Performing Masculinity by Geir Presterudstuen

Author:Geir Presterudstuen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Money and the tension of modern life

Fijian engagement with the market economy not only has practical implications on village life but may also be considered contaminating for important cultural practices. Throughout my research, my respondents continued to allude to a perceived ideological divide between traditional, village-based ways of living, ‘the Fijian way’, and a modern, ‘Western’ lifestyle centred on money, which were seen to be in direct conflict with each other. Fijian men’s relationship to waged work and money can thus at best be described as complex and ambiguous. The village setting remains the focal point for most Fijian men’s social lives, and village identity is perceived as crucial to men’s self-identification. Hence, while the financial circumstances in the villages I conducted my research put pressure on men to take up waged work outside the village, most of my respondents had strong reservations about engaging in this, largely because it was perceived as jeopardizing their status in the village. In short, it was difficult to make a decent living while simultaneously ‘being good at being a man’.

It appears quite clear that contemporary chiefs’ engagement in the capitalist economy, for what is largely seen as personal gain and ambition, undermines the credibility and status of the traditional chiefly office as an important institution. However, what seems to be a paradoxical situation, the fact that traditional chiefs, by attempting to cement their hegemonic power through economic and political means, are simultaneously losing status and respect in traditional Fiji, is also an effective example of ideas about hegemonic masculine hybridity. Although their traditional power has been weakened in the modern context, traditional leaders appear to have successfully renegotiated their power positions by drawing upon other hegemonic notions of masculinity, such as economic prosperity and political prestige, which are highly valued in the larger, non-traditional ideological sphere.

These are in many ways men that are still drawn towards an idealized version of ethno-Fijian identity. For many others, particularly younger men or those who had relocated to town in order to set up a new life outside their ancestral villages or family homes, the allure of modernity and what city life had to offer far outweighed the potential damage represented by engagement in the money economy. Not only had many of them moved to Nadi to seek out jobs in the tourism or entertainment industry, they also often had a critical distance to life in the village and the social constraints associated with Fijian tradition. What often struck me in conversations with them was how they inverted the dominant discourse about essential differences between the Fijian way and the European way in order to present themselves as modern, outward-looking subjects. The complexity of these engagements, the various relationships people had to money and work and the many different ways they articulated their life stories in context of modern Fiji are what I am mainly concerned about in the following chapters. These are also the factors that made Nadi such a productive research setting.

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