Making the Present, Revealing the Past: The Mutability and Continuity of Tradition as Process

Perpetual Lament: Kava‐drinking, Christianity and Sensations of Historical Decline in Fiji

“…The seating pattern around the kava bowl is hierarchical, with increasing rank the further ‘above’ (in front of) the bowl one sits. Christina Toren argues that the pattern of service in kava‐drinking sessions transforms reciprocal relationships into hierarchical ones, and legitimizes hierarchy in general: ‘the centrality and significance of [kava] ritual are such that people's disposition in space when they gather to drink [kava] provides an image of social relations as properly hierarchical’ (1990: 117; see also Toren 1988; 1994; 1999). The privilege of commanding an audience is correlated with one's social position, so that when a high‐seated drinker begins to talk, lower drinkers tend to fall quiet and listen 8 .…”

A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge*

“…It is this replication that Miyazaki (2004) takes as his anthropological problematic. He goes back to Toren's (1988) original insight into the way that ‘Fijian’ and ‘Christian’ ritual work together, not as different forms but (in his words) as versions of a single form unfolding in time (Miyazaki 2004: 99) 18 . This includes the manner in which people cease to emphasize their own actions and deliberately look to others for their response.…”

Unmapping knowledge: connecting histories about Haitians in Cuba

“…Although these practices seemed to emphasise official views in which contemporary experiences of the asociaciones were depicted as folkloric elements related to a foreign country, a distant past and rural settlements called ‘Haitian communities’, groups like Dessaline and LH were creating connections with other modes of existence and collectively shared family experiences. Hence rather than emerging exclusively from experiences of immigration and belonging to ‘communities’, these actors implied that the histories supposedly associating them with certain places and times could be told and retold in multiple forms, mediated by diverse object and events, and apprehended through a critical perspective, albeit one subject to personal interpretations (Toren ) . The existence of asociaciones did not mean that the gatherings of residentes and descendientes provided members with collective memories, allowing them to recall a distant and localised past, but enabled them to produce new forms of relationship as a way of creating a politically possible actuality.…”