Ethnic tension in paradise: explaining ethnic supremacy aspirations in Fiji

Food Security in <scp>COVID</scp>‐19: Insights from Indigenous Fijian Communities

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

The country of Fiji, with a population of approximately 870 000 people, faces a growing burden of several communicable diseases including the bacterial infection typhoid fever. Surveillance data suggest that typhoid has become increasingly common in rural areas of Fiji and is more frequent amongst young adults. Transmission of the organisms that cause typhoid is facilitated by faecal contamination of food or water and may be influenced by local behavioural practices in Fiji. The Fijian Ministry of Health, with support from Australian Aid, hosted a meeting in August 2012 to develop comprehensive control and prevention strategies for typhoid fever in Fiji. International and local specialists were invited to share relevant data and discuss typhoid control options. The resultant recommendations focused on generating a clearer sense of the epidemiology of typhoid in Fiji and exploring the contribution of potential transmission pathways. Additionally, the panel suggested steps such as ensuring that recommended ciprofloxacin doses are appropriate to reduce the potential for relapse and reinfection in clinical cases, encouraging proper hand hygiene of food and drink handlers, working with water and sanitation agencies to review current sanitation practices and considering a vaccination policy targeting epidemiologically relevant populations.

Since the colonial period, kerekere as an indigenous Fijian mode of exchange has been blamed for stunting the economic development of indigenous Fijians. It has often been reduced to ‘begging’ and it has been used in connection with terms such as ‘corruption‘, and ‘dependency‘. This article strives for a more balanced and culturally complex account of kerekere. Business and vanua; modernity and tradition; moral economy and market economy are often imaged as dichotomous and irreconcilable by indigenous Fijians and others. However, this paper will show that these are false dichotomies, and yet the way they are imagined has a significant bearing on indigenous Fijian business discourse and practices and indigenous Fijian identity. After surveying politics of tradition and indigenous development literature, the authors appeal for integrated economic approaches in business discourse in Fiji which acknowledges kerekere as a potentially positive element in indigenous social entrepreneurship.

ABSTRACTPrevious research has claimed that world religions can extend the in-group beyond local and ethnic boundaries to form larger multi-ethnic groups, expanding human societies. Two experiments were run in Fiji to test religion’s ability to expand group boundaries. Experiment 1 employed a religious prime to increase prosocial behavior towards co-religionists among Hindu Indo-Fijians in an economic game. There were no overall effects of priming, but gender-specific effects were found. Priming reduced the amount women biased coin allocations to favor their preferred group. Men showed no bias in either condition. Experiment 2 employed the same economic game, without a prime, in a sample of indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian Christians. In this game, the monetary allocations were made between different religious and ethnic groups to test if preferences for religious in-groups were stronger than preferences for ethnic in-groups. Indo-Fijian Christians showed bias against their own ethnic group if they were from a different religion (Hindus or Muslims), but allocated fairly towards Christians from a different ethnic group (indigenous Fijians). Indigenous Fijians allocated less money to Muslims, but not Hindus. This evidence suggests that religious bonds can overcome the preference for one’s own ethnic group and expand in-groups to multi-ethnic religious groups.

Fijian rugby players see the possibilities of their careers as a source of national pride, for they show what they are capable of achieving on a global scale. Almost all prominent athletes are Indigenous Fijians or i-Taukei, and their success is regarded as part of the supposed naturalness of Indigenous Fijian moral and physical strength. To understand the global rugby industry, need to grasp how it combines with the social systems in which its athletes (and others) are enmeshed, in this case the Indigenous Fijian social structures, based on kinship, a variety of “traditional” and modern values, and the strong but changing influence of different Christian churches. Indigenous Fijian kinship systems are adapting to the possibilities and restrictions of modernity. Increasing numbers of Fijians live away from the close-knit hierarchical village communities and communal economies that are at the core of many Indigenous conceptions of kinship.

Fiji is one of the four Pacific Island Countries (PICs) that have a military force. The Fijian military, the Republic (formerly Royal) Fiji Military Forces (RFMF), has contributed to political instability by overthrowing democratically elected governments on four separate occasions. The first of these coups was in May 1987 and was said to be for the protection of indigenous rights and to avoid the military being used to suppress indigenous ethnic Fijians. The military had underwritten ethnic Fijian (Taukei) underwrote chiefly power against a government that was perceived and portrayed as Indo-Fijian supported and Indo-Fijian dominated. Interestingly enough, the very same military nearly 20 years on overthrew what was largely an indigenous Fijian supported and dominated government. The imposed military-backed government was generally opposed by Taukei (indigenous Fijians). The Fijian military has remained over 99% ethnic Fijian (Taukei) in a multiethnic society. Over the last ten years, there has been further militarization of the country, and although both the military-backed and the post-2014 democratically elected government led by Retired Rear Admiral Vorege Bainimarama have strongly advocated ‘racially’ or ethnically blind policies, the ethnic composition of the military has remained unchanged. This chapter provides a historical background to the Fiji military force’s ethnic composition, its role in political instability and human rights violations, militarization, and the potential for further instability and oppression. It argues that a more multiethnic and gender-balanced military force being more representative of the country’s people is less likely to engage in illegal usurpation of state power.

The article presents a post-colonial reading of affirmative action (AA) policies in education in Fiji. It argues that AA was a deliberate response by various predominantly Indigenous Fijian post-colonial governments to counter the effects of a discriminatory and disadvantaging colonial history that left huge gaps in the social (education) and economic (employment) fabric of Indigenous Fijian life. In an analysis of the outcomes of AA to assist Indigenous Fijians in education, the point is made that the outcomes have been mixed. The focus then shifts to providing five alternatives to AA policy in Fiji. The article ends with suggestions for how we can rethink AA in Fiji.

In this paper, I explore the moral challenges of reflexivity in the contexts of social hierarchy and the politics of tradition. I analyze the work of indigenous Fijian anthropologist R.R. Nayacakalou, a keen social observer who endured professional challenges because of his nonchiefly social status. A student of Raymond Firth's at the University of London, Nayacakalou was the first indigenous Fijian to earn his Ph.D. in anthropology. He was managing the Native Land Trust Board in Fiji when he died tragically young in 1972. His reputation has suffered since his death, as his untimely passing has been interpreted by some indigenous Fijians as punishment for his supposed alienation of indigenous lands. Nayacakalou's life and work illustrate the ways in which anthropological reflexivity can inspire moral critique from its subjects when a critical stance toward tradition is mistaken as an attack on indigenous sovereignty.

For most of its postcolonial history, Fiji’s government was under iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) control, viewed by iTaukei as the guardian of their status and rights. However, iTaukei-headed governments from the military coup in 2006 until the parliament elections in 2022 undertook modernizing reforms that emphasized equality and enjoyed predominantly Indo-Fijian support. Central in the governing political party’s manifesto from the resumption of elections in 2014 was the new constitutional principle of ‘common and equal citizenry’. Electoral competition and parliamentary debate under the 2013 Constitution have been marked by protests against the removal of much of the institutional support for Indigenous group rights that existed in Fiji’s political system until the 2006 coup. The December 2022 elections brought a new government by a coalition of parties led and supported mainly by Indigenous Fijians. Its agenda includes a promise to redress the weakening of Indigenous status and rights under Bainimarama’s rule.

The article presents a post-colonial reading of affirmative action (AA) policies in education in Fiji. It argues that AA was a deliberate response by various predominantly Indigenous Fijian post-colonial governments to counter the effects of a discriminatory and disadvantaging colonial history that left huge gaps in the social (education) and economic (employment) fabric of Indigenous Fijian life. In an analysis of the outcomes of AA to assist Indigenous Fijians in education, the point is made that the outcomes have been mixed. The focus then shifts to providing five alternatives to AA policy in Fiji. The article ends with suggestions for how we can rethink AA in Fiji.

The article presents a post-colonial reading of affirmative action (AA) policies in education in Fiji. It argues that AA was a deliberate response by various predominantly Indigenous Fijian post-colonial governments to counter the effects of a discriminatory and disadvantaging colonial history that left huge gaps in the social (education) and economic (employment) fabric of Indigenous Fijian life. In an analysis of the outcomes of AA to assist Indigenous Fijians in education, the point is made that the outcomes have been mixed. The focus then shifts to providing five alternatives to AA policy in Fiji. The article ends with suggestions for how we can rethink AA in Fiji.

This article explores the race and class issues which continue to define Fiji soccer and perplex its stakeholders up to the present day. Cultural hegemony is clearly present with indigenous Fijian ex-star players finding it difficult to reach positions of status in administration and management after their playing careers end; this usually condemns them to a life of village-based poverty and (from a secular western standpoint) unemployment. The Fiji-Indian community (37.5% of the total population) ‘controls’ the game, and indigenous Fijian stars are basically accepted as players but not as managers or administrators. Although deliberate racism is probably not common, the game’s culture is imbued with a ‘racial feeling’, to quote the ex-Ba and Fiji player (and Fiji-Indian) Julie Sami, and is exclusionary in its effects. Fiji-Indian stereotypes of indigenous Fijians as lazy, ill-disciplined, and prone to drunkenness mirror white stereotypes about black footballers referred to in prior literature.

Reviewed by: Our Wealth is Loving Each Other: Self and Society in Fiji Matthew Tomlinson Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other: Self and Society in Fiji, by Karen J Brison. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7391-1488-9, xix + 150 pages, bibliography, index. US $60.00. Many scholars would agree that “tradition” and “modernity” are cultural categories through which people evaluate, and sometimes attempt to shape, unfolding social action. Tradition and modernity are invoked as oppositions, each constructed against the other, but in practice they are often not neatly separable. In this regard, one of the delights of Karen J Brison’s Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other is reading the personal accounts of indigenous Fijian women who use both of these categories strategically, and sometimes simultaneously, positioning themselves both as vanguards of the new and defenders of the old. Brison argues that tensions of traditional versus modern are often configured in Fiji as sociocentric versus individualistic orientations: that is, being traditional means working for the social order, whereas being modern means looking out for oneself. The women who tell their life stories in this engaging book have figured out how to be both traditional and modern through “casting communalism as an individual achievement” (10). They insist on their own autonomy, but frame their autonomy as something they exercise for others’ benefit. The key ethnographic term in the book is vanua, a complex Fijian domain encompassing chiefs and their subjects, land, and traditional practices including ritual exchanges [End Page 495] and kava-drinking ceremonies. The vanua, in indigenous Fijian discourse, invokes passionate senses of belonging to a specific place that has deep roots in the past. One belongs to one’s father’s village, and to the chiefdom of which it is a part; Fiji, as a nation, belongs inalienably to indigenous Fijians (so the reasoning goes) because the Christian God gave it to them. In these senses, the vanua is something of which many Fijians are intensely proud. In vanua terms, one always has a role to play: one is a chief or a commoner, a member of a certain clan, with rights in particular lands and certain ceremonial obligations. These obligations can be rather onerous, especially for women and non-chiefly men. Brison’s interlocutors face the challenge of defining a place for themselves within the vanua that they find satisfying, even as the vanua imposes many constraints and obligations that force people to subvert their individual desires. After the introductory chapter, in chapter 2 Brison considers the ceremonial speech of isevusevu presentations. In isevusevu, guests and hosts present kava plants, from which a narcotic (and extremely popular) beverage is made. The speeches depict the vanua as sacred and ranked in a precise hierarchy, although Brison observes that many villagers are privately critical of this idealistic view. The heart of the book is chapters 3 through 5, in which women’s life narratives are used to illuminate the broad topics of Christianity, sociocentrism, and modernity. In chapter three, Brison notes how the Methodist Church is often seen as the denomination closest to the vanua, whereas evangelical churches are considered to be globally oriented institutions that challenge (or ignore) the power of local chiefs. In the next chapter, she presents the stories of four women, all of whom give an “account of a properly sociocentric self” (68) by presenting themselves as acting in the best interests of the vanua. The following chapter contains two more life stories, again showing how women depict themselves as both autonomous and community-minded—modern subjects who appreciate tradition. After these core chapters, Brison gives two men’s life stories in chapter 6, and concludes in chapter 7 with an analysis of children’s senses of identity, focusing on their ideologically framed use of different dialects and languages. Although it is not an explicit topic of the book until the last chapter, Brison makes sharp observations about language ideology in earlier sections, noting how vanua events are often marked by the self-conscious use of local dialects whereas speakers in church tend to use the national standard variety of Fijian, called “Bauan” because it is based on the dialect of Bau...

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other explores the fluid and context-bound nature of cultural and personal identity among indigenous Fijians. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized pre-modern tradition, individual Fijians are often more concerned with defining their identity vis-à-vis other villagers and other groups within Fiji. When people craft self accounts to justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity on the margins is an experience of anxiety provoking contradictions between competing ideologies, and between international ideologies and local experiences. Indigenous Fijians have been exposed to international ideologies and government programs extolling the virtues of "pre-modern" communities that place communal good and time honored tradition over individual gain. But other waves of policy and rhetoric have stressed individual achievement and the need to "shake" individuals out of community bonds to foster economic development. Individuals feel contradictory pressures to be autonomous, achieving individuals and to subordinate self to community and tradition. Brison examines traditional kava ceremonies, evangelical church rhetoric, and individual life history narratives, to show how individuals draw on a repertoire of narratives from local and international culture to define their identity and sense of self. Our Wealth is Loving Each Other is appropriate for upper level students and anyone with an interest in Fiji or anthropology.