The last couple of days have been slightly slow-going at the Arts Council, as I have handed in the second, completed draft of the project proposal on Friday and am waiting to hear about it. The database for the Conservatorium of Music is also finished up, although that took much longer than the proposal I've been working on.While working, however, or during breaks from the database work, I've been paying closer attention to the artwork that adorns any and all available surfaces at the Fiji Arts Council. For the most part, these are all previous winners of the National Fine Art Award, an award from the National Art Exhibition and Awards. It's one of many categories, things I've learnt from the proposal work; other categories include an Indigenous Award, for a Fijian or Rotuman artist, a 3D/sculpture award, and a new Children's Award. The result is that many of the winners are in the FAC offices – and so I'm surrounded by walls of people who all see Fiji differently, who all have different perspectives and perceptions which they then incorporate into their work. It's amazingly diverse, as some of the photos that I've taken demonstrate. They show the range and variations in how different people experience Fiji. Below are only a few of them.

'Dressing the bride'

'Three sister on rest'

Unnamed

Unnamed

Pottery, unnamed portrait

'Market Day'

 

Closer detail of 'Market Day'

The very last painting in particular has given me a great deal of inspiration for my essay, and and idea of writing about bi-cultural, or perhaps multi-cultural spaces. The market scene seems like it might be another space in which Teiwa's idea of kinship might be employed, another way in which meaningful community and individual connections might be forged. This particular concept of kinship, in many ways divergent and removed from my more theoretical (and anthropology based) understanding of 'kinship', has been a difficult thing for me to grasp, understand and see in practice in the world around me. It's difficult, admittedly, because so much of my day is spent in the office, but I suppose the content of this very blog entry indicates that even that can be a source of information and inspiration. With that in mind, I'm beginning to see if looking at the way people interact with each other in public spaces like a marketplace or footpath, or the structures of the markets/footpaths themselves, reflects something about this kind of kinship, this way of establishing mutual and meaningful connections through public space – and popular culture. The loud music that plays from the Hindi-English DVD store across from the FAC, for example, is one example of how public space and popular culture mix here. Furthermore, though less about popular culture, Mosi, our host here, mentioned the way that language is negotiated between Indo-Fijians and i-taukei in public space, dependent on the numbers of people. In Levuka, (which I think I'll have to talk about much more in my next blog) where there are more Fijians than Indians, Indians learn and speak Fijian in shops and on the streets. Although, Levuka probably should be noted as a place with a history that means English, more than Fijian, seems to be the lingua franca. Things are different on the West Coast of Viti Levu however – the place that Teaiwa identified as the 'sugar-cane belt', where the Indo-Fijians are in the majority. There, Mosi said that it's the inverse; it's the indigenous Fijians that learn Hindustani, that use it in shops and on streets.

Language was another one of my interests here, in particular I have become interested in Fijian Hindi and Rotuman. For example, when Mosi mentioned that Fijians learn and speak from Hindi, I wondered what other languages might be spoken in Fiji, and how that plays a role in the cultural landscape here – the appearance of names like Singh told me that not everyone was Hindi-speaking or Hindu adherant. Sikhs, for instance, seem almost invariably to speak Punjabi as a native language, and Ethnologue also lists Gujarati and Tamil, not suprising since the Fiji Museum mentioned that many of the free migrants, after the girmits, were Gujarati or Punjabi. Do they learn Hindi through their schools? Their friends? Or do they only learn Fijian and/or English, and are they linguistically excluded from the more mainstream of Indo-Fijian identity? How do religious differences factor in? I think that, in having so little contact with Indo-Fijian, I've become intensely curious about this other side of Fiji. Likewise Rotuman. I didn't know much about Rotuman language or culture, but Master Masio working with the LHT project gave me some quick language details. He described it as a Polynesian language, and lexically that would seem to be the case, but that seems to be a result of all the cultural contact with Tonga and Samoa. Rotuman has borrowed from those languages much more than Fijian seems to have, and so it looks, on the surface, like a Polynesian language, though it is linguistically grouped with Western Fijian (and by Andy Pawley no less, one of our Pacific Languages guest lecturers). It even sounds like one, as a second result – it has the glottal stops that are so common in Samoan and Tongan yet unheard of in (standard, Bauan, Eastern) Fijian. Admittedly, my source for this is Wikipedia, but the web page looks incredibly detailed and the linguistic evidence makes sense to me – it looks, actually, like it could have been posted as part of the profile project we did in Into to Pacific Languages, which we were encouraged to post to Wikipedia. Yet while Wikipedia calls Rotuman a 'Polynesian influenced culture', Maea mentioned during our dance practices that that's not necessarily the opinion held by all. A Rotuman informant from their project, for instance, was very insistent that Rotuman dance didn't incorporate any of those (less desirable?) elements typical of Polynesian dance, such as hip movements or wiggling and following your hands with your eyes. Perhaps another indication of how different people experience a place or culture, a difference articulated in art or dance, dependent upon the person and their own context. I'm not sure, but I do know that I'm interested in learning more about these other sides of Fiji – if only we had the time!