Laughter and Truth in Fiji: What We May Learn from a Joke‪.‬

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.