WEAVING THE COMMUNITY:
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF A FIJIAN VILLAGE
by Stephanie Sienkiewicz

Extended Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on the Pronunciation of Fijian Words

Introduction

Methods

Researching By Means of Participant-Observation

The Narewa Koro

Chapter 2 - Social Organization and Structure in the Village: Existing and Changing Rules

Patriarchy and Hierarchy

Village History

Age Hierarchy

The Kinship System and Systems of Respect

Social Organization, Bending Rules

Education in the Village

The Religious Village

Conclusion

Chapter 3 - Village Economics: The Distribution of Trust

Daily Life and Occupation in the Fijian Village

Sources of Income

Expenditures

Payment Procedures Confirm that Saving Money is Not a Main Goal

Give and Take, Kerekere Solesole

Conclusion

Chapter 4 - Life Cycle Rituals: Individuals Connect the Community

The Sevusevu

Birth

The Twenty-First Birthday

Marriage

Death

The Wedding, An In-Depth Analysis of a Ritual

Chapter 5 - Life Stories: Experiences of Village Life

Life History: "Tila"

Life History: "Menani"

Life History: "Dili"

Life History: "Sulueti"

Conclusion

Chapter 6 - Religion in the Village: The Function of Church

The Methodist Church in Narewa

The Assemblies of God Church

Conversion from the Methodist Church to the Assemblies of God Church

Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to extend deep thanks for my integration into the Narewa village community. My friends and family in Narewa divulged any type of information and assistance that I desired while in Fiji. I immensely value the familiar conversations I held with many women in the village. These encounters evoked some of the most sincere sadness and joy that I have ever felt.

My integration could not have been possible, however, without the term abroad program to Fiji. Thank you to Karen and Steve for not only developing the term, but for devising a way to combine academic progress with immersion into the community. I have both scholastic work and a web of personal relationships to show for my experience. I also wish to thank my professors for their attention to my personal needs, hygienic and emotional. I have learned much through my interaction with them.

I want also to thank those at home, specifically my mother, who provided an outlet and a link away from the field when I needed escape.

While in Narewa, I struggled with a concept of giving that is unfamiliar to me in America. I often received unprovoked gifts and could never express my gratitude in a way I saw fit. Accustomed to my own personal background, I felt I should give something in equal exchange. Still, I never felt that I could reciprocate appropriately. Likewise, I cannot reciprocate the amount of help which the Narewa village community provided me. I greatly admire the unselfish sharing nature of every person I encountered in the village. I hope I have been able to integrate this into my own person such that I might contain the village at all times within me. I desire the comfort with which the villagers both received and shared their possessions and their lives.

Finally, I wish to thank the people of Narewa for allowing me to witness and become a part of their lives. Thank you Nana for your nurturing. I was very fortunate to live with someone with your understanding. I wish to thank Nei for accompanying me, relaxing me, and being my sister. Thank you to Adi for your sense of comfort. Thank you to my friends Solei and Kalisi for helping me remember how universal friendship is. I wish too to thank the children of Narewa for giving me a sense of peace which is what I need most to feel about the world.

"Vinaka Ra!"

NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF FIJIAN WORDS

Fijian orthography generally follows an pattern that fits with an English speaker's intuitive understanding, but some distinctive devices have been used to render Fijian in a systematic way.

More conventional orthography:

"a" as in "father"
"e" as in "bed"
"i" as the "ee" in "beet"
"o" as in "hope" but with no diphthong
"u" as in "tube"

The unconventional features of Fijian orthography are as follows:

"b" refers to the sound "mb" as in "tomboy"
"d" refers to "nd" as in "find"
"c" is a voiced "th" as in "the"
"g" is the "ng" as in "singer"
"q" is the "ng" as in "finger"

INTRODUCTION

A Fijian village has many facets which must be explored in order to understand the Fijian cultural value system. During my research in Fiji, I looked into the topics of social organization and structure, economics, rituals and life cycle, personal life stories, and religion. These five categories divide this ethnography into five chapters; the chapter total is seven with the addition of the Introduction and Conclusion chapters. I hope that I have been able to express what life in a Fijian village is really like and that I have represented the villagers with whom I lived and interacted in a courteous and respectable manner.

Fijian ethnic identity is centered around the community. Individuals are a representation and satellite of their greater community. An occupation with rules and etiquette thus flavors much of village life as communal living restricts people's actions. Each person stands for the entire community which accepts the blame or praise of each villager. A community must curb the actions of its members then so as to maintain a positive reputation.

Fijians see interaction between people as interaction between members of two different communities. The world is composed of communities rather than individuals. Following this process of thinking, Fijian society is framed around hierarchy since there must be someone to represent the entire community. This person is the chief of a village or district, etc. A chief is the apex of Fijian hierarchy and a chiefly family maintains high status. The hierarchy descends from elders to children; birth order dictates status. Also, in a patrilineal society, such as Fiji, men are placed above women on the status scale. A system of respect mandates that those lowest on the hierarchy respect anyone above them, especially those at the top.

As a result of communal living, individuals see themselves as the product of the relationships they have with others. Social organization is a very important part of Fijian life. In a small community, such as a village, a person is related to each other person in a defined way. Fijian relationships are structured so that each person has a certain role which he/she must play out with each other person he/she is related to. These roles limit what kind of activity, if any, relatives may engage in together. They also dictate how a person should act around one of his/her relatives. All of these role relations operate upon and reinforce the social hierarchy within the village.

The village economy is also influenced by communal life. Fijians pride themselves on a system of sharing with relatives and fellow villagers. This emphasizes that they are primarily part of a community and secondarily an individual. Hoarding money indicates a break with the community, so Fijians keep a nonchalant approach to their personal finances with the idea that social ties are more important than economic status. Continually renewed social ties allow villagers to trust that they will survive. This trust intertwines the community further as many people could not live comfortably without the assistance of their relatives.

It is apparent that individuals are considered extensions of their community since rituals centering around life cycle events bring together entire communities. The rituals performed are always functions for an entire social group and are structured in a way that they reiterate Fijian hierarchy. The life cycle events which Fijians celebrate emphasize an individual's movement from one certain role in the society to another. Various members of the community attend to mark the occasion and to reaccept that person into the community in a new role with different expectations and requirements.

It is valuable to look into individual people's lives in the community to gage how supportive and at the same time restrictive village life is. The Life History Chapter delves into the lives of four women in the village. One may see through reading these stories how women new to the community find communal restrictions oppressive. But as they age, adjust to their new community, and gain status, these women grow to see their community as fulfilling, not restrictive. They begin to feel that the communal demands placed upon them are in line with their personal desires. The interdependent, interwoven life in a Fijian village supports villagers but at the same time places constraints upon them.

All village life exists around hierarchy. And, institutions which the community supports reinforce the social order. Religion too has been molded to fit into the traditional Fijian value system. The Methodist Church, to which the majority of Fijians belong, operates around and reiterates status relations as they exist in the village outside of the church. Conversions are increasingly frequent in Fiji however. This shows that communal regulations are controlling to the extent that people need an outlet from that hierarchy; often conversions are motivated by a person's search for an egalitarian atmosphere.

Fijian individuals are embedded in a closely connected community. Communal life places restrictions on villagers' lives because as an extension of a community, an individual's actions must uphold the reputation of that social group. These regulations are sometimes seen as oppressive and often seen as supportive. Hierarchy, the concept around which all of Fijian life exists, infiltrates each facet of Fijian life.

Ethnography Methods

I began orienting myself to the village by mapping and performing a census. These provide a sense of the social divisions in a village, if houses are grouped with other houses of the same clan, for instance. I performed the census for ten different village households. The census provided the following basic information about each house:

1. Name of the head of the household and wife.
2. Name of house location. (Each house in the village is given a name at its construction.) This is a name of the occupant's choice.
3. Original village of wife. (According to traditional culture, women move to their husbands' villages.)
4. Name of husband's mataqali, tokatoka, and yavusa. (The mataqali is "an agnatically related social unit - usually a lineage of the larger clan" (Ravuvu 1983:119). The tokatoka is "a sub-lineage of a mataqali" (Ravuvu 1983:121). The yavusa is "a social unit of agnatically related members larger than the mataqali and the members of which claim descendants from a common founding male ancestor" (Ravuvu 1983:123).)
5. Full information on husband. (This includes parents' names, parents' original villages, extent of schooling, church affiliation, jobs or work, previous marriages.)
6. Full information on wife.
7. Full information on eldest child.
8. Full information on next eldest, etc.
9. Full information on anyone else who sleeps in the house.

The census allowed me to make some estimates about the size of the village in general and specifically about the sizes of mataqali and families. It also allowed for some other generalizations such as proportions of the different religious affiliations to one another, percentage of employed villagers, rate of education, etc. Informally however, this procedure introduced me to many villagers and oriented them to the interview process which I employed throughout the course of my stay.

In order to learn the kinship system, I drew up genealogies for two different people in the village and also conducted interviews with people about the kin terms they use and the relationships that they have with different sorts of relatives. Using the genealogy diagrams as a model helped me to locate the Fijian names for all types of relatives. Understanding the differing rules which correspond to various relationships which family members have with other family members provided insight into the hierarchy of village social structure.

In order to assess the economic life of the overall village, I gathered information through an economic survey. This survey aimed to uncover the kinds of economic activities villagers engage in, their sources of income, and how they spend the money they have. The economic survey contained the following questions.

1. How do the husband and wife of the family spend their days, what is their daily routine?
2. What are their sources of income?
3. What are their debts?
4. What are their expenses?
5. What are their attitudes about economic issues? (I asked if donations and money spent on ceremonies is burdensome. Is making money important to people, would they like to be rich? I also asked if people mind lending money or borrowing money from others.)

After performing this survey in six village households, I could get a sense of the proportions of people in the village with jobs or those who depend upon subsistence farming. I could also then make generalizations about the village as to how much money most people make, where they get this money from, and what things they consider important enough to spend it on. The survey was useful to assess how important money is to people.

Throughout the course of my stay in Fiji, I observed various rituals. While attending these I took notes on the proceedings and asked questions of attendants as to the significance of that specific ritual. I also conducted interviews with villagers about the rituals that mark a person's progression in the life cycle. I asked them what the important times in a person's life are that they celebrate with a community gathering. The answers to this question did not just provide description about the many rituals. They demonstrated how Fijians conceptualize the life cycle, how many different roles people play in the community over the course of their life.

I conducted interviews with four women in my village. I told these people that I was interested in finding out what it feels like to be in the different stages of life in Fiji, to fill different roles of the community. I listened as these women told me the stories of their lives, as they think of it. Because of time constraints, I could not interview everyone in the village about their life. Therefore, I could not acquire descriptions about each role in the village. I interviewed four women with whom I was comfortable and friendly, such that I could better understand how they view their own lives in the context of the lives I witnessed them lead. These were women whose lives I wished to hear more about; our familiar acquaintance provided a relaxed atmosphere in which to conduct the interview.

During my stay, I attended numerous Methodist church services. I also attended one Assemblies of God (a separate Christian sect) church service with a family in the village. During both kinds of services I took notes on the structure of the mass, layout of the church, etc. in order to make a comparison between the two denominations. In order to find out more about the difference between the churches and about the factors which motivate someone to switch from Methodism to another sect, I interviewed a woman in the village about her conversion.

I compiled information from all of these techniques in order to write this ethnography. I could not have received such rich information however, if I was not seen as a member of the community during my stay.

Researching By Means of Participant-Observation

I was allowed such a look into the community because I was taken in by a family in the village. My family explained social and kinship relationships to me just as if I was a member of the family. I therefore experienced all of the different kin relations that Fijians have. I did not merely ask about them and report. I became involved in the community, as a member of that community. This technique is called participant-observation.

The only real understanding of a culture comes when a person can place herself inside that culture and look out, look at the world, from that vantage point, discarding, for a short time, her own world views. Participant-observation means that a person enters into a community and lives with that community. By living in the culture, by participating in the same things that the people of that culture participate in, one can develop an understanding of why they do things the way they do.

While taking part in village activities, living the village life, I made almost daily recordings of events and actions that I witnessed. My fieldnotes, kept throughout the duration of my stay, contain a wide range of material from village functions, to daily activities, to stories people told me and interviews I conducted.

The Narewa Koro

During my stay in Fiji, from early September, 1999 to late November, 1999, I lived in a village named Narewa. Narewa is in the Rakiraki District of the province of Ra on the northwestern coast of Viti Levu. It is on the coastal side of King's Road, a highway encircling Viti Levu (this changes into Queen's Road in other parts of the island). Narewa is situated directly adjacent to a landmark rock, called Ulu ni Navatu. This rock is a favorite for motorists when they drive by and see the naturally created silhouette of a person's face atop the mountain.

Narewa and the two adjacent villages, one on each side of Narewa, fall under the jurisdiction of one chief, the Tui Navatu. The Tui Navatu is located in Vitawa, the largest of the three villages. There is also a chief in Narewa, the Tui Malake. He represents members of a different yavusa than those that the Tui Navatu presides over.

Narewa is a relatively small village compared with others in the district. There are approximately 80 people in the village and only 18 houses are occupied. The houses in the village are arranged in an imperfect circle surrounding the Methodist church and community hall. Between these two buildings is the village green, where all festivals and outdoor village activities are held.

The small size of the village also means that people within it know each other very well and the sense of community may be stronger than in other larger villages. Narewa seemed very familiar to me since it was small enough that I knew almost everyone who lived there. Their were also instances during my stay that I could feel communal constraints and how tightly connected the community is.

The name of the house in which I lived is Andua, meaning alone. Six people lived in this house aside from me. My nana, Neni Waqa, repeatedly told me that she was my mother while I was in Fiji and rubbed my back as only a mother can. My tata (father), Jone Waqa, is known as the village joker and has the high-pitched chuckle to match. My 29 year-old brother Samisoni, called Makete by all, the village vakatawa/catechist, correlates my place of origin, New York State, with King Kong. I won't forget the sound of his 9 year-old son, Vunigasau, called Puni, calling through my bedroom window my first week in the village to get me up from an afternoon nap, "Nei, please, I want to see your computer" (nei is aunt in Fijian). Bubu (pronounced mboo-mboo) is the fifth person in the house. No one is clear on her age; most say 107 or 108. She is my tata's cane-wielding mother. And the sixth person of the house, my constant companion, interpreter, and link to the rest of the village, is my 18 year-old sister, Nei (Her real name is Vinaina but since she was named after her aunt, everyone calls her Nei.). These people were and continue to be my family.

On to Chapter 2...