Decolonising Fiji: Reclaiming indigenous Fijian psychologies

Abstract

Creating meaningfulness in an unstable, confusing environment can redirect one to sift through the chaos for the very basic, forgotten things in order to make sense of the world one lives in. This paper represents a process of searching for these simple things to make sense of the indigenous Fijian world, with particular reference to the people of the yavusa o Cu’u (Cu’u tribe). For more than a century, indigenous Fijians have struggled to live in dual worlds torn between the pull of modernization and traditionalism. Modernisation represents the new foreign life that leads many Fijians to view their traditional ways skeptically and question whether traditions are worth hanging on to. With decades of these struggles, very little makes sense anymore. The more we are pumped with foreign aid to make us modern, the more we are lost in new types of psycho- social challenges that baffle everyone, young and old alike.