State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji

5 Fear of a Nation Returning to Jungli

5 Fear of a Nation Returning to Jungli While Indo-Fijian political leaders and community spokespeople were busily promoting a vision of the Fijian nation as built on the cooperative and harmonious endeavors of Fijians and Indians alike, for many grassroots Indo-Fijians this image was shot through with racial divisiveness. Most of Indo-Fijians’ discussions of local history, national belonging, and national development invoked pride in what Indians have achieved in Fiji, but did so on the basis of making negative comparisons with what they depicted as indigenous Fijians’ inability to undertake sustained, systematic labor or to discipline their spending. In these discussions, it was Indians alone who were portrayed as developing (develop kare) or moving the country “forward.” Recall Devi’s comment that “when Fijians were here, it was only jungle. Then Indians came and cleared it.” In contrast to Indians, indigenous Fijians were depicted in these discourses as “dirty” and “lazy” “spendthrifts” whose desire for money and material goods led them not toward labor, but toward theft. Although there existed important counterdiscourses of inter-ethnic solidarity, many IndoFijians reified ethnic distinctions between Fijians and Indians by suggesting that ethnically distinct work ethics, economic practices, and levels of “civilization ” were at the heart of the political conflict. With alarming frequency Indo-Fijians derogatively referred to Fijians as “junglis,” portraying them as the bearers of “primitivism” and “animality” who, it was feared, would return Fiji itself to the realm of the “uncivilized jungle.” In taking these stereotypes seriously and examining their historical roots as well as their deployment during the 2000 coup, I am aware that my analysis might be misread and used to reify the very racist images that I wish to interrogate. This is a danger inherent in any analysis of racist stereotypes but it is not one that I believe should preclude us from looking at how racism structures identity and experience. Rather, the power of racist images, which leads some scholars to shy away from them, or worse yet, to deny their existence, is what behooves me to examine them here. In doing so, I follow a line of anthropological inquiry that has demonstrated the necessity of examining racism and ethnic stereotyping as part of the constitution of national identity and everyday experience. As Liisa Malkki (1995), Mary Weismantel (2001), and Michael Herzfeld (2005), among others, have argued, a deeper understanding of how national identities are consolidated can be gained by critically examining governmental and popular channels through which ethnic and racial stereotypes are constituted, as well as the political, material, and emotional effects of their deployment. I find it useful in undertaking this task to return to Fredrik Barth’s classic notion of oppositional ethnicity. At the core of Barth’s groundbreaking theory was the assertion that ethnic identity develops and is sustained through interactions between those who perceive themselves as belonging to different ethnic groups. In an effort to steer research away from the cataloguing of the supposedly “objective” criteria that constitute ethnic groups, such as shared language, customs, and dress, Barth suggested that anthropologists focus on the boundaries between different ethnic groups as sites where ethnic identities undergo continual renegotiation (1969). What I take from Barth is his emphasis on the oppositional nature of ethnic identity. The question thus becomes not only how is ethnic identity constituted, but against whom is it constituted. In the case of the reification of “Indian” identity in Fiji, the tensions lie between three groups: Fijians , Indians, and Europeans, none of which are natural or essential categories, but each of which came to be defined based on their interactions with one another. In examining these dynamics, I am particularly interested in how ethnic stereotypes came to be deployed as part of Indo-Fijian responses to the 2000 coup and what they reveal about the constitution of fear, alienation, and hatred—what Das (1998), in another context, has referred to as the “social production of hate”—during times of violence. Images of Intractable Difference Some of the most prevalent sentiments of ethnic difference were typified in a conversation I had with Ganesha and Parvati just a few days prior to the May 2000 coup. With the renewal of taukei activism, the violence of the 118 State of Suffering 1987 coups was on their minds. As we prepared dinner, they reflected back on the events of 1987, and Ganesha spoke at...