The Growth of Species and the Making of Timeless Forms: Divine Objects and Extraordinary Bodies in Fijian Ritual Polities

• Published in: Oceania Vol. 88; no. 1; pp. 55 - 68
• Main Author: Abramson, Allen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melbourne Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd 01-03-2018; Blackwell Publishing Limited, a company of John Wiley & Sons, Inc; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Analysis; Cosmology; Cultural anthropology; Divinity; Fiji; material culture; Native culture; Native peoples; Negation; Oceanic languages; Organizations; Philosophy and religion; Philosophy of religion; Relatedness; Rites & ceremonies; ritual polities; Sorcery; Species; timeless forms; Fiji
• ISSN: 0029-8077; 1834-4461
• DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5181

Oceanic polities and social organizations are often characterized as life‐giving systems that reproduce specific modes of humanity in ritual cycles of cosmogony or in regenerative flows of ancestral substance and relatedness. These portrayals typically enforce a strong ontological contrast between the properties of human beings and those of their immortal forebears. This paper shows in detail how, far from reproducing human life as a dilution of ancestral timelessness in a specifically human realm, Fijian ritual polities act as ‘paradise machines’, working to assemble precisely configured axes of natural species, human beings, manufactured objects, ancestors, and divinities as simulacra of the mythically narrated and danced domain of Nakauvadra. By comprehending Fijian ritual polities as hopeful denials of specifically human being, light is shed upon the cosmological significance of familiar modes of ritual hierarchy and ceremonial gift‐giving, but also of technical synthesis that has as its mission the material recomposition of these axes of timeless forms and relations: or, as in the case of sorcery, their deathly technical negation.