Matt Tomlinson has been conducting research in Fiji since 1996. His area of investigation is the relationships between the indigenous chiefly system and the Methodist church, which had enormous influence on politics until the most recent coup in 2006.
“What struck me during fieldwork was how the relationship between the chiefs and the church, that is, between political and religious authorities—has generated a pervasive sense of loss,” he says.
“People regularly compared the present negatively to the past, in which people were stronger, everyone worked together, customs were intact, and mana (effectiveness, often with a spiritual aspect) was present. I came to realize that these statements were not nostalgia, at least not in the usual sense: people were not just recalling the past fondly, but expressing persistent anxieties that lost power was a curse,” says Tomlinson.
Matt Tomlinson is Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University in Australia and co-editor of The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. Tomlinson’s latest book, In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity was published by UC Press in January 2009
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