Fiji and the Fijians: Two Modes of Missionary Discourse

The effect of the colonialist terms “orphan” and “adoption” on the citizenship status of indigenous Fijian adoptees within their own community

“…Through a ritual practice the wife would be strangled and buried with her husband. Any children of this couple would then became the responsibility of family members (Lukere, 1997; Pollock, 1989; Weir, 1998). In 1911, while Lorimer Fison travelled around Fijian villages researching important rituals and the inheritance of land, he came across a witness to this very situation in an interview in Nadi.…”

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940

“…The collaboration with metropolitan theorists strengthened a tendency, which had been apparent in some considerably earlier missionary writings such as those of the Methodist Thomas Williams (1815-1891) on Fiji, to see traditional religion in systematic terms rather than just as a collection of abhorrent practices. In his representation of a Fijian religious system (1858), Williams began to valorize it in powerful, positive terms (Herbert 1991;Weir 1998), thus anticipating the social evolutionary view that all people had some form of religion which marked a definable stage in human religious and social development. By around 1890, the view was widely held both by theorists and by many of their missionary collaborators that early religions should be 'respected for their place in preparing humankind for higher religions' (Gunson 1994:303).…”