Sometimes I wish I had taken at least one class in anthropology. Actually – a lot of times I wish that. Maybe if I’d taken anthropology I would be better able to analyze another culture, compare their values to mine and understand those things that confuse me. Maybe I’d be better able to emulate them, better able to make friends, better able to communicate.
But I didn’t take anthropology. Instead, I took microeconomics. In microeconomics I learned nothing about how people actually behave but I learned a lot about how they (theoretically) aught to behave. For instance: if some random person (who has taken microeconomics) has a choice between fishing on the riverbank for three hours and catching, on average, two small (hand sized) fish (to eat for dinner) or, alternatively, engaging in an income generating activity for three hours which will allow that person to buy enough fish for a family of four for a week, the person would take the latter option because the opportunity cost of fishing is too high. If you haven’t taken microeconomics, you should look this up. It could change how you make decisions.
No one in my little village has considered microeconomics. And they take me fishing. This is Fiji time. And I’m regretting not taking anthropology, again.
On Wednesday I went out cutting copra with Na, Ta and Vili. Everyone in the village goes cutting copra at least once a week. Well, pretty much once a week. Copra, if you don’t have a dictionary handy, is the flesh of the coconut, which is dried and then cooked into coconut oil. This is one of very few income generating activities in the village. Ta had gone out on Tuesday and collected a bunch of coconuts in piles so when we hiked out Wednesday morning we just set up camp at one pile after another and got to work. When the coconuts come off the tree they don’t look like they do at Albertson’s. There’s a thick husk that makes cracking them open fairly difficult. In order to crack the coconuts Na brought a hatchet. She can crack them open in one swing. It took me all day to get down to one swing, and I still couldn’t do it consistently and my back was seriously aching! We tossed the halved coconuts in a pile and Ta and Vili cut the copra with special knives. Since they do this every week they’re super fast and can get it out in one whole piece. I could barely get my knife through the copra, so I was relegated to cracking open the coconuts, which was fine with me. After we finished a pile we’d pack all the copra into a bag (about 40kg after one pile) and head on to the next pile. After 5 hours we headed home, piling the bags on the road to be picked up and hauled to the dryer. At 40¢ per kilogram we wound up with $72.80 FD. It was quite a payday! That’s more than enough money to support a family of four for two weeks. I estimated the rate to be about $3.50 FD an hour. But there aren’t enough coconuts to do this much every week so you can’t always go cut copra instead of fishing and there’s not really much that pays as well as cutting copra in the village.
I heard once that ceremonies are important to anthropologists. I think that’s because a ceremony is like a concentrated dose of a culture. There’s a lot more to analyze in a small amount of time. Personally I think that makes it harder. It’s easier for me to take in one thing at a time. At ceremonies there’s so much going on that I get confused and end up tuning out most of the “noise” which is probably the important stuff the anthropologists look at.
Last week there was a ceremony in the village. I’m not entirely certain what it was about but I know it had something to do with a girl from my village that got married to a boy from another village without asking permission from the girl’s parents first. Someone was apologizing to the girl’s parents, but I’m not sure if it was the couple or the other village. In any case, an old man from the other village presented a tabua (the tooth of a sperm whale tied on a cord, an ultimate honor in Fijian culture and worth more than a pile of money) to the elders of our village. He gave a speech and clapped in the traditional manner. The elders from our village accepted the tabua and gave speeches, too. What confused me was why neither of the girl’s parents were involved. The father is the headman of the tribe, too. You’d think he’d be the one accepting the tabua and giving speeches. There was a lot of congratulating, some crying and, of course, tea after the ceremony. Then we went to drink grog. At this point the traditional relationships started coming out. There’s this thing called “Tau” in Fiji which allows you and encourages you to play pranks on people from certain other provinces depending on which province you are from. Similarly, “tauvale” means your joking cousin, the child of your mother’s brother or father’s sister. One of the women I was drinking grog with saw her tauvale playing ukulele for the singing and the pranks began! Tossing baby powder on each other’s hair and faces, making them wear funny clothes, serving them undrinkable large bowls of kava, it was craziness. But it was late, too, and me being a lightweight grog drinker, I headed back to my bure wondering what would happened if I did that at home.
I’m not sure what an anthropologist would make of all of this. After all I’ve never taken anthropology. But what I think is that people in Fiji enjoy life. Maybe they’re going fishing to chat with their friends and spend a few hours by the river. If they need some money – they can go cut copra for a day, but they’re not going to spend their whole lives worrying about bills. And if they have the chance, they’ll go out of their way to play a joke on you. So be prepared. If you’re like me and haven’t taken anthropology, you’ll wind up in the middle of joke not having a clue what’s going on. My advice: Laugh.
