A fighting people? Fijian service in the British Army and the production of race and nation

Abstract: This dissertation is an examination of the ways in which colonial ontologies continue to structure forms of self-understanding in the postcolonial world, with specific reference to contemporary Fijian military service in the British Army. Based on seventeen months of ethnographic and archival research in Fiji and the UK, this dissertation examines the ideological construction of a people, with particular reference to notions of race, gender, and violence. Although Fiji is one of the smallest of Britain's former colonies, Fijians are the largest contingent of soldiers from the Commonwealth in the British Army, where they account for 2% of the army's operational strength. Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fourteen Fijians serving in the British Army have been killed in combat. Beginning with an anthropology of the history of Fiji, I examine how this military service finds its origins in the earliest encounters between Fijians and Europeans. I show that the ontological frames which shaped these encounters, and the discursive forms through which they were later written about, combined to represent Fijians as a "race" defined by a "natural" predisposition to violence. I show that pragmatic Fijian responses to the new realities of British colonialism led to forms of tactical self-essentialization that often drew upon, or at least seemed to confirm, aspects of this colonial imaginary. I argue that this history, and the relations of structured inequality in which many postcolonial Fijians find themselves living, have given rise to contemporary Fijian service in the British Army, and that this service reinforces the association between Fijians and violence that is its own condition of possibility. My ethnographic research reveals how military service reproduces, but also transforms, distinctive Fijian social relations and practices, such that what it means to be Fijian is becoming both increasingly dependant upon and defined by military service. Finally, as the rise of private military contracting has transformed the global market for military labour, I show that many Fijians are increasingly willing to monetize their identity as "a fighting people" in order to find for themselves a particular slot in this new supply-chain of deterritorialized and privatized military power.