PERPETUAL LAMENT: KAVA-DRINKING, CHRISTIANITY AND SENSATIONS OF HISTORICAL DECLINE IN FIJI

Themes of historical decline are common cross-culturally, but in certain contexts they may transcend nostalgia and become the motivation for political action. This article examines the ways in which themes of historical decline are made intelligible and palpable for indigenous Fijians in the Tavuki Bay area of Kadavu Island. After addressing the roles of colonial subjugation and Christianization in generating people's senses of powerful pasts and weakened presents, I describe one particular ritual site in rural Fiji, that of evening kava-drinking sessions, arguing that such sessions are key sites in which people come to understand and feel that Fijian society has lost power. By drinking kava in communal sessions and describing excessive kava-drinking as a sign of decline, people come to know the theme of decline intellectually and to feel it in their bodies. This theme, having come to seem a natural fact, can then help to inspire political action.     

The Cost of Being Fijian in the United Kingdom

This paper is the first within Fijian migration studies to discuss why indigenous Fijians migrate to the United Kingdom (UK) and the socio-economic challenges they face. The majority of these Fijians form a well-organised community based on similar principles as in Fiji (kinship, church, and chieftainship) and do their utmost to live ‘in the Fijian way’ (na ivakarau ni bula vakaviti), a lifestyle also known as living ‘in the manner of the land’ (i tovo vakavanua). I argue this way of life is a central aspect of being a Fijian person, which is characterised, amongst other things, by supporting kin as part of one's kinship obligations in the form of exchange and tribute. The tributes Fijian migrants make are predominantly in the form of services, goods, and especially monetary contributions towards church, communal, and ritual events to both kin in Fiji and in the UK. These monetary contributions regularly interfere with payments, such as utility bills and car insurances. As a consequence, electricity and phone lines are cut or cars are towed away. In Fiji, migrated relatives and friends are thought of as being millionaires, but this article illustrates that the reality is very different. Living costs in the UK are high and prioritising which bills to pay, how much one should contribute to church, communal, and ceremonial events, and how much money to remit to kin in Fiji can be very stressful. I discuss the pressures and motivation for these decisions in this article.     

Archival data on wild food plants used in Poland in 1948

Background

The author reports on the plants, rituals and spells used against worms and the so-called scantu (fright) in some areas of Sicily. The work is based on ethnobotanical research carried out, prevalently, between 2002-2006, in some areas of Eastern, South-Eastern, North-Central and South-Central Sicily.

Methods

This research is based on dialogue. Senior 'healers' were contacted; furthermore, doctors, teachers, farmers and in general 'experts' with herbs and 'magic' rituals. Information was collected about the way the plants of folk medicine are prepared. The interviewees were also invited to recite prayers and spells against helminthiasis.

Results

The author has highlighted the importance of how, in some parts of Sicily, some ailments like helminthiasis and other correlated pathologies like scantu are 'treated' and, especially within the rural social classes, by folk medicine remedies, herbal practises, particular prayers, rituals and spells.

Conclusion

As regards health/illness, it should be noted that in the last ten years conventional medicine has provided very satisfactory results even resolving potentially mortal pathologies. However, in certain social classes, there is no real collaboration between conventional and folk medicine; so for some senior citizens, the 'healer' with his rituals and empirical and magical herbs is still the person to turn to for the 'cure' of particular ailments. Interest in these practises from ancestral heritage in an advanced country like Italy, is only relevant if the aim is to recoup a cultural identity which is already in decline. It is significant to report a piece: on 14 October 2007 the news on a well-known national Italian TV channel reported an interview with a 94 year-old man from Arbatax (Sardinia) referred to as a 'healer' because both his townspeople and others from all over the world go to him for his cures. He is not paid except in kind and has been known to cure St. Anthony's fire, burns, scalding and marine fungal infections, by smearing his saliva over the infected part and reciting 'special words'.     

Olfaction and Taste: Invasive Odours and Disappearing Objects

The metaphorisation of sight and hearing, the objective senses, dominate the founding ideas, or philosophemes, of Western philosophy. The senses of taste and smell are of little relevance in the formation of conceptual knowledge or in classificatory systems; they are, by virtue of their dissolving objects, incapable of giving objective knowledge in Western metaphysics. Derrida and Ulmer developed a metaphorology that exploits the chemical basis of the subjective senses of taste and smell. The anthropology of the senses takes this questioning of metaphysics into issues of how olfaction and taste function in sociality. In the routine practices of everyday life, is olfaction able to create the sense of community that it does in rituals? Or, has the repression of smell in humanity's evolution towards ‘civilisation’ muted the connective ability of multiple odour particles? In a culture and metaphysics that presumes the separability of the self from the other and the self from the object, is there a place for senses that make a nonsense of separation and objectivity through their state of meaningful dissolution? Through philosophy's metaphorisation, has taste been stripped of its sensuousness and made a sense for aesthetics and not flavours and textures? In a metaphorics premised in judgement and discernment, can taste be a sense that founds sociality? In blurring the boundaries between self and other that are necessary to form and maintain the distinction, the dissolvability of smell and taste makes another metaphorics and other socialities possible. Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying—bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘other’. As perception and the perceived—both are united—smell is more expressive than the other senses (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979:184).     

Sunday Lunch in Fiji: Continuity and Transformation in Ideas of the Household

In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest that this change may be a function of an intensification of commodity exchange in day-to-day village life. As the children's data demonstrate, continuity as well as transformation in ideas over time may be understood as a function of the self-same ontogenetic process through which we make sense of our relations with others in the lived world. I argue that such ethnographic studies of ontogeny enable us both to appreciate the material validity of our informants' ideas and to render them analytical.     

The shadow of life: Psychosocial explanations for placenta rituals

Culturally determined patterns of behavior associated with placenta disposal are characteristic of many modern and ancient societies. This paper defines this type of placenta disposal as a ritual event that delimits a portion of reality; explanations are provided leading to the conclusion that placenta rituals operate as anxiety releasing mechanisms that provide a means of control over the future health and welfare of mother, child, and community. The question of why the placenta figures so prominently in folk beliefs and practices has previously been attributed to its morphological and physiological properties; this paper argues that attributes associated with it from a psychosocial model are equally important. The data for this study were drawn from a compilation of ethnographic reports of post-partum practices in African, Asian, European, and Latin American societies. Additional information on placenta disposal was derived from interviews with 1,859 Peruvian informants. Analysis of the data obtained from the Peruvian studies show a significant difference between rural and semi-urban patterns of placenta disposal.I am using the term ritual to refer to the culturally determined behavioral sequences that relate to the placenta. The basis of the explanatory system that I have proposed in this article to account for its cross-cultural importance is that these behavioral sequences are examples of secular rituals as defined by Moore and Meyerhoff 1977: 3–24.     

Language, Ideology, and Political Economy

After sharply defining and contrasting an "analytic-scientific" and an "emotional-ethical" approach and their interrelations, this article goes on to explore some possible interconnections among the three main phenomena, before discussing each in more detail. The first is political economy in several important senses; germane problems are noted that deal with (ethno) quantification and the innovative individual. The second phenomenon is ideology, in three senses: (1) notional ideology, (2) ideology for maintaining or changing a sociopolitical order, and (3) ideology for masking a structure of domination. The third phenomenon is language, again in various senses, but particularly as (1) a symbolism with a structure analogous in some ways to that of economics, and (2) a mediator between ideology and political economy; considerable attention is given to the political-economic functions of language figures such as irony and synecdoche. A fourth, analytically crucial kind of ideology, "linguacultural ideology," fills in the foregoing structure. Alternative logics, alternative combinations of variables, and alternative complementary theories are suggested throughout, particularly in the final section.     

FROM SUGAR CANE TO 'SWORDS': HOPE AND THE EXTENSIBILITY OF THE GIFT IN FIJI

Hope has recently emerged as an important subject of inquiry in anthropology and social theory. This article examines the hope entailed in efforts to extend aspects of gift-giving to various other social and theoretical projects. I identify and contrast two different kinds of hope found in these efforts, which I will call 'hope in an end' and 'hope in the means'. The discussion focuses on two extensions of indigenous Fijian gift-giving: John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan's recent analysis of Indo-Fijian sugar cane farmers'gift' of cane to an indigenous Fijian high chief in 1944; and the Fiji government Ministry of Tourism's efforts in the mid-1990s to train indigenous Fijian souvenir traders in a properly 'Fijian' manner of engagement with tourists. With this contrast, I argue that 'hope in an end' occludes 'hope in the means'.     

Unburdening evo-devo: ancestral attractions, model organisms, and basal baloney

Although flourishing, I argue that evo-devo is not yet a mature scientific discipline. Its philosophical foundation exhibits an internal inconsistency that results from a metaphysical confusion. In modern evolutionary biology, species and other taxa are most commonly considered as individuals. I accept this thesis to be the best available foundation for modern evolutionary biology. However, evo-devo is characterized by a remarkable degree of typological thinking, which instead treats taxa as classes. This metaphysical incompatibility causes much distorted thinking. In this paper, I will discuss the logical implications of accepting the individuality thesis for evo-devo. First, I will illustrate the degree to which typological thinking pervades evo-devo. This ranges from the relatively innocent use of typologically tainted language to the more serious misuse of differences between taxa as evidence against homology and monophyly, and the logically flawed concept of partial homology. Second, I will illustrate how, in a context of typological thinking, evo-devo's harmless preoccupation with distant ancestors has become transformed into a pernicious problem afflicting the choice of model organisms. I will expose the logical flaws underlying the common assumption that model organisms can be expected to represent the clades they are a part of in an unambiguous way. I will expose the logical flaws underlying the general assumption that basal taxa are the best available stand-ins for ancestors and that they best represent the clade of which they are a part, while also allowing for optimal extrapolation of results.     

Television,Disordered Eating,and Young Women in Fiji: Negotiating Body Image and Identity during Rapid Social Change

Although the relationship between media exposure and risk behavior among youth is established at a population level, the specific psychological and social mechanisms mediating the adverse effects of media on youth remain poorly understood. This study reports on an investigation of the impact of the introduction of television to a rural community in Western Fiji on adolescent ethnic Fijian girls in a setting of rapid social and economic change. Narrative data were collected from 30 purposively selected ethnic Fijian secondary school girls via semi-structured, open-ended interviews. Interviews were conducted in 1998, 3 years after television was first broadcast to this region of Fiji. Narrative data were analyzed for content relating to response to television and mechanisms that mediate self and body image in Fijian adolescents. Data in this sample suggest that media imagery is used in both creative and destructive ways by adolescent Fijian girls to navigate opportunities and conflicts posed by the rapidly changing social environment. Study respondents indicated their explicit modeling of the perceived positive attributes of characters presented in television dramas, but also the beginnings of weight and body shape preoccupation, purging behavior to control weight, and body disparagement. Response to television appeared to be shaped by a desire for competitive social positioning during a period of rapid social transition. Understanding vulnerability to images and values imported with media will be critical to preventing disordered eating and, potentially, other youth risk behaviors in this population, as well as other populations at risk.     

Reflections on tamazai,a Tuareg idiom of suffering

In this essay, I explore ways in which the theatrical and the medical are inextricably mixed and affect each other, in the Nigerien Tuareg idiom of tamazai. Tamazai is locally-described as an illness of the heart and soul, not curable by Koranic verses, but by exorcism of spirits. A case study and analysis of healing rituals demonstrate how this idiom communicates women's relationships and empowers dramatic framing.     

‘This Painting Becomes His Body for Life’: Transforming Relations in Yolŋu Initiation and Funeral Rituals

ABSTRACT

Among the most striking images produced in north-east Arnhem Land today are the paintings given to young boys during their first initiation ceremony (dhapi). Skilfully applied on their chest over several hours, while singing and dancing proceeds on the ceremonial grounds nearby, these body paintings act as relational matrixes which locate the initiands within a socio-cosmic web of connections. At the other end of the male ritual life-cycle, the bodies of the deceased undergo a similar process of transfiguration, as they are made to resemble the groups’ most sacred objects, seen to instantiate the powers of specific ancestral beings. In the context of these rituals, the links between clans, places, and ancestral beings are expressed by being made visible on and around the body. Pragmatically composed and displayed for all to see, I suggest that Yol?u ritual images appear as ‘matter(s) of relations’ par excellence, materialising various sets of social relationships. This paper examines the material logics behind this transfiguration process which, by turning people into ancestors, transform the relations between individuals and groups, between humans and non-human beings, and between the living and the spirits of the dead.     

Mutant Medaka fish having a deficiency in otolith-vestibular system and their behavior in microgravity

Vestibular and visual senses are two major factors fish use for controlling their posture under 1 G conditions. From various studies in the past (parabolic flights and some ground-laboratory experiments), I came to have a hypothesis that "heavily eye-dependent" fish are tolerant to microgravity (micro-G). Theoretically, for "heavily eye-dependent" fish, the following three types may exist. (a) Fish having good eyesight, and having an ordinary sensitivity to gravity, (b) Fish having an ordinary eyesight, and having less sensitivity to gravity, (c) Fish having good eyesight, and having less sensitivity to gravity. In Medaka fish (Oryzias latipes), these three types have successfully been obtained. In this paper, the behavior of such different types of Medaka fish under micro-G will be studied by use of parabolic flights of an airplane. The ground-laboratory experiments are also reported, which focus on the contribution of both vestibular and visual senses to the posture control for each of three types of Medaka fish.     

Experiential Autochthony in the Okavango Delta,Botswana

The white Batswana of the Okavango identify as African, are strongly nationalistic and express deep senses of belonging to the social and physical environments of their birth and upbringing. Yet, claims to belonging by white people to extra-European territories are often perceived as inauthentic at best and neocolonial at worst. This raises the question of how the empirical realities of such connections can be analytically rendered without threatening or appropriating indigenous identities. Through making a case for the heuristic utility of the concept of experiential autochthony, I argue that emplacement and belonging can be fruitfully explored for migrant and settler groups.     

Shown but not Shared,Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non‐restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter‐indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter‐Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo‐colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.     

Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250–900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch’ahb’ that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.

No longer can evolutionists dismiss such works [of ritual sacrifice] as scholarly, but irrelevant, esoterica–explorations of the bizarre but insignificant elements of Precolumbian culture…we must address this ideological data base with the same interest that we would give to studies of settlement patterns, subsistence systems, or political institutions [1].

     

The Temporalities of the Market

Social theorists' recent interest in global capitalism is partially driven by their sense of "being behind" in a changed and changing world. It is also part of their larger efforts to critique the present. In this article, I seek to find analogues of this sense of temporal incongruity between knowledge and its objects in the Tokyo financial markets. My focus is on the anxieties and hopes animating some Japanese securities traders' life choices. I argue that these traders' differing anxieties and hopes resulted from their divergent senses of the temporal incongruity among trading strategies, workplaces, and Japan's national location vis–a–vis the United States. Drawing on a parallel between social theorists' and traders' efforts to generate prospective momentum in their work, I propose that anthropologists investigate the work of temporal incongruity in knowledge formation more generally. [Keywords: time, Utopian vision, knowledge formation, financial markets, Japan]