Compassion for One Another: Constituting Kinship as Intentionality in Fiji Author(s): Christina Toren Source: The Journal of the

Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 265-280 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2660697 Accessed: 17/11/2010 07:04
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COMPASSION FOR ONE ANOTHER: CONSTITUTING KINSHIP AS INTENTIONALITY IN FIJI*

CHRISTINATOKEN

Brunel University

This article shows how the ontogenetic process of constituting kinship as intentionality makes any given Fijian able ideally to bekin with any other and, further, makes kinship serve at once as the expression of collective order, as the domain of relations in whose terms libidinal desire is structured, and as the ground of ideas of self and other. An understanding of kinship has to be constituted rather than merely received, and a key element in this process is a developed consciousness of one's peers as peers. To become consciously a subject of kinship, a child has to find its peers; in so doing it begins to know kinship as the unifying and inexhaustible medium of all its relations with others. Finally, this example of an analysis of ontogeny provides a method that allows access to the preoccupations of the people whose manifold relations with one another are the object of anthropological analysis.

Once a week at the primary school outside the village of Sawaieke on the island of Gau, central Fiji, a special assembly was held. Children and teachers gathered in one room - the teachers on a line of chairs facing the children who sat crosslegged on the floor. Usually, a church elder preached a sermon, its theme taken perhaps from a Methodist handbook for the guidance of teachers and parents:Na isau ni veika vinaka e dau vakayacora (the reward of doing good deeds). I attended this assembly half a dozen times towards the end of my first 20 months of fieldwork in 1983, and again during my stay in 1990. One aspect of it fascinated me: the period of masu,prayer. The teacher taking assembly would announce 'Masu!' and the teachers would bow their heads and close their eyes. So did the children: some little ones bowed their heads right over their crossed legs and rested their foreheads on the floor; others wore an expression of devout concentration; only the few who had their eyes open might note that I had mine open too. But whether their eyes were closed or not, many children almost at once began a silent and intense struggle with those nearby: they pinched, poked, elbowed, punched or knocked sharply with their knuckles the head of another child. The squirming, wriggling intensity of these childish encounters between peers, intended as often in friendly acknowledgement as in hostile challenge, was emphasized by the silence in which they took place: even a child who began to cry (most did not) made no sound. Meanwhile, the teacher or church elder prayed, assuring God of our attendance upon Him, of our reliance on His compassion, asking Him to bless us all and help us perform our duties correctly. And throughout the prayer, which might last for ten minutes or so, children continued their silent assaults upon one another, ceasing only when we heard 'emeni' (amen) and everyone opened their eyes, when the children always
*The MalinowskiMemorialLecture1996 Inst. J. Roy.anthrop. (N.S.) 5, 265-280

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presented to their teachers an appearance of perfect behaviour. This silent conspiracy between children in the face of adults did not hold for other circumstances; often, both at home and at school, they told tales on one another and routinely displayed a triumphant righteousness in bringing down adult wrath on the head of another child. But this they could do only for acts that adults regarded as offences, like leaving church early on pretence of sleepiness, defying an adult order, stealing, playing on Sunday. A blow delivered to or by another child did not count. At school, knocking and hitting occurred almost whenever the teacher's eyes were turned away, as if the sheer proximity of one child to another invited at the very least some kind of threat display: a clenched fist, a mimed knock with the knuckles.' When adults took notice of such encounters, it was to punish for unseemly behaviour all the children involved, no matter who was at fault. So the children's silence in the face of assaults during masucould be said to be in each child's own interest. For me, this same silence brought into being a manifest solidarity, a consciousness of which was apparent in the smile of collusion exchanged between any child whose own open eyes caught me looking, and myself Indeed, for me the children's silent struggle with one another has become emblematic of the unending contest that is, in Fiji, characteristic of kinship between peers. Competition between equals is not inimical to compassion; rather, it is in this contest that veilomani,mutual compassion, becomes definitive of kinship and the vehicle of its extension across houses, clans, villages and chiefdoms. Fijian adults I know routinely talk about kinship in terms of veilomani.So, if kinship is to articulate relations between Fijians in the country at large, as adults say it does, then compassion has to be for them a form of intentionality. 'Intentionality' is not another word for motivation; it denotes an embodied consciousness of what one may take for granted in this case - compassion. A Fijian village child lives kinship as the very medium of existence; such a child constitutes ideas of self and others or, in simpler terms, comes to be who he or she is, in reciprocal relations between kin. And to be kin to others a Fijian child must become one whose very being is informed by compassion as the ground of existence.' Here I try to show how the ontogenetic process of constituting kinship as intentionality makes any given Fijian able ideally to be kin with any other and, further, makes kinship serve at once as the expression of collective order, as the domain of relations in whose terms libidinal desire is structured, and as the ground of ideas of self and other. My ethnography is drawn from two periods of fieldwork and is crucially informed by children's own understandings of kinship in so far as these can be derived from drawings of their villages produced in 1990 by seventy-seven children aged from 6 to 14 years old and stories on the subject of 'kinship' written by forty-six children aged between 8 and 14 years old. But why this focus on children?

Children informants as
As an anthropologist I want to understand how people become who they are and to theorize mind in a way that makes sense of anthropological data: finding out how children bring themselves into being is the best means I know of gaining

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understanding on both counts.3 My previous efforts in this direction have led me to argue that mind is constituted over time in inter-subjective relations with others in the environing world. Each one of us is the locus of manifold relations with others that inform the endogenous constitution of our schemes of thought; so each one of us brings into being for ourselves the social relations of which we are the transforming product. Thus, at any given time of life, mind is manifested in the whole person, considered as a particular person with a particular history in relation to others who are similarly constituting themselves as unique manifestations of mind - a perspective from which it is clear that for any one of us our being and our becoming are one and the same. We have a common biology, are subject to the same general physical conditions and physiological processes and each one of us has to make meaning of the world by virtue of engaging with meanings others have made and are making. Knowledge is the product of cognitive schemes, themselves best thought of as 'self-regulating transformational systems'; this explicitly biological concept renders continuity and transformation not as separable processes but as aspects of one another. So, in constituting cognitive schemes over time, from birth to death, we are manifesting history and making it. Actively constituting an understanding of the world in and through relations with others, we maintain the continuity of meanings and, in so doing, transform them. So children socialize themselves, for they engage their caregivers in the process of making their own distinctive meanings of the world.4 Indeed, the way infants engage with others suggests that the recursive qualities of language are immanent in pre-speech cognitive processes: human infants see that others see them seeing them. This mode of cognitive functioning allows specific forms of sociality (or what some call 'culture') to inhere in both implicit and pre-speech concepts. In speech this recursiveness is further elaborated: I attribute to the other the awareness that I am aware that the other is aware of my awareness. Further, that recursiveness is given in the processes of human mind is suggested by the way that knowledge one has embodied but does not know one has, is brought forth as a function of certain relationships. One's 'parenting practice', for instance, is a function not only of what one has consciously observed or decided to be good practice, but of how one was oneself 'parented' in infancy. The infant other calls forth knowledge constituted and embodied by its caretakersin their own infancy, knowledge which, to a greater or lesser degree, is transformed in later life in the course of other relationships. Thus humans are at once in historical time and themselves incorporate history, such that continuities in human ideas and practices are embedded in the self-same processes that give rise to transformation. So, the systematic study of how children constitute the categories used by adults to represent, for example, political economy or religion can be extraordinarily revealing. For, as we shall see, an ontogeny of intentionality allows us not only to understand what people are doing and saying, but to reveal the substantive source of certain anthropological debates.5

Beingkin to oneanother
What is it to be kin to one another? I asked children to write a story telling every-

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thing they knew about kinship - na veiwekani.This reciprocal form of the base weka may also be translated as 'being in relation to one another'; ideally, all ethnic Fijians are one another's kin. 'Within-generation relationships are designated by fully reciprocal terms like veitacini ('taci to one another', same-sex siblings), veiganeni ('gane to one another', cross-sex siblings), veitavaleni('tavale to one another', same-sex cross-cousins) or veidavolani('davolato one another', crosssex cross-cousins).6 Across generation the base term designates the senior party refer respectively to the relation to the relationship, so that veitinaniand veitamani between a mother (tina) and her children and a father (tama) and his children.7 But in the case of a child and its parents' cross-sex siblings, the term veivugoni (vugo to one another) is again fully reciprocal (a matter I return to later). This Dravidian terminology is used in reference and address to everyone one knows within and across villages and chiefdoms and routinely extended to take in people previously unknown. In talking about kinship, adult villagers may remark, for example, that women are 'paths of kinship' because they 'carry the blood of posterity', and when the similarity between generations is striking they may say that 'the blood is too strong', that the families have been inter-marrying over too long a period. They also enjoy tracing genealogical connexions when asked to do so, but they are much more likely to talk about kinship in terms of veilomani, mutual familial love or mutual compassion. And so are children. A content analysis of children's essays, looking strictly at the words they used, showed that the attributes girls most often mentioned were that kinship brings happiness (37.5 per cent.), that kin are generous to one another (37.5 per cent.), they cook or eat together (41.7 per cent.), that kinship is a good thing (50 per cent.), it concerns certain relationships (62.5 per cent.) and is about compassion (62.5 per cent.). The attributes most often mentioned by boys were that in kinship there is no anger or fighting (36.4 per cent.), that kinship is a good thing (36.4 per cent.), that it is about compassion (50 per cent.) and concerns certain relationships (54.5 per cent.). The relationships to which children referred are several. They wrote of being the same blood, of recognizing one other, having names in common, being siblings, being related though house, clan, yavusa (group of related clans) or village, being related as a child and its parents' cross-sex siblings, as child and parent and so on; thus children pointed to their being of the same kind as their kin. Compassion is implicated here, for those who are of the same kind should be compassionate towards one another. Veilomani open to numerous English glosses that suggest love and pity;8 I is prefer 'compassion' here because it suggests at once the pity that inheres in the Fijian idea of love between kin and its hierarchical implications.9 The base loma denotes the inside of a thing and, in many compounds, the mind or the will: for exarnple, lomadonu (straight-minded) denotes sincerity, lomakasa having a retentive memory, lomavuku being wise or learned. The verbal form lomana means to love, pity or have mercy on; the reduplicative form lolomatranslates as love, charity, pity or mercy. The compassion denoted by veilomaniis reciprocal, such that the will or mind of each party is in harmony with the other. According to adults, compassion should encompass all kin relations, but any given person is party to many more hierarchical relations with kin than to equal relations with kin as peers.10For

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people older than 14 or so, hierarchical relations are characterized by varying degrees of respect and avoidance, with the obligation devolving on the junior party.However, all people have peers, cross-cousins, with whom they are bound to be familiar and assert themselves, irrespective of differential status, and it is in day-to-day relations with cross-cousins, both within and across sex, that veilomani reveals its aspect of equality."t Sexual relations are allowable only between those who can call each other cross-cousin and by definition one marries a cross-cousin, but marriage transforms this relation between equals into the axiomatic hierarchy that makes any married man a chief in his own house. This shift begins in marriage rituals and thereafter is daily made apparent at every meal. Exchange relations between spouses are complementary and balanced, but at meals the wife sits below her husband, serves him and eats only when he has finished; her subordination seems to be rendered complete by the young husband's almost routine violence towards her. Over time, however, this relationship transforms yet again: the sexual love between equals that precipitated the marriage becomes the compassionate love proper to hierarchical kin relations. But sexual love is the locus of the constitutive violence that helps produce the subservience of wife to husband, while the compassion a husband feels for his wife underlies the possibility of equal relations within marriage. So marriage as process makes it clear that hierarchy and equality are not to be understood as a function of different relationships, but as aspects of one another and thus as potentials of any relationship (see Toren 1994a). How does one come to understand equality and hierarchy as aspects of one another, as dependent on one another for their very continuity? To begin with, if a child is to have kin who are its peers, the hierarchical pretensions of pity that inhere in compassionate love across generations have to be made to give way to a compassion that resides in mutual recognition of one another as equals within generation. And this is indeed what happens, but it happens as an ontogenetic process in the course of which any given person comes to understand for her- or himself that explicit peer relations are possible only across boundaries.

in Someelements theprocess constituting of kinship

An infant comes to know its mother and other close adult kin as those who feed, clothe, clean, comfort, kiss, cuddle and generally care for it. Once a child has begun to talk with some fluency, adults will tell him or her to do or not to do certain things or ask standardquestions requiring standardresponses, but they do not usually enter into open-ended interactions and children's questions are discouraged, as is any form of childish self-assertion. So, in adult company, toddlers are markedly passive, able to sit quietly for long periods in observation or quiet imitation of their elders. This relation between caretakersand infants conforms to hierarchical relations within the household, whose explicit model is not so much the parent-child relationship as the seniority of siblings. Indeed, the weight accorded by their elders to the seniority of siblings means that even though, considered categorically in relation to young men and women and to adults, children (na gone) are one another's peers, they cannot, within a household, ever quite be so. Equality is at once constituted and expressed in open contest or competition, in teasing or

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joking and in mutual familiarity. In children aged up to 14 or so this behaviour obtains between all those who are within two to three years of each other, even between immediate siblings living in the same house. But relative seniority is ultimately over-riding here because even a child of 4 or 5 should take care of and dispensing food, discipline and parentis, watch over younger siblings, acting in loco affection when required. So it is across households that Fijians find their peers. Competitive, challenging relations between them are fostered early in childhood. Many times I saw two mothers, each encouraging the infant in her arms to punch out at the other, both children grinning and crowing with glee until one of them took too hard a blow and began to cry, at which point he or she was kissed and laughed over by the mother. These are the very gestures of friendship and love in which the mock punch, the playful knock with the knuckles are common indicators of intimacy and affection, both within and across sex, at least until one is in one's thirties or so.12 The daily conduct of a child's life with its mother or other caregiver (for example, FM, MM, mother's or father's unmarried YZ), is such that its first recognized peers are likely to be close classificatory siblings, the children of father's true brothers and mother's sisters. A woman often works alongside her husband's brothers' wives, veikaruani(those who are each other's counterpart; the term also designates two men whose wives are sisters), co-operating with them in any task that requires more than one household, and she will probably have her toddler or baby with her. In such a situation toddlers encounter one another, watch one other, stroke one another, take things away from one another, offer them back, imitate each other, punch out at one another and vocalize to one another. So long as the children are quiet, their mothers do not interfere. Because houses belonging to a clan tend to be grouped together, and residence on marriage is usually patrilocal, it is likely that father's true brothers' children live nearby. If the marriage is endogamous to the village (in Sawaieke there is about 45 per cent. village endogamy) then mother's true sisters' children may also be within easy distance, even if their houses are situated on the other side of the village.'3 By the time a child is 3 or so, it is used to making its way from its own house to the house of its closest kin, and such children are to be seen pottering about in one another's company, imitating one another, holding hands sometimes and, often enough, in a tussle over something each of them wants, at that moment, to have. In these peer relations a child begins to come into its own. Open, outgoing and lively behaviour is expected among one's peers; with them one can assert oneself, joke, play and even fight. Compared with 6- and 7-year-olds these preschool children tend still to be rather quiet and subdued with one another. As peer relations become stronger, children are more likely to assert themselves. When first I lived in Sawaieke it used to surprise me to come upon a child, previously encountered only in adult company, and find him or her gaily loquacious, self-assertive, full of liveliness and curiosity. This behaviour is reserved for one's peers - this being as true for older children and adults as it is for 5- to 13-yearolds - and is especially characteristic of children in groups who are enjoying themselves. One comes upon them on the road between school and the village, bathing at the beach or waterhole, perhaps engaged incidentally on some task such as collecting the dried calyx of the coconut for the fire or coconuts for use

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in the kitchen. Such groups of children intent on their own concerns are always loud with laughter and talk, but this lively independence comes into effect only when they are not overlooked by adults. Children's consciousness of the gaze of adults is perhaps most pronounced in church. Virtually every Sunday morning, from birth onwards, the child, dressed in its best, is carried to church, usually by one of its grandmothers. Most village children are walking at 12 months and may then be taken to church by one of their grandfathers, but by the time a child is 3 or so the duty of looking after it in church has usually devolved upon its older siblings. Children's attendance at church is mandatory and frequent: once or twice during the week, at least two out of the three Sunday services, Sunday school. If a child falls asleep it is taken home by an older sibling. A toddler may be allowed to wander up and down the aisle, but a child of three and a half or so is expected to behave well - to sit down, not to make a noise, to close its eyes and bow its head in prayer - and when it misbehaves will be admonished by stern looks or whispered injunctions from any of its close senior kin who are watching and, if it persists, taken out of church and sent home. A toddler is not punished for misbehaving in church but a child over 4 may receive a sharp poke from the long stick held by one of the church elders whose task it is to watch over the children's conduct. The following extract from my field notes for 1982, describing two mid-week evening Methodist Youth Fellowship services, conveys something of the intensity of surveillance of children in church. 14 From what I could see, it meant virtually no knocking or pinching, but my son (then aged 8) says that determined assaults were just as frequent, only more carefully concealed (he also says they were fun).
Two young men in turn stand up during the opening prayer and go and pester the children to close their eyes, bow their heads, etc. One directs the re-seating of a row of little girls, making one 12-year-old get up and move out half a dozen or so of the others. Only with difficulty can she make her way between the pews ... we watch the older child push with her open hand at the forehead of one little girl after another.... A ripple of amusement runs through the choir. The young man is importantly directing the operation, his long stick for poking the children's backs in his hands ... [At another service] another young man gets up and takes from a vase a flower with a long, thick stem. He seats himself stern-faced behind the children, having already gone around methodically whacking their legs with the flower stem under the pews, and continues - at random as far as I can see - to switch at the legs of those who are most conveniently placed near him ... I wonder who is attending to the prayer - certainly not many of the old ladies (constantly on the lookout for deviant behaviour in church) and certainly not the young men who seem intent on taking the children's piety as their own responsibility.

The salience of the church is clear in children's drawings of their villages. Of twenty-nine children from Sawaieke and Somosomo between the ages of 5 and 7/10 (that is, 7 years 10 months), twenty-seven showed either the church and their own house, or the church, their own house and up to two other named houses. The two other children drew only their own houses. So, virtually all of these youngest primary-school children showed the church in their drawings, most depicting it correctly as several times larger than their own houses, and often with people inside it. One can contrast these drawings with those of twenty-four girls and boys aged between 7/10 and 10/0: only just over half of these children depicted the church, few made it very prominent and none showed people inside it. They concentrated on showing more named houses,

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between three and sixteen, usually including their own (in the case of Sawaieke children, most of whose kin ties I know, the majority of named houses were those occupied by the children's closest kin). The salience of the church reasserted itself, however, in drawings by the twenty oldest children, aged from 9/10 to 13/11: it was shown by 75 per cent. of girls and all the boys. But these children also depicted many more named houses, between seven and twentytwo, as well as other buildings. In summary, the youngest children made the church and one to three houses, including their own, represent their villages; children somewhat older were as likely to ignore the church as to include it and concentrated on drawing houses, their own and those of their close kin; the oldest children were likely to show the church as one of several communal buildings, including the village hall and the store, and many more named houses, including some not belonging to close kin. Drawings by children in the middle range of ages, from 7/10 to 10/0, are of special interest, because their shift of focus from the church and one's own house, to one's own house as one among the houses of one's kin, suggests a shift of focus towards one's peers.'5 Kinship with peers This suggested shift is confirmed in the children's stories, where a developed consciousness of their peers becomes clearly apparent. One boy aged 9/10 wrote as follows:
We are really kin to one another. But sometimes we fight as if we are not. We always have a lot of fun ... but sometimes we fight ... When we are let out of school we are very caring towards each other.16 Also every Sunday we are also very loving to each other. We also try hard to sit in the church so that we may serve God every day ... Every Sunday we serve God. We are really good kin to one another every day.We are compassionate to each other every day.

But what does this boy understand as being caring, loving, compassionate? I want to suggest that for children of his age, compassion resides precisely in a developed consciousness of one's peers as peers and of an entailed obligation to be peers. Consciousness of one's peers as peers is the inevitable corollary of its being in these relations that a child comes into his or her own - a matter I return to below. In the adult ideology of kinship, the Christian God's love is the ultimate source of compassion, for it was with conversion, villagers say, that the mutual compassion of true kinship came into being. This rhetorical use of history makes contemporary compassion play against an idea of the past as a time when people 'attended on devils' (qaravitevoro)who, in demanding cannibal sacrifices, put compassion into abeyance. So it is a duty of kinship to attend church with one's fellow villagers and in doing so maintain and even enhance the power of God, who makes compassion possible. An adult loves others in taking pity on them; so it is compassionate to make sure that the old and the sick eat well, to help others with any major task, such as house-building, preparing pandanus for mats or cooking for feasts, to attend on those who are mourning or celebrating a birth, marriage or circumcision. Such acts of compassion are what adults refer to when they tell foreigners about 'life according to kinship' (na ivakarauni bula vakavei-

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wekani) or when they deliver sermons in church, speeches in village meetings or instruct children. So, in Sunday school from the age of three or so onwards, and later on at school, children are explicitly taught what it is to behave 'according to kinship', what it is to be 'loving' or 'compassionate'. But the compassion referred to in the boy's story quoted above, while it relies on this ideology, uses a perspective that is different from an adult's; not only is it clearly directed towards the boy's peers, but it is made to lie in having fun with one another and not fighting. Compare this child's essay, and remember he was aged 9/10, with one by the youngest boy to write an essay, aged 8/2, and one by a boy aged 13/0. The younger boy wrote:
Kinship. Visiting sick people in other houses. Being diligent in other houses. Giving food to other houses. Being obedient in other houses. My kin love/pity me.17

The 13-year-old wrote at greater length:

In a Fijian village kinship is easy because there is a great deal of mutual compassion, of listening to one another and mutual concern because we are generous. Another thing, if someone is taking a shortcut by our house, if we are eating we call that person to come and eat or to rest. Another thing, if we ask for something from another house we will be given it ... There is no stealing nor anything bad. In some Fijian villages mutual compassion and concern is very great, there is no fighting, if we want to make use of a piece of earth we shall go to the one who owns it [and they] will agree to it ... Kinship is very easy in a Fijian village. That kind of behaviour is a good thing, also life in Fiji is easy because of it.

When one compares the content and style of these three stories about kinship it is clear that both the boy aged 8/2 and boy aged 13/0 are reiterating aspects of an explicit adult ideology. But the boy aged 9/10 appears to be telling us something rather different about the complexities of the conflicting feelings one may have for one's peers."8 What children are explicitly taught about the compassion of 'life according to kinship' has to be married to what they have lived as ready-made or already there. As an explicit concept of sociality and as practice, kinship (na veiwekani)presents children with a problem of some magnitude. Inside the house and clan (mataqali) the emphasis is on filiation and siblingship, and adults talk as if these relations are intrinsically hierarchical: husband above wife, father above son, elder sibling above junior sibling. Up to 3 years old or so the child, as the object of its senior kin's compassion, embodies what it is to be an object of kinship as hierarchy. To become consciously a subject of kinship a child has to find its peers, and they are to be found only in other houses. In finding its peers a child begins to know kinship as the unifying and inexhaustible medium of all its relations with others. Like the boys, girls around the age of nine or so are becoming consciously aware that relations with peers are characterized by a different kind of compassion from hierarchical relations. The youngest girl to write a story was aged 7/10; she simply listed various names of people who are kin to her. The next oldest girl, aged 8/9 wrote as follows:
Those who are kin to one another are good kin. They are generous to one another ... True kin ... They help each other really a lot ... Kin are very caring towards each other. Kin cook together ... Kin help each other a great deal.

Compare this with the following, by a girl aged 9/1:

Kinship means compassion for one another. Alena and I are kin because we play together

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and care for one other. We [two] have made a real effort to know each other's names. Litea and I are very good kin because of the compassion according to kinship. We [few] really care about one another. Sereana and I are kin because we are generous to each other. We just play and are happy every day. The meaning of kinship is the relation between children and their parent's cross-siblings or between siblings. Alena and I are really serious kin. Those who are kin are really properly loving to one another. We few always walk together on the road [to school].

It is from nine years old that having a good time with one's kin becomes an explicit, but not universal, issue for the children. Play is a medium of their constitution of kinship as intentionality, not because they play at being kin, but because they play with their kin and in playing they become a certain kind of kin, kin who can be peers."9So the child quoted above remarks that she and another little girl are 'serious kin', cross-cousins, with whom relations are serious not because one is obliged to respect them, but because one is obliged to them as peers. These primary school children apparently placed no stress on relative seniority among classificatory siblings and, because secondary school children are not very visible in the village (most being away at school), I do not know when it first becomes important. Certainly, young men and women in their late teens and early twenties make seniority distinctions among themselves. For example, a girl's older classificatory brothers, perhaps not much older than herself, may begin to order her behaviour, to punish her if they catch her smoking or suspect her of a sexual relationship of which they disapprove. Similarly,within sex, older girls or boys may begin to order about younger classificatory siblings or may take it upon themselves to discipline breaches of propriety.So, after secondary school, if not before, a young person is made to recognize that a hierarchical relation obtains between classificatory siblings across houses. Across sex, avoidance begins to be emphasized and brothers and sisters no longer speak to one another, while within sex the matter of who is the older becomes more salient. But this recognition of relative seniority has to be married to an already lived knowledge of 'kinship in the manner of siblings' (veiwekani vakaveitacini)as a good, an admirable, a compassionately loving relation between equals.20 So a girl aged 11/5 writes:
In Gau a great many of us are kin. We are kin because we are siblings. Druma my kin. We are siblings. We love one another and sometimes we fight ... She is in Class 5 and I am in Class 6. When I go round to their place I laugh away to her and she also laughs back to me. I have many kin: Sese, Viniana, Teresia, Mereia, Tuni, Bale [all are her classificatory siblings]. My kin are really very many. In the village most of us are kin. We go to school together. Sometimes we quarrel. We play and we also have picnics. Kinship is a good duty ... a truly surprising thing. There are my siblings, my cross-cousins, my parents' cross-siblings. There is one of our kin who goes to school with us who is a child from Rabi. Two villages go to school here, Somosomo and Sawaieke. Somosomo children are well behaved. We are very happy together. And sometimes we quarrel. Kinship is an important thing. My story ends here.

But the transformation from classificatory sibling as equal into classificatory sibling as senior or junior is accompanied by some difficulty, if only because, in being assimilated to the relation between siblings within the household, an element ofjealous rivalry becomes a potential problem.

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one's hand Wtthholding I said that children are explicitly taught the ideology of kinship. In one little talk on the subject delivered in 1983 to 8- and 9-year-olds, the class teacher said that a compassionate, loving child is respectful, gentle, good tempered and helpful dau (dau vakarokoroko, yalo malumalumu,dau yalo vinaka, dau veivuke). If we are compassionate, she said, God will have compassion on us (e na qai lomanikedana kalou) and we should have compassion for everyone regardless of where they come from or the colour of their skins because compassion prevents quarrels.We can show our compassion by helping all our kin in the village; we should do little things for people who are away in the capital or who have sick people at home. She said: You have seen how often your mother sends you with cooked food to your kin - "takethis to your momoto eat, take this to your bubu"'.In the teacher's examples compassion appeared desirable for its own sake, but she brought her talk to an end with an obscure threat: if we are not compassionate, she said, mai 'something terrifying will be heard of here' (e na rogovaki na ka vakadomobula). This brings me to what I have come to think of as the fundamental act of compassion. It consists in staying one's hand - an act remarked on by children (especially boys) when they wrote that in kinship there is no fighting, and one that all children have to recognize if others are to be allowed to be their peers. But for adults it is not fighting per se that poses a problem. Stinginess, back-biting gossip, jealousy, selfishness and anger may all disrupt day-to-day relations between villagers, but they are able to assert in good faith that they live their lives according to kinship because, despite these regrettable and mundane lapses, they know they do not do what they could do if they were without compassion, they do not do witchcraft. Those who qaravitevoro('attend on devils') are said to kill their close kin first because if they killed just anyone their magic would not gain strength. Specific accusations of a named person are rare in my experience. Of four such accusations I heard over the years, twvo referred to men having killed their brothers, one to a man having killed his brother's children (his classificatory sons) and one to a man having killed his own son. When, in their sermons in church, at school or even at home, adults praise 'kinship in the manner of siblings' (veiwekanivakaveitacini) they implicitly extol hierarchy,for the relative seniority of siblings is definitive of hierarchy within the house and the clan; irrespective of gender, the eldest of a set of siblings is due the respect and obedience of those who are younger. When siblingship is extended beyond the bounds of the house to take in other houses and, within the clan, men as household heads are ranked against one another in order of seniority, it appears as if hierarchy is 'given' in relations across houses. We have seen that it is not, for in any person's experience the recognition of hierarchy across houses and within generation requires a transformation of peer relations into hierarchical ones. It follows that the envious anger that can fuel witchcraft is often said to show itself in an attack on siblings or siblings' children. By attending on the ancestors in their malign aspect as devils one can revive their power and augment one's own. It is because veilomani,mutual compassion, is the ground of one's relations with others that one does not. And because one knows one's kin to be Christians one can by and large rely on their compassion for oneself, submit with equanimity to hierarchical kinship and keep at bay the

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'something terrifying' referred to by the teacher. The very idea of the clan as clan is constituted in exogamy and in Fiji it is crosscousins who bring the clan into being. The corollary of this is that across-clan hierarchy can and does become, openly, a contested issue and cross-cousinship is made to play against siblingship in such a way as to leave the issue always unresolved. Any given person lives this tension in the transformations that take place over time in the relation between any child and its parents' cross-sex siblings. Both within and across sex, a child is often a great favourite with its real mother's brothers and real father's sisters - much indulged and affectionately teased - and if the marriage is endogamous to the village this may be especially true for a boy with his mother's brothers. But at some point in the child's middle or later teens this relation is abruptly transformed into the strictest of all crossgenerational relations. Respect, avoidance and obedience are all enjoined on the junior party in relation to mother's brother. At the same time, thejunior party (as vasu)can take without asking anything he or she wants from men of the mother's clan, that is, from mother's real and classificatory brothers. In other words, the vasu relation combines the licence allowed cross-cousins with the extreme avoidance and respect that is characteristic of relations between brother and to sister, and it is this binding of antithesis that allows the term veivugoni be fully reciprocal, where other terms for cross-generational relations name the senior
party.21

Cross-cousinship and clan exogamy challenge the idea that clans can and should be ranked. The idea ofthe yavusa(derived from yavu, the earth foundation of a house22)as a group of clans related by ritual obligations and marriage permits this challenge and, by extending outwards, as it were the walls of the house, undercuts it. (In the past, when marriage was permitted only between second cross-cousins, marriage across yavusa,and across villages, was more likely.) Contest and recognition of the other as one's own potential match are possible only between peers, but if one is to be peers with others then the contest has itself to be recognized as possible. In hierarchical relations one can, as the junior party, be only what one is given to be. So, a child comes into its own, can assert its selfthood, only in peer relations, for only here is the child uncoerced by hierarchy. Cross-cousinship has its obligations, primarily the obligation to come to grips with one another as equals and to have a good time doing so; these obligations are about living, about producing the relation between cross-cousins as the ground of libidinal desire, of marriage, of fertility. It follows that cross-cousins do not have to be made 'other', they are other because, once classificatory siblings have been ruled out, cross-cousins remain one's only peers, the reflection of oneself Thus, cross-cousinship is the crucial relationship for the extension outwards of the mutual compassion that defines kinship, so that it may take in all ethnic Fijians. in The corollary of this is that it is not hierarchical kinship (vakaveitacini, the manner of siblings) that is extolled when speeches are made about relations across chiefdoms. Rather it is veiwekanivakavanua(kinship in the manner of the land) or veiwekani vakaturaga(kinship in the manner of chiefs) that unites different vanua (countries) in the relation of veitabaniand veitauvu.23 These are both joking relationships and may thus be assimilated to the relation between cross-cousins who, in allowing others to be their peers, make compassion for the other the medium of the extension of kinship outwards across houses, villages

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and countries, and who, in marrying, found the hierarchical household whose image makes the chiefdom possible.24 Conclusion It is a truism that we get the answers to the questions we ask. This awareness has posed a profound epistemological problem for anthropologists of my generation, some of whom have been so enchanted by the existential anxiety that comes with committing ourselves to paper that they have tried to persuade the rest of us that writing itself is the primary problem with which we should wrestle, a conclusion that lends itself at best only to an increased elegance of prose. I propose a different solution entirely: that we let children show us what questions their being in the world raises for them and how, over time, they answer them. Anthropologists have been discussing 'kinship', 'religion', 'political economy' and so on for years with little or no reference to children as informants. Indeed, the reification of ideas like 'kinship' and 'religion' into domains of inquiry is the artefact of an analytical procedure that ignores the contribution that children as informants have to make to our discipline. Nevertheless, even the most superficial reader of this article will have heard in it the echoes of other voices, the voices of the ancestors demanding recognition of their contributions to it: where are the references to descent and alliance, to the structural significance ofjoking, to the atom of kinship, to the axiom of amity or to the logical basis of marriage of cousins? I do not deny the power of these ideas: as the footnotes demonstrate, they have crucially informed my own. Moreover, my data from children suggest that these issues from an earlier anthropological era remain relevant, as indeed does the study of kinship.25But my primary purpose here has been to emphasize what children have to reveal to us: that what we think of as analyticalissuescan be better understood better and explainedas ontogenetic ones. In coming into being in relation with others, children willy-nilly ask questions of the world and answer them for themselves. The challenge they present to us as anthropologists is, in any given case, to discover if we can what their questions and answers are. In studying how children constitute, and in so doing transform, the concepts that adults use to describe what they know, we can arrive perhaps at an analysis that is driven by the preoccupations of those whom we are trying to understand, rather than by our own parochial concerns, a proceeding that would, I like to think, have met with the approval of Malinowski.
NOTES This articlewas originally presentedas the MalinowskiLecturefor 1996, an occasionon which I took the opportunityto thank those who taught me: my teachersat the London School of Economics and my contemporaries the Thesis WritingSeminarduring the years 1983-1986; in with specialthanksbeing due to my tutors,the lateAlfredGell andJamesWoodburnand, above all, to MauriceBloch who supervisedmy doctoralresearch to whom I am especiallygrateful. and Many thanks too to Peter Gow, Eric Hirsch, Adam Kuper,AlexandraOuroussoff and George Milner for their patientreadingsof the presentarticleand their useful criticisms. I Children'sfirst responseto a knock or blow was to look round with an angryand injured was expression,but if the perpetrator their playmatethe angryexpressionwould dissolve into a smile. 2 See Merleau-Ponty (1962: xvii) for whom intentionalityhas two components: that all consciousnessis consciousnessof somethingandthat'the unityof the world- beforebeingposited or as there'. by knowledgein a specificact of identification is "lived" ready-made already 3 Cf Malinowski,who argued that '[o]nly by studying the formationof the earliestbonds

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between parent and child, by following the gradual growth and development of these, and their ever-widening extension into bonds of local grouping and clanship, can we grasp the kinship system of the natives' (1929: 433). Despite his often excellent observations of children, Malinowski could not be said to have carried this project through; c? Firth (1963) who used Malinowski's 'biographical approach' to good effect as one element in his analysis of Tikopian kinship. The 'biographical approach' does not, however, concern itself directly with the constitution of mind as an aspect of human being. By and large Malinowski takes the child's own understandings for granted as a product of 'maturation' or 'training'; in other words, and despite his own evidence to the contrary - witness his acknowledgement of Trobriand children's 'small republic' (1929: 45) and his respect for the 'keen ambition' exhibited in small boys' garden plots (1935: 60) - the child in Malinowski's works is ultimately a mere receiver of ideas transmitted by adults (see also Fortes 1957; cf Toren in press: Introduction). 4A child has to constitute the categories of its native language, it does not merely receive them. The idea is implicit in Volosinov's (1986 [1929]) brilliant analysis of language as always a material process of 'becoming', a perspective that can be usefully applied to how we constitute over time the 'meaning' of ritual (see Toren 1990). Compare Malinowski's 1923 observation, radical in its time, in that 'the conception of meaning as contained an utterance is false and futile ... in the reality of a spoken living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except in the context situation'(1952: 307), and of that 'language functions [primarily] as a link in a concerted human activity, as a piece of human behaviour ... [as] a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection' (1952: 312). 5Consider Merleau-Ponty's point (1962: xix): 'Reflection even on a doctrine will be complete only if it succeeds in linking up with a doctrine's history and extraneous explanations of it and putting back the causes and meaning of the doctrine in an existential structure. There is, as Husserl says, a "genesis of meaning" (Sinngenesis),which alone, in the last resort, teaches us what the doctrine means'. For ethnographic demonstrations of this view, see Toren (1990; 1993). 6 Tavaleused to apply only to male cross-cousins, dauve to female cross-cousins and davola to cross-cousins across sex; nowadays, in my experience, tavaleis used in all cases indiscriminately. 7This accords with the way the terms are used by a third party; when used by ego, veitinaniand veitamani refer respectively to ego's relations with mother (tina-qu) and father (tama-qu), while veiluvenidesignates ego's relation to those he or she calls child (luve-qu). 8 Love, liking, regard, affection, sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling, tenderness, benevolence, kindness, devotion, infatuation, heart, feeling, sorrow, caring, warmth, pity, compassion, commiseration, yearning, longing, charity, ruth, long-suffering, condolence, forbearance, indulgence, pardon, forgiveness, magnanimity. Thanks to Professor George Milner for the completeness of this list. 9 The contemporary Fijian idea of veilomani as compassion is informed by Christian (here Methodist) ideas. For Fijians the Christian overtones of 'compassion' implicate a historical transformation of an idea that pity can be a product of sacrifice and as such constitutive of relations between people and gods (Toren 1995a; see also 1994a; 1998). 10 Status distinctions derive from an interaction between rank, gender and seniority, where 'gender' denotes the status difference between wife and sister in relation to a man. Husbands are automatically above wives, but an elder sister is above a younger brother; if she is the eldest, a woman is due the respect of all her younger siblings and should be consulted in any matter of importance to her natal house. Thus while wives may be said to be below their husbands, it is not the case that women in general are of lower status than men. But because women marry out and because 'women as wives' are in general more salient to men than are women as sisters, men can assert that men in general are above women. 11 Radcliffe-Brown identified respect and joking, avoidance and familiarity as analytically distinctive of the nature of the second-order relations between kin that are generated by the elementary situations of parenthood, siblingship and marriage. Taking the perspective of the husband in relation to his wife's family, he shows (1952a: 91) how the relation involves 'both attachment and separation, both social conjunction and disjunction', and argues that there are two ways of giving it a 'stable, ordered form': either respect and avoidance or mutual disrespect and licence, a joking familiarity. Here Radcliffe-Brown built on his seminal (1952b) 'The mother's brother in South Africa', which itself laid the foundation for Levi-Strauss's brilliant analysis of 'the atom of kinship' (see n. 19, below). 12 The love knock is not symbolic of a harsh blow, it is the opposite end of a continuum of meaning in whose terms love may be framed.

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In Fijian usage one may differentiate immediate kin as 'true' (dina)or close (voleka). In the Sawaieke church, children occupy an area in front of the women's section, opposite the choir (which faces them) and directly under the eye of the preacher and the chiefs who are seated in their own section above (i cake) congregation who are seated below (i ra). the 15As many children in this age range depicted the village store as the church, the store being a spot where children congregate during the early evening. Children's drawings rarely included the school, which is always outside the village. 16 Here and subsequently, all expressions printed in boldface type are glosses for veilomani. 17 This 8-year-old clearly has at his disposal 'certain fundamental structures of the human mind' which Levi-Strauss (1969: 84) argues to be universal: 'the exigency of the rule as rule; the notion of reciprocity regarded as the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between self and others; and ... the synthetic nature of the gift' (see also Toren 1995b). This last becomes clearly apparent in essays by those older children who are explicitly concerned with peer relations. 18 Even where they did not write about their relations with peers, children aged around 9/0 tended not to produce a series of routine sayings about kinship or a list of names of their kin. Rather, they were likely to introduce a distinctly personal tone into their stories, which often concerned their relationship to particular named kin. 19 Mimetic play is important in the process of understanding. Here, however, I want to emphasize the mutual identification between peers that is at once expressed and given form in playing with them (c? Fortes 1938). Fortes (1970: 142) emphasizes Tale children's identification with the same-sex parent. Fijian children no doubt make a similar identification, but this does not rule out recognition of one's peers and a powerful desire to be like them and to be liked by them. 20 Cf Fortes (1969: 241): 'the model relationship of kingship amity is fraternity, that is sibling unity, equality and solidarity' 21 Levi-Strauss (1977: 46) argued that in the 'atom of kinship' constituted in the relations between brother, sister, father and son, relations between men and women in the senior generation will stand in correlative opposition to relations between men across generations. In Fiji this should mean, for example, that reserve between B and Z is opposed to familiarity between H and W as reserve between F and S is opposed to familiarity between MB and ZS. This set of oppositions does not obtain as such, but when we take the point of view of a male ego as a child who becomes a young person who becomes an adult, we can see that at any given point in this process IAviStrauss's thesis holds. The father's sternness to the young child contrasts with the playful familiarity of the mother's brother; while a progressive relaxation in the relation between F and S over time contrasts with increasing avoidance between MB and ZS. The relations between a male ego and his father's sister, at first a somewhat frightening person, undergo a less pronounced and elaborated change in contradistinction to the relation between him and his mother (cf LUvi-Strauss 1978: 100). 22 Or so I was told by my Sawaieke teacher of Fijian. Linguistically, however, it may not be, given 'but used more generally of that Capell's (1941) dictionary lists a root vusaas a synonym for yavusa, a group tribe [sic], either of people or animals, etc.' 23 People of countries that are veitabani said to have founding ancestors who were crossare come from countries that have the same founding ancestor cousins, while those who are veitauvu on whom, in the past, they attended. 24 See Sahlins (1985), Levi-Strauss (1984: 172) and cf Toren (1994b) where the analysis of Fijian chiefship shows how applicable to the Fijian case is Levi-Strauss's (1983 [1979]) idea of'the house' as a fundamental unit of social organization. 25 As is brilliantly demonstrated, from a different perspective, by Gow (1997) in his analysis of Piro kinship consciousness (see also Gow 1989).
14

REFERENCES Suva: Government Printer. Capell, A. 1973 (1941). A newFijiandictionary. Boston: Beacon Press. Firth, R. 1963 (1936). We,theTikopia. an Fortes, M. 1957. Malinowski and the study of kinship. In Manandculture: evaluation thework of of Bronislaw Malinowski (ed.) R. Firth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1969 (1963). Kinship thesocial and order: legacy LewisHenry the London: Routledge of Morgan. & Kegan Paul. 1970 (1938). Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland. In Timeandsocial and structure other London: Athlone Press. essays.

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Gow, P 1989. The perverse child: desire in a native Amazonian subsistence economy. Man (N.S.) 24, 299-314. 1997. Kinship as human consciousness. Published as: 0 parentesco como conciencia humana: o caso dos Piro. Mana3(2), 39-65. Boston: Beacon Press. of structureskinship. Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. Theelementary anthropology. 1977 (1963). Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In Structural Harmondsworth: Penguin. II. anthropology 1978 (1973). Reflections on the atom of kinship. In Structural Harmondsworth: Penguin. London: Jonathan Cape. 1983 (1979). Thewayofthemasks. In and 1951-1982.Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1984. Anthropology myth. Lectures London: George Routledge. life Malinowski, B. 1929. Thesexual ofsavages. London: George Allen & Unwin. and magic. 1935. Coral gardens their of 1952 (1923). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In Themeaning meaning (eds) C.K. Ogden & I.A. Richards. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ofperception. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962 (1945). Thephenomenology in andfunction primitive Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952a (1940). On joking relationships. In Structure London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. society. in andfunction primitive 1952b (1924). The mother's brother in South Africa. In Structure London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. society. London: Tavistock. of Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands history. as in process Fiji (Lond. Sch. Econ. Monogr. of cognition social sense hierarchy: Toren, C. 1990. Making social Anthrop. 61). London: Athlone Press. 1993. Making history: the significance of childhood cognition for a comparative anthropology of mind. Man (N.S.) 28, 461-78. issuesin 1994a. Transforming love: representing Fijian hierarchy. In Sex and violence: and (eds) representation experience P Harvey & P Gow. London: Routledge. 1994b. All things go in pairs or the sharks will bite': the antithetical nature of Fijian 64, kingship. Oceania 197-216. and in 1995a. Cosmogonic aspects of desire and compassion in Fiji. In Cosmos society Oceania (eds) D. Coppet & I. Iteanu. Oxford: Berg. legal 1995b. Ritual, rule and cognitive scheme.J. contemp. Iss.6, 521-33. 1998. Cannibalism and compassion: transformations in Fijian ideas of the person. In worlds single lives(ed.) V Keck. Oxford: Berg. Common and London: Routledge. in press. Mind,materiality history: explorationsFiian ethnography. in and Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. and of Volosinov, MN. 1986 (1929). Marxism thephilosophy language. Press.

Compassion mutuelle: la constitution intentionalite 'a Fidji

Resume

de la parente comme

Cet article demontre comment le processus ontogenique par lequel la parente est constitu6e comme intentionalit6 donne a tous les Fidgiens quels qu'ils soient la possibilite ideale d'etre apparent6s a qui que ce soit, et en outre fait que les relations de parent6 soient a la fois l'expression de l'ordre collectif, le domaine des relations dans les termes desquelles le d6sir libidinal est structure et le terrain des idees de soi et d'autrui. Une comprehension des relations de parente doit etre constitu6e plutot que simplement re,ue et le developpement de la conscience d'6gaux en tant qu'6gaux est pour un individu un el6ment clef de ce processus. Pour devenir consciemment un sujet dans les relations de parent6, un enfant doit decouvrir ses egaux. Ce faisant, l'enfant commence a reconnaitre les relations de parent6 comme le milieu unificateur et in6puisable de toutes ses relations avec les autres. Finalement, cet example d'une analyse de l'ontog6nie offre une m6thode qui permet d'avoir acces aux preoccupations des gens dont les relations multiplexes qu'ils ont les uns avec les autres font l'objet de l'analyse anthropologique.

DeptofHumanSciences, BrunelUniversity, Uxbridge, Middlesex 3PH. UB8 Christina. Toren@brunel.ac. uk