Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T20:32:39.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Moving Up the Ranks: Chiefly Status, Prestige, and Schooling in Colonial Fiji

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Carmen M. White*
Affiliation:
The Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Central Michigan University

Extract

In a 1987 volume titled Class and Culture in the South Pacific, Samoan historian Malama Meleisea describes orthodox Marxism, modernization theory, and unilineal evolutionary thought as united in their “Eurocentric frame of reference,” their “notion of unilineal progress,… assumption that pre-capitalist social institutions are obsolete and that class formation is historically inevitable.” While Meleisea's pointed polemic against metanarratives that privilege a universality of Western laws of historical development and progress is partly informed by the undelivered promises of modernization theory, his critique is more than the mere stirrings of an incipient postmodernist discourse. It also derives from a practical engagement with socio-political developments in the South Pacific region that puts in relief the ways in which grand paradigms can mold and distort contemporary Pacific Island institutions into Western images. Here, he speaks to the tendency to explain the endurance of chieftaincies in modern Pacific states as homologous with, a local variant, or the actual equivalent of, a new type of “class relations.” In a more recent edited volume that focuses on chiefs in the contemporary Pacific, White and Lindstrom similarly note a popular regard for chiefs as “antique survivals from pre-state political formations” that ultimately fails to address contemporary chiefly authority on its own terms. As White and Lindstrom note further, based on the projections of development proposed in Weber-inspired modernization theory, chiefs should have become obsolete in the modern nation-state: “The forces of modernity were meant to usher him (or sometimes her) from the global stage, replacing tribal or feudal styles of leadership wkh thg universalistic, rational forms of the natioh-state and its attendant bureaucracies.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 History of Education Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Meleisea, Malama, “Ideology in Pacific Studies,” in Class and Culture in the South Pacific eds. Anthony Hooper, Steve Britton, Ron Crocombe, Judith Hunstman, Cluny Macpherson (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1987), 151.Google Scholar

2 Geoffrey White, M. and Lamont Lindstrom eds., Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17.Google Scholar

3 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1947).Google Scholar

4 White, and Lindstrom, , Chiefs Today, 1.Google Scholar

5 See, for example, Altbach, Philip G. and Gail Kelly, P., “Introduction,” in Education and Colonialism eds. Philip Altbach, G. and Gail Kelly, P. (Longman: New York, 1978).Google Scholar

6 For example, Kelly, Gail P., “Colonialism, Indigenous Society, and School Practices: French West Africa and Indochina, 1918–1938,” in Education and Colonialism eds. Philip Altbach, G. and Gail Kelly, P. (Longman: New York, 1978).Google Scholar

7 Altbach, and Kelly, , “Introduction.”Google Scholar

8 Collins, Randall. “Functional and Conflict Theories of Educational Stratification.American Sociological Review 36 (December 1971): 10021019.Google Scholar

9 Collins, “Functional and Conflict Theories,” p. 1010.Google Scholar

10 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinctions: The Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

11 Collins, “Functional and Conflict Theories,” p. 1010.Google Scholar

12 “For an example in mission education, see Menton, Linda K. “A Christian and ‘Civilized’ Education: The Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children's School, 1839–50.” History Of Education Quarterly 32 (Summer 1992): 213242. This study chronicles the history of a Royal School established by a missionary family for the children of Native Hawaiian royalty. It describes how the school, founded at the behest of the indigenous nobility, played a role in the demise of Native Hawaiian leadership via its failure to “produce men and women equipped to rule in the unfamiliar world of a constitutional monarchy … [and in] a society in transition,” p. 242.Google Scholar

13 For an exceptional case study, see, for example, Srivastava, Sanjay, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (Routledge: London, 1998). Srivastava's study of the Doon School—an Indian public school founded during the British colonial period—represents a study of colonial education that privileges the ways such schooling was defined and adapted to local structures of meaning, including its role at the forefront in shaping a set of standards that would become the basis for cultivating the “modern Indian citizen” in postcolonial India.Google Scholar

14 Throughout this article, “Fijian” designates the indigenous people of the Fiji archipelago.Google Scholar

15 It is beyond the scope of this study to provide an analysis of the separate track of educational development for Indian indentured laborers who arrived in Fiji beginning in the late 1870s and their descendants, as well as the “free immigrants” who began arriving from India roughly four decades later.Google Scholar

16 Williams, Thomas, Fiji and the Fijians, Vol. 2. The Islands and Their Inhabitants (London: Paternoster Row, 1858), 2526.Google Scholar

17 Williams, , Fiji and the Fijians, 41–42.Google Scholar

18 Nation, John, Customs of Respect: The Traditional Basis of Fijian Communal Politics (Canberra: Australian National University, 1978); Ravuvu, Asesela, The Façade of Democracy (Suva: Reader Publishing House, 1991).Google Scholar

19 France, Peter, The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonisation in Fiji (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

20 Nayacakalou, Rusiate R., Leadership in Fiji (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1975).Google Scholar

21 Thomson, Basil, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom (London: William Heinemann, 1908), 33.Google Scholar

22 Thomson, , The Fijians, 32.Google Scholar

23 The Lau group is geographically closer to Tonga than to the nearest island in the Fiji archipelago.Google Scholar

24 Calvert, James, Fiji and the Fijians: Vol. 2. A Mission History (London: Paternoster Row, 1858). See also Schutz, Albert, The Fijian Language (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985).Google Scholar

25 Clammer, J.R., Literacy and Social Change: A Case Study of Fiji (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976).Google Scholar

26 See, Burton, J.W. and Wallace Deane, A Hundred Years in Fiji (London: The Epworth Press, 1936) and Clammer, Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

27 Calvert, , Fiji and the Fijians. Google Scholar

28 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

29 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

30 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji, and Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

31 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji, Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change; and Ravuvu, Asesela D., Development or Dependence: The Pattern of Change in a Fijian Village (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1988).Google Scholar

32 Calvert, James, Fiji and the Fijians, 34–35.Google Scholar

33 Jackson, John in John E. Erskine, Journal of a Cruise Among the Islands of the Western Pacific, including the Feejees and Others Inhabited by the Polynesian Negro Races (London: John Murray, 1853), 461.Google Scholar

34 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change, 138.Google Scholar

35 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

36 Allardyce, W.L., “The System of Education in Fiji,” in Educational Systems of the Chief Crown Colonies and Possessions of the British Empire, including Reports on the Training of the Native Races [1908] (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968).Google Scholar

37 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

38 See Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji. Google Scholar

39 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji. Google Scholar

40 Thornley, A.W., “Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945: The Emergence of a National Church.“ PhD diss., Australian National University, 1979. Thornley notes that untitled Fijians experienced unprecedented opportunities to achieve “chief-like status” among fellow commoners once appointed to higher positions within the church hierarchy. For example, by the late 1880s, native ministers of commoner background were being censured for assuming such chiefly entitlements as requesting their congregation and other mission workers to perform lala in service to them.Google Scholar

41 Ravuvu, , Development or Dependence. See also Toren, Christina, “Symbolic Space and the Construction of Hierarchy: An Anthropological and Cognitive Developmental Study in a Fijian Village.” PhD diss., University of London, 1986.Google Scholar

42 Ravuvu, , Development or Dependence and Toren, “Symbolic Space and the Construction of Hierarchy.”Google Scholar

43 Thornley, , “Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945.” Thornley notes that chiefs could intervene in the posting of specific pastor-teachers, the payment of their salaries, and the provision of their housing.Google Scholar

44 Horne, J., A Year in Fiji: An Inquiry into the Botanical, Agricultural, and Economical Resources of the Colony (London: Edward Stanford, 1881), 140141.Google Scholar

45 Horne, A Year in Fiji. Google Scholar

46 Thornley, , “Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945.Google Scholar

47 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji and Thornley, , Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945.Google Scholar

48 Clammer, , Literacy and Social Change. Google Scholar

49 Thornley, , Fijian Methodism, 1874–1945. Google Scholar

50 Ravuvu, , The Façade of Democracy. Google Scholar

51 Here, and more generally within the context of Fiji nomenclature practices, the term “European” designates anyone of European descent regardless of national origins, and so refers to white Australians, New Zealanders, and North Americans as well as whites actually born in Europe.Google Scholar

52 For a detailed discussion of the Regulations, see Legge, J.D., Britain in Fiji, 1858–1880 (London: MacMillan, 1958).Google Scholar

53 Durutalo, Simione, “Internal Colonialism and Unequal Regional Development: The Case of Western Viti Levu, Fiji” (MA thesis, University of the South Pacific, 1985). Durutalo notes that the provinces of western and central Fiji—which had been characterized by less hierarchically organized precolonial political structures—waged campaigns of resistance to colonial rule and were subsequently “pacified” with the assistance of native battalions and through the imposition of Roko Tui from the eastern and southeastern regions.Google Scholar

54 Nayacakalou, , Leadership in Fiji. Google Scholar

55 The writings of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna are replete with the theme of the propriety of positioning chiefs as the leaders of the Fijian masses in colonial Fiji. See, for example, Scarr, Deryck, The Three-Legged Stool, Selected Writings of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna (London: Macmillan, 1983).Google Scholar

56 James, Kenneth N., “Schooling in a Colonial Setting: An Account of the Government School for Fijian Boys, 1881–1900” (MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1981).Google Scholar

57 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji. See also, James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

58 Thomson, , The Fijians, 313–14.Google Scholar

59 Cited in James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting,” p. 29.Google Scholar

60 Ali, Ahmed, Plantation to Politics: Studies on Fiji Indians (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1980).Google Scholar

61 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji.” Also, James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

62 For a discussion of English public schools, see, for example Weinberg, I., The English Public Schools: The Sociology of Elite Education (New York: Atherton Press, 1967) and Wakeford, J. The Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1969).Google Scholar

63 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji.”Google Scholar

64 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

65 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

66 Horne, , A Year in Fiji, 141.Google Scholar

67 Horne, , A Year in Fiji. Google Scholar

68 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

69 James, , “Schooing in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

70 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji.”Google Scholar

71 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

72 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji.”Google Scholar

73 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

74 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji,” 195.Google Scholar

75 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji.”Google Scholar

76 Landers, H. and Miles, V., The Fiji School of Medicine: A Brief History and List of Graduates (Kensington: University of New South Wales, 1992).Google Scholar

77 A traditional form of Fijian dress resembling a kilt.Google Scholar

78 Allardyce, , “The System of Education in Fiji” and James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

79 Cited in James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting,” 92.Google Scholar

80 Cited in James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting,” 96.Google Scholar

81 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

82 James, , “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

83 MacNaught, Timothy J. “‘We Seem to No Longer Be Fijians': Some Perceptions of Social Change in Fijian History.” Pacific Studies 1 (1977): 1524.Google Scholar

84 Durutalo, , “Internal Colonialism and Unequal Regional Development.”Google Scholar

85 Durutalo, , “Internal Colonialism and Unequal Regional Development” and James, “Schooling in a Colonial Setting.”Google Scholar

86 Scarr, Deryck, Ratu Sukuna: Soldier, Statesman, Man of Two Worlds (Macmillan Education Limited, 1980).Google Scholar

87 Stephens, F.B., Report on Education in the Colony of Fiji, Fiji Legislative Council Paper no. 18 of 1944.Google Scholar

88 Mann, Cecil, Education in Fiji (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935) and Stephens, F.B., Report on Education in the Colony of Fiji. Google Scholar

89 Mann, Cecil, Education in Fiji, 42.Google Scholar

90 Stephens, F.B., Report on Education in the Colony of Fiji, 9–10.Google Scholar

91 See Watters, R.F., Koro: Economic Development and Social Change in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) for a discussion of how the hierarchical ranking of chiefs impacted differential levels of entrepreneurial participation among the Fijian nobility.Google Scholar

92 Burton, and Deane, , A Hundred Years in Fiji, 75–76.Google Scholar

93 MacNaught, , “‘We Seem to No Longer Be Fijians.'”Google Scholar

94 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

95 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

96 Cited in James, , “School in a Colonial Setting,” 132.Google Scholar

97 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

98 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

99 Landers, and Miles, , The Fiji School of Medicine. Google Scholar

100 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

101 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. See also Snow, Philip, The Years of Hope: Cambridge, Colonial Administration in the South Seas and Cricket (London: The Radcliffe Press, 1997).Google Scholar

102 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

103 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

104 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna, 102.Google Scholar

105 Norton, Robert, Race and Politics in Fiji (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1990).Google Scholar

106 MacNaught, , “‘We Seem to No Longer Be Fijians.'”; also, see Fiji Government Publications, Fijian Affairs Regulations (Suva, Fiji: Government Printer, 1948).Google Scholar

107 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna, 154.Google Scholar

108 Scarr, Deryck, Fiji, The Three-Legged Stool: Selected Writings of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna (Macmillan Education, 1983), 307.Google Scholar

109 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna; Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool. Google Scholar

110 Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool, 340.Google Scholar

111 Colonial Official Annual Report on Fiji for the year 1947 (London: Your Majesty's Office, 1949).Google Scholar

112 Esther, M. Williams, “A Study of the Education of Girls in Fiji with Special Reference to the Education of Indian Girls” (BA thesis, Melbourne University, 1937).Google Scholar

113 Mai Na Ruku Ni Veidakua: The Story of Adi Cakobau School (Videorecording), Pasifika Communications, 1998.Google Scholar

114 Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool, 342.Google Scholar

115 Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool, 342.Google Scholar

116 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

117 Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool, 360.Google Scholar

118 Scarr, The Three-Legged Stool, 478.Google Scholar

119 Colonial Official Annual Report on Fiji for the Year 1950, 36–37.Google Scholar

120 Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, The Pacific Way: A Memoir (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1997).Google Scholar

121 Mara, , The Pacific Way. Google Scholar

122 Scarr, Ratu Sukuna. Google Scholar

123 Tarte, Daryl, Turaga: The Life and Times and Chiefly Authority of Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau, G.C.M.G, K.C.V.O., K.B.E., D.S.O., K.St.J., E.D. in Fiji (Suva: Fiji Times Limited, 1993).Google Scholar

124 White, and Lindstrom, , Chiefs Today, 17.Google Scholar

125 A number of Fijians from various walks of life, but not of chiefly descent, and with whom I spoke, noted that Fijians of chiefly status, or well connected to high-ranking chiefs, are still favored for university scholarships abroad, most notably for graduate studies—thus suggesting a new frontier of educational exclusivity.Google Scholar