Laughter and truth in Fiji: what we may learn from a joke.

 
   Laughter is both a fundamental contestation, exposing the basic 
   frailty of an established truth, and a dawn of day, liberating one 
   from fixed boundaries and ties. Fear is overcome by laughter but 
   remains its origin. Laughter is a sovereign mode of thought, 
   revealing the ground of a thing ... and there is no basic 
   difference between laughing at something and understanding its 
   truth ... And although laughter is considered an experience of 
   sovereignty.... [i]t does not entail the exercise of power ... 
   Basically it is an experience of revolt, of transcending servitude. 
   (Hub Zwart, 1996, discussing Bataille's L'experience interieure) 

More than twenty years have passed since I wrote the fieldnotes on which this paper is based: it's taken this long for me to come to grips with my puzzlement concerning what, actually, happened. The epigraph above provides the means of resolution. I had not, at the time of the events themselves, or later, paid enough attention to people's laughter. The revelatory force of laughter has peculiarly anthropological implications, for, as I show below through analysis of a minor but very Fijian contretemps, laughter can at once be evidence for and give new meaning to ethnographic analysis.

My case rests on a long extract from my fieldnotes for 1982. At the time I was undertaking my first fieldwork in Sawaieke, the chiefly village of the eight villages that constitute Sawaieke vanua or country on the island of Gau. (1) The edited notes cover the period from 6th to the 19th July 1982--that is, from two-weeks before the general election to just after it. The major parties in that election were the Alliance (the government party whose membership and following were predominantly ethnic Fijians) and the National Federation Party (whose membership and following were predominantly Fiji Indians). The small Nationalist Party and its leader Butadroka were vociferous and highly visible, but according to all reports had little real following and certainly none in Sawaieke country.

The history of Fiji, from the time of its independence from Britain in 1970, had been marked by a largely peaceful co-existence of ethnic Fijians and Fiji Indians--that is, until the military coups of 1987. In the early 1980s, however, there appeared little likelihood of anything like this. The 1980 census gave the population of Fiji as just over 634,000, with Fiji Indians numbering just over half. On smaller islands, however, like Gau the population was (as it still is) often almost entirely made up of ethnic Fijians. (2) My fieldnotes bear on the political rivalries of the time--national and local, but as the reader will see, my focus is not these rivalries as such, but a joke to which they gave rise and what we may learn from laughter.

The fieldnotes take for granted a knowledge of Fijian sociality, so I begin with generalisations derived from my previous work. They concern the fused antithesis of hierarchy and competitive equality that informs literally all social relations between Fijian villagers. This antithesis is manifest in ideas that are at once conserved and transformed in the practices of day-to-day living that bring them into being anew, and it was crucial to the success of the joke that was the climax of the events I describe. 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 country (and indeed among those rural Fijians who live in central and eastern Fiji) as a function of the processes through which meaning is constituted over time. (3)

A SINGLE IDEA OF ANTITHETICAL DUALITY

In central and eastern Fiji, among ethnic Fijians, social relations in general and chiefship in particular are a function of complementary and opposing concepts of competitive equality (as evinced, for example, in reciprocal exchanges across houses and clans) and hierarchy (as evinced, for example, in tribute to chiefs). Indeed, one can argue that here instituted hierarchy and competitive equality are fused aspects of a single idea of antithetical duality where each kind of social relations depends for its very continuity on the other. (4) This radical opposition pervades Fijian daily life and informs, for example, sexual relations, kinship, chiefship and ideas of the person. In the village, the fused opposition between hierarchy and competitive equality is expressed in one's position relative to others in time and space.

One's status in the community at large, as derived from an interaction between rank (chief or commoner), seniority (older or younger), and gender (wife or sister in relation to a given man), marks out one's place above (i cake) or below (i ra) others in any gathering in house, village hall or church. This above/below axis is applied both to a single horizontal plane, for example one end of the floorspace of the village hall, the church, and any house is above and the other is below, and to the vertical; for example, it is polite, when moving among others, to adopt the respectful stooping posture called lolou. In Gau all meetings, gatherings, meals, worship etc. take place in the ritualised space of the house, village hall and church and all villagers over the age of five or so are well aware which area of the space is above and which below. People's relative status is evident in their disposition vis-a-vis one another on this above/below axis.

The above/below axis is constituted out of a transformation in ritual of another spatial construct--veiqaravi lit. 'facing each other', also 'attendance on one another' which describes the disposition of houses in the space of the village and suggests mutual ritual obligations across clans. Also, any given house is usually orientated such that its 'land door' faces onto the 'sea door' of the house beside it, thus evoking relations between lands-people and seapeople. Veiqaravi may here refer to the balanced reciprocity in exchange over time across houses, clans and yavusa; (5) the term also, however, denotes 'attendance on chiefs' when the reference is to a chiefly ceremony, and 'worship' when the reference is to a church service. Thus the very term veiqaravi contains the tension between competitive equality and instituted hierarchy that allows reciprocal exchanges across houses to be transformed in yaqona ritual into tribute to chiefs. (6) The fused antithesis between hierarchy and competitive equality here references that between non-marriageable kin (where the paradigmatic reference is to the hierarchical house and clan) and marriageable kin (who as cross-cousins are equals across houses and clans). (7)

High chiefs are associated on the one hand with relations within the house and on the other with affinity--a chiefdom being always said to have been founded by an in-marrying stranger. (8) Having drunk the installation yaqona a high chief becomes the leader of a vanua--land or country, whose image in yaqona ritual is that of 'the house' writ large. But the house depends on the existence of other houses for its own continuing existence. (9) People relate to one another as kin, but while kin relations within the house are axiomatically hierarchical--husband above wife, older sibling above junior sibling--kinship across houses references the equal relationship between cross-cousins. And all exchange relations are competitive and ultimately those of balanced reciprocity even while the rituals of chiefship render them as tributary and apparently unequal. (10)

Relative status is especially evident in the full yaqona (kava-drinking) ceremonies that are mounted to welcome a visiting high chief, but no matter how informal the occasion, persons of the highest status sit above the tanoa--the large bowl in which the pounded root of the yaqona plant is infused in water and from which it is served--while those of lower status sit below it, facing the chiefs, veiqaravi. The seating position above (i cake) is defined by its being the place of chiefs, the position below (i ra) by its being the place either of women or of women and young men (11) and the prepared yaqona is served according to status, with the highest status person present being served first. Here the paramount chief is seen to take precedence over and to be above others just as, within the house, a man is seen to take precedence over and to be above his wife. The perceived subordination of wife to husband itself depends on the ritual transformation of the equality of cross-cousins into the hierarchy of marriage and is effected not only in the marriage ceremonies themselves, but on a daily basis in the conduct of every meal. (12) The exchange relations between spouses are complementary and balanced; but at meals the wife sits below her husband, serves him, and eats only when he has finished.

The foregoing account is an artefact of analysis--a distillation of what villagers in Sawaieke country take for granted. The reader is asked to bear in mind, while reading the edited extracts from my fieldnotes, the fused antithesis of hierarchy and competitive equality that informs literally all social relations between Fijian villagers, at least in central and eastern Fiji. Note that the personal names are pseudonyms, except where I am referring to public figures such as politicians and to Takalaigau, the paramount chief of Sawaieke country, and that the ritualised drinking of yaqona and the ritualised use of space it entails is a necessary feature of village meetings.

 
   A VISIT FROM THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE…