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235 Shanti and Mana The Loss and Recovery of Culture under Postcolonial Conditions in Fiji John D. Kelly In The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Ashis Nandy (1983) argued that the British, in India, hypermasculinized themselves while denying adult manhood in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to the colonized men in India. Kipling is his prime example. Nandy argued that the Gandhians responded most effectively : they abandoned efforts to outmasculine the British and instead valorized an androgynous ethic of nonviolent and spiritual superiority. Nandy’s thematic of loss and recovery is certainly relevant to the anxieties and ideologies one finds in Fiji in recent decades, most obviously among ethnic Fijians justifying military coups, but more subtly, and quite possibly as profoundly, among Fiji citizenry appalled by its domestic military aggressions. Under postcolonial conditions, the question is not dialogue between colonizer and colonized but, especially in Fiji, dialogue among the excolonized . Yet in Fiji that dialogue retained the form it had had in the colonial end game, hypermasculinity confronted by an opposing ideology it cannot measure, an enemy to patriarchal claims of right-and-ready violence that insists with ethical passive aggression, calm reason, and peace. In Fiji, the chiefs of the Great Council, above all, took over the role of masculine paramounts, hypermasculinized agents of power— and thereby kept alive an extreme colonial gender dialogue for decades longer than it lasted in most sites in South Asia or the Indian diaspora. In Fiji, the cultures of ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians, despite the great diversity of both and especially the latter, are also locked together structurally in ways that no group expects or welcomes, in a gendered political dialogue. In their resolution to overcome the influence of the other they change in connected, contrastive ways, and sustain or even ramify a late colonial gender structure. Unlike in Africa (cf. Mbembe 1992), chiefly rule in Fiji is not about the banality of power but its masculinity, and the strange political tactics of nonviolent protest and withdrawal, aggressive pacificism, find ample targets and extend themselves . The result is a sequence of impasses that dangerously illegitimize the state, yet the impasses are extraordinary for the infrequency of actual political violence despite the extremes of feeling. 236 | Shanti and Mana Shanti and Mana Shanti and mana are both important in Fiji. Neither is simply a local phenomenon. Mana is of pan-Pacific importance in Islander ritual and politics. Via anthropological literature , starting at least with Codrington (1891), Durkheim (1915), Malinowski (1922), Mauss (1924), and Hocart (1936), the idea of mana has also gained an academic life. While anthropologists focused on the Pacific continue to contribute to its interpretation and fame—in recent decades, notably Valerio Valeri (1985), Marshall Sahlins (1985), Roger Keesing (1984), and Bradd Shore (1989)—the term has also spread to new usage especially in the United States and Europe. It has become a recognizable term for political charisma, capacity, and force, and has even become a staple in fantasy literature. Mana is a Pacific contribution to transnational, cosmopolitan culture, in ways (as is typical) not intended by and not even reasonable from the perspectives at its origins. But if mana has in its strange vicissitudes become a global token,1 it has not thereby lost its local vitality nor stagnated in its social career in specific Pacific locales. Quite the contrary: My thesis is that its social life has taken quite an unexpected turn in recent decades in its social career in Fiji. It has become the opposite of shanti. Shanti means peace, which is roughly as adequate as saying that mana means power. Shanti is a conception of religious peace and well-being, the calm after the storm and the experience of grace, particularly important in the bhakti devotional traditions within the universe of discourse that is commonly glossed “Hinduism.” Bhakti means devotion, devotion to God, and the many bhakti traditions in Hinduism over the past millennium recentered religious practices away from ritual, austerities, meditation, and study as ends in themselves and toward devotion to God and quest for reunion with God. In most bhakti traditions, intense longing and despair make shanti, peace, both a goal and a means of religious commitment. In Fiji, Hindu devotional movements as varied as the Kabir Panth, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), and the Sathya Sai Samiti brought their views of shanti to Fiji,2 and shanti was and is particularly important to the branch of Hindu...

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