Luve Ni Wai as the British Saw It: Constructions of Custom and Disorder in Colonial Fiji

Abstract

In 1887 British colonial authorities in Fiji established a regulation prohibiting ni wai and kindred practices. Never clearly comprehended by the British, these varied possession and invulnerability rites evoked characterizations ranging from superstition to rebellion. Taking the colonial British as its object of ethnographic analysis, this essay explores luve ni wai as the British saw it. Analyzing indirect rule based on custom as a British invention of tradition which created a Christian, chiefly hierarchy, the essay finds in the 1887 regulation against luve ni wai a corollary creation of negative tradition in which alternative Fijian expressions of authority and order were constructed as criminal and disorderly. In Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg (I983) writes of the sixteenthand seventeenth-century benandanti, participants in an agrarian fertility cult in the Friuli region of Italy, who were constructed as witches by the Inquisition, and of the process by which the inquisitorial categories eventually refracted into the beliefs of the benandanti themselves. Keith Thomas (1971: 2I3-67) chronicles a similar historical process in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England in which practitioners of magic, so-called cunning men and wise women, became witches of a different sort in relation to the Christian church's distinction between the godly and the satanic.1 So too in colonial Peru did an indigenous cosmological system (and in particular indigenous women's relationships to founding goddesses) become witchcraft in the Spanish colonial rule and records (Silverblatt 1987). In parallel, in the British colony of Fiji invulnerability rituals called luve ni wai were initially labeled heathen by settlers, missionaries, and colonial officials. In 1887 the British colonial government of Fiji passed a regulation against ni wai, kalou rere and kindred practices which Ethnohistory 36:4 (Fall I989). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8oI/89/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Tue, 18 Oct 2016 06:30:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms