Imagining Modernity in Rural Fiji

Abstract

Understanding ethnic identity in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific requires looking at the ways that individuals draw on ideologies to make sense of the particular circumstances of their lives. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized premodern tradition, individual Fijians are more concerned with defining their identity vis-a-vis other villagers. When people justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community, they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity is experienced individually as contradictions between competing ideologies and local experience through idiosyncratic life circumstances. Modern and traditional are not opposites but creatively redefined as having much in common. (Fiji, modernity, postcolonialism, ethnic identity, Pacific) Much literature has examined the ways tradition in the Pacific is invented or imagined to define present identity and achieve contemporary goals (e.g. Keesing 1989; Lawson 1996; Linnekin 1990). This article follows Englund and Leach (2000), Riles (2001), and Robbins (2001) in suggesting that the ways Pacific people imagine modernity is just as crucial as the ways they invent tradition for constructing their sense of self. Modernity, in the form of increased flows of capital, commodities, ideologies, and images, is a state of the world; but, following Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001), modernity, like the concept of tradition, is also a local construct, imagined in a variety of ways to make sense of particular life circumstances. Ferguson (1999) and Riles (2001) both argue that Third World peoples use constructs of modernity to define identities for themselves within local culture. Ferguson (1999) says that his Zambia informants in the 1980s sounded as if they had read 1950s sociology texts on modernization theory when they stressed the need for strong nuclear families, independent individuals, and the need to work hard and try new things in order to bring about economic development. While social scientists and Third World governments have largely rejected modernization theory, it lives on in the minds of those who grew up under the policies it shaped. Ferguson (1999) suggests that Zambians slip in and out of modernity as a distinctive style in order to position themselves in Zambian society; for instance, espousing nuclear families and avoiding the demands of rural relatives. Riles (2001) similarly argues that urban Fijian workers in NGOs define their identity within the Fijian community through an international aesthetic of modernity that constructs problems and approaches in terms of international concepts like the need for networks and for grids generating goals and plans for action. Both scholars suggest that modernity is constructed in imagination to create local identities (cf. Englund 2002). The life stories of several rural Fijians show that constructs of modernity are just as crucial to imagining identity as constructs of tradition. Examining how people use constructs of modernity to imagine their identities is important for understanding debates about the effects of colonization and globalization on Pacific identities. Some anthropologists (e.g., Barber 1997) argue that Third World postcolonials are trapped in a dynamic of trying to restore local control and pride by embracing romanticized, essentialist, ethnic identities. In Fiji, for instance, prominent government figures have rejected democracy based on common roll elections as inappropriate to a Fijian culture based on ranked vanua (chieftainships tied to particular pieces of land). This was part of an effort to protect Fijian control of land and government when many feared that unchecked economic competition would quickly relegate indigenous Fijians to the bottom of a national and world order (Keesing 1989; Lawson 1996). These ideas were apparently illustrated by a 2000 coup in Fiji that brought with it renewed calls to return to a Fijian tradition of chiefly control and ties to the land. …