Abstract
The aim of this article is to reflect on oral history interview data provided by an ex-soccer star who played for Fiji and in what is now the Fiji Premier League, and reconcile his criminal past (according to town-based criminal laws) with his current village assistant headman status. The article compares and contrasts two sources of law–customary Indigenous traditions of rights and responsibilities and town-based criminal laws, which have their origins in British colonial-era laws and are now administered and enforced by the neoliberal Bainimarama government. Because the soccer star’s jewellery store robberies were of Fiji Indian-owned stores, it is difficult for them to penetrate into the world of ‘village-space’, other than as a repressed spectre, since non-Indigenous people cannot live in Indigenous villages. For the Indigenous Fijians, ‘town-space’ is a place for employment, education, venturing out and partying, beyond the gaze of village elders, whereas ‘village-space’ is the ordered space of home and community. ‘Quasi-space’ is here defined as space physically in the town, but when Indigenous people are the only ones present, or a clear majority, some aspects of village understandings can dominate in that space at least for certain time periods and with variable intensity.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 465-484 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Griffith Law Review |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 9 Sept 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2 Oct 2022 |
Keywords
- Fiji Indians
- Fiji soccer
- Indigenous Fijians
- quasispace
- town-space
- village-space