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Corrigendum: Becoming a Christian in Fiji: an ethnographic study of ontogeny

2004; Wiley; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-9655.2004.00187.x

1467-9655

Christina Toren,

Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

We regret that, due to a production error, the data on pp. 711-714 in the article by Christina Toren (Toren, 2003) were inaccurately presented, due to the setting of a point instead of a colon between the raw figures and their expression as a percentage. For example ‘God loves us (18.69 per cent)’ should have been set as ‘God loves us (18: 69 per cent)’. In addition, the reference: Waterhouse, J. 2002. Anthropology as the whole science of what it is to be human. In Anthropology beyond culture (eds) R. Fox & B. King, 105-24 is wrongly listed. This work is by Christina Toren. The reference should read: Toren, C. 2002. Anthropology as the whole science of what it is to be human. In Anthropology beyond culture (eds) R. Fox & B. King, 105-24. We apologise to the author and reprint in full the corrected version. By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people’s constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke girls and boys between 7 years, 10 months and 13 years old. The broader objective is to demonstrate, first, how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and, secondly, how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it. Ritualized activities pervade daily life in the villages of central Fiji, including the eight villages that make up the country (vanua) of Sawaieke on the island of Gau where I did fieldwork.1 Specifically Christian rituals include prayer before every meal (including morning or afternoon tea – taken on special occasions) and numerous church services throughout the week; the Wesleyan Church in Sawaieke held early morning prayer every day, at least three evening services during the week, two full Sunday services (morning and evening), and Sunday school. Moreover, all the many traditional ceremonies, such as sevusevu (the offering of yaqona root that constitutes a request for permission to be present in a place and accompanies all yaqona-drinking) and the elaborate ceremonies of welcome to any official visitor, include Christian formulae at the end of speeches of presentation and often a long prayer of Christian blessing. It is, however, in the ceremonies occasioned by death that Sawaieke people reveal most clearly how their commitment to Christianity and to what is traditional (vakavanua, literally, according to the land) are mutually constituted in such a way as to define what it is to be Fijian. This article points to the importance of these ritualized activities and ceremonies for Sawaieke children’s constitution of the ideas that inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. It also demonstrates, incidentally, that orthodox Christian practice is by no means bound to produce orthodox Christians. As will become apparent, there is no need here to posit any explicit or implicit attempt at either syncretism or resistance. This article is not about syncretism, however, nor about Christianity as such, nor even the Fijian-ness of Fijian Christianity.2 My concern instead is twofold: I wish to examine the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and also the significance of ritual for this process. I seek to achieve this through an analysis of transformations in certain ideas held by Sawaieke girls and boys aged between 7 years and 10 months (7/10) and 13 years (13/0).3 My broader objective is to demonstrate (a) how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and (b) how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it. My analysis accords with an argument I have made elsewhere: that mind is a function of the whole person that is constituted over time in intersubjective relations with others in the environing world. In this unified model of human being, consciousness is that aspect of human self-creation (autopoiesis) that, with time, posits the existence of the thinker and the self-evidentiality of the world as lived by the thinker. Given that human autopoiesis is grounded in sociality – that is, we humans require other humans in order to become and be human – it makes sense to think of our own personal development, and of child development in general, as a micro-historical process in and through which mind is constituted over time as an always-emergent function of the whole person (no need here to posit a dialectical relation between mind and body). Moreover, this whole person’s moment-to-moment encounters with the material world of objects and other people are always and inevitably mediated by relations with others – that is, by intersubjectivity (no need here to posit a dialectical relation between reified abstractions such as individual and society or biology and culture). The model takes for granted that intersubjectivity is inevitably emotional, that perceiving and feeling are aspects of one another, that intentionality is through and through a matter of a felt, emotional engagement in the peopled world. All our relations with others and our sense of self cannot be other than lived and felt.4 The model rests on two demonstrable propositions: first, that there are no received meanings and, secondly, that the process of making meaning is such that the continuity and transformation of ideas are aspects of one another. Put simply, this is because we make meaning out of meanings that others have made and are making: that is, any neonate, infant, child, young adult, adult, middle-aged, or old person is enmeshed in manifold relations with others who cannot help conveying their own understandings of social relations and the way the world is. Any given person cannot help but assimilate these understandings to his or her own and, in so doing, accommodate – more or less – both to the other’s ideas of the world and to the other’s idea of their relationship to one another as persons. The relation between any infant and its caretakers is such that the growing child has willy-nilly to come to grips with a world that has already been, and continues to be, rendered meaningful by those caring others. The others structure the conditions of existence that are lived by the child but, even so, they cannot determine what the child makes of them. Moreover, however dutiful a child may be to its elders, human autopoiesis entails that the process of making meaning is one in which knowledge is transformed even while it is maintained and in which meaning is always emergent, never fixed. This process renders each person’s ideas unique.5 It follows that mind may be understood as the fundamental historical phenomenon, by virtue of the micro-historical processes of genetic epistemology.6 The children’s data analysed here were obtained in 1990. The majority of my adult informants are Sawaieke villagers, including some who were brought up in the village, educated in secondary schools on the mainland, and now live in the capital, Suva, where they are employed as teachers, nurses, security guards, government officials, and so on; several have travelled overseas. Every one of my informants has his or her own ideas about religious practice and doctrine, about the ancestors and what is vakavanua (according to the land), but I would argue that where I make generalized observations, they would be likely to agree with them. My use of the ‘ethnographic present’ is intended to suggest the continuity that resides in transformation such that the ideas and practices I discuss here are likely still to prevail in Sawaieke, and indeed among Fijian Methodists at large, as a function of the processes through which meaning is constituted over time. The systematic data analysed here are derived from what Sawaieke children said and wrote about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies. Death ceremonies are highly salient in Fijian village life; they occur relatively often7 and induce a pervasively heavy and portentous atmosphere that lasts from the moment the death is announced until the fourth night of ceremonial observance, when the initial mourning period is lifted, light-heartedness explicitly encouraged, and the next day the normal daily round is resumed. Death ceremonies in Sawaieke combine Christian observance with Fijian traditional practices (as do all life-cycle rituals and the day-to-day ritualized behaviours proper to the conduct of well-regulated family life), and while children are forbidden to attend them, they cannot avoid knowing how they are conducted. Where the children produced written accounts I had asked them to ‘write a story’ about God, about Sunday school, about death ceremonies. I gave them no other guidance as to content, and they wrote their accounts in their school class groups, sufficiently separated from their neighbours to prevent copying.8 Analysis of the content of the children’s essays showed that, with the exception of differences informed by gender and/or by age, what they had written about God and Sunday school was remarkably uniform and orthodox. To begin with na kalou (God). Twenty-six girls aged between 7/10 and 11/9 and twenty-two boys aged between 8/2 and 13/0 produced stories about God. Girls mentioned twenty-six different aspects of God in all; one-third or more said that: God loves us (18: 69 per cent); God made everything (14: 54 per cent); God has many admirable qualities (14: 54 per cent); God saves us (13: 50 per cent); God protects us (12: 46 per cent); God approves and/or disapproves certain acts (10: 38 per cent); God gives us good qualities (10: 38 per cent); God helps us (10: 38 per cent); God gives us food, drink, and other material things (9: 35 per cent). Boys mentioned a total of twenty-one different aspects of God and one-third or more said that: God loves us (14: 64 per cent); God made everything (14: 64 per cent); God has many admirable qualities (11: 50 per cent); God’s child is Jesus or God was born into the world as Jesus (9: 41 per cent); God saves us (8: 36 per cent); God helps us (7: 32 per cent); God gives us food, drink, and other material things (7: 32 per cent); and God does miracles (7: 32 per cent). While the children’s acounts of God were remarkably similar, gender informed their ideas in that boys were only minimally concerned with the good qualities God gives to humans and in writing of God’s own qualities boys remarked on God’s not being always angry and not fighting, while girls mentioned qualities such as God’s good temper and forgiveness. Girls in and above the middle age range were also more likely to remark on the behaviours of which God approves or disapproves (that is, 10, or 48 per cent, of girls over 9 years). Older children tended to include an element of more complex theological detail in their accounts. Thus seven girls and nine boys aged 9 and over (that is, 33 per cent of girls and 53 per cent of boys over 9) referred to the relation between God and Jesus, or between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or between God and other gods. Also concealed in the idea that God’s primary attribute is that of loving or having compassion for humans is a shift whereby, from age 9/10 onwards for both girls and boys, God’s love is commented on as either unconditional and enduring in the face of humans’ bad behaviour or conditional on a person’s pitiable state, on good behaviour, or on Christian observance. Both ideas (antithetical as they appear) inform the hierarchical aspect of compassion as definitive of kin relations within household and clan.9 Adults’ views – as derived from participant observation – make ritual Christian observance the crucial sign of belief in God; God’s love for humans depends on their attendance on him, and this in turn governs whether or not a person will be saved. One must be seen to say grace before meals, to bow one’s head and close one’s eyes while praying, to attend church services twice on Sundays and at least once during the week, to give money to the Church and to support its organizations and projects. This matter of the visibility and frequency of Christian observance connects with the still-prevailing Fijian idea that it is attendance on a god or chief that actually empowers him. So, while all the old Fijian gods and ancestors continue to exist, their mana (effectiveness) is greatly diminished because those people who do attend on them can do so only in secret:10 since conversion to Christianity, attendance on the old gods and ancestors constitutes witchcraft. Children are well aware of the importance of Christian ritual observance in that their attendance at church is mandatory: they are expected to be present for at least two out of the three Sunday services and to attend Sunday school and any service held for them during the week. In Fijian, Sunday is na siga tabu, literally ‘the forbidden day’; women and girls prepare meals, but apart from this one should not do any work and should confine one’s activities to church-going, reading religious texts, and rest. So, on Sundays, children are forbidden to play any sport, go swimming, run about on the village green, or play in any obvious way. Each school day begins with prayer and each school week with a special religious assembly taken by a church elder. The importance of ritual observance is apparent in what children wrote about Sunday school, wilivola (literally, ‘reading’). Again, their accounts were remarkably uniform, with twenty-three out of twenty-five girls and all twenty-two boys providing a more or less elaborate account of the procedural aspects of Sunday school from the sounding of the drum after lunch until the children were dismissed to go home; younger children’s essays were less detailed than those of older children but, nevertheless, the vast majority followed the same pattern. Boys and girls tended, however, to emphasize somewhat different aspects. One-third or more of the girls gave a more or less detailed procedural account (23: 92 per cent); described what they learned at wilivola (15: 60 per cent); noted that reading occurs every Sunday (12: 48 per cent); explained why we attend church or wilivola (12: 48 per cent); referred specifically to the numbers of children and/or named their teachers (11: 44 per cent); remarked on what is forbidden on Sunday (8: 32 per cent), and said that Sunday reading is good and enjoyable (8: 32 per cent). One-third or more of boys gave a more or less detailed procedural account (22: 100 per cent); described what they learned at wilivola (9: 41 per cent), and remarked on what is forbidden on Sunday (8: 36 per cent). Of the nine boys who described what they learned, two of the youngest referred to virtues such as obedience and piety, one to being taught not to swear, and the remaining six to learning songs and stories. The sixteen girls who described what they learned also emphasized stories, but tended to be more explicit about their content; twelve girls further remarked that the purpose of reading is to reveal what is written in the Bible, while the five oldest of these (aged 10/4 to 11/6) said also that its purpose is to come to know God or Jesus. Only one boy (aged 11/6) made this same remark. Children’s accounts of somate (death ceremonies – twenty-five essays by girls, twenty-two by boys), like those for Sunday school, exhibit a distinct bias towards the procedural, with increasingly rich detail with age about what happens from the time the death is notified to the ceremonies for the fourth, tenth, and one-hundredth nights. One-third or more of twenty-five girls gave a more or less detailed procedural account (24: 96 per cent); remarked on women’s weeping (23: 92 per cent), communal meals (18: 72 per cent), the burial of the body (18: 72 per cent), the church service or blessings, hymns, and so on at the grave (17: 68 per cent), the grave itself (13: 52 per cent), the coffin (12: 48 per cent), people coming from other villages for the ceremonies (11: 44 per cent), the bringing of mats, bark-cloth, and other valuables for presentation (10: 40 per cent), the bringing of feast food for presentation (9: 36 per cent), and women’s preparation and cooking of food (9: 36 per cent). Just over a third or more of twenty-two boys gave a more or less detailed procedural account (21: 95 per cent); remarked on the burial of the body (17: 77 per cent), on the church service or blessings, hymns, and so on at the grave (15: 68 per cent), the grave itself (14: 64 per cent), communal meals (12: 55 per cent), women’s weeping (13: 59 per cent), the coffin (9: 41 per cent), the particular kin who weep, dress the corpse, and so on (9: 41 per cent), the fourth, tenth, and/or one-hundredth night ceremonies (8: 36 per cent), and men’s killing of a cow and pig (8: 36 per cent). This procedural bias is accompanied by a definite shift with age whereby children older than 9/0 included personal references in their accounts, or described ceremonies for specific named kin or ceremonies in which they had been personally involved; this shift is found in the essays of thirteen out of twenty girls (65 per cent) and seven out of seventeen boys (41 per cent) aged 9 and above. These personal references are further distinguished, in the case of girls, by a shift from goal-orientated to actor-orientated verbal constructions along with the use of first-person pronouns (I, we), which itself suggests a shift in their orientation to the activity being written about – one that is apparently informed by gender (see below). In their essays about both God and Sunday school, children seem more concerned with doctrine and procedure than with their personal involvement; the following three examples (by a girl aged 9/4) demonstrate the shift in tone that may be found in essays about death ceremonies written by children over 9 years old; the first essay is about God, the second about Sunday school, and the third about death ceremonies. Note how this child, even while she gives a generalized account of what is done for a death, injects a distinctly personal note. A story about God We perform church services to God. Church services to God are really very useful. For we may sing hymns, for we read the Bible. God orders our lives. God alone. He helps us in all our activities. God is good. He helps us and looks after us wherever we go. God also formed the parts of our bodies. God takes care of us a great deal. God also loves/pities us. God has power. We always pray to God. We always ask God to give us wisdom. Reading on Sunday We always read on Sundays. We children learn some stories about our reading on Sunday. We read the sacred book. We sing during Sunday reading. Some are bad children on Sunday. We learn a lot of stories in the sacred book. Our teacher reads very clearly to us some stories about Sunday reading. After lunch the drum sounds, we go at once to church so that we may attend to our duty or reading. If every single day we read no trouble will come to us. Our teachers always help us. The somate The somate is truly a terrifying thing because someone is dead, the ladies cry. The somate is held in the place where somate are held if a gentleman or lady dies they are at once carried here to their house. There are also communal meals according to clan. We eat together if there is a death. For myself, if someone died in our house I should be absolutely overwhelmed. If there is a somate a cow is killed and chickens and a pig. After that the coffin of the dead gentleman or lady is carried away for burial. Beautiful mats are spread below [the coffin], after that a little earth is put on top, then it’s buried completely. Unlike a number of much younger children, this child does not, in her account of the somate, mention the church service or prayers and hymn-singing at the graveside; most salient for her are the weeping, the communal meals, the burial, and the grave itself. Weeping and preparing and cooking food for communal meals are women’s duties, and the frequency of their mention in girls’ essays implicates not only the gendered nature of the activities, but how gender is intrinsic to the learning process itself. Boys also remark on weeping, but refer more often to activities such as the burial and the service at the graveside which are presided over by men, who are also implicated in references to the grave, which is dug and prepared by men. Boys are less likely than girls to inject a personal note into their stories (41 per cent of boys compared with 65 per cent of girls over the age of 9) and when they do so, these personal references have a tone that is qualitatively less engaged. Thus boys by and large continue to make use of goal-orientated verbal constructions and, when they do use actor-orientated constructions, tend overwhelmingly to use third-person plural pronouns (they). Only one boy, aged 11/10, produced an essay about the somate that was similar in tone to the girls’ essays (an extract is to be found in the appendix). The tone of the following piece, by a boy aged 11/9, is more typical of the tone of essays on the somate by boys aged 9 and above: When someone dies the somate is done, children are forbidden to be there, or meet together or play or shout or laugh, the [people in] the somate are silent, when someone appears with valuables they weep, if some guests come those in the somate may be happy or crying … When those who are kin of the dead do the burial they will cry in the village. The grave-diggers are ready, they wait to carry the coffin there. The coffin carriers carry it on their shoulders to church for the service, then there is the service, after that [the coffin] is carried to the grave for burial, when they arrive there at the grave they do the church service, then the minister speaks: earth to earth, sand to sand, after that the burial is done at once, after the burial they come [home] here, after that there is the ceremony for the fourth night, after that the kin of the one who is eating stones disperse, they will go home and it will not be long before there is the [ceremony for] the hundredth night. Nevertheless, that some boys over 9/0 do inject a personal note into their stories, shows that at this age they, like the girls, are consciously assimilating mandatory collective activities to their sense of themselves as particular children, in particular kinds of relations with particular kin. Death at once disrupts the relation between the child as ego and his or her dead kinsperson and is an occasion for the elaboration of other relations with other kinspersons.11 This developmental shift suggests too that at around the age of 9/0 to 10/0 children are deliberately reflecting on what they know and, in so doing, assimilating their understanding of Christian doctrine to their embodied knowledge of Christian ritual, such that the doctrine becomes explanatory of the ritualized behaviour, which had earlier had no particular meaning beyond its performance. Thus what I have called above a ‘procedural bias’ is the foundation of the child’s knowledge. This procedural bias is apparent too in Sawaieke adults’ accounts of a wedding, funeral, or other occasion elsewhere. This is a casual observation derived from listening to people relate their experiences; their accounts routinely contain a blow-by-blow description of the festivities, beginning with how the narrator got up in the morning, bathed, dressed, went for breakfast, what he or she ate, how afterwards they made their way to the village hall, entered, sat down in such-and-such a place, and so on – apparently conforming to an idea of narrative structure that places weight on temporal and procedural aspects. Thus the children’s written style of ‘telling a story about …’ is similar to adults’ oral style when they tell others about what happened at the Methodist Conference or Provincial Council or other meeting or festivity or ceremony. What I think is important in the case of both children and adults is that this procedural bias is evidently related to ritual, which itself tends to be talked about not in terms of meaning, but in terms of who should do what, when, and how. In anthropological texts, ‘ritual’ usually refers to discrete ceremonies; I use ‘ritualized behaviour’ here to refer more widely to behaviours that are pervasive in daily life (in our own as well as others’), so taken for granted that their ritual quality is rarely recognized. I argue that most, if not all, human behaviours have a ritualized aspect – that is to say, an aspect that can be rendered explicit as ‘a rule’. Here I am following Lewis’s formulation that, ‘[i]n all those instances where we would feel no doubt that we had observed ritual we could have noticed and shall notice whether the people who perform it have explicit rules to guide them in what they do … What is always explicit about ritual, and recognised by those who perform it, is that aspect of it which states who should do what and when (1980: 11). Adults are usually capable of ascribing a meaning to ritualized behaviours, but from a child’s point of view that meaning cannot be obvious; it does not declare itself. For a child, the significance of the behaviour may be simply that ‘this is how you do X’. In my previous work, I have shown how this childhood experience of embodying a ritual behaviour or series of behaviours is crucial for the process through which, over time, meaning comes to be ascribed to that behaviour such that its performance becomes symbolic of that meaning.12 The developmental process through which a Sawaieke child makes Wesleyan doctrine meaningful for him or herself has to be such that ‘the Christian way’ comes to be at one with ‘the way of the land’ and ‘the chiefly way’. Sawaieke adults in general explicitly hold all three to be in perfect accord. With apparent ease, they can reconcile their devout, and in most respects apparently orthodox, Methodism and their acceptance of the Word of God as written in the Bible, with their equal certainty that the old Fijian gods and ancestors still exist and in their benign aspect come under the Christian God’s aegis and do his will, punishing those who wilfully abjure the obligations of kinship or attendance on a properly installed chief; the ancestors’ malign power is also routinely unleashed in witchcraft. The question is, how can this reconciliation be achieved when there is no explicit acknowledgement in any church service or Christian prayer or Bible story or Sunday-school teaching of the continuing existence of the ancestors? The answer lies, I think, in the day-to-day pervasiveness of ritualized behaviour in Fijian village life, in the dominance of ritual performance over doctrine in villagers’ ideas of what it is to be Christian (which is not to deny the many explicitly and implicitly syncretic statements to be found in both the historical archive and in contemporary Fijian media), in the connected idea that it is attendance on the Christian God, or ancestor or living chief that actually empowers him, and in the idea that the ancestors’ power is immanent in the world, while that of the Christian God is transcendant. In the child’s lived experience the ritual quality of daily life is learned through obedience to endless injunctions from their elders to do certain things in certain ways and not to do other things. For the young child bowing one’s head and closing one’s eyes for prayer and not playing or making a noise on Sunday are thus of the same order as adopting a respectful body posture in the company of adults and not playing on the village green when a chiefly ceremony is being performed in the village hall. Doctrine is not unimportant here. Nevertheless, the child has embodied an array of ritualized behaviours to the point where they are automatic, long before it arrives at an understanding of the doctrinal orthodoxies that are held by adults to render their ritualized behaviours mandatory.13 From the adults’ point of view their injunctions to children about how to behave all bear on aspects of veiqaravi, ‘mutual attendance’, in its most general sense; so, for example, when children are asked (as they often are) to give out an impromptu prayer before meals, they are explicitly implicated in an act of recognition paradigmatic of Fijian ritual interaction. It seems probable that it is in such mundane ritualized practices that children come to recognize veiqaravi as a pervasive form of recognition that unites different domains of Fijian social life.14 Elsewhere, I have shown how, in respect of Fijian hierarchy, this process of constituting the meaning of ritualized behaviour results in conforming behaviour that suggests a complementary consensus about its meaning, whereas in fact people hold significantly different ideas of hierarchy as a function of both age and gender.15 This is likely too in respect of the articulation of specifically Methodist ritual and doctrine, though it is a difficult thing to get at, since the doctrine appears at first sight to be as thoroughly assimilated as the ritualized behaviours. Note, however, that the various forms of Fijian Christian practice and doctrinal differences (between Seventh Day Adventism and Methodism, for example) may be a topic of conversation when people are drinking yaqona, and also a topic of debate.16 Fijians I know are all Christians (mostly Wesleyans); all are assiduous in their Christian practice and all assert beliefs that accord with the Bible and the Methodist hymn- and prayer-book. Mostly such assertions seem not to be merely conve