October 13, 2000: Volume 50, Number 6

Cermony Reflects Fijian 'Place in World'

Imagine a department meeting with long welcoming speeches, asking of forgiveness for failings, greetings to distant relatives and colleagues and an offering of a bitter beverage that most people cannot help making faces over as they "enjoy" it.

Welcome to Fiji, where the idea of short power meetings is, well, foreign.

Instead, Fiji's "sevusevu" ceremony accompanies nearly every gathering of indigenous Fijian people, often turning what would be a brief meeting into an all-day affair. The ceremony and its refrain — "Our Wealth is Loving Each Other and Worshipping God" — emphasize the communal nature of Fijian life and their dismissal of the value of material wealth.

Karen Brison and Steven Leavitt, associate professors of anthropology, will focus on the significance of the sevusevu ceremony in a faculty colloquium titled "Our Wealth is Loving Each Other: Ethnic Identity and the Sociocentric Self in Fiji" on Tuesday, Oct. 17, at 11:30 a.m. in the Olin Auditorium. A buffet lunch will follow in Hale House.

The Pacific archipelago nation of Fiji is populated by 700,000 people, half of whom are indigenous. Most of the other half are descendants of Indians who were brought by British colonists to work as indentured labor on sugar plantations. Considerable economic and political power rests with the Indo-Fijians, who have made education and economic development a priority. The indigenous Fijians, meanwhile, have limited economic prospects.

So why is the "sevusevu" a centerpiece of indigenous Fijian culture?

"We're arguing that this is self-conscious or reactive in that helps the Fijians to feel good about their place in the world," says Brison. "When faced with the greater economic success of Indo-Fijians, Fijians can tell themselves, 'We Fijians deal with each other as parts of our community. We're not interested in our individual benefit. We're interested in playing our role well and supporting our traditional culture.'"

It is also a theme often expressed by the individuals when they talk about their lot in life, Leavitt adds. "They may say that they had to choose what their priorities were in their own life," he says. "They may say, 'I decided I wasn't going to be ambitious and become super successful. Instead I'm concentrating on this idea of being part of my community and being a good Fijian.'

"It has a certain self-serving quality to it in that they can kind of smooth over their failings," Leavitt says. "We're operating from a theoretical perspective that says that all human beings do this."

At the center of the "sevusevu" is the offering of kava, a mildly narcotic beverage made from the kava root. While kava is classified as a "mild narcotic," consuming even large quantities has little effect, causing one to be only a bit more relaxed, say Brison and Leavitt.

"They end up putting a lot of time and energy into this," Leavitt says. "For an observer, it's certainly striking." Leavitt and Brison have met a number of people whose lives are consumed by meetings and the sevusevu ceremonies. There are even "kava widows" whose families bear some of the same strains that alcoholics bring to theirs.

One Fijian, a retired policeman, told Brison and Leavitt that he belongs to some 20 to 25 organizations, any one of which might schedule a meeting with a sevusevu. "Attending these meetings is what he does," says Leavitt. "He kind of enjoys it."

Adds Brison: "The buzz he's getting out of it is not from the kava, but from the feeling that he is an important person, a crucial person in the village." While outsiders often see all these ceremonies as a big waste of time, Brison and Leavitt were eventually convinced that they made life meaningful for many people who might otherwise feel marginalized in a world community.

Brison and Leavitt, who are married, began their research in Fiji in 1997, when they took three students there for field study. Last year, they took seven students for the fall term, and lived there the remainder of the year with their son Jeffrey, now 6.

Brison and Leavitt both earned their masters and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Diego. Previously, they had done research in Papua New Guinea.

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