Contenu du sommaire : Nouveaux regards sur les chefferies fidjiennes

From 1800 on, a number of Western vessels visited the Fiji islands for commercial, scientific or religious reasons. Before 1855, such visitors seem to have had little impact on the political balance of the archipelago, which depended on a few powerful chiefdoms. In local conflicts, however, things were changing. The role of firearms and of those who knew how to handle them became crucial, while other imported goods such as whale's teeth were growing a political and symbolic significance. To this, one must add the settlement of the first Christian missionaries in the islands. This article is concerned with the chiefly management of these foreign intrusions. With specific attention to the chiefdoms of Bua, Bau, Lau and Somosomo, it shows that the absorption of outsider men and goods into the Fijian community fell under local dynamics, pre-existing Fijian categories as well as foreign influences. Above all, it highlights the importance of exchanges within these relations.

‪Itaukei people in Fiji, that is to say the native people of Fiji, seem very homogenous regarding both cultural and political matters compared to people from further ‪west‪. The process of linguistic standardisation undertaken by the archipelago plays a huge part into this, as well as a specific kind of chieftaincy that can be almost considered an anthropological paradigm thanks to the work of Marshall Sahlins. However this chieftaincy isn't prevalent in all of Fiji, as shown by several authors who have studied Viti Levu societies then known as the Hill Tribes. We will focus today on one of those societies, Nasau, located in the middle east of the fijian archipelago, where a number of representations and practices testify of the great upheaval of the ‪‪xix‪‪t‪‪h‪‪ century caused by both the British pacification and the tongan progress that established new forms of hierarchies within this region. ‪

Over the course of the last century and a half, the structural and political underpinnings of Fijian chieftaincy have changed in significant ways and is no longer best represented by the union of the stranger-chief and local lineage. According to what must be the most widely-accepted origin mythology in present-day Fiji, the first Fijians arrived from Tanganyika, Africa. Emphasising the shared origins of all indigenous Fijians, this mythology denies the internal differentiation between autochthones and strangers that is often highlighted as a key constituent in Fijian political organization. In this ethnographic tradition, it is the “synthetic” combination of foreign charisma and autochthonous legitimation that holds up chieftaincy. Colonial-era Native Legislation reveals us a similar denial of the dichotomy in material and linguistic terms, overriding the distinction between the land-owning autochthones and the landless strangers, respectively designated as the “owners” or “hosts” (taukei) and “strangers” or “guests” (vulagi). This article considers the 2010 governmental decision to replace the words “Fijian” or “native Fijian” with the word iTaukei in official English-language use – this being the most recent example of a development that has been in the making for a considerable while.

‪Indigenous Micronesian political forms closely parallel those of eastern Melanesian and Polynesian societies. Chieftainship integrates aspects of land tenure, kin groupings, status hierarchy, and ideologies of the supernatural. Because so many aspects of social and political economy meet in these institutions, chiefly politics have traditionally been responsive to popular pressures; there is in fact, if not necessarily in myth, very little that is autocratic about them. The primary debate in the Federated States of Micronesia has not been about the importance of chieftainship, but whether the people are better served by including chiefs within their constitutional government or keeping them outside it, where it is believed they can more effectively exercise the checks and balances the people wish to maintain.

This paper ethnographies the highly stratified and situated notion of chieftainship within recent Fijian politics. Based on a long term fieldwork, the article explores the complexity and the pluralism that are inherent in chief figure in Fiji. A first part deconstructs the notion on chieftainship in Fiji through the prism of western and colonial influences. During the 2000 coup d'Etat, heterogeneity appeared to be the main feature of the Fijian chiefs as a whole. A second part revisits the mediation enacted by the legitimate and less legitimate leaders during the 2000 Coup d'Etat. It examines the efficiency of some distinctively Fijian practices involving chiefly artefacts (sperm whale's tooth or tabua) to resolve conflict. In the end, the paper connects the trajectory of successive post-independance leaders with diverse understandings of their mana. This brings to enlighten the configuration of the new socio-political class in Fiji in all of its complexity.

‪Drawing on research on the lived experience of ‪‪hiv‪‪ in Fiji, this paper explores the reasons leading ‪‪hiv‪‪-positive people of Indigenous Fijian origin to stop medical care for their condition. My argument in this paper is threefold. First, I argue that interruptions in treatment and medical follow-up by people living with ‪‪hiv‪‪ in Fiji take place in a local moral world in which preserving one's reputation and that of one's family and lineage is often given higher priority than mere health or survival. Second, I argue that the decision of ‪‪hiv‪‪-positive people to refuse or to cease medical care for their condition is strongly influenced by their inability to assume the costs this entails. Third, I argue that relationships between health workers and patients and dysfunctions in the healthcare system contribute to the factors leading people living with ‪‪hiv‪‪ to perceive ‪‪hiv‪‪ care as a burden. This, in turn, encourages interruptions of treatment and medical follow-up. To conclude, I make recommendations for improved ‪‪hiv ‪‪care services in Fiji. ‪

‪Ethnographic studies on Melanesian concepts of the human body and religion have expanded our understandings of the concept of personhood. Melanesian ethnographers have used a number of descriptive words to describe the metaphysical components of the person, including: soul, spirit, life force, ghost, and vital and spiritual essence. By investigating the traditional mortuary rites of the South Fore people in Papua New Guinea, which included the practice of endocannibalism, investigators were able to distinguish the 5 souls of the composite metaphysical person and their relationship to the humors of the body. An understanding of the South Fore cosmology and its relationship to its human inhabitants was required to understand these deeply embedded concepts. The South Fore person was found to be composed of 5 souls and bodily humors which together formed a composite individual, yet partible through division. We elucidated the concepts of the 5 souls of the Fore person, which revealed a strong correlation between the landscape with its overlying cosmology and the cultural bodily humors, and demonstrated their relationship to the power of the land.‪

In the decade or so from 1941, Australian military officers and government officials paid some attention, for the first time, to the Melanesians of New Caledonia. Their comments illuminate Australian attitudes in that period, and offer perspectives on a significant stage in the history of New Caledonia, in terms particularly of the partial enfranchisement of the Melanesians.