaturaga, best translated as ‘acting in chiefly manner’. In fact, this is the most important normative concept among indigenous Fijians irrespective of their status; it encompasses and regulates all aspects of social behaviour,



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including respect, humility, reciprocity, helpfulness and forgiveness (Ravuvu 1987:  18). Vakaturaga becomes a particularly powerful discursive tool when used to sanction economic activities and distinguish between proper Fijian and un-Fijian ways. Working together on village land for the benefit of all is a classic deployment of this principle. In the contemporary context, this is best epitomized through the practice of bringing money from the outside into the communal village economy. Put simply, the potential dangers of engaging in the market economy can be negated by circulating commercially attained money through the traditional exchange economy. Personal consumption and spending on recreational urban activities, however, sit uneasily within this cultural logic. Activities like nightclubbing or gambling not only represent economic irresponsibility but also epitomize un-Fijian behaviour. In fact, as an economic activity, gambling has the potential to disrupt and unsettle the conversion process, not only through the obvious risk of losing one’s money entirely, but also, more important to my argument, to morally pollute money and thus render it unsuitable for the village economy. Gambling, then, emerges as a third nexus of economic activity that interrupts the flow between waged work and the traditional economy, thus violating vakaturaga. Paradoxically, however, this is also what makes gambling an attractive pursuit, especially for those who feel disadvantaged and powerless within the traditional power structure. In order to arrive at this conclusion, it is necessary to revisit the gambling shop and look more closely at gambling as a practice and at some of the idiosyncrasies of Fijian gamblers. While all bets were placed by individuals and most gamblers wagered on competing horses, the financial activity was characterized by collaboration. Modest ‘winnings’ (i.e. if they managed to get a fraction of their outlay back) were often ‘pooled together’ with the available cash from other people who were part of the unofficial group of gamblers. Gamblers who were running out of money before all the broadcasted races of the day were finished also frequently asked to ‘borrow’ money from other punters. However, no one appeared to feel responsible, or held accountable, for repaying their debts. Bookmakers warned me about providing loans to my fellow punters on these terms, because I was not likely to ‘see any of the money again’. This highlights the complex and analytically meaningful intersection between gambling as a social practice and an economic pursuit. Communalizing dynamics ought to be understood in connection with the general ethos of the betting shop as a social field which is by definition irresponsible and uncontrollable, and which lies beyond the jurisdiction of traditional and customary authorities.

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The ‘loans’ were part of a practice which in itself transgressed rules of economic exchange and reciprocity and involved transactions from which no one expected to profit in direct, materialist terms. They therefore simply had no bearing on relations outside of the shop. On another level, the loans were evidence of how the meaning of money changed through the betting transactions. As soon as a bet was put on, or a ‘loan’ provided, the money involved became, at least partly, collective property. This is because all the money ‘made’ from betting would eventually be pooled together in order to purchase luxury goods for collective consumption after the last race. In this economy, social responsibilities associated with reciprocity and exchange disappeared. The system developed between punters contrasts productively against the traditional way of requesting a favour, kerekere, literally translated as ‘beg’ or ‘ask for’ (Capell 1991:  95). Kerekere is a socially legitimate way of beseeching favours or material goods from your peers that remains crucial in traditional ways of thinking about responsibility, reciprocity and communalism. As a social institution, kerekere presupposes a customary reciprocity between traditionally connected individuals and is generally sanctioned by a stricter social protocol. A kerekere request is considered strictly needs-based and should not be turned down, and a future repayment is implicit in the transaction (Sahlins 1962: 203– 14; Eräsaari 2013). Tellingly, several betting shops displayed signs explicitly prohibiting kerekere, which is part of the conflation of kerekere with begging or conniving made by outsiders. While this illegitimization of traditionally condoned, reciprocal economic activities was probably put into place for strictly commercial reasons, it also served to reinforce the notion that money circulated through sports gambling is incompatible with the village economy. Gamblers’ practice of borrowing, lending and pooling money together can be seen as an inversion of the logic whereby money circulated through betting shops or nightclubs becomes invalid for useful consumption. These practices minimize financial risks and democratize the potential social benefits of gambling. It also poses the question of whether gambling in reality represents an alternative form of commonality rather than a strictly individualistic pursuit of self-gain. While gamblers undeniably were held personally accountable for any gambling-incurred losses when they returned to their village or family unit, the economic practices within the betting shop were communal in nature and made sure every gambler received ‘a share of the spoils’. The democratizing elements of gambling on horse racing in Fiji are made more visible still through the rule that allows gamblers to wager amounts as small as five cents on any given event in order to win a correspondingly small fraction



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of the prize money. Critics emphasized the pernicious effects of this rule, which they argue encourages even the poorest members of the community to chance their limited means for a very modest prize at high risk. Fijian gamblers, however, usually considered the rule to have a communizing effect: it enabled everyone to take part in betting and thereby pooling money, and to eventually benefit from the larger transaction. In fact, most of these gamblers perceived the risk of a minor economic loss a negligible trade-off for participation in the social scene and potentially gaining access to the total pool of resources at the end of the day. It also enabled low-income players to partake equally in rejecting traditionally condoned social and economic behaviours in favour of ‘being modern’. By worrying less about increasing their capital than circulating it through an alien, undesirable economic sphere, they perceived themselves as gaining almost total control over the gambling process. This challenges a recurring theme in public health and social policy discourses about gambling, that it leads to individuals losing control over their own circumstances (cf. Walker 1996). Competing Euro-American discourses about gaming chime with Fijian men’s experiences more closely. Schüll (2012), for instance, argues that gambling enables punters to exercise control in ways that are often not available to them in other aspects of their social, professional or personal lives. Basham and Luik contend that gambling may facilitate a series of positive effects, including ‘a sense of freedom, independence and autonomy; enhanced self-competence, improved sense of self-worth/esteem, self-reliance and self-confidence’ (2011:  9). These aspects of betting appear central to many indigenous Fijians’ efforts to explicitly construct gambling as an economic activity set apart from the traditional village economic system. Horse-race betting, I argue, predominantly serves as a form of currency conversion, in which funds are removed from an economic cycle where money made in the marketplace is validated and made useful by being transferred directly in the village circulation. I  therefore view Fijian horserace betting as a sort of reverse-cycle money laundering scheme, which turns potentially ‘good’ money ‘bad’, making it useless for the traditional economy but available for personal consumption. In distinguishing between proper Fijian and ‘European’ behaviour, it was made clear to me that any winnings should not directly or indirectly be brought back to the village or the family. The operating notion here is that money laundered through gambling is ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous’ money. As opposed to money gained through hard work, fair trading or traditionally accepted means, money obtained from gambling is considered both unsuitable and dangerous for purchasing proper, important or good things. One respondent, Willy, stated that

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clothes obtained by ‘bad money’ would ultimately bring bad luck or at best get damaged or stolen quickly. Similarly, gifts purchased by gambling winnings are often understood to bring bad luck, disease and trouble. As Milner found, ‘[w]‌ hen the average Fijian householder had finished satisfying the demands of Government and Church, of custom and Chiefs, he seemed to have very little time, energy or money left to attend to his own family needs’ (1964: 501). In fact, disposable cash for personal use of luxuries was considered non-existent, as it was generally earmarked for more useful purposes, either in the family unit or in the village. For many urban, Fijian men, ‘bad money’ was invoked to inform a series of practices that enabled them to spend money more freely rather than meeting kinship expectations. Gambling was a key factor for ‘producing’ such ‘bad money’, along with bribes, theft and questionable business transactions, including the selling of home-grown marijuana. Money for drinking or betting, then, had to be kept aside from this ‘approved economy’, outside the rational, social control which characterizes village life; it had to be saved or hidden for personal indulgences in activities or products not socially condoned. Men would also find ways (such as gambling) to obtain money and dispose of it before it became part of the official village economy. My respondents always used the English phrase ‘bad money’ when referring to monies obtained in this way, highlighting that such activities belong to a nontraditional, non-Fijian discourse about value which is explicitly contrasted to the traditional village economy (I never heard the term ilavo ca, a literal translation of ‘bad money’, used). Bad money, then, may be considered a type of ‘special commodity . . . required for the purchase of other valued or “special” goods’ (Riches 1975: 22), which is produced outside the traditional system of exchange and reciprocity. As such, gambling appears to be a ‘third nexus’ of economic activity which provides a social and economic context for conversion between the modern and traditional economic spheres. For many of my respondents, such conversions were also a way to secure personal benefit from the money they had earned themselves, preventing it from being wholly consumed by the village and kinship collective. In many villages, only a handful of people have regular paid work, and as Western discourses of individualism and autonomous self-gain increase their purchase in urban Fiji, many workers display a growing discontent with traditional economic principles and distribution of goods. The ambiguity of ‘bad money’ highlights the inherent tension between the moral and instrumental orders that underpin Fijians’ engagement in gambling.



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While most acknowledged the communal nature of the village economy as a positive aspect of Fijian culture, the circulation of money through traditional channels is often considered opaque and slow. In comparison, gambling shops represent a fast-paced, no-nonsense economic sphere which for many urban Fijians symbolized a key distinction between tradition and modernity. Ultimately, the desire for ‘bad money’ suggests that the Fijian notion of the social or communal self, experienced and understood in relation to the larger community (Brison 2008), is increasingly challenged by competing discourses of selfhood attached to consumerism and personal freedom. However, it is worth noting that my respondents would often draw moral boundaries between gambling and other ways to obtain ‘bad money’. Stealing or selling drugs, for instance, was often described as ‘selfish’ and ‘hurtful to others’, characteristics gamblers would never ascribe to gambling. It appears, then, that while gambling is practised in opposition to traditional, communal economic systems, part of its allure lies in the fact that it offers an alternative economic commonality rather than a way to perform individualism.

Gambling, consumption and modern masculinities Gambling is many things in contemporary Fiji. Albeit limited to urban locales and a male demographic, it is at the centre of discourses about money, morality, modernity and tradition. It is at once considered a ‘lucky game’, determined by its unpredictability and chanciness, and a highly structured, socially meaningful practice. For many, gambling epitomizes a general concern about capitalism as an anathema to Fijian traditions and customs. Gambling represents hazardous consumption and impacts economic relations in that it is associated with idleness and improvidence. However, for these same reasons, it also emerges as an attractive modality of contemporary life through which many young, urban Fijians can engage directly with modernity and position themselves apart from traditional life. By viewing gambling as a reverse-cycle money laundering scheme through which perfectly innocuous ‘clean money’ becomes ‘bad money’ that is depreciated and unfit for use in the official economy, many urban Fijian men at once justify and enable expenditure on luxury items like alcohol or takeaway food. Modernization and urbanization have brought more Fijians into direct contact with the market economy; urban lifestyles and increased access to cash facilitate growing needs and desires for material goods which they do not get

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access to through the formal, village-based economy, leading many urbanites to take personal measures to temporarily remove themselves from the circulation of an economic system they no longer feel benefits them. Gamblers’ ways of thinking about money thus include an inversion of dominant ideologies of Fijian identity and tradition and can be interpreted as part of a larger social and ideological shift away from traditional communalism. Gamblers develop an alternative commonality based on overt egalitarianism, sharing bets, risks and benefits outside the traditional system of exchange and economic responsibility. Gambling, then, can be seen as an important symbolic practice used to perform an ethnic and gendered identity which is understood as modern and thus oppositional to the hegemonic notion of Fijianness. For many of these men, gambling also emerges as a key practice through which they understand and construct social categories like ethnicity, gender and social status. While gambling is always presented as a modern and exogenous pursuit, Fijian punters consistently constructed their gambling practices as distinctly Fijian. By emphasizing the sociability of the game and underplaying financial gain as a motivation, not only do they use gambling as a way to dramatize ethnic borders between themselves and Indo-Fijian, Chinese and European punters, they also utilize gambling to perform a version of modernity they are able to label as distinctly Fijian. More generally, these points suggest that the betting shop can be considered a significant social setting in which modern Fijian identities are constructed, performed and negotiated and, in turn, an analytical space where anthropologists can situate themselves in order to gain a fuller understanding of the many complex ways local power structures are shaped and changed by increased marketization.3

7

Sex, sexualities and the modern body

It was a month or so into my first major fieldwork stint, and I had just about settled properly into my home and research base in Cavo, Nadi, when I organized my first structured interview. While I found living in the village both pleasant and easy, research work had thus far been heavy going. I found it particularly difficult to engage friends and potential respondents in overt discussions about the key topics of my project – gender and sexual identities. It felt like somewhat of a breakthrough, then, that Ronny had both expressed some interest in my ideas and agreed to come by my home office to participate in a research interview. The interview itself did not turn out the way I had envisaged it and is perhaps best understood, in research terms, as a ‘false start’. It was nonetheless a formative moment for the analysis that follows and became a catalyst for my ongoing interest in how sexual and gendered identities and relations are negotiated in modern Fiji.1 Although I was already acquainted with Ronny after being introduced to him through mutual friends a few days earlier, this was the first time we had met without the company of others. Using my own living space as the research venue seemed the most appropriate thing to do in the context of this interview. Ronny was a self-identified qauri, which is a local term translated to me as ‘homosexual’, ‘poofter’ or ‘queen’. Though qauri, like many similar terms used to describe nonheteronormative social actors elsewhere in the world, can have a broad range of connotations from the derogatory to the positive, I justify my use of it here as a value-neutral descriptive term based on the fact that it was my respondents’ most common term of self-appellation. Ronny’s physical appearance, like many qauri, can be described as ultrafeminine although he was relatively easily recognizable as a male-bodied person. His tight-fitting, ‘Western-style’ clothing, combined with his long hair that was often adorned with a white hibiscus flower by his right ear, made him easily identifiable as non-heteronormative. While qauri are fairly ubiquitous in urban

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Fiji and enjoy relative social acceptance as a separate gender category, a point I will elaborate upon later, any social relationships they have are generally subject to intense public scrutiny and gossip, one of many dynamics which limits their social inclusion. In light of this, I made the judgement that my enclosed rooms would be a more appropriate setting for our formal interview, rather than a public space, in that it served to protect both myself and Ronny from gossiping by passers-by or interruptions from curious friends and neighbours. In a similar vein, I considered my private space more suitable for the subject matter I anticipated our conversation to take on, namely, the experiences of performing a nonheteronormative gender identity in contemporary Fiji. Given that ‘sodomy’ was still subject to prosecution at the time2 and homosexual relations occasionally attracted moral outrage as well as physical violence, the subject was potentially sensitive. In previous meetings with Ronny in the company of others, he had often taken on an evasive, humorous persona that I  interpreted as a public performance appropriate to how qauri are perceived in the wider community, and I  hoped meeting in private would enable us to go beyond this. Finally, I hoped that inviting him into my personal space would also signify my personal commitment to sharing my own experiences as a queer researcher. Although I had been relatively open about my sexual identity for some time prior to my entry into the fieldsite, the label of queer anthropologist was not an identity marker I  had taken on prior to deciding on a systematic enquiry into the experiences of non-heteronormative Fijian men, or indeed one that I have felt a particular affinity to later, a point that might merit further reflection in itself in a different context, even though it is beyond the parameters of this book. Despite this reflective backdrop to my interview, I suspect that I was a rather ponderous host as I  made an effort to couple friendly hospitality with the formality I deemed appropriate for the interview setting. I went through a brief summary of my research project and tried to articulate clearly what I wanted us to talk about. Perched right at the end of his chair, Ronny appeared jittery and impatient throughout these preliminary proceedings. ‘Can we close that door, please?’ he interjected, gesturing towards the back door that I habitually left open to allow the draught to come through my house on stiflingly warm days. After closing the door, I returned to explain my research and offered him a typed-out information sheet about my project. While he accepted the sheet of paper, he showed no interest in reading it. As a matter of fact, he appeared to be completely uninterested in my introductory spiel altogether, and when I eventually asked him if he was happy to proceed



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with the formal interview, his response took me aback. Briefly looking up at me, shaking his hair, he finally said with a sigh, ‘Look, if you are going to fuck me, would it be okay to do that first, before we talk? That way it’ll be easier afterwards.’ My initial reaction was confusion followed by acute professional embarrassment. It signified a classic shock of difference for me at the time, made more severe, perhaps, by what Don Kulick has called the ‘anthropologically instilled awareness that one is dealing with culturally grounded interactional forms that one may not fully understand, and with the fear that, therefore, any reaction might be interpreted as a socially destructive over-reaction’ (1995: 7). At first, I  interpreted the event as stemming from the emphasis I  had put on my own sexual identity in presenting my research and immediately proceeded to apologize to Ronny for this, stressing that it had not been a roundabout way to suggest we met for sex. When this elicited the response that he had ‘never believed I was gay anyway’, I started to realize the extent to which our interaction had been framed by entirely different conceptualizations of gender, sexuality and sexual power and, to borrow an expression from Deborah Elliston (quoted in Kulick 1995: 7), that ‘the locus of our radical miscommunication’ was located somewhere beyond this isolated event. It soon became obvious to me that neither dwelling on my own professional shortcomings as an ethnographer nor engaging in a more general reflection on the intrinsic intimacy of the ethnographic encounter were sufficient analytical strategies to explain this particular misunderstanding. Instead, it prompted a more comprehensive reflection on how this fieldwork meeting was framed by expectations and understandings that were at once culturally, socially and situationally specific, as well as gendered. My key questions came to be focused on the social construction of non-heteronormativity and different sexual identities in Fiji as well as how Ronny and other qauri perceived their own relationships to other men, particularly those visiting Fiji from abroad. What is clear, however, is that qauri do not exist in isolation from other gendered and sexual identities and performances but need to be considered in a wider context of sexual relations in modern Fiji.

Reflecting on sex and sexuality In broader terms, it is useful to think of the experiences of Ronny and other qauri as examples of how modernity comes to be perceived in ways that are

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very real, very personal and expressly embodied. My early fieldwork encounter with Ronny also helped me think through the importance of sexuality and sex as means through which people construct and perform their ‘modern selves’. Indeed, another more general point that makes this event a suitable analytical starting point for a more comprehensive consideration of sex and sexual agency in modern Fiji is associated with my own research reflexivity. What is often described as the phenomenological turn in anthropological research has facilitated an intensification of self-reflection as integral to ethnographic work, with the view that this has the potential to offset some of the power inequalities that are intrinsic to the research encounter. While I  have some sympathy with this as a principle, my experience in the field indicates that one has to be cautious about exaggerating the effect such reflexivity has on the ethnographer– respondent relationship beyond making ourselves, as researchers and outsiders, feel more comfortable. In my case, I  went into the encounter with Ronny, perhaps rather naively, expecting to build mutuality based on sharing my queer identity. While queer reflexivity can enable me as a researcher to draw attention to ‘the erotics of knowledge production’ (Rooke 2010: 35), this perspective has its clear limitation in this situation where mutuality was set against, rather than emerging from, a sense of commonality. The notion of queer had little to no meaning to my respondents, and my own queerness was not something Ronny seemingly understood or acknowledged. Frankly, he had read me as a ‘straight man’ with whom his only possible connection could be my desire to have sex with him. What initially incurred my shock of difference was not so much the realization that my intentions could possibly have been misinterpreted as sexual advancement but rather that Ronny seemed to think that this was the only premise on which our meeting was feasible. It was this apparent impossibility of developing male-to-male intimacy based on what I  considered a shared experience of being non-heteronormative that I  experienced as most striking and difficult to come to grips with at the time. It was almost as if my insistence on reflecting upon my own vulnerability as an angle to develop sociality with a respondent got in the way of a more thorough consideration of the social reality of our relationship as researcher–respondent and the different circumstances in which our identities were framed. Only when I moved my reflective gaze away from my own emotions at the time and attempted to view my interview with Ronny as part of a broader social context in which relations of gender and sexual power were constructed, performed and negotiated did the analytical value of the encounter become



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apparent. As a consequence, I  soon started paying more attention to the centrality of sex in local discourses about modern life. In this chapter, I wish to focus on these topics, and consider sex as a particular mode of experiencing modern life. For many Fiji citizens, the link between urbanity, modernity and sex, as well as other types of personal realization, is explicit. On one level, this highlights the centrality of the body in local understandings of how change is experienced and perceived, a point I return to as I conclude this chapter. On another level, these ideas draw upon a long narrative tradition describing cities as places of danger, vice and temptation that take on a certain local flavour in the Fijian dichotomy between village and town. This trope is equally effective among conservative voices intent on emphasizing the destructive aspects of modernity on what is perceived to be local traditions and dynamics as it is among youth and many city dwellers who willingly embrace modernity as an exciting opportunity for self-realization and new life choices. In both cases, the perceived distinction between traditional constraints on people’s sexual experience is juxtaposed against a notion of modern places and practices that facilitate frivolity, sexual license and different ways of exploring socio-sexual relations. At the core of this discourse is a sense of urban centres as places outside the control of traditional social systems, whether that means indigenous village hierarchies or the Indo-Fijian patriarchal family. But it also draws upon much more empirically based understandings of the difference between local practices and products and a modern, ‘European’ lifestyle. While Fiji has been in a continuous relationship with foreign people, products and cultural expressions for centuries, the last few decades have seen a significant increase in foreign visitors and availability of foreign products for cultural consumption. Pirated versions of Hollywood blockbusters, English Premier League games, American pro-wrestling shows and ‘blue’ movies are easily accessible throughout Fijian urban centres and are much coveted, particularly by young men, emphasizing how global consumer capitalism ‘undergirds the sense of being or desiring to become modern’ (Knauft 2002: 3). Among other things, these cultural influences are instrumental in giving people new reference points for judging their own and others’ appearance, the nature of a desirable or modern body and how these bodies are positioned and utilized experientially, and how to perform sexualized and sexual behaviours. As a consequence, there is a certain sexiness associated with a performance of modernity, and sex becomes a central part of many people’s exploration of what it means to be modern. Sex is of course a notoriously difficult topic for social researchers, fraught as it is with complex and manifold connections to cultural politics, moral discourses,

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personal emotions, ethical considerations and other dynamics that converge to make certain issues ‘sensitive’. As a consequence, anthropologists have often shied away from the topic entirely, limited their inquiries to a sort of stocktake of comparative sexual mores, often in the context of discussions about rites and rituals (cf. Allen 1967; Herdt 1981, 1982, 1984; Tuzin 1997; Silverman 2001), or treated it as a specialized field of research somewhat removed from the key concerns of the profession.3 Such approaches rely on a reductionist view on sexuality that struggles to hold up against scrutiny. One only has to scratch the surface of sexual practices and relations in order to understand that these are by definition linked to history, class, gender, ethnicity, race and other key social categories. Not only is it impossible to ‘just’ study sexuality, once we being paying attention to sexuality, ‘social issues never appear in quite the same light again’ (Weston 1998: 4). It is equally true that any study of gender or other social identities are near impossible to separate from sex. Seen in this light, it is easy to make the argument that sexuality deserves to be at the centre, not the periphery, of anthropological inquiries. Notwithstanding such debates, researching sex presents a set of unique methodological challenges. First, standard ethnographic research provides few opportunities to observe sexual behaviours in practice. Second, because ‘sexual behaviour is unusually resistant to cultural standardization or conformance to cultural prescriptions’, it follows that ‘ideological and normative constructs are poor predictors of what members of populations actually do in sexual privacy’ (Tuzin 1991: 868). In other words, it is uniquely difficult to ascertain the relationship between what people say about sex and their actual sexual behaviour in any given context. Still, it would be a conceptual fallacy to limit what we consider sexual behaviour solely to what is most commonly conducted in the privacy of people’s bedrooms. Public displays of affection, flirting, vocal expressions of sexual desires and dancing, among other practices, all form parts of people’s sexual register. When combining an analytical focus on the way people talk about sex and share intimate knowledge with observations of how sexual desire is communicated publicly through various means, one can gain considerable knowledge about the dynamics that underpin sexual relations. In what follows, I pay particular attention to what I, following my interlocutors, label sex talk (or ‘talking sex’ in verb form) between men as a practice which is not only central to how they construct themselves as sexual agents but also constitutive to their everyday performance of masculinity.



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Sex talk Though often shy and evasive in talking seriously about such personal matters, the young Fiji citizens with whom I spend much of my research time incessantly hinted at sexual activities. Social conversations, particularly in male-dominated settings, are often rife with double entendres and teasing. In the urban context, this frequently translates into explicit flirting and sexually charged play between the genders as well. The localized discourse surrounding these practices also suggests that sex and sexuality have been subject to extensive social change in that modern Fijians are perceived to negotiate sexual desire and activity more easily and openly than what the case was before. Young people embraced this relative sexual liberation in terms that described it as easier and free from taboos, while elite discourses, often driven by religious leaders and parents, predictably framed it in more moralizing terms as signs of the breakdown of traditional values in the face of non-Fijian influences. This dichotomy and its associated narrative of moral deterioration is, of course, a simplification. While modernity, as is famously explained by Michel Foucault (1978), did less to repress sexuality than to make it a subject of continuous discussion and investigation, it is similarly true that many communities in the Pacific Islands have traditions for talking about and understanding sexual development and practice that are more permissive than that of Euro-American societies even today. Many early anthropologists found their Western middleclass moralities shaken by the extent and level of sexual innuendo and jokes in the communities they encountered. One famous case is Bronislaw Malinowski, who reportedly blushed in embarrassment over the frankness with which Trobriand Islanders brought issues about sexuality into everyday conversations (cf. Young 2004; Herdt 2011). The same might have been true for early visitors to Fiji, and it is fair to assume that much of what is emphasized as ‘traditional’ Fijian sexual morality today is just as much a product of Christianization and the consolidation of patriarchal power that followed the colonial project as a deep-seated local tradition of relative prudence. In an early colonial text that otherwise invites incredulity, peppered as it is with overbearing moralism, racism and sexism that no doubt characterized many colonial accounts of the time, Basil Thomson  – a British officer and colonial administrator who spent considerable time in the Fijian administration under both governors William Des Vœux and Sir John Thurston  – argued that precolonialism Fijian sexual mores had at once been laxer and subject to stronger

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social control (1908). In his analysis, pre-colonial Fijians had an intrinsically open relationship to sexuality in that both men and women found it difficult to resist sexual advances, dynamics that were only controlled by a concerted effort by chiefs and elders to maintain ‘decency’ in the village. In the new social order following the influx of European traders and missionaries, local village authorities lost the physical control over young people who in turn used their new-found freedom to roam in order to exercise their sexual license. While ‘elders stayed at home, the young made voyages to the European settlements of Suva and Levuka and tasted vice with the loafers on the beach,’ Thomson (1908: 38) argued. The immediate result was what he labelled the ‘decay of custom’ among younger generations who readily took up ‘the manners of half-castes and white men’ (Thomson 1908: 38–9) rather than follow customary patterns of behaviour. The analysis offered by Thomson might have been warmly welcomed by the Fijian chiefly establishment. It certainly could serve as an impetus for a much stronger collaboration with missionaries and church leaders in order to develop and maintain revised sets of sexual morals that fitted the social environment in the rapidly modernizing society. And these discourses have become dominant in Fijian narratives about the relationship between modernity and Fijian tradition. Throughout the twentieth century, the same arguments served as the foundation for protecting Fijians from the dangers of modern society and, relatedly, maintaining racial separation between Fijians and others. Much of the lament associated with social change that I heard from the older generations and village leaders today echoes not only Thomson’s concern with the incompatibility of modernity with a proper Fijian way of living but also the same preoccupation with urban mobility, sexual frivolity and interethnic relations. An important point in this context is that while the sexual agency afforded to young Fijians in contemporary society exceeds what previous generations experienced, and sexual practices today might well be influenced by global ideas about sex and sexuality, it is equally true that when young Fijians today construct their sexual selves through discourse and practice in opposition to conservative forces, they do so by drawing upon a long local tradition in which sexual desires have been, at least to some extent, both permissive and fluid.

Sex, race and ethnic difference As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, although many of my respondents often articulated a desire to be more modern and engage in practices associated



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with a sphere that lies outside the traditional Fijian realm, they equally often made explicit that this engagement was done in a localized Fijian way. Sex was no different. When ‘talking sex’, Fijian men commonly structured their stories around the theme of how the essentialized differences in mentality and quality between them and Europeans were played out. Some of their girlfriends had told stories about how European men were generally not much fun to be with in the bedroom because they were all more interested in ‘fucking themselves’ than pleasuring their sexual partners. Though the exact details of what this actually entailed was never made explicit to me, it eventually dawned on me, after hearing different variations of this story several times, that they referred to men who pulled out prior to ejaculation and proceeded to finish off the job by masturbation. Told within the logic of racial and cultural difference, this sexual behaviour was construed as a reflection of the intrinsic selfishness in European men in contrast to Fijians whose generosity was played out through long and passionate love-making. Making sense of ethnic difference through more or less jocular discussions about sexual competency is of course an age-old masculinist tradition. In this context, I  find these stories informative because they give an insight into the ways young Fijian citizens, in particular, constitute their modern sexual selves in dialogue with the version of modernity they perceive from international visitors and global cultural products. Here, modernity has as one of its most forceful effects a broadening of the realm of possible experience through mass media as well as real-life connections with an expanding set of others from both within and outside Fiji. An explicit link between sex, sexuality and modernity is evident in the urban night-time economy. The entertainment industry, in Fiji as in many other places, is focused on music, dance and other social performances that play directly on sex and sexuality. The sexualization of dance is nothing new. Havelock Ellis’s seminal work famously described dance as a ‘novitiate for love’ (1923:  43), while others argue the sexy movements of dance, rather than clothes and other ornamentation, represent ‘the ultimate mode of eroticising the body’ (Donnan and Magowan 2010: 29). That is not to say that these sentiments are universally shared or that all dances are necessarily sexualized. Even though dance has a central position in performances of both Fijian and Indo-Fijian cultural tradition, it is rarely constructed as sexualized in ceremonial or ritualized contexts. As a matter of fact, modern forms of dancing are often explicitly constructed and spoken about as being sexier and less restrictive than traditional dancing, both by conservative social voices that use this justification to deride such dancing

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and those who embrace them as new forms of expressions. Sexy dancing, then, is not only associated with tourism and foreign cultural influences (cf. Alexeyeff 2010 for these dynamics in the Cook Islands) but also spatially associated with urban sites such as nightclubs and bars. Nightclubs and their surrounds provide the structural conditions for rethinking the relationship between bodies and sex and explore intimacy and sexual agency outside the moral codes of villages and settlements. The move from the village to the urban nightclub thus includes a sense of moving from a cultural sphere which is experienced as ‘deerotic’, in the sense that overt sexual expressions are discouraged, to one that is ‘polyerotic’, that is, where sexual innuendo, flirting and teasing are integral to the public performance (Jankowiak 2008:  25). Dancing to Western-style pop music becomes at once emblematic of this type of erotic mobility and the practice through which it is experienced. Phil Jackson’s study of nightclub patrons in London highlighted the extent to which dance in these social spaces is constructed and experienced as directly oppositional to routinized everyday life. While a working body is rigid, disciplined and mechanized, the ‘clubbing body’ is energized, frivolous and open – ‘seduced beyond its boundaries’ (Jackson 2004: 21). These views are strikingly similar to how many young, Fijian nightclub patrons described not only the distinction between traditional and modern styles of dancing but also how they saw clubs as spaces to widen their sensual and sexual experiences – ‘it’s where we can let loose, go a bit crazy, plenty of touching and sexy play’ was how one interlocutor put it. For many young men, ‘pulling women’ and ‘getting sex’ were expressed purposes of a night out on the town, and stories about sexual escapades on dancefloors, in toilets, parking lots or, quite commonly, the built urban landscape in the vicinity of nightclubs flourished. Such relative sexual frivolity is unmistakeably part of an eroticization of urban spaces that has been observed elsewhere, where certain parts of the city become inscribed with sexual opportunities and meanings. Writing about Rio de Janeiro, Richard Guy Parker (1999) explains how the ‘impersonality and unpredictability’ of urban spaces make them loaded with sexual opportunities and interactions. Here, the ‘watchful eye of social control in traditional society can thus be transformed into the gaze of desire and the possibility of seduction’ (Parker 1999: 55). In Fiji, part of this includes the unofficial demarcation of areas where trade in sexual favours is conducted, but also a more tacit understanding that some areas are frequented only by those seeking out romance or sex. Nadi town encompassed a myriad of such spaces – including a ‘gay beat’ where men were known to meet



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for same-sex encounters in a semi-public arena, a ‘lover’s lane’ where young heterosexual couples often snuck off from the busy nightlife for a moment of privacy and a number of other places that my interlocutors pointed out to me with a smile and a nudge. It is, however, not the lure of sex in public or sex outdoors that appears to be the strongest driver of these practices. It is rather a more complex process in which the new sexual mores associated with the production and experience of modernity intersect with the long-standing spatial distinction between villages and urban spaces. Many Fiji citizens live in kinship-based villages or extended family households that provide little room and few opportunities for sexual intimacy. Dating, romance or sexual intercourse, particularly for the young and unmarried, has long been reliant upon strategic reterritorialization, and, for many, having sex outdoors – in bushland, sugarcane fields or secluded riverbanks – is the only practical option when they want to organize a rendezvous away from the prying gaze of family and elders. Paradoxically, then, urban public spaces provide an anonymity, privacy even, that is not afforded people in their own domestic realm. While this is true for most, it is of course especially true for many qauri, such as Ronny whose story I alluded to at the start of this chapter, to whom urban life provides their only opportunity for relatively open sexual expression. While their existence is often accepted on a social level, their position in the gendered and sexual hierarchy remains precarious in both the indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian cultural realms, and the level of formal legal protections has wavered throughout recent history.

Qauri as social and sexual subjects The term qauri is frequently used as a collective noun in popular discourses to describe all male-bodied, non-heteronormative individuals in Fiji. In reality, the term can include a wide array of different gendered and sexual identities, ranging from transvestites and drag queens to ostensibly ‘straight’ men who perform effeminate jobs or social roles. Some of these perform a social role connected to the gender category of vakasalewalewa (literally, ‘acting in the manner of a woman’ in standard Fijian) that has historically enjoyed some social acceptance, albeit not to the same extent as similar gender categories elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, such as the Samoan fa’afafine and Tongan fakaleitī. It is, however, in Fiji’s urban centres that contemporary qauri are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Here, the tourism and entertainment industry provides opportunities for paid

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employment and a social life constructed outside the parameters of village traditions and the limitations associated with the vakasalewalewa role. For many of my interlocutors who self-identified as qauri, this was a distinctly modern social identity that set it apart from previous non-heteronormative categorizations and signified a level of gender-political agency. In their view, qauri were enabled by the modern market to develop an independent material existence and, through that, a self-determined gendered and sexual agency they had previously been lacking. Although often highlighted as an ostensibly positive thing by qauri themselves  – I  often heard them describe tourism as a ‘lifesaver’ in that it provided them with a stable income and relative personal safety to perform their chosen identity  – this urban drift nonetheless has a flipside with a number of consequences that are experienced more problematically. Many of my interlocutors did, for instance, describe struggling emotionally with their displacement from ancestral villages and extended families as well as coping with isolation and loneliness in urban settings. On a material level, the drift away from village land and kinship networks signified limited access to communal resources and a subsequent reliance upon the cash economy to provide basic necessities. Most qauri I  became acquainted with had created new livelihoods for themselves at the fringes of the urban economy. Some had relatively stable wage employment in the tourism industry, employed as waitstaff, cleaners or as part of entertainment groups, but many either supported themselves wholly by, or supplemented their wage income with, cash work in the growing, unofficial night-time economy. Although few would consider themselves escorts or prostitutes, it was certainly common for many qauri in urban settings to trade sexual favours for money or other material ‘favours’. While there are numerous aspects of these dynamics worth analysing, what I find most interesting in the context of this chapter is how many described this as a social expectation rather than an economic necessity. In conversations with qauri, it became clear that most experienced that their general social acceptance as non-heteronormative men was predicated on two specific conditions. First, they were expected to play out an explicitly gendered performance associated with certain social rights and responsibilities, such as conducting practical duties considered ‘feminine’ including child-minding, cleaning and providing care for the elderly or sick relatives. In return, they were, at least in principle, socially respected as mediators between women and their male kin. At the same time, they were made to understand that they had no rights



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to make claims to a sexual identity of their own. This had been made explicitly clear to my respondents on several occasions when they had been told that they would lose the patronage of village leaders if they directly sought out sex or ‘demonstrated’ their presumed sexual proclivities in the village (Presterudstuen 2014c). This expectation was, somewhat paradoxically, coupled with a second condition that they were readily available to provide sexual favours to ‘straight men’ in the village. Ronny, for instance, explained that this was intrinsic to the social expectation of a qauri because, as he put it, ‘receiving a man’s sexuality is what qauri [do]’. In other words, qauri ‘appear to have an implicit sexual license to satisfy unmarried men but not to fulfil their own sexual desires’ (Presterudstuen 2014c:  168). Adding to this, it was generally unthinkable for the qauri I  met to contemplate having sexual relationships with other non-heteronormative, effeminate men. The explanation for this lies partly in the notion that qauri is accepted solely as a gender category, not a sexual identity per se, associated with exclusive sexual receptivity. Although those dynamics are obviously facilitated by the types of social pressure described above, it has also become internalized in many qauri’s own sexual identities  – ‘we [two qauri] wouldn’t know what to do with each other’ was a common way to dismiss the suggestion, as was the proposition that it would be like ‘having sex with your brothers or sisters’. Indeed, ‘sister’ is a common local term non-heteronormative social performers use for each other. The construction of the modern qauri identity is at once in opposition to and directly linked to this gendered logic. On the one hand, qauri experience that urban social spaces provide them an arena to express themselves outside these forms of sexual control. In nightclubs and the streets of Nadi (as well as in other urban centres), they have the relative freedom to act out their sexual identities and move more freely than what is the case in villages. On the other hand, it appears that there is an internalization of traditional forms of sexual repression that combine with the increased demand for sexual services associated with the influx of tourists in urban Fiji which facilitate contemporary qauri’s entry into what can loosely be labelled sex work. In the context of my personal reflection, I  also consider this an important point because it can help me understand why Ronny interpreted the invite into my home for an interview to imply an expectation of me receiving sexual favours. Ronny obviously perceived my request for an interview for the purposes of my research little differently from previous proposals from men. He revealed that it was quite a common scenario for him to be ‘chatted up’ at a public venue

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before accompanying another man, most commonly ‘a European’ but sometimes a local, back to their resort room. The expectation of him to perform sex, he explained, was always implied in these situations, though he insisted he would never consider ‘going with someone’ whose company he did not find pleasant. In order to emphasize the social, rather than commercial, nature of these relationships, he also stressed that he would never directly demand money or other types of recompense, such as alcohol or a meal, but always accepted what he was offered. Ronny’s reflexive awareness of the position of qauri in this urban milieu as well as the social expectations associated with the relationship between his non-heteronormativity and ‘straight’ men’s sexual desire is clear here. Given that he perceived me as a ‘straight man’, it was only natural that sexual favours were implied in our cordial relationship. This was further accentuated by the fact that I initiated a meeting away from the public gaze. Underlying all these various, interconnected dynamics is a system of gendered and sexual power relations. Lacking sexual agency of their own, qauri are often considered ‘free to use’ (a phrase one of my qauri respondents used in another conversation) for the sexual pleasure of straight men. While a number of qauri stressed that the fact that they also desire sex with what they perceive as ‘straight men’ makes this arrangement bearable, it also significantly limits their level of broader social inclusion. Ronny’s implicit expectation that I had sought him out in order to receive sexual favours reflects this clearly. It had seemed incomprehensible to him that I, as a ‘straight man’ – a categorization he fell back on because he, like most of his friends, find it difficult to imagine anyone not being exclusively sexually receptive and overtly effeminate in appearance to be anything but straight – should be interested in him for any other purpose than sex. Providing sexual services, then, was what many qauri perceived to be their only access point into social relations with other men.

Sex for money Offering sexual favours for money is not the exclusive domain for nonheteronormative Fijians, nor is it necessarily a recent phenomenon in Fiji. Previous research has suggested that commercial sex work has been a longstanding feature of the Fijian urban scene (Plange 1990) and that the number of sex workers per capita in Fiji rivals that of Thailand (Ahlburg and Jensen 1998). In popular discourses, however, sex work is considered intrinsically linked to the modern economy and processes such as urbanization, mass tourism and the



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diminishing influence of traditional authorities. Most Fiji citizens perceive that opportunities for trading sexual favours for money are rapidly increasing around nightclubs and entertainment strips. For some respondents, this proliferation of sex for money occurring in conjunction with the urban night-time economy has come to be the central metaphor for how the modern ‘way of money’ in itself represents a form of moral disintegration.4 Driven largely by tourist demand, though probably frequented just as much by locals, there are established strips in Nadi, Lautoka and Suva as well as smaller regional centres that are readily identified as places where one can regularly solicit sexual favours, and ‘money girls’ as well as male-bodied qauri are frequently identified in and around nightclubs and bars. The distinction between prostitution and promiscuous sex is rarely clear-cut in these contexts. Many of the men I spoke to considered it quite commonplace to compensate a casual or one-off sexual partner with cash, alcoholic drinks or takeaway food without the women, or qauri, in question being considered sex workers or carrying any stigma in conjunction with this. This was particularly true for married men who considered payment a form of security against stories about their infidelity coming out. One interlocutor took the logic about money changing the nature of sexual relations a step further and argued that sex that was paid for was more akin to ‘watching a blue movie than cheating’ on his wife, though I did not have the impression this particular idea had much traction in the broader community. In most cases, sex for money was not considered qualitatively different from other forms of sexual relations. Several females I spoke to explained that transactional sex was generally more opportunistic than systematic in nature – if they happened to ‘get on’ with someone, especially if it was an older male or foreign visitor, they would occasionally demand money in return for sexual favours without this being an explicit strategy at the start of the night. This resonates with how Ronny explained to me how he and other qauri rarely set out to make money from sexual favours though they often ended up receiving some sort of recompense. These dynamics highlight how sex is considered intrinsic to the experience of modern life. The fact that the involvement of money or other forms of recompense does not necessarily alter the nature of a sexual relation might be understood in terms of local discourses thinking of urban spaces and modern, ‘Western’ lifestyle as part of the ‘way of money’. It also aligns with the overarching idea that the body is the key site for experiencing modernity in the most literal sense. But it would be a mistake not to consider the larger socio-economic

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context in which these practices emerge. Fiji is heavily marketed as a tourist destination in which the always exoticized, sometimes overtly sexualized, local population is the major drawcard. Their friendliness and approachability are central to the experience tourists and expatriates purchase, and while not internationally renowned as a destination for ‘sex tourism’, a sexual encounter or holiday romance is part of the expectation for many visitors. Sex, in this context, happens against a backdrop of significant structural inequality between foreign visitors and locals, and there is little doubt that the former capitalize on their material advantage in order to receive sexual favours. And it is equally clear that economic need and marginalization are key drivers behind women and qauri taking part in sex in exchange for money or other forms of recompense. These dynamics are certainly not lost on my respondents. That is evident in how they construct their participation in transactional sex differently. Many would, for instance, only demand money from foreigners, or alternatively charge significantly more if their sexual partner was a visitor, a system I  sometimes heard jokingly referred to as a ‘tourist tax’.

Interracial liaisons and sex as a boundary maker These structural inequalities between foreigners and locals are also utilized in the creation of sexual moralities. Given that sexual experimentation and adventure is often performed across the ethno-sexual boundary, such practices easily become inscribed with cultural and moral politics. In these discourses, intimate, personal experiences become written into larger narratives about ethnic differences, race and gender and conceptualized as politically meaningful acts. While there appears to be greater acceptance for Fijian women having sexual liaisons with white Europeans than Fijian men getting it on with white women, this is reversed when Fijian/Indo-Fijian relations are articulated in sex talk. In these contexts, gendered sexual norms are written through ethno-political discourses and sexual positions come to directly reflect political positions (cf. Ho and Tsang 2000 in Hong Kong) in a relatively complex system of changing evaluations of the power relations involved in sexual encounters. From a local, patriarchal viewpoint, one might say that Fijian women’s position in the gender hierarchy makes it acceptable that they are fucked by white men, whose economic and social position is something Fijian men often aspire to and respect in terms of Fijian colonial history. The relationships between indigenous Fijian men and visiting women were often considered more complicated. They often



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idealized interracial sexual relations with tourist girls in ways that mirrored how Isaiah Walker described Waikïkï beachboys who used their sexual agency to challenge white men’s hegemony and defy stereotypes about ‘soft primitives’ (2008: 105). Sexual conquests of ‘white women’ in these circumstances became useful identity markers and claims for status among young men, both in Fiji and in Hawaii. But there was a significant counter-narrative to this among my interlocutors. It was sometimes commented that it is degrading for Fijian men to pleasure white women as the liaison then is interpreted in economic terms – being seen as a ‘holiday lover’ who is at a wealthy woman’s beck and call does not reflect well on one’s manhood. On the same token, while apparently not particularly common among my indigenous Fijian interlocutors, ‘fucking an Indian girl’ would give them certain bragging rights as the perceived sexual domination in such relations not only mirrored the imagined Fijian physical, moral and political superiority over Indo-Fijian men that permeates popular racial discourses but also provided a symbolic opportunity to ‘get one back’ at the latter group, who is often perceived to have a material advantage. Such moral perceptions were often reversed when making judgements on sexual liaisons between Fijian women and Indo-Fijian men. My Indo-Fijian friends generally appeared to have a more flexible relationship to these structural inequalities, even though ‘white women’ were often the objects of their desire for sex while they generally considered Indo-Fijian women the better marriage propositions. It is clear, however, that gender and ethnicity are given different purchase when discussing different liaisons, reflecting ethno-patriarchal mores that serve to reinforce existing systems of power in the context of social change. While all sexual behaviours that cross ethnic lines have the potential to be socially disruptive, the meaning attributed to particular inter-ethnic relations are rarely self-evident but rather subject to ongoing social negotiation. What these examples above display, however, is that men actively utilized sex and sex talk in order to lay claim to and justify their dominant position in the local gender order and compete for status with other men. Indeed, ‘when nation, gender and sexuality intersect’ (Mayer 2000: 13) in ways that make the body a significant marker for ethnic and national identities, it is invariably women’s bodies that come into focus (Alexeyeff 2010), albeit through a masculine gaze. Sex, in these contexts, becomes doubly important – as a means through which gender norms are articulated and performed, but also as a practice of ethnic boundary-making (cf. I. Walker 2008 in Hawaii). There are other layers to these social dynamics that complicate local gender relations. For young women, the social dangers associated with exercising their

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sexual agency and partaking in a modern sexual life are somewhat mediated by increased economic status and independence. For some, this included trading sexual favours for money to both tourists and wealthier locals, but also being in a position where they were more likely to meet a foreigner interested in lasting partnerships, and with it the allure of a life outside the village. This point was not missed by aspirational men whose attraction to the modern scene was coupled with a frequently expressed concern about being ‘left behind’ – an expression that has multiple meanings from the metaphorical notion of being the last bearers of, at least some, traditional values and obligations to more concrete fears of getting stuck in villages while women explore life in cities or overseas. These men perceived women’s ability to ‘squeeze’ money and opportunities for self-improvement out of the night-time economy as superior to their own and also doubted their own ability to compete against what foreigners were able to offer local women. At the same time, women are central players in the experience of modern sexualities and key figures in the narratives that men employ to develop reputations as modern, sexy men. Naturally, it is through these sexual practices and the discourses about them that local men most directly experience their changing notions of masculinity in manhood being constructed against, or in dialogue with, changes in women’s sexual practices and performances of gender. Not only is sex predominantly played out in direct contact with women, but (hetero-)sexual acts are also, by their very nature, informed by direct or indirect feedback from women. Despite the emphasis on masculine conquest and sexual prowess, men’s talk about sex was often about what women want and like. Being more in touch with women, in this sense, is understood to be part and parcel of what it means to be a modern man. Both Fijian and Indo-Fijian young men often explicitly talked about how they needed to develop a type of relationship with women that was based on ‘interest’ and respect rather than just ‘want’ and desire. Girls in contemporary Fiji, I  was often told, expected more from men than previous generations and did not ‘take any rubbish’. These social perceptions about changing gender relations are also directly facilitated by international mass media and popular Euro-American discourses about love and sex in which women are increasingly positioned as more active and demanding sexual agents and equal participants in love relations, highlighting how notions of modernity seep into all aspects of social practice through a variety of channels. One telling example of this was when my tavale Simon, a local rugby player whom we remember from the anecdote that set the tone for Chapter 5 on drinking and insolence, expressed his dismay to me after having



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his first sexual experience with a white girl during an international tournament in Suva. It became clear from the story that he had struggled to satisfy the girl in question and had been taken aback by both the intensity and particularity of her sexual demands on him. ‘I felt like being back at school,’ he lamented, ‘with so much to learn in so little time!’ In the end, he recalled it as an embarrassing experience leaving him feeling both backwards and inadequate but somewhat in awe of ‘modern women’.

Sex, morality and the ambiguous nature of modern experience The ambiguity associated with being modern becomes crystallized in these relations of sex, love and intimacy. With increased opportunities for amorous or sexual encounters come new expectations about prowess and experience. For many, the incentives to keep up with these changes, with being modern, are intrinsically connected with their fears about where it might lead them or what might happen if they cannot keep up. Behind the gusto with which many approach talking about sex, for instance, lies a myriad of insecurities. Many are insecure about how to pull modernity off in practice, as it were, how to negotiate modern desires with other cultural obligations and expectations, and the consequences if they do not embrace new ideas and practices. It was also obvious that many experienced that the freedom to explore new things in new ways invariably lead to failure, shame, regret and disappointment as often as pleasure and pride. Although shortcomings in the bedroom were not as readily brought up as more light-hearted success stories, it was clear from my conversations with interlocutors that many struggled to negotiate aspects of sex and romance in these new contexts. Conflicting cultural impulses conspire with the intensification of increased independence and choice to make key issues such as negotiating sexual health, safety and consent more difficult. The most serious end of this is reflected in figures suggesting that reported levels of sexual assaults in Fiji are among the highest in the world (Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre 2010/11). The relationship between such figures and local configurations of masculinity more broadly is an area of study we could do well to pay more attention to, although it was beyond the scope of this project. One point that I found interesting in this context, however, was that both men and women I spoke to argued that the relative liberation of sexual activities facilitated by modern life made people ‘less pushy’. The logic dictating

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these views said that the proliferation of opportunities for sex made it less likely that people retorted to sexual violence. Other respondents claimed that by talking more freely about sex and to some extent removing much of sexual negotiations from villages and family dwellings, people’s awareness about sexual ethics increased. Although these local assumptions need to be analysed in the context of other research data on sexual relations in Fiji, they provide useful insights into how contemporary Fijians perceive the processes of social change associated with sex and intimacy and their own agency in shaping these. Nothing of what is described above should be read to imply that modern Fiji citizens perceive themselves to be entirely cut loose from what is perceived as traditional sexual conventions. Family expectations associated with sexual morality and matrimony remain important factors in how young women, in particular, construct their sexual selves. One Fijian female friend in her late teens, for instance, expressed both shame and regret upon revealing to me that she had started a casual sexual relationship with a local European. She feared some repercussions from her family as a result of being sexually active pre-marriage, but her main discomfort appeared to come from an introspective analysis of her own sexual agency where the inability to control her own desire and ‘save herself ’ for what she considered the appropriate way to consummate a future marriage in a traditional, Fijian way weighed heavy on her conscience. Similar concerns were expressed by young IndoFijian women who often found the perceived sexual freedom afforded them by city life and the modern nightclub scene was significantly limited by family and community expectations about remaining ‘pure’ for a future Indo-Fijian husband. Much of this sexual morality is reproduced by peers. Young men’s boasting about sexual endeavours is, in Fiji like elsewhere, frequently coupled with derision of women who are perceived to be ‘loose’ or ‘easy’ to get to bed. Many young men I  spoke to sought to make distinctions between the sort of girls they met out on town and could ‘have fun’ with, on the one hand, and girls suitable for marriage, on the other. The implication hints at how the attraction of ‘modern life’ is constantly tempered by an ongoing commitment to some aspects of what is perceived as ‘traditional values’, as well as the obvious issue of how bragging about sexual prowess is utilized at once to compete against other men and maintain social control over women.

Postscript: Modern masculinities in Fiji and theoretical implications

One of my most productive pastimes during my first fieldwork was always when I got a group of people together at my home-base, sometimes for talanoa, other times to watch rugby sevens broadcasts, watch films or listen to local soccer tournaments on the radio. Apart from the obvious social value of spending my evenings that way, these sessions were good opportunities to facilitate discussions between the members of the heterogeneous community I was part of and get local insights on some developing ideas. After a while, it almost became institutionalized that I played DVDs on my computer while my neighbours and friends brought food over on Sunday nights, an otherwise quiet night for most people in Fiji. Although they weren’t always productive from a research point of view, I jokingly referred to them as my focus groups because I frequently had my house full of friends. One of these Sundays that stand out in my memory occurred a few months into my fieldwork. Right at the end of the wet season, my small living room was almost full of people huddling together on a tarpaulin sheet on the floor, forming a neat half-circle around my laptop that was balancing on a stool. Having run out of more contemporary titles we watched John Sturges’s 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea. Despite my reservations about its age and slow pace compared to the films we usually watched, this was an immediate hit with my friends. Some of the older men had studied Ernest Hemingway’s novel at school and enthusiastically provided a running commentary of the story as it unfolded on screen. For others, the subject matter spurred memories of local fishing trips and tall tales of their own exploits at sea. Many pointed out the possible religious readings of the story and the depiction of strength, endurance and dedication – values held high both in indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian traditions, and I  eventually managed to steer the conversation more directly onto my research topics of masculinity and manhood, concepts that became reified through the events on screen. With little prompting from me, one of my Indo-Fijian friends was excited to see commonalities between himself and the old man of the film. Spencer Tracy’s

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character of the solitary fisherman struggling with the elements came to stand in for him as he got up at the break of dawn every morning to work in solitude on his sugarcane farm, and it suddenly made sense to him why I  had asked him questions about the menial tasks associated with farm work as part of his gendered self-identity. ‘It’s like we both grow into manhood through hard work, struggle, yeah?’ he asked me rhetorically and continued to analyse the film in ways that, in my previous discussions, I have identified as distinctly Indo-Fijian cultural values (see Chapter 3). While the film facilitated universal interest and discussion, others soon pointed out that the events depicted could never happen in Fiji. ‘No Fijian would set out alone like that and try to catch fish for himself ’, Sami from the indigenous village next door argued, reading the film as a representation of the weakness in European individualism and lack of cooperation. His friends, the more senior part of the audience, agreed, and one chimed in that a group of Fijian fishermen would have no trouble getting the fish back into shore because it would be a collaborative effort. From their point of view, the film could be seen as a warning against forgetting the communality central to Fijian traditions. ‘No, no, no,’ William, my neighbour and one of the younger men in our group, protested. ‘It’s about too much kerekere!’ Kerekere refers to a socially sanctioned form of requesting a favour in Fijian communities, often utilized as a way to redistribute wealth and resources from individuals to the collectivity. ‘The fish is his earnings but before he gets to pocket them and spend them on himself all the relatives have taken their part till there is nothing left,’ he argued to much amusement for him and his friends. Discussions went on for some time, and local forms of social analysis were coupled with tongue-in-cheek teasing in a manner I  was increasingly familiar with and learnt to integrate into my own considerations. This evening stands out in my memory through the richness of its themes I could take from discussions. The way the film made intuitive sense to my friends of various ethnic and social identities was in itself a sign of Fiji’s coloniality complex and postcolonial condition where many have a natural affinity to classic Euro-American literary texts instilled in them through formal education. The fact that they readily interpreted its content in terms that highlighted essentialized cultural differences speaks to the centrality that categories like race and ethnicity has taken on in Fiji. And how those reflections became integrated into the more gendered reading my presence in the group highlights how the process of colonialism has woven together gender relations and racial hierarchies in a way that they become almost inseparable entities in local identity politics. That these conversations remain at the foreground of Fiji citizens’ everyday orientations is

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part of the ‘unfinished business’ of colonial regimes (Burton 1999: 1), part of a script that is constantly rewritten and replayed in changing social contexts. In a similar fashion, this narrative about performances of masculinities in modern Fiji has no immediate conclusion. One of the things that make gender such a productive vantage from which to analyse postcolonial societies is its own capacity ‘to interrupt, if not thwart modernizing regimes’ (Burton 1999: 1). Masculinities and the gendered, sexualized and embodied orders they are part of are equally contingent, and this account can thus not profess to be the definitive one of contemporary Fijian life or how gender relations are constructed and experienced in the present. As all ethnographies, this can only provide a glimpse of things as they were at a specific historical juncture. The events, episodes and social settings I have focused on are not capriciously chosen but provide little more than a cross section of how some urban Fijians develop their livelihoods in a rapidly changing social scene. Analytically, I  have admittedly privileged situations where I  perceived the concurrent production of both masculinities and modernities to play out most overtly. However, practically every aspects of humans’ social life is gendered, and one of the key features of modernity as I conceive of the concept is that it becomes omnirelevant and inescapable; it was clear that my interlocutors felt the immediacy of these processes more acutely in certain circumstances of their everyday lives. It is their ambitions, concerns, ambiguities and that this book is an ethnographic snapshot of. Theoretically, the main contribution of this book is the way it provides an example of how critical gender theories can be operationalized through ethnographic fieldwork and thus interrogated through people’s lived experience. Throughout the book, I  have tried to take my interlocutors’ sociological analyses of their own circumstances seriously and connect them to my overall conceptualizations. I  will consequently resist the urge to editorialize these connections further here. By way of tying the various aspects of the monograph together, I  offer, instead, some reflections on how the experiences of modern Fijian men might inform broader academic discussions about masculinities and gender relations. When talking about and disseminating my research, I  have occasionally been met with criticism for maintaining a strong focus on men’s gendered bodies, experiences and performances. Privileging the voices of men, some critics have argued, implicitly also silences women. From this point of view, my ongoing research is merely a recent example of what intellectual history is full of: men talking to other men about their lives and presenting history from their perspectives. While I  acknowledge the important point that much of

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scholarship in the Pacific Islands as well as elsewhere has a long tradition of marginalizing the voices of women and other minorities, I think these types of criticisms against work theoretically grounded in the fields of critical men’s and masculinities studies are largely misguided. First, although the reality of men’s almost universal structural domination over women is by now well documented, much analytical work remains in order to understand how this operates in the culturally specific. Second, while thinking about men’s performances of gender through the multiple masculinities paradigm has become near axiomatic in the social sciences, how different types of men might relate to structural gender relations differently need to be explored more fully. Finally, and most importantly from my perspective, it is only through engaging men in the critical analysis of locally specific gender dynamics that we can affect real-term change in particular ethnographic contexts. Critical men’s studies is an extension of some of the key principles of feminist theory and can add to, rather than challenge, the strength of arguments proposed in feminist and queer studies. Some of the recent research literature produced on masculinities has not managed to deliver on the key premises about adding further layers to the understanding of gender operates, however, and the conceptual discussions within critical men’s studies are far from settled. Some theorists hold that the term masculinity does little to move men’s studies away from biological determinism, as its use in many contexts essentializes the character of men and their behaviours (MacInnes 1998; Petersen 2003). Coming from another critical vantage point, Hearn has argued that most of the available literature on masculinities fails to address the fundamental question of how the concept, or ‘quality’, of masculinity ‘relate[s]‌to what men do, to men’s material practices’ (1996: 208). A similar critique has been articulated by McMahon, who renders masculinity a somewhat meaningless concept, because to ‘say that the problem with gender relations is the way in which masculinity is constructed, with the solution a “reconstruction of masculinity” is to displace theoretical attention from men’s political practices’ (1993:  692). What all these critiques ignore, however, is the point that masculinities are neither qualities nor sets of traits, but rather a series of social and political practices through which manhood is shaped, understood and constructed in a continuing project of gender formation and affirmation. Masculine identities are created and performed through a series of social praxis, enactments of culturally, historically, socially and symbolically constructed understandings of what men ought to be and ought to do.

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For me, the natural consequence of these ideas is that masculinities ought to be studied as they are constructed, experienced, challenged and performed in a broad social and cultural context. In other words, they ought to be studied ethnographically. After commencing my fieldwork, I  soon realized that my only chance of understanding ‘masculinities in Fiji’ was by looking carefully at what men got up to in their everyday lives, what they spoke about and how they understood the relationship between their own social practices and cultural assumptions about gender relations. Following these approaches, I soon came to see masculinities as ‘configurations of practice that are constructed, unfold, and change through time’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 852). Not only has my research shown that understandings of what masculinity and manhood entails have changed over time, my analyses also suggest that the relationship between men and the various masculinities they perform are profoundly impacted on by the structural changes in the society in which they are played out. A recurring theme throughout this book has been how performances and ideological constructions of manhood were influenced by the larger social process through which Fijian society can be said to move towards modernity. My discussion has shown that almost every aspect of indigenous Fijian masculine performances were influenced by a socio-temporal understanding of traditional Fijian village life as diametrically opposed to the modern, Western way of living. Although Fijian masculinities were reshaped and recreated in modern settings, the historical understandings of the meanings of Fijian manhood remained an important referent for current social practice. Notions of village identities, communal duties, kinship bonds and hierarchical positions sometimes operated as internalized facts, part of the Fijian habitus if you want, which informed constructions of masculine identities for most of my respondents. On one level, this testifies to culturally specific notions of masculinities as practice. Every action these men took to affirm their masculine status was framed by Fijian a system of gender norms, whether it was acted out in the village or in modern, urban settings. The ideological investments made in all social actions were rooted in a discourse which put Fijianness at the centre of their identity formation. However, more often than not there was some tension between the two different cultural spheres in which men performed gender, and contemporary Fijian men often attempted to construct masculinities that balanced these conflicting demands upon self-identities and social practices. Indigenous Fijian men’s different engagements with modernity and the market economy, as well as their social constructions of such practices, are manifestations of what Connell and Messerschmidt has poignantly referred

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to as the layering of ‘potential internal contradiction’ which is intrinsic to all practices implicated in the construction of masculinities (2005: 852). In other words, another important theoretical point which has become clear in this research is that the construction and maintenance of gendered power structures has the potential to involve specific emotional conflict, internal division and ambiguities. In Chapter 7, this was highlighted through how young Fiji citizens experienced the relative sexual liberation associated with modern life in ways that were exhilarating and frightening, emancipating and limiting all at once. In a different context, Chapter 4 discussed how many Fijian men experienced securing the financial means to look after their village and kinship duties was detrimental to their ability to maintain control over and connection to their traditional village, as waged work forced them away from village life both physically and ideologically. Here, modernity is experienced as the disjuncture between the demands of the traditional, moral economy and those of the modern market, much in the same way as Holly Wardlow found that the Huli in Papua New Guinea experienced modernity ‘as the complex of values, beliefs, and practices surrounding the acquisition of cash and commodities made both possible and impossible by capitalism’ (2002: 146). My discussion also revealed how some men used certain aspects of modern, urban life to deliberately perform aspects of masculinities which were not available to them within the traditional realm. Betting on Australian horse races (Chapter 5) or getting drunk in night clubs (Chapter 6) were examples of such activities which were constructed as a sort of temporary, highly structured defiance of traditional gender norms. The implications are clear. First, gender is an inherently fluid category, and men are able to discursively draw upon a number of practices associated with masculinity in order to play out situationally different masculine performances in a variety of contexts. Second, rather than being fixed dichotomies that determine people’s life trajectories or define their identities, traditional/modern, just as much as local/global or Fijian/non-Fijian, appear as contingent categories that my interlocutors use constructively to navigate everyday life in a rapidly changing world. In other words, although hegemonic notions of masculinities in Fiji are tied to traditional power hierarchies such as the chiefly system, the Methodist church and the notion of physical strength, it is also clear that modern life provides new avenues for men to renegotiate what it means to be a man in contemporary Fiji. The concern that modern society and the market economy would put pressure on the traditional Fijian social structures and organization has always been articulated, both by colonial administrators and Fijian leaders,

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and has led to a series of protectionist policies aimed at securing the welfare of the Fijian village economy and the chiefly system (Chapter 4). While these policies have proved effective in some ways, and the importance of tradition and custom is evident in most Fijian men’s understanding and construction of their masculine identity, the impact of modernity is becoming increasingly evident in contemporary Fiji. Brij V. Lal recently pointed this out in relation to the role of the chiefs: ‘The power of chiefs to decide the destinies of their people, to be their sole spokesmen and intermediaries with the outside, has long gone as travel, technology, education, the effects of competitive market economy and exposure to broader forces of change have altered the fabric of Fijian society’ (2009: 428). So, although modernity might ‘always be shadowed by loss’ (Strong 2007: 107), it is also a time-space that provides opportunities for new forms of social relations. It was striking how often my interlocutors reflected on these social changes and articulated new ways of thinking about their own place in the world. Part of that involved rethinking the cultural demarcations, between indigenous Fiji and Indo-Fijians and Europeans, which have been so pervasive in dominant discourses in Fiji. Although these discourses clearly essentialize, and racialize, these categories, Fijians nonetheless define theirs as a culture that is fluid, flexible and able to integrate foreign influences. Here they reflect on a long history of engagements with modernity that has seen the uptake of Christianity, rugby, foreign languages and culinary influences. Similarly, at present, what is considered traditional is increasingly re-evaluated in context of the modern, but while some practices and ideas are explicitly rejected, most are redefined in ways that emphasize some sense of continuity rather than dramatic cultural loss (cf. Strong 2007: 109). Few Indo-Fijians fear cultural loss in the face of modernity. Instead, they refer to loss as an ongoing process that is experienced materially and physically rather than symbolically. This includes the loss of farms and livelihoods that was the reality for many during the 1990s and 2000s, the loss of economic security associated with sugarcane farming, or the loss of communities and families as a result of mass emigration. As a community, they have shown remarkable resilience, and many of my interlocutors had an optimistic outlook on the future in Fiji or overseas. And for most people, a central part of modern Fiji involves reimagining a social sphere that involves closer relations between the various ethnocultural communities. Such self-reflexivity is perhaps itself characteristic of late modern human subjectivity. The movement of ideas  – through popular culture and electronic communication – and people – through mass migration, travel and tourism – provide modern subjects everywhere with

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enormous amounts of stimuli to reimagine themselves in context of broader cultural influences. Demetriou (2001), in his critical reworking of the notion of hegemonic masculinity, sought to clarify the process of reciprocity between different masculine performances and proposed that the process of reconstruction and reinventions of hegemonic notions of masculinity in changing contexts should be understood in terms of Gramsci’s notion of a historic bloc. At the core of this proposition is the idea that no dominant hegemonic masculinity is a pure and stable configuration of practice but rather ‘a hybrid bloc that unites practices from diverse masculinities in order to ensure the reproduction of patriarchy’ (Demetriou 2001:  337). These dynamics were clarified through my research, as all the social processes which have put pressure on traditionally condoned gender hierarchies and, in some cases, forced changes to particular notions that have been associated with hegemonic masculine performances have served to reinforce the larger system of gender domination as a whole (see, for instance, in context of non-heteronormative men in Chapter 7). While normative ideals of what masculinity entails are undoubtedly historically specific, my research supports the idea that the overarching gender hierarchy in which some men enjoy structural dominance over women and various categories of subordinate and marginalized men is reinvented in various contexts. Additionally, in Chapter  2, I  conceptualized Fijian constructions of masculinity in relation to Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and explained that the culturally specific ideas of what constitutes dominant masculinities are by definition hybrid constructs drawing upon colonial ideologies as understood within a Fijian cultural logic as well as what I labelled traditional ideas of Fijian manhood (also Presterudstuen 2010). The natural conclusion is that the concept of hybridity is relevant to understanding any masculine performance, not only dominant ones, and, indeed, that all masculinities are complex and everchanging configurations of practice rather than rigid typologies. This is, of course, intrinsic to Gramsci’s hegemony1 (on which the notion of hegemonic masculinity was based) in the sense that a subordinate group’s consent to the dominant rule is partly reliant upon their ability to recognize agreeable outcomes or aspects of the ruling ideologies and practices that will benefit their own cause. The success of hegemonic masculinities is, for instance, reliant upon the fact that even marginalized and subordinate men benefit from shared dominance over women. However, although it was clear that a variety of men across the Fijian demographic mosaic shared the desire for a self-identity as men and grappled

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with the challenge of achieving masculinity in the meeting point between traditional notions and modern, often imported, ideas of manhood, their social practice was varied and multifaceted rather than uniform. Although the dominant notions of proper manhood in relation to indigenous Fijian ethnic identity were clearly established ideologically and internalized in many of my respondents, there were many ways in which they could be acted out in practice in contemporary Fiji. This emphasizes that it is ‘men’s and boys’ practical relationships to collective images or models of masculinity, rather than simple reflections of them’ which inform gendered praxis (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 841). Engaging in traditional dance performances, attending church, playing rugby, drinking yaqona, fist fighting or contributing to the village economy with money or labour were all constructed as constitutive practices for Fijian masculinities, indicating that ‘tradition’ remained a strong reference point for masculine performances in the present. When juxtaposing these findings with my extensive research data on Indo-Fijian men, I found, unsurprisingly, that masculine performances intersected with ethnic and cultural identities to create specific masculine self-identities ethnically (Chapter 3). However, while Indo-Fijian masculine constructions were rooted in the specific historical developments of the Indo-Fijian cultural communities and thus were often created in opposition to indigenous Fijians, the strategies and practices utilized to create and play out masculine self-identities were often analogous. Both Fijian Methodists (Chapter  2) and Indo-Fijian Hindus (Chapter  3) appeared, for instance, to put equal premium on displaying religious devotion in their masculine performances. Similarly, just as indigenous Fijian villagers used their allegedly intimate and spiritual relationship to their land as a foundation for claiming status, Indo-Fijian farmers used a connection to their farming land through hard work and suffering as a symbol for status among fellow men. Hegemonic notions of masculinity not only inform social practice but are frequently played out and performed in public in order to be effective. I have argued that such diverse practices as religious devotion, farming, drinking alcohol, dancing and telling stories are utilized in order to build up individuals’ masculine self-identity. All these practices are performed in front of an audience and indicated how various men in different situations discursively drew upon hegemonic notions in order to negotiate their position in the gender hierarchy, thereby emphasizing the point that gender identities are reciprocal and socially constructed.

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A running theme throughout my ethnography has been the centrality of the body in these processes. I have demonstrated how the body not only is the central mode through which men position themselves in social settings and experience social change but also how the body is the key site of production for new social identities. Here, traditional Fijian emphasis on the body as a social signifier conspires with modern social scripts, developed in dialogue with an increasing amount of cultural influences through mass media, tourism and urban modes of interaction, to produce an understanding of the body as an intrinsically malleable, dynamic and creative resource that can be refashioned and re-presented to create social and cultural mobility. Consequently, I suggest that researchers should acknowledge that no single man actually performs a hegemonic masculine performance, but that some men come closer to this ideal type of man than others. It seems clear to me that masculinity may be conceived of as project that social subjects are labouring to achieve through progressive-regressive constructions of appropriate behaviour in specific cultural and social contexts. From this point of view, most practices engaged in by men are in one way or another attempts to live up to perceived notions of masculine ideals. However, as gender is by definition reciprocal and interactional, the merits of these performances are constantly assessed by others against the cultural and social parameters of what men should do in any given context. The result is a constant negotiation by which men discursively position themselves and others in a complex normative status system we may refer to as the masculine hierarchy.

Notes Preface 1 Fiji is, as I elaborate on later in the book, a culturally diverse society with a complex and contentious history of colonialism and racial politics. For clarity, I will use the term ‘Fiji citizens’ throughout the book as a collective term for citizens of Fiji irrespective of ethnic identity. For analytical purposes, it is sometimes necessary to distinguish between the ethnicity of my interlocutors and other sources. When doing so, I follow local discourses as best as I can. Indigenous Fijian or Fijian are used interchangeably to refer to people who self-identify as ethnic Fijians (recently that the term iTaukei has become the official nomenclature for this group), and Indo-Fijian is consistently used to refer to people who self-identify as having Indian ancestry (either from indentured labourers or later free settlers). 2 While all my interlocutors have every right to be proud of the way they welcomed me into their homes and villages and offered me their friendship and collaboration, I have chosen to afford them some level of anonymity in this book. All names are therefore pseudonyms that follow the nomenclature traditions of the respective cultural communities that they identified with. For the same reason, I have chosen to utilize made-up names for villages in which I conducted my work.

1  Modernities, masculinities and the Fijian body: Connections and conceptualizations 1 See Margaret M. Lock and Judith Farquhar’s edited collection (2007), Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, for a comprehensive review of the anthropology of the body field of study. 2 Before that, indentured labourers from subcontinental India experienced the travel across the Pacific Ocean, from their homeland to Fijian plantations, intensely physical and embodied; cf. Lal (2000). 3 Jolly’s output in this area spans twenty years and is too extensive to list in detail. Some publications that have been particularly important for my own conceptualizations of gender in the Pacific Islands include Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (edited with L. Manderson) from

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1997 and her edited collection on ‘Re-membering Oceanic Masculinities’ in The Contemporary Pacific from 2008 (Jolly 2008b). David Lipset (2008) provides a highly informative analysis of Bateson’s work and its continuing impact on critical gender studies. Although the concept of hegemonic masculinity first emerged in a research project on gender and socio-economic inequality in schools in New South Wales, Australia (Connell et al. 1982), the more complete conceptualization as it is utilized in this book was developed in Connell’s Gender and Power (1987) and Masculinities (2005). The Native Title Act is still in place and contemporary land ownership is organized according to the mataqali structure with some minor local variations. There are six different units of ownership available. First, the chief, who for the time being holds the hereditary title of Ka Levu, can own land. Second, there is land owned by agnate descendants, according to local customary kinship systems, of a member of a tribe. Third, a tokatoka, a traditional family unit; a mataqali, which is a clan; or a Yavusa, which means a tribe, can own land. Finally, some structures see native land rights held jointly by several Yavusas. The mataqali remains the most common unit for owning land in Fiji, while tokatoka or Yavusa-structures are only recognized in some regions of the republic. Fijian land, however, as defined in the native title act, can only be owned by indigenous Fijians, which today constitute around 57 per cent of the population. Kanemasu and Molnar (2013) provide a discussion about women’s and Indo-Fijians’ participation in rugby and the cultural impact this might have.

2  Performing masculinity through Christian devotion: Methodism and manhood 1 This concept is borrowed from the insightful work of Anibal Quijano (2000, 2007), who coined it as a way to conceptualize how the structures of power, control and hegemony that emerged through modernity and were advanced through colonialism continue to determine global power relations. Quijano’s work has been particularly influential in Latin American subaltern studies but has an obvious utility in all studies of postcolonial societies. In the Fijian context, I take the coloniality complex to include social forces such as Christianity, rugby, militarization, racial inequalities, gender ideologies and structural inequalities to the global north, to name some central dynamics. 2 Although Methodism constitutes just one of a number of denominations which make up the complex constellations of Christianity in Fiji, its first-on-the-scene status and long-standing links with the indigenous Fijian traditional leadership makes it a pertinent denomination to study in this context. More than 66 per

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4

5

6

7

8

9

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12

cent of indigenous Fijians identify as Methodists, making it the dominant faith community in Fiji. The vast majority of the indigenous Fijian interlocutors of my project were also, at least nominally, Methodists. Marshall Sahlins has argued that Cakobau’s conversion in 1854, which in turn spurred mass conversions among Fijian laity, was motivated largely by martial tactics and political concerns rather than spiritual awakening (1985b: 39–40). Owing to the collusion between the chiefly office of Ratu Seru Cakobau, what came to be officialized as Fijian custom was largely based on traditions and practices in Eastern Fiji, especially those of Bau. Yaqona is the standard Bauan term both for the plant and the drink made by straining the powder made from its dried root with cold water through a muslin cloth. In everyday language it is referred to both as kava and, informally, grog. Throughout the book, I use these terms interchangeably depending on setting. Yaqona is also heavily consumed by other ethnic communities in Fiji and has a central place in the social life of Indo-Fijian men, something I discuss at length in Chapter 3. Ryle (2010: 23–5) and Toren (1988: 709) argue that many indigenous Fijians consider the dynamics of the yaqona circle to reflect and represent Christ’s Last Supper. This is documented in a number of studies on the early history of Fiji, most notably J. Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (1992) and R. A. Derrick, A History of Fiji ([1946] 2008). There are of course substantial differences on many levels between how the various Christian denominations in Fiji practice their devotion (see Ryle 2005, 2010; Newland 2013 among others), but I argue that as well as being quantitatively dominant, Wesleyan religious practice has been the decisive power in reforming views on Fijian tradition and custom through its close links with the political and Chiefly powerbase ever since Cakobau’s conversion on 30 April 1854. John Wesley’s substantial production of hymns is evidence of this emphasis on hymn-singing as part of the religious experience which is central to the teachings and practices of Methodists. See also E. D. Davies, Methodism (1976: 83). This is in marked opposition to the teachings of a number of charismatic and Pentecostal movements in Fiji, who emphasizes newness and Christianity as a rupture from the past. See also Tomlinson (2013). Mana has a variety of meanings which appeared to vary considerably according to context, often referring to mystical or supernatural power or spiritual phenomena. The usage applied here is common in anthropological literature, for instance, in M. Dickhardt, ‘Viti: The Soil from Eden’ (2005) and M. Tomlinson, ‘Perpetual

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Lament’ (2004a), and finds support in the fact that the opposite of mana is understood as drevi, meaning ‘useless, inefficacious’, according to A. Capell, The Fijian Dictionary ([1941] 1991: 135). 13 While this paper focuses on Methodist devotees, this is equally true for believers of other denominations (see Ryle 2010; Aporosa 2011; Newland 2013; Tomlinson 2013 among many others). 14 The core of this chapter was previously published as ‘Performing Masculinity through Christian Devotion: Methodism, Manhood and Colonial Mimicry in Fiji’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18.1 (2016), 107–26.

3  ‘Living in Hell’: Performing Indo-Fijian masculinities 1 I am not suggesting that Indo-Fijian women are not religious nor that they do not pray, but it appears that women’s spirituality is played out in a much more private and personal way than that of their male counterparts. 2 Talanoa is a Fijian word, and the definition I have provided here also corresponds to the cultural and linguistic meaning of the word in Fijian (Capell [1941] 1991: 215). 3 While this is still true, many Fijians now consume yaqona for entirely recreational purposes in settings outside the traditional, formalized village setting.

4  Making a living: Land, labour, trade and tradition for modern Fijian men 1 This model was first articulated by Ratu Lala Sukuna (1984) but soon became a central tenet of colonial policy and a key justification for continued British supremacy through indirect rule. 2 Given that Indo-Fijians have generally embraced market engagement, particularly in the service industry, they are often considered, by indigenous Fijians, to follow the ‘European way’ of the money. 3 Matti Eräsaari (2017) interrogates these spatio-temporal conceptualizations and the ‘value of time-wasting’ in village-Fiji in a way that complements this analysis.

5  Drinking, hyper-masculinity and insolence 1 I have chosen to withhold the official name of the village and use this pseudonym in order to protect the privacy of its members.

Notes 173 2 In this particular context, I was considered a tavale based on a perceived veitabani connection between Vinaka and the village in which I was an adopted member. The social relationship called veitabani refers to two specific places that have ancestral spirits (vu) that were cross cousins (tavale) to each other. They may address each other as Naita and treat each other with very severe and frequent joking. 3 These principles are embedded in the bati ideology that several theorists have argued is a central organizing principle for the gendered socialization of Fijian boys and men (Teaiwa 2005; Presterudstuen 2010; Presterudstuen and Schieder 2016). Based on the notion of the traditional Fijian bati (warrior) as a protector of the Chief and the vanua, this ideology encompasses the core values Fijian men are taught to embody – strength, humility, loyalty and bravery. 4 Torstein Veblen coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in his influential book on The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. Veblen defined this rather narrowly as any ostentatious public expenditure of money or consumption of goods that gave provided the consumer with (symbolic) political power. Since then, the term has been applied widely and is commonly used to describe any public display of consumption that may provide people with increased social status in particular contexts.

6  Betting-men and bad money: Modern masculinities and consumption 1 While there are no available data on gambling participation besides my ethnographic material, the fact that Grants Waterhouse, the Australian-owned company who monopolizes sports gambling in Fiji, consistently make annual turnovers of more than A$6 million (see van Fossen 2012) gives an indication of the popularity of gambling in Fiji. 2 This conceptualization is appropriated from the work of Derek Layder (1997), who, from an interactionist and phenomenological tradition, theorized these dynamics in terms of differing social domains and social settings. 3 The core of this chapter has previously been published in the article ‘Horse Race Gambling and the Economy of “Bad Money” in Contemporary Fiji’, Oceania, 84.3 (2014), 256–71. I am deeply indebted to the editor of that special edition, Anthony Pickles, as well my colleagues Luis F. Angost Ferrandez and Rob Stones for their comments on earlier versions of these arguments.

7  Sex, sexualities and the modern body 1 I have also utilized this particular ethnographic event to facilitate a critical reflection in another context, namely, how the spatial configuration of my room

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conspired with straight/qauri sexual relations to create a difficult interview situation (Presterudstuen 2018). 2 This was only overturned on 1 February 2010 when Fiji passed a law decriminalizing consensual homosexuality through the Fiji National Crimes Decree. 3 Margaret Jolly (2008a) provides an extensive overview of some of the key literature in this field and the major theoretical trajectories. 4 This argument is in itself an interesting inversion of the idea Georg Simmel introduced a century earlier when he utilized prostitution as a key metaphor for the immorality of the money economy itself – when ‘one pays money one is completely quits, just as one is through with the prostitute after satisfaction is attained’ (1907: 121).

Postscript: Modern masculinities in Fiji and theoretical implications 1 Antonio Gramsci’s theories are outlined in his Prison Notebooks (1971). Gramsci never directly addressed hegemony as a means to explain male domination or gender issues in particular, but his approach encompasses a theorization of the reproduction of power structures through culture, tradition and practice, which makes it a highly relevant theoretical framework for studies of masculinity and gender disparity (cf. Connell 1987).

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190

Index alcohol 101–15; see also beer; drinking; drunkenness; rum; yaqona Australia 52, 117, 120, 121, 164 authority 6, 17, 33–4, 63–4, 75, 81, 83, 84–5, 102, 106, 107, 114, 115, 146, 153 Christian 31, 32, 34, 40, 43, 46 masculine 24, 29, 58, 60, 62 policing 110, 112 bad money 136–7; see also cash; gambling; money; ‘the life of money’; ‘the way of money’ Bainimarama, Voreqe (Frank) 22, 23 bati 32, 93; see also warrior Bau 30 Bauan rule 30–1, 38; see also chiefly system; chiefs beer 97, 103; see also alcohol; drinking; drunkenness; rum being modern 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 77, 116, 135, 157; see also modernization; performing modernity betting see gambling Bhabha, Homi 35–6, 46–7, 166; see also mimicry Bible verses 28, 36–7, 38–9, 45 bodily taxing 74 bodily work 93 Bourdieu, Pierre 65; see also habitus boxing 101 bravery 21 British 4, 16, 18, 20, 21, 31, 34, 46, 50, 53, 145; see also colonization bula, shirt 43 smile 6, 74 Butler, Judith 10–11 cakacaka vakavanua (‘action according to the land’) 20, 42; vakavanua 32 see also Fijian way; ‘in the manner of the land’; tradition

Cakobau, Ratu Seru (Cakobau) 17–8, 30; see also deed of cession capitalism 16, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 89, 94, 119, 129, 137, 164 capitalist 50, 54, 55, 82, 90 trade 74 carnal 113 sociality 100 cash crops see sugarcane (farming) cash 82–3, 123–5, 150, 164; see also bad money; money; ‘the life of money’; ‘the way of money’ ceremonies 6, 17, 32–3, 58, 60, 63, 79, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 103; see also rituals, veigaravi chanting 27, 36, 60; see also singing chiefly system 17, 18–19, 34, 35, 38, 41, 46, 75, 84, 164–5 authority 21, 23, 30, 111, 114 chiefly office 31 see also Bauan rule chiefs 17, 20, 32, 34, 35, 38–9, 41, 44, 85, 102, 106, 146, 165 integrity of 83–4, 94 see also Bauan rule Christian devotion 27–8, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41–2, 43–6, 47, 167 Christianization 2, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 145 cibi 92 class 13, 16, 22, 50, 51, 74, 84, 125, 144 middle-​class 13, 69 clothing 8, 36, 42–3, 73, 90, 92, 120, 135, 139 coloniality complex 28 colonization 3, 9, 35, 74, 130, 132, 145–6; see also British commodified 89–90, 93 commodities 56, 76, 79, 81, 132, 164 commoditization 81

192

Index

communalism 76, 82, 85, 89, 91, 92, 113, 125, 129, 132–​3, 134, 137, 138, 150, 160, 163 communitas 113 comportment 73, 101, 107 Connell, R.W. 12, 14–​5, 16, 163–​7; see also hegemonic masculinity consanguinity 31, 127, 128; see also kinship; mataqali conspicuous consumption 112, 129, 131, 133, 137; see also alcohol; gambling control 5, 6, 91, 101, 106, 135, 151, 158 corporeal 6, 73–​4, 90 cosmology 32, 35, 41, 61 custom 17, 32, 34, 40, 80, 102, 107, 112, 115, 129, 146, 165; see also tradition dance, sexualization of 144, 147–​8, 167; see also meke deed of cession 18, 74; see also Cakobau discipline 21, 114, 132, 148 displaying strength 6, 7, 21, 28, 45–​6, 90, 91, 92, 101; see also strong; toughness drinking 32–​3, 63–​5, 97–​8, 102–​5, 106, 107–​8, 109–​10, 112, 115; see also alcohol; beer; drunkenness; rum; yaqona drunkenness 102, 105, 106, 107, 109–​10, 111–​12, 113; see also alcohol; beer; drinking; rum; yaqona egalitarianism 23, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 72, 103, 127, 138 embodied 6, 42, 44, 142, 161 embodiment 11, 93 embody 53 Enlightenment 2, 130 ethno-​nationalism 28, 31, 34, 41, 55, 101; see also nationalism European way 4, 76, 93, 95, 105, 106, 116, 129, 131, 132; see also ‘the life of money’ Europeans 20, 31, 35, 38, 53–​4, 74, 75, 78, 82, 84, 95, 106–​7, 115–​16, 124, 129, 130, 132, 135, 143, 146–​7, 152, 154, 158, 160, 165 farming 56–​7, 78, 88, 165, 167; see also sugarcane (farming) fashion see clothing fighting 45–​6, 100, 107, 113, 167

Fiji time 78–​9 Fijian way 31, 37, 42, 76, 78, 85, 88, 93, 94, 95, 106, 107, 114, 115, 129, 131, 132, 146–​7; see also cakacaka vakavanua; ‘in the manner of the land’; tradition gambling 117–​31, 133–​38, 164; see also punting Gandhian 54, 56 gaze 90, 91, 92; see also tourist gaze gender identity 11, 71, 128, 138, 139–​41 gender ideology 28 gender norms 11, 101, 143, 155, 163, 164 gesture 6, 7, 43 gifts 33, 39, 79, 86, 136 girmityas 50–​3, 54, 57–​8 globalization 3, 9, 131, 147 global north 13 gossip 63, 66–​7, 102, 117, 140 Gramsci, Antonio 166 grog 64; see also kava; piper methysticum; yaqona habitus 65, 92, 163; see also Bourdieu hair 8, 139 hegemonic 24, 84, 130, 138 hegemonic masculinity 14, 15–​6, 18, 24, 71, 94–​5, 164, 166, 167, 168; see also Connell hegemony 22, 23, 55, 166 Herzfeld, Michael 13, 65–​6, 69–​70 hierarchical 12–​3, 17, 55, 60, 63, 106, 107, 154, 163 hierarchy 14–​15, 17, 19, 31, 41, 43, 67, 68, 79, 101, 164, 166, 167, 168 Hindu belief 54, 58–​60, 61, 62, 167 Hinduism 51, 59 Hokowhitu, Brendan 21 humility 6, 27, 70, 76, 83, 91, 92, 129, 133 hybrid 35, 38, 41, 51 hybridization 33, 34, 94, 166 indenture 16, 50–​1, 53–​4, 55–​6, 57–​8 India 50, 51–​2, 53, 74, 169 inequality 8, 49, 57, 58, 62, 64 economic 9 structural 154–​5 informal economy 87, 109, 131; see also night-​time economy itaukei 19

Index joking 62–​3, 97, 127, 128, 145, 148, 160 Jolly, Margaret 9 kava 62, 63, 97; see also grog; piper methysticum; yaqona kerekere 134, 160 kinship 76, 79, 85, 109, 111, 113, 149; see also consanguinity; mataqali Knauft, Bruce 30 korosi 37 labour 50–​1, 53–​4, 56–​7, 74, 78, 79, 80, 89–​90, 167; see also waged work, work Lal, Brij V. (B.V. Lal) 22–​3, 165 land 19–​20, 53–​6, 74, 76, 89, 133, 150, 167; see also vanua ‘the life of money’ 4, 93, 119; see also bad money; cash; European way; money; ‘the way of money’ loyalty 7, 56, 83 Macintyre, Martha 9, 112 mana 34, 39, 110, 123 manhood 13–​14, 31, 34, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 58, 65, 71–​2, 77, 78, 81, 93, 101, 105, 107, 112, 128, 156, 159–​60, 162, 163, 166–​7 ‘in the manner of the land’ 75, 115, 129, 132; see also cakacaka vakavanua; Fijian way; tradition market 76, 77, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93–​4, 132, 150, 164 market economy 20, 74, 76–​7, 81, 85, 94, 118, 130, 133, 137, 163, 164, 165 marketing 85, 90, 93, 154 marketization 89, 138 masculine domination 12, 13, 14, 24, 29, 31, 46, 58, 77, 80, 100, 145, 155, 166 mataqali 20, 88, 127; see also kinship meke 37, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93; see also cibi; dance Melanesia 13, 79, 122 Methodism 30, 32–​4, 36, 38, 41, 43–​5, 46–​7, 164 militarism 18–​9, 23 militarization 17–​8, 110–​11, 114 mimicry 32, 35, 36, 46; see also Bhabha modern body 5–​8, 113, 143, 147, 148, 153, 168

193

modernities 4; see also multiple modernities modernity 1–​3, 4, 9, 31, 47, 84, 85, 87, 95, 112, 113, 119, 129–​30, 137, 141–​2, 143, 145–​6, 147–​9, 153, 156, 157; see also performing modernity modernization 20, 29, 77, 114, 137, 161; see also being modern; performing modernity money 74, 75–​7, 78, 81–​3, 86, 87, 94–​5, 124, 125, 126, 131, 132–​7, 138, 152–​4, 167; see also bad money; cash; ‘the life of money’; ‘the way of money’ moral decay 84, 106, 129, 143, 145–​6, 153; see also morality; moralizing; moral lessons moral economy 77, 164 moral lessons 28; see also moral decay; morality; moralizing morality 60, 76–​7, 82–​3, 106, 115, 129, 132, 148; see also moral decay; moralizing; moral lessons moralizing 118, 130, 140; see also moral decay; morality; moral lessons multicultural 18, 75 multiple masculinities 14, 15, 162 multiple modernities 2, 3; see also modernities muscular 90, 92 muscled (body) 15 music 36, 61, 147–​8 Nadi 86, 88, 95, 98, 151, 153 Nadi town 59, 119, 148 narratives 3, 31, 34–​5, 38, 54, 68, 71, 84, 87, 106, 146, 154, 156 nationalism 19, 24; see also ethno-​nationalism New Zealand 21 nightclubbing 108, 131, 133, 148, 158 night-​time economy 8, 98, 100, 147, 150, 153, 156; see also informal economy non-​heteronormativity 139–​40, 141, 142, 149, 150–​2, 166; see also quari Norton, Robert 24 Papua New Guinea 9, 79, 122, 128, 164 patriarchal 12, 13, 24, 31, 34, 57, 143, 145, 154, 155, 166

194 performance 10, 11, 14, 16, 59, 65, 68–​9, 71, 103, 107, 112, 128, 140–​1, 143, 147–​8, 150, 166, 168 performativity 10, 60, 69 performing modernity 6, 102, 103, 113, 125, 142; see also being modern; modernization piper methysticum 32; see also grog; kava; yaqona placing a bet; see gambling postcolonial 29–​30, 130, 160–​1 postcolonialism 3 posture 6, 7, 43 praying 27, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 55, 58–​60, 61, 63; see also puja precolonial 17, 19, 36, 145–​6 presentation (of self) 6, 43, 65, 67, 69–​71, 90–​1 prostitute 150; see also sex work prostitution 106, 111, 152, 153; see also sex work puja 58; see also praying punting 117–​18, 120–​2, 126, 127, 133–​4, 135, 138; see also gambling qauri 81, 139–​41, 149–​54; see also non-​heteronormativity Rabuka, Sitiveni 18, 22, 23 race 6, 7, 16, 17, 49, 75, 104, 114, 144, 146–​7, 154, 160 racialized 78, 105 Ravuvu, Asesela 6, 17, 20, 43, 83 reflexivity 139, 140, 141, 142, 152, 165 rituals 13, 32, 33–​4, 61, 63, 64, 68, 103, 107, 144, 147 rugby 21–​2, 27–​8, 44–​5, 101, 123, 165, 167 rum 99, 111; see also alcohol; beer; drinking; drunkenness Sahlins, Marshall 81 self-​identity 14, 24, 46, 47, 55, 56, 57, 65, 77, 90, 113, 130, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167 seniority 64, 69, 77, 103, 106–​7, 115, 128 service economy 49, 90, 117 sex 140–​1, 142–​4, 145–​6, 147–​9, 151–​2, 153–​4, 155, 156–​8; see also sex talk

Index sex talk 145–​6, 147, 154, 155; see also sex sex work 148, 151, 152–​3; see also prostitute; prostitution sexiness 143; see also sexy sexual agency 142, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 156, 158 sexualized 90–​1, 143, 147, 154, 161 sexy 91, 147–​8, 156; see also sexiness singing 36, 59, 61, 105, 107, 111; see also chanting; korosi sociality 25, 47, 62, 100, 104, 112–​13, 116 spatial 78, 84, 85, 93, 119, 128, 132, 148, 149 spatio-​temporal 4, 10, 11, 78, 113, 163–​5 status 17, 18, 21, 23, 53, 56, 60–​1, 62, 63–​4, 67–​70, 71, 80–​1, 103, 113, 127, 155, 163, 167 storytelling 34, 39–​40, 58, 64, 67, 69, 70–​1, 167 strong 64, 101, 128; see also displaying strength; toughness sugarcane (farming) 24, 50, 53–​4, 56–​7, 165; see also farming Suva 84, 86, 146, 153 tabua 17, 79 talanoa 62–​8, 71; see also tanoa tanoa 33, 40, 62, 63, 85, 87; see also talanoa tavale 97, 127 Techniques of the Body (Mauss) 5 Tomlinson, Matt 83, 84, 129 Toren, Christina 20, 76, 97, 102, 106–​8 toughness 7, 15, 21, 23, 45, 64, 92, 97, 101, 128; see also displaying strength; strong tourism 89, 90, 94, 108, 114, 132, 149–​50, 152, 165, 168 economy 86, 88 work 6 see also tourists tourist gaze 6, 74, 93; see also gaze tourists 86–​8, 89, 90–1, 98, 151, 154, 156 money 131 resorts 90 see also tourism trade 75, 76, 85, 88, 114; see also capitalist trade

Index trading 88, 153, 156; see also capitalist trade tradition 3, 4, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 34, 38, 40–​1, 46–​7, 63, 65, 77, 79, 83, 87, 89, 90, 119, 129, 137–​8, 144, 145–​6, 147–​8, 165, 167; see also cakacaka vakavanua; custom; Fijian way; ‘in the manner of the land’ training 8, 28, 44 transgression 7, 103, 105, 108, 110, 131 turaga 83; see also turagaism; vakaturaga turagaism 84; see also turaga; vakaturaga unruliness 111 unruly 21, 107, 112, 113, 127 urban Fiji 7, 8, 25, 49, 108, 109, 119, 136–​ 7, 139–​40, 161; see also urbanism; urbanity; urbanization urbanism 8, 84, 132; see also urban Fiji urbanity 143, 146, 148–​9; see also urban Fiji urbanization 78, 114, 137, 152; see also urban Fiji vakaturaga 76, 83, 84, 132–​3; see also turaga; turagaism vanua 19–​20, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38–​40, 42, 83, 93, 94, 97, 106, 114; see also land veiqaravi 79; see also ceremonies village authorities 102, 115, 146 economy 76, 80, 81, 109, 125, 132, 133–​ 8, 164, 167 identity 94, 104, 163 land 76

195

life 4, 51, 74, 75, 78–​9, 82, 84–​5, 92–​3, 94–​5, 101–​3, 107, 108, 114, 129, 136, 164, 164 protocol 103, 105, 107, 127, 143, 146, 148 see also vanua violence 8, 9, 100, 106, 112, 113, 114, 140, 158 waged work 6, 74, 75, 76, 79–​80, 82, 85, 88, 89, 94, 109, 132, 133, 164; see also labour; work warrior 92, 93; see also bati wash-​down 97 ‘the way of money’ 75, 82, 85, 153; see also bad money; cash; money; ‘the life of money’ Wesleyanism 30, 31, 36, 38, 41 Western 37–​8, 82, 94, 116, 136, 153, 163 influence 7–​8, 35, 84, 139, 148 westernization 29, 129 work 6, 54, 55, 57, 62, 73–​4, 78–​9, 80, 90, 130, 131, 150; see also labour; waged work yaqona 32–​4, 39–​40, 58, 63–​4, 78, 79, 80, 86, 89, 93–​4, 97, 103, 104, 107, 109, 167; see also alcohol; grog; kava; piper methysticum young men 4, 6, 8, 28, 42, 44, 45, 47, 64, 69, 77, 80, 81, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106–​8, 109–​ 12, 113, 114–​16, 119, 128, 129, 137, 143, 145–​6, 147, 148–​9, 155, 156, 158, 164

196