Epilogue: Multicultural Relations in Fiji--Between Despair and Hope‪.‬

Since the events of May 19, 2000 public and scholarly interest in Fiji has dramatically swelled. In Australia there was a veritable deluge of media attention from the moment when George Speight and his armed men strode into Parliament House in Suva and took Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and members of Parliament hostage. Although that media deluge slowed to a trickle over subsequent months and years, there has been a steady stream of scholarly works flowing from within and without Fiji, which have attempted to analyse that coup and to reflect on its aftermath. (1) Although two papers in this volume focus on the events of that year on the basis of embodied witness, this volume is less an analysis occasioned by the urgency and drama of those events, than it is a distilled reflection on the configurations of the place of Fiji before and after. It offers a series of distinctly anthropological analyses, based on long-term fieldwork in Fiji, with indigenous, Indo-Fijian and Banaban interlocutors. Many of the papers were first conceived for a session on Fiji organized by Elfriede Hermann and Anette Schade at the meetings of the European Society for Oceanists in July 2002. But all have been extensively revised and they now engage in a spirited collective conversation, framed by the editors' insightful introduction. In that introduction, the editors avow Fiji to be multicultural in fact, although multiculturalism as value is hotly contested. They acknowledge the tensions and violence inherent in ethnic relations in Fiji but insist that even violent relations are perforce relations (Hermann and Kempf this volume). The dominant discourses of race and primordial identity may seek to naturalize such relations, but such discourses are palpably the creations of culture and of history. Relations between indigenous Fijians, Indo-Fijians and Banabans are not the natural outcomes of autochthony or migration, of certainties flowing from precedence in dwelling. Their mutual relations have been formed in the turbulent cultural politics of colonialism and its long, enduring wake. The mutual relations of these three peoples are even now shadowed by the absent presence of the British, the foreigners, the whites.