Mind, Materiality and History

Explorations in Fijian Ethnography

Christina Toren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134645152
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we become who we are? How is it that people are so similar in the ways they differ from one another, and so different in the ways they are the same?
Christina Toren's theory of mind as not only a physical phenomenon, but an historical one, sets out to answer these questions by examining how the material world of objects and other people informs the constitution of mind in persons over time.
This theory of embodied mind as a microhistorical process is set out in the first chapter, providing a context for the nine papers that follow. Questions explored include the way meaning-making processes reference an historically specific world and are responsible at once for continuity and change, how ritual informs children's constitution of the categories adults use to describe the world, and how people represent their relationships with one another and in so doing come to embody history.
Mind, Materiality and History has direct relevance to current debates on the nature of mind and consciousness, and demonstrates the centrality of the study of children to social analysis. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in anthropological theory and methodology, as well as those engaged in material culture studies.

Part I
OBJECTIFYING HISTORY, MATERIAL MIND

My introductory essay above attempts to resolve theoretical problems which have nagged at me since first I became conscious of them during the postgraduate qualifying year that converted me from a psychologist to an anthropologist, and which crystallised during the writing of my doctoral dissertation—completed in 1986. At any given time—both then and later—what I was writing focused on an attempt to understand the ideas and practices that inform everyday life in Sawaieke and in so doing to gain a degree of access to my own taken-for-granted. All three essays in this first part provide examples of how the knowledge that is a product of mind is made material in practices like yaqona-drinking, in objects such as tapestry reproductions of ‘The Last Supper’, in the very land itself. In this process history is rendered objective by virtue of its instantiation in the concrete—a process that itself suggests that the real and the symbolic are aspects of one another.

As will become clear to the reader of the essays in this volume, my understanding of life in Sawaieke has shifted with the years—a shift I attribute in part to the way new data gathered during additional field-trips threw up new questions and in part to an increasing awareness of what ethnography can contribute to human knowledge. As a scientist, I am interested in explanation. Fijians do not need me to interpret them to the world; should they see any need for this they are well able to do it themselves. But I have reason to be grateful to Sawaieke people, because they let me be a participant observer in their midst and so gather the material that would allow me to provide an empirical demonstration of how it is that people come to be enchanted, as Bourdieu would say, by an idea they themselves have made—in this case, the Fijian idea that hierarchy is a principle of social relations.

The reader who recoils at the mere thought of ‘an empirical demonstration’ is perhaps owed a brief explanation here and this is easiest done via a little autobiographical detour. I was spared the post-modernist crisis—in part because I was fortunately in the field from 1981 until 1983 when the eye of the storm passed over UK anthropology departments and in part because the analytical problems that precipitated it had been the focus of intense informal discussion outside the classroom among pre-fieldwork graduate students in the LSE in the early 1980s. Neither I nor any of my peers went into the field as naïve empiricists. We knew that any answers we found would be a function of the questions we asked and that the questions we asked were our own product and as such a product of our personal and collective history. But we did think that anthropology—i.e. ‘the whole science of man’—was possible. We did think that ethnography could claim to be explanation and that some explanations were demonstrably better than others. It was a question of how we were to deal with history, and not just other people’s history, but our own. In my own case it became ever more plain that the challenge was to derive a model of human being that was as good for explaining me and my certainties about the world as it was for explaining the others and their, perhaps very different, certainties.

It is worth noting that the influential post-modernist texts in anthropology were produced by people who did their graduate work in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who either then or later lost faith in the positivist tradition in which they had been educated and in whose spirit they had, presumably, carried out all their early work. The existential crisis to which this loss of faith gave rise seems, by and large, to have resulted either in a new positivism (tending to be ever more abstracted from the rigours of fieldwork and to take a cognitivist form) or in an attempt to persuade a younger generation that ethnography is the art and ethics of ‘writing culture’. Indeed it seems to me that the crux of the problem for a number of this senior generation was that they at once relinquished the positivist dogma and held to it in their hearts—a form of bad faith that has proved disastrous for those who came into anthropology from the late 1980s onwards and were led to believe that interpretation (itself held to be impossible except as a kind of art form) was the only justification for ethnography. My peers and I were lucky enough to have more inspiring objects of intellectual interest, in particular Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift which, still in manuscript form, was the focus of a near- and post-doctoral reading group in the LSE some time around 1987.

To return then, to my own work. The essays here are more or less adequate, empirically based, explanations of how Fijians become who they are; they are all founded on systematic fieldwork and they all have as background the data and analysis I produced in my doctoral dissertation, later edited and published (in 1990) as Making Sense of Hierarchy: Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. The first two essays in this part were written while I was still in the throes of my dissertation, and revised for publication shortly after it was finished. At this time I was still mired in a distinction between the real and the symbolic and so, when Fijians told me that clan chiefs are above others and therefore always—even in reference to a single plane—seated above others who, in any gathering, both sit below them and face upwards towards them, I interpreted this in my own mind as ‘symbolic above/below’ and used single quotes around ‘above’, ‘below’ and ‘upwards’ to indicate their symbolic status. (Single quotes are fine, of course, to indicate that one is quoting or translating an indigenous term; it’s another matter, however, when they are used to suggest that people don’t really mean what they say.) I felt uneasy about this usage, but held to it in part because, given that Fijians also used the terms above and below to distinguish between different planes, it seemed to me they must be making the same kind of distinction that I was making myself between the real and the symbolic or the literal and the metaphorical. Nowadays I would use the data in these first two essays to show how the material and the ideal, the real and the symbolic, the literal and the metaphorical are, in each case, aspects of one another. In other words, while I would hold to the data themselves and to the explanatory core of each analysis, each paper would be in itself both more coherent and phenomenologically more sound.

Here the important thing to note is that my endeavour in each case would be to find out what happens, as it were, when one really sticks to the terms in which Fijians talk about their lives and the world they live. This is emphatically not to argue that the people with whom one works are better at analysing their own lives than any anthropologist. After all, this is not their project—they live their lives and by and large are not concerned to produce a social analysis of what they live. But by the same token, if someone tells you, for example, that one transaction involving money is a gift and that another, in your view remarkably similar, transaction is payment, it makes sound ethnographic sense to credit what you’re told. So, for example, in ‘Drinking cash’ I should no longer argue that the ideal contrast between the Fijian and the European ways ‘does not reflect an empirical reality’; instead I should show how this distinction is warranted by the lived experience of Sawaieke villagers and how it can be understood as a transformation of historically earlier ideas that was mediated by the Fijian colonial encounter, whose manifold features were assimilated to the existing structures of Fijian dualism. In so doing I should hold hard, however, to what might some might take to be a now superseded structural analysis. As will become plain, especially in Part III, Fijians are thorough-going dualists; indeed, in elaborating his own ideas of structural transformation Lévi-Strauss made frequent use of Hocart’s data on Fiji. Moreover, as is clear in Peter Gow’s study of transformations in Amazonian responses to historical contingency, a structural analysis is inevitably an analysis of historical transformation. See Gow (forthcoming, and related works 1989 and 1991).

I leave it to the reader to spot other points where these first two papers clash with the model of mind I proposed in my introduction—the third paper in this section being rather more closely in line with it.

It will be apparent that I am not sympathetic to the notion that ethnography is the outcome of a ‘dialogical process’; in my view this would be the case only were I working with a Fijian anthropologist and the two of us were constantly talking things through and writing papers together—a crucial point here being that each of us could then claim the same academic credit. Any ethnographic endeavour entails making other people the object of one’s gaze and there is little point in adopting cosmetic methods that pretend otherwise. On the other hand, one has a duty to check whether what one has written makes any sense to the people one is writing about—which is not to say they have to agree with everything one writes. In my own case I have been content, for example, to hear two Fijians arguing with one another as to whether or not I was justified in making certain inferences about chiefship out of my field data—one being for my analysis and another against and neither one disagreeing with the data themselves. On the other hand, it is wonderful to receive whole-hearted approbation as when a Fijian Methodist minister, having read ‘Making the present…’ told me that it should be set as required reading for students in all Fijian Methodist training colleges.

1
DRINKING CASH
The purification of money through ceremonial exchange in Fiji

Many times during the eighteen months of my fieldwork in the village of Sawaieke on the island of Gau, Central Fiji, I listened to one or other of my hosts champion na i vakarau ni bula vakaViti, ‘the Fijian way of life’ which he or she contrasted with na i vakarau ni bula vakailavo se vakavavalagi, ‘a way of life in the manner of money or in the European way’. Virtually all Fijian villagers remark on this contrast to visiting Europeans and they do so in an entirely predictable way. The speech below is that of the elderly man who, in the early months of my fieldwork, gave me lessons in Fijian:

The Fijian way of life is good eh? Nothing is paid for. If you want to eat there are many kinds of food available—taro, cassava, chestnuts, yams, green vegetables, pawpaw, pineapples. The food’s not paid for, it is just given. You are hungry? Yes. Fine. Come and eat, come and eat here. Come here and eat fish. You want to drink? Fine, come and drink yaqona here. Should a guest come here we look after him. If he wants something it is given to him at once. It is not paid for. No, not at all. This is the Fijian way, the chiefly way, the way according to kinship. Kinship and life in the manner of kinship are good things—there are never any problems. No, not at all. But it is different with you Europeans. Everything is paid for. You all live alone, each family by itself. Not one of your kin is nearby. They are perhaps far away. With us kinship is the most important thing of all, for you it is not.

This succinct statement of an enduring ideal contrasts ‘giving’ with ‘payment’. What is given is food and yaqona (piper methysticum whose ground root is infused in water to make the mildly intoxicating, but non-alcoholic, drink that is called kava elsewhere in the Pacific) and the giving is made identical with Fijian tradition. So ‘the way according to kinship’ and ‘the chiefly way’ are made antithetical to ‘the European way’ by which kinship is not valued and everything is paid for. The Fijian way is conceived of as highly moral and ordered, the European way as amoral and without order—an association of strangers. Here, by implication, an assertion of the overriding value of money results in the alienation of one’s kin.

However, this ideal contrast does not reflect empirical reality; it ignores the practical organisation of contemporary village life in Fiji and denies historical change. The Fijian village economy is a mixed cash and subsistence economy.¹ Villagers today want a secondary education for their children, a Western-style house, furniture, radios and so on. In addition every family needs money to buy a variety of commodities in standard use and to meet their obligations in respect of village funds. The money for these wants is obtained, for the most part, from the sale of cash crops. Moreover, villagers have to engage in monetary transactions with each other—buying and selling, paying for food and other items and even sometimes for labour. Yaqona is an important commodity and yaqona-drinking too has taken on a modern form—one that reflects profound historical change rather than an unalterable tradition. Nevertheless, villagers are able, with justice, to assert their ideals as reality, even in the face of these apparent contradictions. How they manage to do so is the subject of this chapter.

The gift and the status quo

My teacher’s speech does not suggest that there is anything wrong, in itself, with money. Rather, it is money as symbolic of a commodity exchange that is seen as antithetical to the Fijian way. Villagers make a sharp distinction between an ideal commodity exchange, which assumes the independence (and thus a notional equality) of transactors, and an ideal gift exchange, which assumes a relation between them. This distinction is not an empirical one; rather it depends on the construction that may be placed on any given transaction. This construction should not challenge the high moral value attached to the recognition of proper social relations ‘in the manner of the land’. In other words, the notion of the gift is essential for the maintenance of a status quo that is supposed to depend upon a set of part-ascribed, part-achieved traditional statuses that everyone recognises and accepts.

In the traditional status quo in the chiefly village of Sawaieke the chiefs of ranked clans (yavusa) hold sway over their own clan and, to a lesser extent, over villages that are traditionally subject to it.² These chiefs are the focus of exchange processes in the kinship/gift economy. Thus one can, to a great extent, map differential status onto differential access to various forms of labour and produce.³ Clan ranking is ambiguous in that, while everyone believes the clans and the lineages (mataqali) within them to be ranked in accordance with their traditional tasks vakavanua (‘in the manner of the land’), people differ as to the precise order of this ranking according to their view of the place of their own clan within it.⁴

The rank of one’s clan is important for one’s personal status within the community and interacts with two other equally dominant principles: seniority and gender. These latter principles structure hierarchical kinship relations within the domestic group.⁵ The term for kin, veiwekani, subsumes affines and friends as well as consanguines; ideally all Fijians are kin to one another. With the excep tion of the relation between cross-cousins all kinship relations are hierarchical. The equality of cross-cousins poses an implicit threat to the assertion of hierarchy as identical with social order. However, this threat is effectively de-fuse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mind, Materiality and History
• Part I: Objectifying History, Material Mind
• Part II: The Material Basis of Meaning
• Part III: Living History, Material Mind and the Stuff of the World
• Notes
• References