'Not like before': An ethnographic study of land, continuity, and climate in Taveuni island, Fiji

This thesis explores the entwined relationship between past, present, and future in the everyday reflections, stories, and prophecies, in Taveuni, Fiji. Following the return of indigenous former Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka to power, talk of ‘going back’ was rife amongst indigenous, rural Fijians. The prospective aspect of this nostalgia incorporated feelings of indigenous decline and posited a return of the past. In Taveuni, people frequently referred to this sense of decline in terms of the island’s once-famously fertile volcanic soil paling in comparison to yesteryear. In this thesis I explore readings of land decline in relation to the sentiments they evoke, where the land simultaneously measures, corroborates, and forecasts that which is to come. I engage frequently employed dialectics within Fijian ethnography to highlight how interlocutors balance Biblical fatalism with narratives of continuity that compress pre-colonial and postcolonial times. This seeming contradiction is part of an indigenous, self-reflexive response to the scientific and modernist claims of climate change, which prescribe an increasingly foreclosed future. To explore the internal tensions produced by these varied temporal orientations, I focus on the topics of land history, contemporary exchange, and environmental concern, as encompassing enduring issues of injustice, morality, and futurity. In drawing on the syncretic visions of my interlocutors, the main contribution of this thesis is to further anthropological understanding of meaning-making in periods of change, unpredictability, and frequent confoundment, when time and change is said to be ‘so fast’. Past-oriented futurity, then, coalesces the past, present, and future, to bring forth varied returns: of land, power, and the Lord.