Martha Kaplan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College.

Neither Cargo Nor Cult

Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji

By Martha Kaplan

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-1578-0

Contents

List of Figures,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
1 Introduction: Culture, History, and Colonialism,
2 Embattled People of the Land: The ra Social Landscape, 1840–1875,
3 Navosavakadua as Priest of the Land,
4 Colonial Constructions of Disorder: Navosavakadua as “Dangerous and Disaffected Native”,
5 Navosavakadua’s Ritual Polity,
6 Routinizing Articulating Systems: Jehovah and the People of the Land, 1891–1940,
7 Narratives of Navosavakadua in the 1980s and 1990s,
8 Navosavakadua Among the Vatukaloko,
9 Conclusion: do Cults Exist? do States Exist?,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE, HISTORY, AND COLONIALISM

Agency and Meaning in Colonial History

What shapes the lives of colonized people? Is their agency a product of indigenous cultural systematics, rejecting, encompassing, transforming external change? Or is colonial power the prevailing force in their lives; do they respond to, react to, resist incursion, in an agency already therefore shaped by colonial hegemonic structures? How are anthropologists to understand encounters, conjunctures, domination, asymmetries of power, beyond first contact moments into the complex societies of a connected colonial and postcolonial world? How, in particular, can we rethink a part of Fijian colonial history previously called a cargo cult?

In establishing our rapprochement with history, it seems to me that anthropologists have used three analytic strategies to write about agency, meaning, and colonial history. One strategy insists on the priority of cultural difference. Here the concept of culture and cultural difference, the preeminent contribution of anthropology to the social sciences, is invoked to shape accounts both of indigenous change and of indigenous apprehension of external incursion. One leading example is Marshall Sahlins’s “structure and history” including his recent work on the multiple cosmologies driving the capitalist world system (1981, 1985, 1988, 1992). Another example is David Lan’s (1985) account of the agency of spirit mediums in the guerilla war to liberate Zimbabwe. This approach produces narratives which insist upon local categories of meaning and local agency for an understanding of encounters with the world system or colonizing peoples.

In contrast, a second analytic strategy sees colonial power as the overwhelming tension-charged historical watershed forever changing the world of the colonized. Here colonial societies are understood to be products of the agency of external transformative dominators, and colonized people can emerge again as agents in their own right only as colonized, local, already transformed, resisters. Instances of this approach include world system scholars such as Eric Wolf (1982) who find transforming agency in capitalist penetration, and also studies which, influenced by Foucault or Gramsci, focus on discourse and particular (here colonial) systems of meaning and practice beyond the realm of political economy narrowly defined—law, literature, sexuality—that dominate and transform (see, e.g., Cohn 1987, Said 1978, Stoler 1989). For many such scholars the emphasis is on colonial constructions of others, especially those accounts which find any scholarship concerning “others” so intricately implicated in western categories or in the mechanisms of colonial domination that concepts of “culture” and “cultural difference” themselves become artifacts of colonial categorizing (Said 1978, and see, e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986).

A third strategy finds a space in between insistence on cultural continuity and insistence on colonial transformation. As figured in Michael Taussig’s (1987) recent work on terror, that space is chaotic: neither indigenous nor colonial but an “epistemic murk” in between. The epistemic murk extends from participants to chroniclers. In Taussig’s view such spaces almost defy portrayal, since even counterrepresentations and counterdiscourses risk replicating colonizer’s discourses; montage and incompleteness are the techniques he uses to represent the chaotics he finds.

Establishing a strategy for writing a colonial history—as an anthropologist—is not a hypothetical question here. I want to begin with four narratives out of Fiji’s past and present: a colonial official’s essay, a present-day Fijian’s recollection of an ancestor, a brief reconstruction of what I think Navosavakadua might have intended, and a cosmological history by an Indo-Fijian visionary mystic. In their disjunctures and interrelations lie the problems I want to address.

Intersecting Narratives: Navosavakadua or the Tuka?

A Colonial Officer’s Narrative of Tuka

In 1891 John Bates Thurston, British colonial governor of Fiji from 1888 to 1897, asked A. B. Joske, irrepressible memoirist and commissioner and magistrate in the hill districts and Ra province, to summarize “the movement” in an article for The Australasian, a Sydney-based newspaper. I excerpt from this article:

Superstition in Fiji

In the country round about Kauvadra, the Mount Olympus of Fiji, there seems to have been always prevalent a superstition called by the natives the “Tuka,” the priests of which professed to possess an elixir of life….

The first historical knowledge of it was about 30 years ago, when, owing to the spread of Christianity, the natives of different districts became able to have freer intercourse with one another [due to the cessation of warfare]. About then Saro Saro, a high priest of the “Tuka” gave a good deal of trouble to the late King Cakobau … [and was eventually] put to death by his tribal chief.

However, Saro Saro left a descendant, said to be his son—one Dugamoi—who, engrafting his native legends and superstitions on the Biblical narratives compounded a new Tuka…. [Dugamoi] established a great reputation among the followers of the “Tuka” as a high priest and prophet who gave him the title of “Na Vosa va Ka dua” [sic] literally, the man who speaks only once and must be obeyed. The Chief Justice of the colony … holds this title of honor amongst Fijians.

Dugamoi first came prominently into notice about the end of the year 1877. He then made a tour through the least civilized portions of Viti Levu [the main island of the Fiji group], predicting a millennium when all who died as faithful votaries of the faith would rise again, and aided by divine powers sweep all unbelievers from the face of the earth….

The people of the eastern highlands of Fiji, partially conquered under King Cakobau’s reign, closely related to those of the eastern highlands, who in 1876 had been in revolt against British authority, and who during that trying period had been with great difficulty kept steady, became very uneasy and excited, and to secure absolute peace Na Vosa va Ka dua had to be … deported to one of the eastern islands of the group, but after a short period of detention he was allowed to return to his home.

Again he started to preach his new and improved version of the “Tuka” supplementing native legends with what he found in the Bible. These doctrines have gradually spread over the northern coasts and eastern highlands of Fiji…. In the year 1885 Na Vosa va Ka dua began to have men drilled. Although the new reign of the “Tuka” was to be ushered in by the miraculous assistance of the gods, probably soldiers were thought to be a useful, if not necessary adjunct. No doubt Na Vosa va Ka dua aimed at the overthrow of the British Government in the group and the extinction of the Christian religion and of the white settlers. The drilling of troops speedily came under the notice of the authorities and warrants under the English statute prohibiting illegal drilling were issued. At first, these warrants were resisted, but after a brief period of anxiety to the authorities the ringleaders were secured without bloodshed. The chief prophet, Na Vosa va Ka dua, was exiled to Rotumah [a small island outside the Fiji group, which the British colonized and administered from Fiji] and others were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

With the removal of the leader and prime spirit of this movement it was thought that the fanaticism would die out a natural death, but there remained many priests of the “Tuka” who found that the steady spread of Christianity and progress of settled government interfered materially with the revenue they formerly derived from the simple credulity of their fellow countrymen. These men during the present year stirred up a vigorous revival of the “Tuka.” They predicted the re-appearance of Na Vosa va Ka dua exalting him into a divine personage whom the foreign Government had in vain endeavored to kill….

A village called Drau-ni-ivi and a few of its outlying hamlets have been the centre from which this disturbing movement has radiated. Whales teeth, answering to the Chupatties [sic] of the Indian Mutiny have been sent out from there calling upon the faithful to rally and be united for the overthrow of the Government.

It is a foolish, fantastic and fanatic movement. This is now its third outbreak, and it became absolutely necessary that it should be put down with a strong hand. The votaries of it mainly dwell in the glens and valleys of a rugged and almost inaccessible district. Knowing nothing of the power of the Government and seeing but little of the symbols of authority, they consider themselves all powerful and important. In time the delay of miraculous aid must have been explained by their priests, to whom but one explanation would have been possible unless they confessed themselves powerless impostors. This would have been the non-satisfactory propitiation of their tutelary gods and ancestral spirits…. To those cognisant of the traditions and inner thoughts of Fijians it is well known there could be only one satisfactory offering to Fijian gods, and that is human sacrifices, the burnt offering alike of Assyrian and Druidical superstitions.

The foregoing is a brief summary of the origin and progress of the “Tuka” superstition, which has been to the Government from the first a source of trouble and uneasiness. Its recent vigorous revival induced the Governor to personally investigate the matter, and for this purpose … he made a three weeks tour through the central mountainous districts of Viti Levu…. His Excellency deemed it the wisest and most merciful course to remove [the people of Drauniivi] at least for a while to a more civilised portion of the group where there would be little likelihood of their pernicious doctrines gaining credence … to prevent the spread of the “Tuka” superstition among the simple, yet wild, half-Christianized, half-civilized tribes living in the ranges at the back of Drau-ni-ivi….

The Drau-ni-ivi people have therefore been removed, and are now located on good fertile Crown lands in the island of Kadavu….

The Kadavu Islanders, possessing a large intermixture of Tongan blood, are perhaps the most advanced and intelligent … of our Fijian population. There is therefore no fear of the “Tuka” doctrines being received by them otherwise than with ridicule and it may reasonably be hoped that finding themselves among a strong but law-abiding and civilised community the Drau-ni-ivi people will profit by their association with them by qualifying themselves for what they will certainly long for—a permission to return to their own mountain district. (17 October 1891, attached to Colonial Secretary’s Office minute paper 94/2036)

This narrative reveals central themes in the colonial imagination of “the Tuka.” Joske finds no paradox in the topic: he presents an account tracing the origin, diffusion, alteration, and consequences of a doctrine of “Tuka.” Joske’s Tuka is either an autonomous phenomenon, a superstition which spreads like a disease in a receptive population, or an ideology perpetrated by its charlatan-priest author on a credulous faithful. By contrasting rebellious hill and interior people, prey to their charlatan leader, with the “advanced and intelligent” (and lighter-skinned) Kadavu islanders under “King” Cakobau, he constructs Tuka as marginal, deviant, and criminal, in the face of a developing colonial order on a British model. The article itself is a product of the colonial concern with self-presentation and legitimation of the colonial project, in the face of a wider, sometimes critical, audience of many factions in the larger Empire. It expresses as well much about colonial British concepts of society, order, religion, and legitimacy that I will explore in later chapters. Here, I want to note that in this British imagination of these Fijian events Tuka was construed to be a named doctrine leading to rebellion and disorder, and to note as well that this British imagination was no fanciful contemplation. Constructions of Tuka such as these would lead to arrests and deportation for Navosavakadua and the people of Drauniivi.

Narratives by Some of Navosavakadua’s Present-Day Descendants

In contrast, when I sought to discuss the topic constructed in such colonial accounts with Fijian informants, a differently bounded narrative emerged.

Nowadays Fijians do not generally know the meaning of the word “Tuka.” In Drauniivi village, among the people who call themselves Vatukaloko (a kin group and ritual name), those older people who do know it say, for example, “It was a thing of the devil, practiced by a heathen priest, who was not our relative. The people of Rakiraki knew it, we did not. Navosavakadua led the faction who rejected this thing of the devil which did not go in accordance with the ways of God, nonetheless we were blamed” (my summary and translation of a longer statement by a Nasi man). One informant added, “there is a law against it.” This was all they had to say on the subject of Tuka, not, I believe, because they were afraid to tell me more, but because the word is not a focus of practice or concern to them. Moreover, the word is not used nowadays to describe any of the other practices (e.g., local healing, “witchcraft,” and invocation of Fijian deities) which are sometimes classed as “things of the devil.” Attempting to investigate “the Tuka movement” I drew a blank. But Navosavakadua, his life, and deeds are a vast indigenously constructed topic, subject of discourse in at least two important indigenous genres: oral accounts (both formal narratives related by elders with specialized knowledge and gossip and anecdotes told by younger people and the less knowledgeable) and written accounts in Fijian-language newspapers. And then of course there is the role of Navosavakadua in the lives of his living descendants.

Here is a narrative of Navosavakadua by one of his descendants. In the 1980s this man was the elected headman (Turaga ni Koro) of Drauniivi village. (The administrative office of Turaga ni Koro originated in colonial indirect rule; the office is rarely held by Fijians of chiefly rank.) This gentleman is a historical and genealogical specialist. In particular he is heir to the knowledge of kin groups and relationships of the Vatukaloko people that was compiled by the village’s representatives to the Natives Lands Commission in 1918, about which much more will be said in chapter 6.

He [Navosavakadua] was a shy man who did not speak much. He didn’t know evil paths. What happened to him was that he was given a task. He was a man of themataqali (ritual kin group) Nakubuti, of the Makita subdivision. His hereditary standing (itutu vakavanua) was “bulibulivanua” [literally “maker of the land”; people of this standing install the Vatukaloko chief]. His father was Rareba Vunisa, whose third name was Tavakece. He was Navosavakadua’s true father. His mother was Namasala, a lady from yavusa (ritual kin group) Navisama, from the village of Narara.

His daily work was as a farmer. When our ancestors left the old village of Nakorowaiwai they lived at Waisai. In the mornings he used to go to bring his crops from the gardens at the old village.

At the hill inland called Vatunisauka he went and met with the mana (miraculous or effective power) or the word which was given to him. He heard a voice, he didn’t see any people. I don’t know if it was a devil or God who spoke, he heard the voice say to him, “Mosese Dukumoi” (for that was his true name, the name given to him by his father and mother)…. the echo of the voice said to him “Mosese, I want to take you, I anoint you to be my servant.” And Mosese answered “what am I to do for you?.” Then the voice said to him “I want you to spread the news that you can make people live [vakabula na tamata, literally make people live, sometimes also save people, in the Christian sense]. Do you want this power? If you want some other thing, wisdom, or to live peacefully, or anything you want, I will give it to you.” Then Mosese Dukumoi said “I don’t want anything, I only want you to give me the power to make people live.” Then he heard the voice again, “If I give you the power to make life, will you achieve every task I set you?” He answered, “yes, I will try.” Thus the task was given to him….

And his religion, it was not Seventh Day Adventist, nor Wesleyan, nor Church of England, nor Catholic. Before they arrived, he had a religion, and it was the religion of God, he served God, he preached about God, before these other religions came….

And when the power had been given to him, the people of the Twelve Tribes [Biblical twelve tribes, the term used now to name the indigenous confederation of peoples whom Navosavakadua led] then they called him Navosavakadua. He would speak once, then the command would be fulfilled. I don’t know what kind of power it was, whether from devils or God, but I know that the God he served is the God we worship today.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Neither Cargo Nor Cult by Martha Kaplan. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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