What Does Curses Foiled Again Come From
In June 2009, I was interviewing a Fijian Methodist minister on the island of Matuku when the field of study of curses came up. I had asked him about mana and sau, terms associated with spiritual power, which are oftentimes paired in indigenous Fijian discourse. Mana is anthropologically famous as a term Robert Codrington credited to Melanesians; Marshall Sahlins theorized for Polynesians; and Claude Lévi-Strauss characterized as a "floating signifier," a sign "susceptible of receiving any meaning at all." Sau, in Fijian, is frequently associated with a punitive spiritual force linked to chiefs. If yous disobey the main and you get sick, that's sau.
When I asked the government minister at Matuku about mana and sau, he responded in part by explaining the latter term equally follows: "Here's an example. Y'all say something, [and then] it happens. It's like this, if I should curse you. You volition exit today, even if yous haven't heard what I said, you volition meet with misfortune. Yous'll go and go hurt, eh?…That's one translation of sau."
The minister spoke Fijian, although the term I am translating every bit "expletive" was, in fact, the English loanword "curse" plus a Fijian causative suffix: cursetaki. I had heard Fijians use the English word before, also every bit Fijian-language terms that could exist translated as "curse," including one based on the root sau. The Fijian translation of the Bible offers various words for curses, with many of the Fijian terms based on roots denoting acrimony, evil, and ruin. These characteristics—speaking malice performatively, holding bad intentions, expressing acrimony, manifesting evil—are thus recognizable in both English and Fijian varieties of curses. Within Fiji, they are recognizable in pre-Christian every bit well as Christian traditions. In 1858, the missionary Thomas Williams reported that a dying homo might pronounce the name of his enemy "if not every bit the object of firsthand vengeance, yet of gloomy and disastrous predictions, which never fail to attain the ears where they are least welcome." If this is not a curse, strictly speaking, it nonetheless bears a strong family resemblance.
In the present day, the furnishings of curses in Republic of the fiji islands are said to exist seen in such symptoms as sickness and decease, poverty, and educational declining. Curses often afflict families and villages rather than individuals. Curses are often attributed to non-Christian ancestors, simply they are sometimes attributed to God. In a memorable moment in Fiji's tumultuous national politics, the Methodist Church warned a constitutional review commission in 1995 that if Republic of the fiji islands were non declared a Christian nation, it would mean that "this nation is under a Divine curse."
Equally I conducted research on Fijian curses, I gradually came to call up of them in ways that were detached from questions of evil. I began to consider them an inherent part of Methodist practice. I do not mean that people actually become around cursing each other, or that they discuss curses openly in church. They don't. Only in that location is a strong sense in ethnic Fiji that curses exist and must exist dealt with, and from my own analytical perspective—here is the thorny, paradoxical office—attempts to go rid of curses only make them more normal, more present, more than interwoven with the strong Christian fabric enfolding daily life. In fact, in ane nationally known case, a curse seems to be growing in popularity, as diverse groups want to merits a identify in its shadow as I describe below.
I came to think about curses in new means partly past reading, of all authors, Søren Kierkegaard. I had been reading Kierkegaard for my own interests, not because I expected him to shed low-cal on Fijian social processes. I was both horrified and amused, as many present-twenty-four hour period readers probably are, by the story from Kierkegaard's biography about his family's curse. His male parent, as a immature boy tending sheep in a pasture, had gotten angry and cursed God for making him suffer. Because he cursed God—in the sense of proverb angry words toward God, only as Job's wife told Job to "expletive God, and dice" for his woes (Job two:9)—the senior Kierkegaard came to experience that God had cursed his family. His son, the philosopher-to-be, became convinced that he and his brothers would all die earlier they reached the age Jesus had died. When he turned 34, living longer than Jesus is said to have done, Kierkegaard was surprised, and wondered if a mistake had been made in recording his date of nativity.
It was non the biographical anecdotes from Kierkegaard'southward odd private life that gripped me however, as much every bit his theory of repetition. For Kierkegaard, repetition is "recollection forrard," the remaking of an outcome. Maybe the best clarification of Kierkegaardian repetition comes not from Kierkegaard himself but from the theologian John Milbank (2009: 159), who describes information technology as "positive persistence which both establishes the 'adjacent affair' and secures the reality of the 'initial thing' in the showtime place. In my own thinking, Kierkegaardian repetition was a useful alternative to other well-known ways of thinking anthropologically about Christian social transformations as either radical rupture or central continuity.
In 1867, Rev. Baker and 7 members of his travelling party were ambushed and murdered in the highlands of Vitilevu, Fiji's largest island. The village virtually closely associated with the killing ceremonially apologized to the Church in 1903. In 1977, Republic of the fiji islands's Catholic archbishop, Petero Mataca, conducted a Mass of Reconciliation at the murder site. Then, in 1985 (the 150th anniversary of the Methodists' arrival in Republic of the fiji islands) villagers apologized once more, carrying a whale'due south molar and a lit torch to Suva, the nation's capital and site of the Methodist Church's headquarters. In 2003, they apologized nonetheless again, this time inviting Baker's descendents to exist part of the ceremony.
At that place may well exist time to come apologies, because the Bakery curse is gaining momentum. Indeed, people outside the land where Bakery was killed are at present claiming a connection to the curse. In Naitasiri province, people from the Waimaro chiefdom believe their ancestors carried out the actual killing, and that every bit a result they are at present one of the weakest chiefdoms in Fiji whereas before they were ane of the strongest (Chris Gregory, personal communication). Because of this, and because the master who had requested Bakery's murder was from Naitasiri province, a party of 70 marched from the killing site to the Methodists' theological college at Davuilevu in 2011 for a new ritual apology.
I have sketched this history in a casual style because I desire to reorient thinking nearly curses in the fashion described above, analyzing curses equally an inherent office of the religious cloth, at least in the case of Fijian Methodism; or, to switch metaphors, to retrieve of curses as a soft obbligato rather than a screeching violin solo. I desire to detach curses from questions of evil because, among other reasons, the authors of Fijian curses are often considered beauteous. If the nation of Fiji is under a curse from God, as Methodist leaders worried, this does not mean that God is evil, nor that Fiji is evil, merely that Republic of the fiji islands has fabricated political mistakes such as not formally endorsing Christianity equally a country religion. If ancestors curse their living descendants, this does not make the ancestors hated; they are admired for their power even as it threatens to disrupt everything.
Curses are non, I emphasize, normal or everyday things in a comfortable, glad-to-run into-you sense. In fact, the people of highlands Vitilevu—and people in most parts of present-twenty-four hours Fiji—have serious, legitimate concerns about the wellness, didactics, and prosperity of their villages, and some (though not all) of the stories associated with curses are horrifying and tragic. My point is that curses tin be considered normal and everyday in the sense that they don't necessarily go away when one conducts the rituals to brand them go abroad.
Having said this, I run the risk of portraying Fijian villages as particularly dark places, which would be a highly misleading impression. Equally whatsoever visitor can testify, there is an enormous amount of exuberance, joy, and laughter in daily life in Republic of the fiji islands. Villages are not usually gloomy and villagers are not usually glum. Merely their Christian behavior and practices consistently reserve a identify for curses, and in thinking almost why this is the case, I have come to recall of curses as things that are remade rather than removed.
Source: https://tif.ssrc.org/2014/10/21/curses-foiled-again-and-again/
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