Abstract
Christianity is often considered a religion of transcendence, in which divinity “goes beyond” human space and time. Recent anthropological scholarship has noted, however, that claims to transcendence must be expressed materially. This chapter examines the ways in which Fijian Methodists attempt to achieve a kind of Christian transcendence in which they escape negative influences of the vanua (land, chiefdoms, and the “traditional” order generally). They do so by offering sperm whales’ teeth to church authorities in order to apologise and atone for the sins of ancestors. Such rituals do not achieve the transcendence they aim for, however, as the whales’ teeth–the material tokens offered to gain divine favour–gain their ritual value precisely because of their attachment to the vanua.
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Notes
- 1.
Matthew Engelke has explored this paradox in his writings on the Masowe Apostolics, a Zimbabwean Christian group whose members strive for “an immaterial faith”—they denounce the Bible as a physical object which blocks a “live and direct” relationship with God—but return, inevitably and continually, to material engagements in their quests for transcendence (see especially Engelke 2007).
- 2.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migrants were brought to Fiji from South Asia to work on sugarcane plantations. Most of their descendents, now generally called Indo-Fijians, are Hindus and Muslims. Tensions between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians have led to the lamination of religious and political identities, with indigenous “ethnonationalists” calling for Fiji to be declared a Christian state.
- 3.
Tabua is the standard term for a whale’s tooth, but various polite synonyms are used in speech, including vatu (stone), the synecdochic wawa (cord), and especially kamunaga (valuable); see Ravuvu (1987, p. 23).
- 4.
During my research in Fiji, I have purchased several teeth from pawnshops in Suva and have found them to vary widely in these characteristics and to be priced accordingly, ranging from around 100 Fijian dollars for a modest tooth to several hundred dollars for a large, lustrous one. From visits to pawnshops in Suva and the nearby town of Nausori, Van der Grijp reports that he was offered a total of 23 whales’ teeth with an average price of 200 Fijian dollars, and he notes that “Burglars steal tabua because these usually are the most valuable objects they can find in Fijian houses” (2007, p. 348; on selling tabua, see also Ryle 2010, pp. 125, 129; Williksen-Bakker 2002, p. 77). Because of their value, tabua are subject to being counterfeited in various materials, including plastics, cement, and animal bones. The Fijian government has tried with limited success to control the trade in teeth; in February 2010, police announced that they had confiscated almost 850 tabua from three Suva pawnshops (Fiji Sun 2010).
- 5.
Moreover, Takei was not the only whale’s tooth turned into a spirit shrine. In pre-Christian Fiji, tabua were sometimes carved into squat, miniature human figures kept with model temples woven from coconut fiber; these model temples were, in turn, stored inside houses devoted to spirit worship (bure kalou). Fiji’s first colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, described one tabua carved into the shape of two women standing with their backs to each other, and noted the claim that “In olden time it spoke with a thin little squeaky voice” and “would walk about” the temple (quoted in Larsson 1960, p. 27; see also Hooper 2006, p. 248; Kleinschmidt 1984, pp. 187–188). Governor Gordon mentioned that the tooth could once identify thieves and demand food, but with the arrival of Christianity, it had lost its power. Another distinctive spirit shrine was the “composite tooth,” a large tabua pieced together skillfully from parts of multiple whales’ teeth (Hooper 2006, p. 251; see also Ewins 2009, p. 212; Parke 1997, Roth 1937).
- 6.
Rod Ewins (personal communication, January 15, 2010) notes that itovo vakavanua, “vanua-related customs,” is a field that overlaps with but is not entirely contained within the vanua as social unit and territory. Accordingly, even if pre-Christian religious practices are considered old vanua-related customs, they can be considered distinct from the broader category of the vanua in some ways.
- 7.
- 8.
Whales’ teeth were also used competitively by missionaries from different denominations. Thornley (1979, p. 303) reports a case from 1905 in the Soloira district in Vitilevu, in which local chiefs “were presented with two tabuas from the chiefs of Naseuvou accompanied by the Soloira Catholic priest: together with the tabuas went the request that the recipients accept the Catholic religion. Consequently, the occupants of two houses became Roman Catholics.” Conversely, Buatava (1996, p. 182) describes the persecution of Catholics in Kadavu Island and mentions an incident in Tavuki village where “a local chief traditionally presented mats and food with a tabua…to some Catholics asking them to give up the faith.” Unfortunately, he does not give the date of the occurrence, but from the context of his article it was apparently in the late nineteenth century.
- 9.
- 10.
On the 1985 presentation, which took place on the 150th anniversary of Methodism’s arrival in Fiji and involved an elaborate torchbearing procession, see the Fiji Times editions of August 19 and August 26 for that year. There is a popular myth that the murderers tried to cook Baker’s boots so they could eat them, prompting one local man to declare in 1927 that his ancestors “did no such thing…. It’s true they were dark-minded, but they were not as dark-minded as that” (Hames 1972, p. 41). Nonetheless, “In 1993, villagers presented the Methodist Church of Fiji with Baker’s boots” (Pareti 2003). The 2003 apology received international media attention; see, e.g., BBC News (2003) and Pareti (2003). On the Christian denominational dynamics of this latest event, see Ryle (2010, Chap. 2).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of the Tui Tavuki, Ratu I. W. Narokete. The final version has benefited from the criticisms of Matthew Engelke and Rod Ewins, as well as the expert linguistic advice of Sekove Bigitibau. Thanks also to Apo Aporosa and Matti Eräsaari for their observations on counterfeit tabua. All errors are my own.
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Tomlinson, M. (2012). Passports to Eternity: Whales’ Teeth and Transcendence in Fijian Methodism. In: Manderson, L., Smith, W., Tomlinson, M. (eds) Flows of Faith. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2932-2_13
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