Corporal destinies: Faith, ethno-nationalism, and raw talent in Fijian professional rugby aspirations

Abstract

Many young itaukei (indigenous) Fijian men train daily in the hope of becoming professional rugby athletes, despite the difficulty of this unpaid work and the uncertainty of the overseas careers to which they aspire. Rugby players and their families draw on a sense of destiny grounded in three ideologies of success to understand and control their futures. First, many view rugby in terms of an indigenous warrior ideal imagined as innate to itaukei men. Second, most Fijians link godliness, moral discipline, and religiosity to professional success. Third, they increasingly draw on ideas of natural talent, genetics, and pedigree widely held in global rugby. Ethnography among Fijian rugby players both in Fiji and abroad shows that this sense of destiny includes the future orientation of hope, but adds a moral imperative for action. Reading these emic conceptions of the future in terms of corporal and spiritual destiny highlights their influence not just on individual aspirations but also on social and political life, revealing both the power and limits of destiny as an analytical tool.

Assembling Success: Desire, Worker Mobility, and Value Creation in Finnish Ice Hockey

“…Hope also translates into projects where the future is located elsewhere (Narotzky and Besnier 2014). At the quotidian level, reducing uncertainty is part of the work of being a professional player, whether through the policing of conduct and the reduction of stress (Gmelch 2000) or through strategies modeled on faith traditions (Guinness 2018) or political activism (Rubin 2014).…”

Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age

“…Daniel Guinness, who pursued a career in professional rugby for eight years prior to becoming an academic, experienced these dynamics firsthand, as well as the increasing self-surveillance of what one says, when one laughs, and how one presents oneself. Again, these new forms of biopolitical selfcontrol trickle down to the Global South, where athletic hopefuls engage in personal projects of self-improvement that mirror the practices extant in professional sport, often with the help of local resources such as Pentecostalism or the mystical services of marabouts (Besnier, Guinness, Hann, and Kovač 2018;Guinness 2018;Hann, this volume;Kovač, this volume).…”

Sport

“…The competition in sports means that the results are unpredictable, and so athletes worldwide deploy a wide range of practices designed to deal with uncertainty and fate, some derived from local cultural contexts, others derived from global flows, blurring the distinction amongst religion, magic, morality, gender, and bodily technique. Their practices include local magical practices (Gmelch 1978), revivalist religions such as Pentecostalism, which is increasingly popular amongst athletes from the Global South (Rial 2012;Guinness 2018;Kovač 2018), as well as sports techniques and training, the ideology of scientific professionalism, and sport psychology. In the national sport of wrestling in Senegal, wrestlers employ the services of marabouts, magico-religious specialists who prescribe potions, amulets, and rituals that merge Islamic and local cosmologies; but they combine the services of the marabouts with the hard training of an individualistic self and commercial sponsorship in the neoliberal mode (Hann 2018).…”