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

Abstract

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 Stuff of Imagination: What We Can Learn from Fijian Children's Ideas About Their Lives as Adults

“…Andrew Arno (1993) includes an account of the place of yaqona drinking in conflict management, while Richard Katz (1999) tells of the uses of yaqona with the primary focus on yaqona as a medium for contacting the vu (ancestors). Matt Tomlinson (2004) analyzes the religious and political implications of yaqona drinking (see also Tomlinson 2006Tomlinson , 2007. 15.…”

Janus and the siren's call: kava and the articulation of gender and modernity in Vanuatu

“…Kava has been important to articulating the oscillating relation between the ‘sides’ of kastom and its Others since at least the early twentieth century, particularly in relation to Christianity (for Fiji, cf. Tomlinson 2004; 2007). This seems to be the case wherever it was also drunk on a regular basis (e.g.…”

“…As earlier suggested, engaging people in kava‐related talk often provokes narratives of socio‐cultural degradation, particularly given the soporific effects of the brew and the tendency for heavy drinkers to ‘ las ’ (to feel lazy, be disinclined to work) the next day (for Fiji, cf. Tomlinson 2004). These narratives are invariably stretched across a spatial framework in which understandings of the embedded, correct or stret (straight, correct) sociality of village life is seen to be threatened by the transformations, innovations, and importations of town.…”

“…Rather than being valued for their historical ‘truth’, 4 such statements link kava's intoxicating properties to more generalized notions of excess and degeneracy (cf. Tomlinson 2004). They also belie important concerns regarding a perceived demise of inter‐generational fraternity, particularly through the breakdown of the nakamal (‘men's houses’) and sumbwe (‘graded society’) as primary male social institutions in relation to the negative consequences that things not‐ kastom – town life, Western‐style education, the cash economy, alcohol – have entailed for the socialization of young men.…”

“…Through the diversity of contexts in which kava circulates and is consumed, it has become saturated with meanings that evoke complex narratives of nostalgia, anxiety, and hope (regarding Fiji, cf. Tomlinson 2004; 2007). For those communities for whom its use as a soporific narcotic stretches back to the pre‐European past of taem bifo (‘time before’), kava and its related practices are intimately connected to social and cosmological configurations that inculcate ideal relations of gender, generation, rank, and ancestry.…”