January 3, 2020

INDEXES ON
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FIJI
Art And Life In The Pacific
BY JAMES D. BALESTRIERI
When I was very young, I used to find myself in the Coin and Stamp Department in Gimbel’s on
Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee. I would be feeling the sting of my weekly allergy shot, received
with a stoic wince in Dr. Lee’s office down the block. One day, while my mother was at Gimbel’s
Delicatessen — I can still smell the clovey, molassesy ham they made — I was peering, as usual,
over the wooden counters at some rarity I coveted. Beside me, a tall, elegant, silver-haired woman
was bargaining — arguing really — with the numismatic salespeople — all men, all in suits and
ties — trying to sell her late husband’s coin collection. She was in a hurry, and vocally unsatisfied
with the agreement they came to. Then she said, “Now, about the stamps.” Philately chimed in
from the next counter: a proper appraisal would be required, etc, etc. The woman leaned down to
me and said, “Little boy, do you like stamps?” Startled, I stammered, “Yes,” and before I could say
another word, the woman commanded the salespeople to “Get this young man some bags.
( continued on page 8C )
“Fijian Warrior (with Whale Tooth Necklace)” probably by John William (J.W.) Waters, 1880s.
Albumen print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial gift of Mark and Carolyn Blackburn
and purchased with funds from LACMA’s 50th Anniversary Gala and Fiji Water. Photo ©Museum
Associates/LACMA.

This contemporary drua (double-hulled sailing canoe) was commissioned as a heritage project in Fiji to encourage the retention of canoe-building skills.
Joji Marau Misaele managed the project in Fiji with the drua building team — carvers and mat-sail-makers — originally from the islands of Ogea and
Vulaga in the Lau region. The team harvested trees from the forests on Ogea and completed the canoe, which has no metal components, using traditional
tools, fiber lashings, and shells. The sail is composed of six sections of hand-woven pandanus-leaf matting, which prevents tearing of the entire sail. With-
out a fixed bow or stern, drua can sail in either direction. In the Nineteenth Century, large double-hulled canoes provided effective open ocean transpor-
tation and carried troops in times of war. Installation photograph, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

At The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art

8C — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — January 3, 2020

Necklace (wasekaseka/waseisei), Fiji, early to mid-Nine-

teenth Century. Sperm whale ivory and coir, 2½ by 16-3/8
by 9-7/8 inches. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol-
“Levuka in Ovalau, Fiji, 19th September 1875” by Constance Gordon Cumming. Watercolor, ogy, University of Cambridge: 1931.203, collected by

FIJI
19-3/16 by 28 inches. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge: Alfred Maudslay 1875-80. Photo reproduced by permis-
1998.55. Photo reproduced by permission of the Museum Archaeology and Anthropology, Uni- sion of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Uni-
versity of Cambridge. versity of Cambridge.

Art And Life In The Pacific

( continued from page 1C )
The stamps are his.” And so they were. You can imag-
ine the look on my mother’s face—and the line of inter-
rogation — when appeared in the deli with two bags
full of stamp albums. When I got home, the first stamps
that really caught my eye were some bright, beautiful
1930s stamps from Fiji. Since then, Fiji has always had
an association for me as an El Dorado of sorts, a para-
dise so remote from my experience that I could scarcely
imagine it.
“Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific,” on exhibition at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), goes a
long way toward dispelling my notions of exoticism in
regard to Fiji, though I must admit, it makes me want to
travel there all the more. More than 280 objects drawn
from the Fiji Museum, the British Museum, the Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, the
Smithsonian and fine pri-
vate collections, are
featured in the
exhibition, making this by far the most extensive presen-
tation of Fijian art ever mounted in the United States.
The excellent accompanying catalog, written by Steven
Hooper, professor of visual arts and director of the Sains-
bury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and
the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich,
is an indispensable aid in coming to grips with the com-
plexities of Fijian history, society and culture and in plac-
ing the objects on view in proper context.
The title of the exhibition creates a linguistic division
between “Art and Life,” which raises immediate ques-
tions and demonstrates the difficulty for us, raised in
the Euro-American tradition, to apprehend a society in
which art is inseparable from life, in which, in many
ways, art is life, and, conversely, life is art.
In fact, in the Fijian language — as in many, maybe
even most languages around the world — there is no
word that means “art” as we mean art. By art, in West-
ern terms, I am thinking of art as a reality of its own, an
aesthetic reality detached from and running alongside
the reality we inhabit, an art — born of leisure, and of a
philosophical separation between sacred and secular
realms — that dips into reality as a brush dips into
paint, that makes use of reality without claiming to rep-
resent any reality other than that of the artist.
A single instance of the differences between Fijian
and English, as Hooper writes in the catalog, high-
lights the difficulties: “The single English word ‘you,’
which is indiscriminate in Fijian, is rendered by four
different terms which indicate singular, dual, few and
numerous (koiko, kemudrau, kemudou, kemuni).
There are dual, few and numerous terms for ‘them,’ as
well as separate inclusive and exclusive terms for ‘us’
(two people, including or excluding the interlocutor, a
few people, and so on). The linguist George Milner
explained to me years ago, only half in jest, that Fijian,
with its highly complex pronouns but lack of complex-
ity in tense (a simple past, present and future) was the
diametric opposite of English, which had impoverished
pronouns but complex tenses (past perfect, pluperfect,
etc). He associated this with the differing concerns of
the two cultures — that Fijians were intensely inter-

Turtle-shaped bowl (dari vonu), Fiji, probably Kabara Island, southern Lau, mid-Nineteenth
Century. Wood and hibiscus fiber, 6¾ by 15½ by 25¼ inches. Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, University of Cambridge: 1937.321, belonged to Ratu Seru Cakobau; given
by him to Colonel R.W. Stewart, Royal Engineers, 1870s. Photo reproduced by permission
of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Spiritual observance in the early Nineteenth Century focused mainly on divine ancestors, to whom temples were dedicated rather than a lineage of creator
gods. In Fiji there was a direct correlation between divine power and the phenomena that affected human life, such as rain, drought, crop fertility and, espe-
cially, illness. Model or portable temples, such as those seen in this section, duplicate the architecture of full-scale temples and were probably kept in the main
bure kalou, and possibly taken as portable shrines on canoe voyages. They are made of great lengths of handmade coconut husk cordage and their elaborate
construction was a form of sacrifice and skilled sacred work. Installation photograph, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

Priest’s Yaqona Dish, Duck Form (ibuburau ni
bete), Fiji, early Nineteenth Century. Wood and
shell. Fiji Museum, Suva: 55.40, collected by Rev-
erend James Royce at Noco, Viti Levu, 1857-61,
given to him by the Tui Noco and his priest follow-
ing their conversion to Christianity. Photo ©Trust-
ees of the Fiji Museum.
Missile Club (iula tavatava), Fiji, early to mid-
Nineteenth Century. Wood and sperm whale
ivory, 18¾ inches long. Fiji Museum, Suva: 78.670,
collected by Reverend James Royce 1857-61;
given to him by Ratu Seru Cakobau, Vunivalu of
Bau. Photo ©Trustees of the Fiji Museum.
ested in social relations, in who was involved in some-
thing, but were not so obsessed with time.”
If art in the Western World is obsessed with anything, it
is obsessed with time — with individual and collective
memory, with history, with death. In Fiji, the bedrock of
culture is vanua or land, an idea embracing physical land
— earth, soil and its bounties — bounded territory, and,
most importantly, custom or traditional actions. Vanua
“has intense emotional force for Fijians...The vanua con-
tains the actuality of one’s past and the potentiality of
one’s future. It is an extension of the concept of self.”
Through elaborate feasts and rituals, important events
are commemorated — funerals, marriages, birthdays —
and relations between families, clans and peoples are
cemented or renewed. At these feasts, the chief, who is
always seen as a creature of the sea, receives abundant
gifts. Beautifully woven barkcloth mats and clothing are
presented. Yaqona, a drink made from the roots of a pep-
per plant and served in wonderfully wrought wooden
bowls, is shared. These are considered female products
of the landspeople. Food — things grown, gathered and
hunted — are male offerings. Shields made from shell
and whale bone, clubs and spears carved from wood and
decorated, these are chiefly products made by men who
are often the same craftsmen responsible for construct-
ing the magnificent ocean-going sailing vessels, the larg-
est of which are called drua.
Hooper writes, “A logical extension of the association of
chiefs with the sea and with sea products, such as whale
teeth and various species of shells, is that chiefs’ bodies
should be adorned with these materials. At one level of
analysis they are equivalent substances, embodiments
of divinity — this is what gives the tabua its power and
significance — so ivory and shell regalia can be seen as
extensions of the chiefly body, splendid to behold.”
Whale teeth, or tabua, carved and worn as pendants
and sometimes smoked to give them a reddish appear-
ance, are gifts of special importance and value. But, as
Hooper writes, the life of a chief is a life of sacrifice.
Chiefs are installed and can be removed, especially if
they are seen as miserly. Chiefs “are expected to deliver
abundance, and although a regular stream of feasts and
valuables may come their way, these should all as quick-
ly be redistributed in obligatory expressions of largesse.”
Hooper goes on, “the qualities that most define a chief
are generosity towards the people, loving the people and
making sure they have enough to eat.”
When we look at the indigenous objects in the exhibi-
tion — there are also crucial pieces of colonial origin —
we can marvel at the craftsmanship and apply our stan-
dards of beauty to them — admiring their forms, design,
composition, intricacy and so on — but I’m not at all
sure these aesthetic categories mean much in Fijian
terms. Imagine talking about Michelangelo’s “Pietà”
without making any reference to Christ and Mary and
you get some idea of what I am thinking about.
Consider the breastplate made of deep purple pearl
shell surrounded by polished sections of whale bone
deftly fit together with coir braid. The size of the shell
January 3, 2020 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — 9C
Warfare was frequent in Fiji until the mid-Nineteenth Century; the country continues to maintain a
proud martial tradition. More than weapons, Fijian clubs and spears were important ritual objects
and expressions of supreme carving and military skill. The clubs included in this exhibition demon-
strate the great variety of forms made in Fiji. Although most were effective weapons for hand-to-hand
combat, some are relatively unwieldy, even for powerful Fijian warriors; their appearance and form
was often considered more important than their technical efficiency. Very little is known about the
specific makers of these clubs and what the different forms represent or signify, but large numbers
have survived in collections, partly because of their durability and partly because of Nineteenth Cen-
tury European interest in collecting weapons. It is difficult to assign particular club forms to regions
of Fiji because clubs, like many other objects, were exchange valuables that circulated widely within
Fiji and beyond, including to Tonga and eventually to Europe and America. Installation photograph,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA.
Breastplate (civavonovono), Fiji, early to mid-
Nineteenth Century. Sperm whale ivory and
black pearl shell, 9¼ inches diameter. Lent by
Mark and Carolyn Blackburn. Photo courtesy of
the Mark and Carolyn Blackburn Collection,
Honolulu, Hawai’i.
alone boggles the imagination and the inlays of whale
bone: stars, moons and sun, suggest the chief’s marine
origins, the night sky over the sea, but in form they seem
astonishingly proto-modern, as if the makers of the piece
had looked at Matisse or Picasso — instead of the other
way around. A breastplate of this quality was worn by
chief Ratu Tanoa when the Wilkes Expedition (known as
the Ex. Ex.) visited Fiji in 1840 and then, in turn, was
given by his son, Ratu Cakobau, to Sir Arthur Gordon,
Fiji’s new British Governor, in 1875. When you learn
that the breastplate appears in a painting by one of Wil-
kes’s artist-scientists, Alfred Agate, in 1840, and appears
again in a painting by Constance Gordon-Cumming in Barkcloth (masi bolabola), Fiji, probably
1876, and you learn that other similar breastplates such Cakaudrove, mid-Nineteenth Century. Paper
as the one pictured were highly prized yet freely given mulberry inner bark and pigment, 31 by 100
when the occasion called for a tabua of such value, you inches. Lent by Mark and Carolyn Blackburn,
get a glimpse into a culture that values art in a different collected by Reverend Joseph Waterhouse while
way. Inherent in the work is the natural origin and value stationed in Fiji, 1850s. Photo courtesy of the
of the work’s raw materials, the craftsman’s lineage and Mark and Carolyn Blackburn Collection, Hono-
fealty to the chief, to nature and to the gods, all of which lulu, Hawai’i.
are expressed in the craftsmanship. Then there’s the
history of the work’s presentation and ownership — write this article and took a look at those Fiji stamps. They
where it’s been, when it’s been worn, the ceremonial put me in mind of a story I read as a kid in Robert Arthur’s
vanua enacted around it, its transactional history of Ghosts and More Ghosts. In the story, two guys find some
having been given and received. All of this must be seen gorgeous stamps from a tropical country called El Dorado.
as possessing an unbroken spiritual value. Only there is no El Dorado. They use one to send a letter to
Unlike other indigenous peoples who came under colo- a fictitious address. The letter flies out the window and
nial rule, the complexity and sophistication of Fijian vanishes, only to return in a minute postmarked “Address-
society acted as something of an insulator against the ee not known.” Something like that. Then they attach a
worst excesses of occupation and exploitation. Fiji has stamp to the collar on a rheumy old cat. The cat flies out
preserved more of her culture than most. Christianity, the window and returns a minute later — but renewed and
which is practiced by most Fijians, is, to this day, mixed full of life. Seeing this, the narrator’s friend says, “That’s it.
with traditional beliefs and rituals. Fijians have proven I’m going,” affixes some stamps to his shirt, and flies out
remarkably adaptable in other areas as well, transform- the window. Some days later, the narrator gets a postcard
ing the beauty of their weaving into inspiration for a from his friend: postmark El Dorado. The postcard
burgeoning fashion industry. describes an island paradise. I noticed my Fiji stamps are
I pulled out the old stamp album as I was preparing to still in mint condition — unused, uncanceled. I wonder...