Laughter and truth in Fiji: what we may learn from a joke.

Toren, Christina

 Laughter is both a fundamental contestation, exposing the basic
 frailty of an established truth, and a dawn of day, liberating one
 from fixed boundaries and ties. Fear is overcome by laughter but
 remains its origin. Laughter is a sovereign mode of thought,
 revealing the ground of a thing ... and there is no basic
 difference between laughing at something and understanding its
 truth ... And although laughter is considered an experience of
 sovereignty.... [i]t does not entail the exercise of power ...
 Basically it is an experience of revolt, of transcending servitude.
 (Hub Zwart, 1996, discussing Bataille's L'experience interieure)

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.

The history of Fiji, from the time of its independence from Britain in 1970, had been marked by a largely peaceful co-existence of ethnic Fijians and Fiji Indians--that is, until the military coups of 1987. In the early 1980s, however, there appeared little likelihood of anything like this. The 1980 census gave the population of Fiji as just over 634,000, with Fiji Indians numbering just over half. On smaller islands, however, like Gau the population was (as it still is) often almost entirely made up of ethnic Fijians. (2) My fieldnotes bear on the political rivalries of the time--national and local, but as the reader will see, my focus is not these rivalries as such, but a joke to which they gave rise and what we may learn from laughter.

The fieldnotes take for granted a knowledge of Fijian sociality, so I begin with generalisations derived from my previous work. They concern the fused antithesis of hierarchy and competitive equality that informs literally all social relations between Fijian villagers. This antithesis is manifest in ideas that are at once conserved and transformed in the practices of day-to-day living that bring them into being anew, and it was crucial to the success of the joke that was the climax of the events I describe. My use of the 'ethnographic present' is intended to suggest the continuity that resides in transformation such that the ideas and practices I discuss here are likely still to prevail in Sawaieke country (and indeed among those rural Fijians who live in central and eastern Fiji) as a function of the processes through which meaning is constituted over time. (3)

A SINGLE IDEA OF ANTITHETICAL DUALITY

In central and eastern Fiji, among ethnic Fijians, social relations in general and chiefship in particular are a function of complementary and opposing concepts of competitive equality (as evinced, for example, in reciprocal exchanges across houses and clans) and hierarchy (as evinced, for example, in tribute to chiefs). Indeed, one can argue that here instituted hierarchy and competitive equality are fused aspects of a single idea of antithetical duality where each kind of social relations depends for its very continuity on the other. (4) This radical opposition pervades Fijian daily life and informs, for example, sexual relations, kinship, chiefship and ideas of the person. In the village, the fused opposition between hierarchy and competitive equality is expressed in one's position relative to others in time and space.

One's status in the community at large, as derived from an interaction between rank (chief or commoner), seniority (older or younger), and gender (wife or sister in relation to a given man), marks out one's place above (i cake) or below (i ra) others in any gathering in house, village hall or church. This above/below axis is applied both to a single horizontal plane, for example one end of the floorspace of the village hall, the church, and any house is above and the other is below, and to the vertical; for example, it is polite, when moving among others, to adopt the respectful stooping posture called lolou. In Gau all meetings, gatherings, meals, worship etc. take place in the ritualised space of the house, village hall and church and all villagers over the age of five or so are well aware which area of the space is above and which below. People's relative status is evident in their disposition vis-a-vis one another on this above/below axis.

The above/below axis is constituted out of a transformation in ritual of another spatial construct--veiqaravi lit. 'facing each other', also 'attendance on one another' which describes the disposition of houses in the space of the village and suggests mutual ritual obligations across clans. Also, any given house is usually orientated such that its 'land door' faces onto the 'sea door' of the house beside it, thus evoking relations between lands-people and seapeople. Veiqaravi may here refer to the balanced reciprocity in exchange over time across houses, clans and yavusa; (5) the term also, however, denotes 'attendance on chiefs' when the reference is to a chiefly ceremony, and 'worship' when the reference is to a church service. Thus the very term veiqaravi contains the tension between competitive equality and instituted hierarchy that allows reciprocal exchanges across houses to be transformed in yaqona ritual into tribute to chiefs. (6) The fused antithesis between hierarchy and competitive equality here references that between non-marriageable kin (where the paradigmatic reference is to the hierarchical house and clan) and marriageable kin (who as cross-cousins are equals across houses and clans). (7)

High chiefs are associated on the one hand with relations within the house and on the other with affinity--a chiefdom being always said to have been founded by an in-marrying stranger. (8) Having drunk the installation yaqona a high chief becomes the leader of a vanua--land or country, whose image in yaqona ritual is that of 'the house' writ large. But the house depends on the existence of other houses for its own continuing existence. (9) People relate to one another as kin, but while kin relations within the house are axiomatically hierarchical--husband above wife, older sibling above junior sibling--kinship across houses references the equal relationship between cross-cousins. And all exchange relations are competitive and ultimately those of balanced reciprocity even while the rituals of chiefship render them as tributary and apparently unequal. (10)

Relative status is especially evident in the full yaqona (kava-drinking) ceremonies that are mounted to welcome a visiting high chief, but no matter how informal the occasion, persons of the highest status sit above the tanoa--the large bowl in which the pounded root of the yaqona plant is infused in water and from which it is served--while those of lower status sit below it, facing the chiefs, veiqaravi. The seating position above (i cake) is defined by its being the place of chiefs, the position below (i ra) by its being the place either of women or of women and young men (11) and the prepared yaqona is served according to status, with the highest status person present being served first. Here the paramount chief is seen to take precedence over and to be above others just as, within the house, a man is seen to take precedence over and to be above his wife. The perceived subordination of wife to husband itself depends on the ritual transformation of the equality of cross-cousins into the hierarchy of marriage and is effected not only in the marriage ceremonies themselves, but on a daily basis in the conduct of every meal. (12) The exchange relations between spouses are complementary and balanced; but at meals the wife sits below her husband, serves him, and eats only when he has finished.

The foregoing account is an artefact of analysis--a distillation of what villagers in Sawaieke country take for granted. The reader is asked to bear in mind, while reading the edited extracts from my fieldnotes, the fused antithesis of hierarchy and competitive equality that informs literally all social relations between Fijian villagers, at least in central and eastern Fiji. Note that the personal names are pseudonyms, except where I am referring to public figures such as politicians and to Takalaigau, the paramount chief of Sawaieke country, and that the ritualised drinking of yaqona and the ritualised use of space it entails is a necessary feature of village meetings.

 A VISIT FROM THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NATIONALIST PARTY

 Extract from fieldnotes, 6 July 1982 Two men from the Nationalist
 Party win over to their side almost everyone present at this
 morning's (8.30 a.m.) meeting. When I enter the village hall
 several young men are looking after the yaqona for two clan chiefs,
 the current chairman of the village council, and some others.
 [Later others enter, bringing the numbers present to about forty:
 seven elders--inc. two clan chiefs, twelve or so married men in
 their 40s and 50s, ten or so young men, twelve or so women.]

 Our leaders have betrayed us--this is the nub of the
 Nationalist's speech. He tells us that before independence [1970]
 Ratu Penaia said in the Council of Chiefs that politically and
 administratively Fiji should be in the hands of Fijians, but now
 we find it is in the hands of foreigners; the Alliance leaders
 themselves are tools of foreign advisors who have their own big
 business interests to pursue. The Nationalist tells the history
 of Fiji since independence, how Ratu Mara [the Prime Minister]
 was the first nationalist but betrayed his own ideals. He names
 the wives of big Alliance government men who are on the boards of
 foreign-owned companies. Virtually all companies are controlled by
 foreigners--Indians and Europeans. Fijians should be trained to
 take them over. Millions and millions of dollars are going to
 everyone but Fijians, what is the government doing baleti keda
 na dravu-dravua, about us poor people? Other countries are run for
 the benefit of their owners--why should Fiji be different? The
 Nationalist has been twice in India where before independence
 millions in Bombay slept in the street and ate rubbish. This is
 no longer true because now the land is governed by its owners. And
 look what the Europeans did in America, in Australia. There the
 indigenous people have received nothing. All foreigners should be
 shipped back to their own lands. And the rights of traditional
 chiefs are being ignored: who gets the royalties when the Japanese
 fish in Takalaigau's [the high chief's] waters? The government gets
 everything and the Chief nothing. Children are being educated in the
 European mould, they are beginning to think like Europeans and to
 betray their own interests. Nor are our leaders true church men,
 they allow political meetings to be held on Sundays, they are not
 true men of God and what is more important to us than our religion?

 Everyone listens intently to the Nationalist's long speech with
 only occasional lapses of attention, restlessness and when it's over
 there is a chorus of vinaka, vinaka--thanks, thanks. There follows
 an excited buzz of interested talk, more thanks, and I hear the lay
 preacher say, Wananavu! Superb! and others saying, Na ka dina
 saraga--'the truth itself'] Nearby Lady Tupou is speaking
 disparagingly of the current Prime Minister. She asks the speaker,
 if the Nationalists win, who will be PM? He says Butadroka and she
 appears pleased. A clan chief says something about the Provincial
 Council that I can't follow and Samueli, a middle-aged married
 man--heretofore a fervent Alliance supporter, thought Butadroka
 crazy--asks something about money and is also happy with the answer
 he gets. I am aware of the appeal of the Nationalist's speech but
 even so, I am somewhat amazed by how excited the atmosphere is; it
 is clear that many are being won over and that Samueli is one of
 them.

 There are no more questions--because everything is clear, the
 Nationalist Party representative has spoken the truth and that is
 enough; but he has a question for us: O cei na digitaka na tabua?
 Who will choose the whalestooth? (This is the Nationalists' election
 symbol, Alliance has a wheel, the National Federation Party and the
 WUF a tree). Almost everyone raises their hands. Well, we must have
 a Nationalist Association here, who will be its President?
 Matanivanua [the paramount chief's herald] offers himself with
 various young men as secretary, treasurer and committee members.
 New committees have been formed too in two villages of the Sawaieke
 vanua where the Nationalist representatives have already been.

 The session's over, the Nationalist representatives leave and
 lots of villagers get up to go and see them off in high excitement.
 Some of the women are still there in the hall and Grandmother Tokasa
 says to me, Sa vakacava tina i Manueli?--'So, mother of Manuel,
 what about it?' I don't commit myself. I just point out that if the
 Nationalists take a lot of seats, Alliance will lose them, and this
 will benefit the Federation Party.

 When the men return to the hall, the members of the new
 committee to drink yaqona as it were in confirmation of their
 existence as an identifiable group, the Lay Preacher tells me 'E
 levu na tamata malumalumu e na matanitu'--'There are a lot of weak
 men in the government.' The young men are excited. All discuss the
 meeting for some time; they are talking about one of the clan chiefs
 and something he'd said about the Provincial Council--that is, that
 the Provincial Council (Bose ni Yasana) had said everyone should
 vote Alliance but, they tell me, he must have lied because e tabu
 na ka politiki e na Bose ni Yasana, e tabu me curu kina na ka
 politiki--'politics are forbidden in the Provincial Council, it
 is forbidden for politics to enter there.' And everyone agrees
 dina, dina. The clan chief had lied. One of the young men cries out
 several times to people still in the hall, Digi-taka na tabua!
 'Choose the whalestooth!' He is exhilarated.

 When I get home at noon, I find that Lady Mereia, however, has
 not been swayed. She says kaivalagi [Europeans] and kai Idia
 [Indians] are citizens of the country and everything cannot go to
 Fijians as the Nationalists urge. We should all be able to live
 well together.

 Note: When I ask the Lay Preacher, then Matanivanua (the high
 chief's herald, to whom I am referred) what the new committee will
 do to try to increase the Nationalist vote, he answers, Sega.
 Vakamacala ga na ka dina, 'Nothing. Just explain the truth.' But
 I have the impression he finds my question surprising and it seems
 they will do nothing in an organised way. I think it likely that the
 young men will discuss the meeting a lot among themselves and that
 they will bring round to the Nationalist view those that were not
 present today. The excitement and fervour of the whole thing so
 clearly appealed to them and in addition if they vote Nationalist
 they have a way of secretly defying their elders, convention and
 everything else. There were a few visitors today from Somosomo
 village who were present at the meeting. I had the impression
 they were not so enthused as others. One later remarked in reference
 to the village hall, Sa vakaevei? Oqo na vale ni Alliance. 'So how
 come? This is an Alliance house.' [Alliance is the party of
 government and fully supported by the Council of Chiefs.]

 Extract from fieldnotes 8th July 1982 ... After 9 p.m. last night
 ... The atmosphere [in the meeting in the village hall] is subdued.
 Takalaigau, the high chief, is sitting in isolation at the top
 centre of the room, his herald Matanivanua right over near the wall
 to Takalaigau's right and another chiefly elder over near the wall
 to his left. People are speaking in whispers; there are a number of
 young men looking after the yaqona and some women at the bottom of
 the room, but the hall is not at all full [perhaps 30--35 people
 are present]. It is around an hour and a half since I heard the
 first conch sound but the meeting has not started yet. I am told in
 whispers that this is a bose vakoro [village council]. It begins
 about 10 minutes after I enter.

 Takalaigau delivers a blistering, if initially somehow pathetic,
 lecture about how the Nationalists meeting was held here yesterday
 morning and no-one came to his house outside the village to inform
 him. He is chief of this village, of this country and yet when
 strangers come on such an errand and a gathering is held in the
 village no-one comes to call him ... What would the guests think if
 the head of house was nearby but no-one informed him that guests
 had arrived? Au vosa ga ena noqu itutu vakailiuliu. 'I am speaking
 as a function of my status as leader.' [...] someone should
 immediately have fetched him, but it was only later that morning in
 another village that he knew of their arrival and at the same time
 he heard to his shame that a Nationalist Association had been formed
 in Sawaieke. He is furious. O iau na iliuliu ni matavuvale oqo! 'I
 am the leader of this household!' He will not have any such
 association in the village. They can vote for whom they like. If
 they want to place a tick against the name of the Nationalist
 candidates when election day comes, let them do so, it is nothing
 to him. But he is not going to have this Nationalist association in
 the village. Au sega ni taleitaka. Au sega ni vinakata. 'I'm not
 interested in it. I don't want it.' He repeats many times that he
 is the leader of this village, of this place; he is Takalaigau, he
 is the chief of this land. He says how much the Alliance government
 has done for Gau, for Sawaieke: only last year they allotted $10,000
 to this village for work to be done to improve it. And what about
 the road? The sea-wall? The air-field? The schools for our children?
 All these things were given by the Alliance government. They must
 know that there are three races in Fiji: Europeans, Indians and
 Fijians; this is a multiracial country, it is for all of us. The
 Indians and Europeans cannot be sent home. E sega ni rawa, e sega
 ni rawa. 'It can't be done, it can't be done.' They already have
 their home here. People should vote for those who have already
 given them a great deal and who will continue to do so. They
 should vote Alliance. He, Takalaigau, has shown them what is right,
 he is 'the leader of this land' and that's it.

 A silence follows. Most people are sitting with their heads
 bowed, their gaze directed at their crossed legs. Others ... are
 leaning against the wall with their eyes closed. The chiefly
 herald, Matanivanua, begins to speak. He says he proposed himself
 as President of the new association only to get the two Nationalists
 out of the village. He was joking. If he gave them what they wanted
 they would leave quickly; so when they asked who would be President
 he at once proposed himself, O iau. He apologises for his error and
 also, obliquely, for Takalaigau's not having been informed. He had
 come back from the bush to find the meeting already in progress and
 had joined it.

 THEY WERE ALL JOKING

 The atmosphere begins to lighten. The young men around the tanoa
 (who include all the new komiti members) begin to grin. At first
 I think that this talk of a joke is a response to Takalaigau's
 anger, but the ladies tell me that yesterday, after the Nationalists
 had gone and the komiti was drinking yaqona, Matanivanua had said
 to the Lay Preacher Oqo se sega ni ka dina, au vinakata ga me
 vakatotolo na nodrau lako--'It wasn't true, I just wanted to speed
 their going.' (I had not heard this, tho' I was in the hall at the
 time, on the other side of the room.)

 I am confused. O.K. Matanivanua was joking, but what about all
 the others who raised their hands? Lady Tupou says no one had
 planned the thing, but everyone knew that the herald Matanivanua
 and the rest were joking. All the raising of hands in support etc.
 was all joking. I ask how she knew, she says she knows the behaviour
 of people here and so she could tell. But she also says that in the
 Fijian way one must do what the chief says, it was a pity he had not
 spoken before the Nationalists came here, that would have been
 better, but even so, everyone would follow what he said. Of the
 hands-raising, she says, dryly: Ni laveta na ligana na kai vavalagi,
 sa dua na ka dina; ia ni laveta na ligana na kai Viti sa sega kina,
 sa lasu. 'When a European raises a hand it's a true thing, but when
 a Fijian raises a hand it isn't, it's a lie.'

 I am by this time unable to stop grinning myself, barely able to
 repress my laughter. The whole thing is really extraordinarily funny
 and the ladies (including Takalaigau's wife and other senior women)
 are enjoying it immensely. But Grandmother Tokasa who yesterday
 asked me 'So how about it, mother of Manuel?' does not appear to be
 amused. And still I am puzzled. Lady Tupou tells me the people in
 Nawaikama who had formed an association were joking too. That night,
 after the meeting there, the new association members had announced
 they were joking.

 I am looking at the young men. One, I decide, was joking, the
 other two I'm not so sure about. And the others? Last night I had
 a long conversation with Ratu Epeli about the Nationalists and I
 have now twice asked why he didn't tell me last night that they
 were joking. Each time he evades my question. Last night he said
 he hadn't yet made up his mind about joining.

 This morning when I tell Lady Mereia that Matanivanua said he
 was joking she says she knew that because he had said so later as
 they walked out of the hall. She knew when he proposed himself
 because he was smiling. Why didn't she tell me this yesterday?
 She does not answer. I ask if everyone who raised their hands was
 joking. She says they were. I say I can't believe it--what about
 the clan chief? what about Lady Tupou? She says probably they were
 not joking--the clan chief most certainly was not, and Lady Tupou
 in any case is odd, she's been known to vote Federation. She says:
 E rau sa sega ni dau veiwali--'Those two are not given to joking.'

 This morning, a man from Vione says he could see yesterday in the
 hall that I did not like the Nationalists' speeches. He says too
 that not only did everyone know the others were joking, but the
 Nationalists themselves knew. How did they know? I ask, absolutely
 staggered by this fresh revelation. He says they knew because when
 the Nationalist speaker asked who would be President of the
 association there was a silence; no-one put themselves forward and
 then the Nationalist said that if they could not decide now they
 could just have a standby committee and then Matanivanua put himself
 forward to get the thing over with and get rid of them.

 I ask myself what made me feel that people had genuinely
 supported the Nationalist stand? The alacrity with which arms were
 raised. The enthusiastic and apparently genuine chorus of thanks.

 The assertions that what was said was 'the whole truth'. Lady
 Mereia's saying to me later that some people hated Indians and so
 they supported the Nationalists but it was not right. The feeling
 of excitement in the hall after the meeting. The Lay Preacher's
 saying to me that 'there are a lot of weak people in the
 government'; his comment 'superb!' when the Nationalist had spoken.
 Ratu Epeli's telling me later the Nationalists spoke the truth,
 knew what they were talking about. How a certain clan chief moved
 up near the Nationalists and talked warmly with them after the
 speeches were over. Also, my teacher said nothing about joking when
 we discussed the meeting later. He says people support Nationalists
 because they hate Indians and this is not right. And Takalaigau had
 not been told it was a joke ... Also, when I'm trying to find out
 whether everyone knew, people are definite and then again
 indefinite, asserting it was a joke and then saying well, we'll
 only know after the election.

 Things that puzzled me yesterday, that would point to the
 thing's being a joke: Restlessness at one point while the
 Nationalist was talking; I thought at the time his speech was too
 long and was putting people off. Samueli raising his hand with
 such alacrity. I had thought him a devout Alliance man.
 Matanivanua's smile as he proposed himself for President; one
 normally keeps a serious expression on such occasions; and he is
 a rather dour man on the whole. Lady Tupou's saying Great! when
 told that Butadroka would be PM. I had thought his name anathema to
 Sawaieke people. Just now I ask Ratu Epeli if Butadroka is of
 recognised chiefly status--and he laughs, no, Butadroka is kaisi,
 kaisi dina--'without status, really low-born'. The young men
 Tuesday night when we were 'drinking cash' saying within the
 hearing of Takalaigau 'choose the whalestooth...'. I was
 astonished by their apparent impertinence but if they know they are
 joking they might assume that he would know too.

 I still have not made up my mind. I just can't believe that
 everyone knew that the others were joking and was him/herself
 joking. But today and indeed last night everyone seems entirely
 to have accepted and be utterly convinced that the whole show of
 support was a joke.

 Extract from fieldnotes, Friday 9th July 1982 This morning the
 village council chair, who was present in the morning with the
 Nationalists and at night in the village council, tells me that
 Matanivanua had not been joking when he proposed himself as
 President of the Nationalists' association here; the initial
 response to the Nationalists was na ka dina [the truth] and the
 joke explanation e dua na iulubale walega, 'just an excuse.'

 Extract from fieldnotes, 19th July While we are waiting for the
 truck [to go to the rubbish hall dance in Nawaikama] I ask the
 three young men present whether they are, or are not, still
 Nationalists. They say they are and will vote as such. But
 Ropate's manner is ambiguous; he says, 'Yes, choose the
 whalestooth!' in such a way that I can't tell if he's joking
 or not.

 21st July [after the general election] I ask Samueli whom he voted
 for. He says Alliance. So why had he raised his hand for the
 Nationalists during their campaign here? He says because he was
 taken by their speech, but later he understood again what had
 earlier been clear to him. The Nationalists are racists he says
 (using this English word); they cause trouble, incite hatred in
 people's minds (na yalodra). He does not think many Sawaieke
 people voted for them, though some young men may have. Earlier I
 ask one of the young men of chiefly rank if he voted Nationalist
 and he laughs, says no, he voted Alliance. I ask why he changed
 his mind and he says, Baleta ga sa cudru o Takalaigau--'Only
 because Takalaigau was angry.' I am surprised at this say, Lasu
 [That's a lie!] and then, O dina? [Are you telling the truth?] He
 says yes, he cannot do something Takalaigau has forbidden.

JOKING, LYING AND TELLING THE TRUTH

So what are we to make of this material? Well, firstly, it's clear enough that I was alone in wanting to establish whether or not people had been joking when they raised their hands in enthusiastic response to the Nationalists' request for support, whether or not Matanivanua (the high chief's herald) had been joking when he proposed himself as Chair of the new association, and the young men when they put themselves forward as committee members. No-one else gave a damn--perhaps because they knew they had been temporarily seduced by the Nationalists and that passing this off as a joke was the best way out of a difficult situation. Or perhaps because their laughter revealed to them that they had, indeed, been joking. As for me, even down the line, when I was pretty sure that I understood the married man Samueli and the young men, I was still asking myself whether the herald Matanivanua had or had not been joking. And I found this unsettling. Why? Because fieldwork provides the basis for ethnography and if people do not tell the truth, how is one to do fieldwork? (13)

It will be apparent to the reader that for the Fijian villagers with whom I work lying can be a form of joking and joking can take the form of lying. Lasu! meaning Liar! or Lies! is a frequent response to what is being related about this or that and especially when the teller is one's cross-cousin. Joking is a feature of the competitive relations between equals, one jokes with those one can call cross-cousin (or with others classified, loosely, as opposite numbers across chiefly countries). (14) Joking between cross-cousins is often enough too a kind of public performance; indeed the fun of any gathering in house or village hall is dependent on there being present a sufficient number of people who stand in this relation to one another. All other kinship relations are characterised by varying degrees of avoidance and joking is out of the question, so if a gathering is to be full of laughter and enjoyment, cross-cousins must be engaging one another in jokes and banter across the room so that all can hear and be amused by their exchanges.

The term for joking--veiwali--is a reciprocal, i.e. mutuality is intrinsic to it and it is often, especially across-sex, more or less explicitly sexual. And joking does not necessarily imply lying--lasu--which does not usually take a reciprocal form. Even so, a person who is discovered to be lying, is likely with a shout of laughter to assert him or herself to be joking. And people would tell both me and one another outrageous lies apparently for their own amusement or just to mitigate boredom. In general, Sawaieke villagers were not concerned with truth as an absolute in the sense that they often did not care much to establish whether something was or was not empirically the case. Even so truth is important because what is effective (mana) is what is true (dina); in my experience, however, truth was not usually either/or, being more likely to be a case of both/and. Thus even in cases where the truth of a matter was crucial--for example when someone was accused behind his back of witchcraft and having at last been told to his face, announced his innocence weeping in a full meeting in the village hall--even in such a case the truth was ultimately a matter of whether the speaker was able to render his assertion effective, i.e. to make it true. (15) In the matter of any dispute between the Nationalist Party representative and Takalaigau (the high chief of Sawaieke vanua) as to whether or not a Nationalist Association had been formed in Sawaieke, it was no contest. Villagers may initially have felt that what the Nationalist said was na ka dina taucoko, wholly true, but Takalaigau's chiefly anger was more effective. Villagers' support for the Nationalists was converted into a joke by their own laughter and a joke was what it became. At the same time, it is evident that the revelation of the joke rendered Takalaigau's words effective--i.e. they came to be true: there was no Nationalist Association in Sawaieke.

What had or had not happened was not what mattered; what mattered was that villagers' seduction by the Nationalists' speeches be undone and that the proper form of veiqaravi, 'attendance on one another' be restored--an outcome achieved by virtue at once of the Fijian idea that truth is given in effective speech and the revelatory force of laughter. (16) The effectiveness of Takalaigau's angry speech might be easily explained as a function of authority--that is, if Takalaigau had not made it clear that he knew his authority had been flouted. Thus the first part of his speech was characterised by pathetic observations about his being deliberately ignored; no-one had come from the village to his house at Tautu to inform him of the guests' arrival. Only after he had told us of his shame at hearing from others, in Qarani (another village outside Sawaieke vanua) of the formation of the Sawaieke Nationalists Association did the anger born out of this shame manifest itself.

THE REVELATORY FORCE OF LAUGHTER

It is instructive to understand what was absurd in my efforts to establish whether or not everyone had been joking when they raised their hands in support of the Nationalists and whether or not Matanivanua had been joking when he proposed himself as chairman of the committee. This was a classic case of the researcher pursuing a wrong line of enquiry. Whatever had been the case at the time they showed their support for the Nationalists, it was later nullified by people's laughter; the ladies' tremendous enjoyment of the joke, the young men's broad grins, even my own stifled laughter had the force of knowledge--though what exactly that knowledge consisted in surely differed according to the perspective we each brought to bear. Indeed, reading the literature on the subject of laughter, I came to see that every one of the various theories implies that laughter has some kind of revelatory force. (17)

For Aristotle 'the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or distraction' (1996:9). Hutcheson (1758) maintains, however, that 'this [Aristotle] never intended as a general account of all sorts of laugh' (which seems probable enough) and argues against Hobbes' 'ill-natured nonsense'--his view that 'laughter is nothing else, but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in our selves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonour' (Hutcheson 1758:2). Hutcheson's own theory covers the many uses of laughter, one of which is to overcome our own 'impotent horror' in the face of what may be presented to us as an object of veneration. 'Nothing,' he tells us, 'is so properly applied to the false grandeur, either of good or evil, as ridicule: nothing will sooner prevent our excessive admiration of mix'd [sic] grandeur, or hinder our being led by that ... to imitate also and approve what is really mean' (ibid:46). For Bergson (1999), however, laughter is a means whereby society makes the individual aware of his or her stubbornness and inflexibility, forcing the person to adjust his or her behaviour and become alert to others--a view that is directly opposed by Bakhtin (1968) for whom 'laughter sides with the individual rather than with society ... Laughter is a phenomenon of resistance rather than adjustment' (Zwart 1996:60). As Zwart, following Bakhtin, points out '[l]aughter is a basic mood or mode of thought that allows a basic aspect of the world to emerge ... the comic and the rational are two basic conditions of human reflection' (ibid:59). Further, 'the experience of laughter allows reality to appear and to emerge in a certain light ... certain aspects of the world are revealed, rather than represented, by laughter' (ibid:64/65). More radically, Bataille argues that, in interrupting the flow of thought, laughter provides for a revelation of the moment, a kind of consciousness that is sovereign precisely because it allows us to be 'in the moment, without fleeing it' (Bataille 1997:305)--a position that would seem to be related to Freud's idea of the joke as evincing an eruption of the unconscious that subverts conscious control.

Any and all of these ideas might be applied to the many and various perspectives of all of us present there in Sawaieke village hall on the evening the joke was revealed. (18) What is anthropologically significant is this very point--that they all apply. Let me show why.

The Fijian idea of the person rests on recognition of social relationships and the obligations they entail: you distinguish yourself by demonstrating who you are as a function of what you are given to be in relations with others. (19) Thus displays of shame and fear and anger and courage (for example) evince a person's existential effectiveness in relation to others. (20) Madua--usually translated as 'shame' is always a function of the dynamics of relationships. Madua is manifested in face, body posture and actions--one hangs one's head, drops one's chin to one's chest, avoids eye contact; one's shoulders and body droop; one does not speak and if profoundly madua one flees the company of others. An adult is especially madua when his or her behaviour is brought into disrepute. This is to be ashamed of oneself, but one may be shamed too by others' behaviour: a younger brother's drunken violence, a son's laziness and neglect of duty, a younger sister's illegitimate pregnancy, a daughter's involvement with a married man; elders collectively may be shamed by drunken behaviour in young men; a paramount chief or clan chiefs may be shamed by their people's poor showing in some community endeavour. In these collective relations, a paramount or the clan chiefs may induce apparent shame in their people by publicly berating them. In dyadic adult relations within sex, shame gives rise to an angry and/or sorrowful lecture from the senior person that is intended to induce shame in the junior. But where a man feels shamed by a woman's behaviour he may resort to physical punishment.

In all cases, shame and anger are aspects of the same experience; this is most clearly seen when the anger can be directed by the person who is shamed (a father, say) towards the one who has done the shameful thing (say, a promiscuous daughter) who is then shamed by being punished for what she has done. For her, the anger that is an aspect of shame can have no object but the self. Note that in all the examples I have given, the senior party rebukes or punishes the junior. (21) Madua has no acknowledged place in relations between cross-cousins who by definition compete as equals. So, at public gatherings, cross-cousins both within and across sex may tease each other unmercifully; to evince madua in such a case is to be outdone. In short, madua is at once expressive and constitutive of hierarchical relations.

The effectiveness of Takalaigau's speech described above resided in his being able to convert his own declared shame into justified anger directed at those of his people who had shamed him by forming a Nationalists' Association in Sawaieke. But in converting their actions into a joke and in so doing deceiving their high chief, the perpetrators of the offense were able at once to rescue themselves and to imply that Takalaigau's anger was just a little absurd. My point here is that if indeed people had perpetrated an elaborate joke against the Nationalist Party representatives, it turned out to be also a joke against Takalaigau and the sheer fact that he too was deceived called his authority into question in the very act by which it was confirmed. (22) The amusement that was felt and shown at Matanivanua's revelation of the joke was compounded at once of relief and undeclared triumph. Takalaigau had made his own shame fuel an anger that produced a display of shame in his hearers--who, if you remember, hung their heads and gazed at their knees. The revelation of the joke, however, made possible the transformation of shame into an amusement characterised by a covert awareness that after all the people were one-up, as it were, on the high chief who was in effect being treated not as 'the head of this house' but as a cross-cousin, as one who may be the object of a competitive exchange rather than as one who is owed tribute. Nevertheless, the Alliance candidate was returned with a large majority as our MP and while I cannot know whether certain Sawaieke villagers voted Nationalist it seems to me to be unlikely because, given the manifest effectiveness of Takalaigau's speech, any particular villager would be conscious of the potential danger entailed by voting contrary to his wishes.

The effectiveness of a paramount chief lies in his having the ancestors 'at his back' because the ancestors bring harm, illness or even death to those who wilfully disobey an installed chief. But he, too, has to fear the ancestors for it is they, under the aegis of the Christian God, who strike down a paramount who fails in his obligations to the people by, for example, failing to redistribute what comes in as tribute or embezzling public funds. And Fijian chiefship is not a matter of predictable lineal succession from father to son; other high status men, including the chiefs of commoner clans, in particular those whose task it is to instal a high chief, have a significant say in who from the chiefly clan is to be made paramount. If they are unsure of a man's fitness for office, they will delay his installation--for years if not forever. At the time of the events described above, Takalaigau was not yet installed and this made it possible for people--especially young men--at times apparently to flout his authority. Even so, he was the named paramount and it seems likely to me that this was sufficient to give his hearers pause.

Given that for Fijians the person is a locus of relationship and that all one's relations with others are characterised by the fused antithesis between instituted hierarchy and competitive equality, it follows that for any given Fijian villager--chief or commoner, man or woman, child, young person or adult--one's sense of oneself at any given point is going to be in part a function of the aspect of this antithesis one is able to express in particular relations with particular others. And this expression in turn evinces that aspect of relationship--hierarchy or competitive equality--that is right now, in this case, apparently given. The joke, the lie, subverts hierarchy and laughter as a form of knowledge renders the lie effectively true. The beauty of this case was that the villagers' laughter at once made Takalaigau's chiefly word effective and at the same time evinced their gift for subtlety-has he won or have they?--and their awareness of a potential for irony that lies at the heart of the Fijian idea of hierarchy as principle. It is the binding of antithesis that makes Fijian chiefship what it is: allegiance is denoted by the term vakarorogo vua--to listen to ... that is, to listen and put into effect what is said, and people know that it is their willing attendance upon a paramount that makes him so, just as it is attendance on the Christian god that makes the church with its many millions of followers a powerful force in the world. By the same token, as I was often told by Fijian villagers, if they decided a chief was not worthy, the people could withdraw their attendance upon him; that they do not do so, even when very angry over some injustice, has everything to do with the fact that if their chief is publicly shamed by the people's withdrawal of allegiance, so too are they, for after all it was they who selected him. (23)

LANGUAGE AS A MORAL FORCE IN THE WORLD

What are the conditions that render what is said or written good (and right), or bad (and wrong)? Our idea of these conditions is by and large identical with our idea about what language is good for; it is, broadly speaking, an idea of its moral force. As an anthropologist I value veridical accounts of the way the world is and of human experience and while I know that people (myself included) tell the truth as a function of what they hold to be true, this very idea takes it for granted that truthfulness is fundamental and that by and large others are going to tell me the truth. My quandary as a young ethnographer lay in what I was to make of a situation where it seemed that any distinction between lying and joking was always blurred, where at worst lying was ineffective and at best one of the joys of life. Struggling to make sense of what was for me a fundamental challenge to understanding brought me to the idea of the moral force of language--which, like everything else that is human, is necessarily an historical phenomenon. And from which it followed that, if our ideas about what language is good for necessarily inform our understanding of the truth conditions of what is said, then, as in this instance, truth may be regarded not as an absolute, but as a function of that moral force which is itself embedded in, and constituted through, the everyday social relations that we may analyse in terms of gender, kinship, chiefship, ideas of the person and so on.

In Fijian a paramount is often referred to as na sau--a term that also denotes the command or prohibition of such a chief, that is to say a decisive power of speech that is itself a function of the chief's having been 'made to drink' (vagunu) under the proper ritual circumstances a bowl of yaqona served by the hand of the chief of that clan whose ritual function it is to 'make the chief'. At the time of the events described above Takalaigau had not yet been installed, but he displayed his chiefly effectiveness in an angry speech that was able to render what he said true. The details of the Fijian material suggest that it is ritualised aspects of language use that structure speakers' constitution over time of their ideas about the moral force of language.

To understand a language is also to understand native speakers' ideas about what speech does and the conditions that render it good and right. (24) And here it is important to be aware of the process through which native speakers constitute an idea of the moral force that is given in ritualised aspects of language use. Ethnographic studies of children's acquisition of their native language (including studies of our own children) might usefully bear on this issue. In my previous work, I have shown how children's experience of embodying a ritual behaviour or series of behaviours is crucial for the process through which, over time, they ascribe meaning to that behaviour such that its performance becomes symbolic of that meaning and, as such, obligatory. (25) In other words, the power of ritual to communicate is not given in ritual itself precisely because, in direct contrast to what is spoken, ritual cannot declare its own meaning. Rather, the communicative power of ritual is the outcome of a process of making sense through which, over time, a person renders certain ritualised behaviours meaningful. It follows that, as an adult, I am coerced by those rituals and ritualised behaviours that I rendered meaningful because, long before I asked myself what they might mean, I had already embodied an indelible knowledge of the 'what' and 'how' of these particular ritual practices. (26) In becoming native speakers of our language we are also finding out how to be in relation to others, we are constituting an idea of ourselves as subjects as a function of inter-subjectivity--an idea that can usually itself be rendered explicit in language. (27) And in so doing we are making sense too (along with much else) of those ritualised aspects of language use that inform our ideas of the moral force of what is said or written--that is to say, we are rendering meaningful and thus integral to our language practice, phenomena that are paralinguistic and likely to be remarked upon only obliquely.

In the context of the present paper, these observations suggest that an understanding of the moral force of language is bound to be constituted in the very process of coming to be a native speaker of that language and, in so doing, arriving at a knowledge of the conditions that make a statement true. The argument of this paper, however, has been that understanding the moral force of what is said--is it good and right?--and how it is manifest in any given instance is, for all its fundamental importance, not a complete solution to the problem posed by the ethnographer's continuing efforts to understand. And here laughter presents a difficulty, because, as Bakhtin points out it 'is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils' (Bakhtin 1968:94). In the present case, laughter provided the ethnographer with an opening onto a subtly pervasive and fundamental aspect of language use--its moral force--and at the same time showed how, for all we may learn from laughter, it ultimately eludes analysis. Laughter has a revelatory force whose effectiveness lies in a spontaneous joyousness--the explanation of which (insofar as there can be any) resides in laughter itself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper has had a number of readers to whom I am grateful both for their time and their useful comments. Many thanks to Andrew Beatty, Peter Gow, Eric Hirsch, Jadran Mimica, Alexandra Ouroussoff and three anonymous readers for Oceania.

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Christina Toren

Brunel University

NOTES

(1.) At that time, the population of Sawaieke country was about 1,250 and of Gau about 3,200. Fieldwork occupied 20 months in 1981 1983, four months in 1990, and two months in 1993. The economy was (and still is) mixed subsistence (gardening, small numbers of livestock) and cashcropping, yaqona being the most lucrative crop.

(2.) In 1988 the population of Fiji numbered 342,965 ethnic Fijians of whom 31.4% lived in urban areas and 341,141 Indo-Fijians of whom 42.4% lived in urban areas (Lal 1992:217); by 1988 Indo-Fijians had emigrated in large numbers and were now outnumbered by ethnic Fijians.

(3.) Continuity resides in transformation because we make meaning out of meanings that others have made and are making: that is, like any other human being, I am enmeshed in manifold relations with others who have their own understandings of social relations and the way the world is. In any encounter with any other I assimilate the other's understandings to my own and, in so doing, accommodate--more or less both to the other's ideas of the world and to the other's idea of our relationship. Each one of us is born into a world in the making that is already rendered meaningful in all its material aspects and, over time, we make these meanings anew. Toren (1999:1-21 and 2002) explains how meaning is always emergent never quite fixed and how, in the process of making meaning, knowledge is transformed even while it is maintained. This micro historical process of genetic epistemology renders each person's ideas unique, even while each one of us willy nilly co-opts the others in making our own sense of the world. Compare Sahlins (1985) and his idea of the 'structure of the conjuncture' where change is a function of an encounter with an unlike other, rather than an inherent and thus inevitable aspect (more or less radical) of the process of making meaning.

(4.) See Toren 1999:163-181, 'All things go in pairs...'.

(5.) A yavusa is composed of clans related by descent or marriage and owing ritual obligations to one another.

(6.) See Toren 1990:74(89 and 1999:67-82, 'Seeing the ancestral sites...'.

(7.) In Sawaieke vanua, kinship terms are used in reference and address to everyone one knows within and across villages and chiefdoms and routinely extended to take in previously unknown people using a classificatory principle; the terminology is Dravidian.

(8.) See Sahlins (1985) and compare Toren 1999:163-181, 'All things go in pairs....'.

(9.) Toren 1999:163-181, 'All things go in pairs ...' shows how applicable to an analysis of Fijian social relations is the idea of the house as developed by Levi-Strauss (1983 and 1984).

(10.) The ritual transformation of balanced reciprocity into tribute has the appearance of being fully effective only in the ceremony of the installation yaqona, in which the chief becomes one who has 'all the ancestors at his back'. For a full account of yaqona ritual, see Toren 1990:100-118.

(11.) Gender enters into the process of constituting hierarchy as a principle of social relations, see Toren (1990:202-208,222-225, 238-244).

(12.) See Toren 1990:52-64 and 1999:129-145, 'Transforming love...'.

(13.) In her analysis of jokes and the work of myth among the Piaroa, Overing (2000) writes that 'the most ironic anthropological predicament of all would be for the ethnographer to take as (seriously) literal a people's ironic commentary on the world and their own behaviour ...' I agree. She also points out that, by and large, '[t]he ludic is not expected in other peoples' religious, political and economic life. Or, if there, it is considered banal, irrelevant--or inappropriate--to the study.'

(14.) Two countries that historically attended on the same ancestor God are veitauvu, 'of the same root'; to be veitabani is to be 'mutually branching' and relates countries whose ancestors were cross-cousins. They are both joking relationships.

(15.) See Hocart (1914), Sahlins 1985:37-38 and cf. Miyazaki (2004:49) who discusses the connection between efficacy and truth in the case of Suvavou people's struggle for compensation for their loss of land.

(16.) The aesthetics of veiqaravi are implicated here, see Miyazaki (2000).

(17.) Cf. Douglas (1975: 90-114) on jokes and the social control of cognition, Apte (1985) on joking's many forms, Hobart's (1995) observation that knowing and laughter 'are both about doing something in and to the world', and Driessen's (1997) that 'anthropologists rarely acknowledge the vital role of humour and laughter in fieldwork and in the construction of ethnographic evidence'. None of these authors argues for the kind of analysis I propose here.

(18.) The following comes from comments by one of the readers for Oceania, who makes use of Bateson's ideas on play and Plessner's on laughter (see fn 21) to argue that '... the villagers themselves did not know they had been joking, or to which degree they were joking, playing with the nationalists' ideas, in the meeting the previous morning until faced with the chief's anger ... this revelation became deeply embodied during the chaotic moments of laughter at their own sudden totalizing insight that they had been joking. Since they could have joked with a straight face (or a near straight face), who was to say that they hadn't? Put differently, the chief's anger turned the attraction of the claims of the Nationalists into fantasy in a more definitive way." This was certainly the case for some of Takalaigau's hearers, but not, I think for everyone, which is why, rather than going with this theory of laughter as the 'sudden totalising insight' I want to insist on retaining all the different revelatory possibilities--more or less totalising--given by the various theories of laughter.

(19.) See Toren 1998.

(20.) From the analyst's point of view, it is not necessary to suppose that a person is actually feeling shame or anger or other emotion, only that they demonstrate it where it is appropriate; as Beatty (2005) shows, displays of emotion may routinely be used to effect political ends in public debate.

(21.) If a junior person were to lecture or beat his or her senior this would itself be a cause for shame and require the junior person ceremonially to ask forgiveness by presenting yaqona root or a whale's tooth, followed by the drinking of yaqona.

(22.) The comments by the reader referred to in footnote 18, included the following: 'Experimental research in London in the late 1970s or early 1980s (if I remember, at University College, London) demonstrated that laughter (in response to the telling of jokes) 'shook up' persons, physiologically, cognitively, and socially (in terms of social relationships). This shaking up--[which] today could be understood as a 'chaotic moment'--enabled persons to re-configure themselves within themselves and in relation to others ... laughter enabled them to start again, and so, differently, and in this sense to re-make the reality that had already (if only moments before) happened. The phenomenologist, Helmuth Plessner (1970) argued that in laughing (as in crying), one's mind surrenders to one's body. Let's say that the chaotic moment of re-configuring is therefore deeply embodied, as is the revelation.' Certainly any re-configuring , like any revelation, is embodied--as are all forms of knowing the world, but I am not persuaded that in laughing 'one's mind surrenders to one's body'. If, as I have argued elsewhere (Toren 1999:1-21, 2002), mind and body are aspects of one another rather than separable systems, then we can retain all the manifold possibilities of the revelatory force of laughter including, as in the case I am discussing here, an awareness that the laughter itself might be deceitful.

(23.) This is an indication of the relation of reciprocal obligation that obtains between a high chief and his people--if a chief does not fulfil his obligations then the people withhold their service. Note that chiefs were historically and still are considered necessary to the continuing autonomy, prosperity and well-being of a country (see Toren 2000 for a more detailed discussion of chiefship and its significance for contemporary Fijian politics).

(24.) Robbins (2001) argues for an anthropological study of these ideas and that we should investigate in tandem the relation between people's ideas about language and about ritual. This makes sense because, provided one supposes that it is meant to mean, ritual can always be rendered meaningful and thus communicative. Note, however, that developmentally speaking, it takes time to become a native speaker of a language and time to constitute our ideas of the meanings we give to ritual and everyday ritualised behaviours.

(25.) See Toren 1999:83-124, 'The material basis of meaning' and, in press, 'The effectiveness of ritual'.

(26.) The power of ritual to coerce is precisely not a function of its 'conventional character' but is rather a product of the process through which, over time, we render it meaningful. The unified model of human being I propose to analyse this process (see Toren 1999:1-21, 'Introduction' and 2002) does not, as Robbins (2001) would have it 'borrow on ... Western individualist assumptions'; on the contrary, it enables the analyst to realise the historical nature, the transforming and transformative potential, of these assumptions and to investigate their material significance.

(27.) There are a number of excellent existing studies of aspects of children's language acquisition--for example Ochs (1988), Schieffelin (1990), Kulick (1992)--but so far as I know none that investigates this issue.