Sources of Indigenous Fijian ‘law’: village mores versus town-based criminal laws

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to reflect on oral history interview data provided by an ex-soccer star who played for Fiji and in what is now the Fiji Premier League, and reconcile his criminal past (according to town-based criminal laws) with his current village assistant headman status. The article compares and contrasts two sources of law – customary Indigenous traditions of rights and responsibilities and town-based criminal laws, which have their origins in British colonial-era laws and are now administered and enforced by the neoliberal Bainimarama government. Because the soccer star’s jewellery store robberies were of Fiji Indian-owned stores, it is difficult for them to penetrate into the world of ‘village-space’, other than as a repressed spectre, since non-Indigenous people cannot live in Indigenous villages. For the Indigenous Fijians, ‘town-space’ is a place for employment, education, venturing out and partying, beyond the gaze of village elders, whereas ‘village-space’ is the ordered space of home and community. ‘Quasi-space’ is here defined as space physically in the town, but when Indigenous people are the only ones present, or a clear majority, some aspects of village understandings can dominate in that space at least for certain time periods and with variable intensity.