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Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings, Performances and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji
Author(s) -
Kempf Wolfgang,
Hermann Elfriede
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.356
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1834-4461
pISSN - 0029-8077
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4461.2005.tb02897.x
Subject(s) - ethnic group , diaspora , politics , gender studies , identity (music) , colonialism , sociology , nationalism , embodied cognition , anthropology , geography , political science , archaeology , aesthetics , law , art , artificial intelligence , computer science
Spatial belonging and ethnic identity among the Banabans resettled on Rabi Island in Fiji are the product of historically and culturally specific articulations and transformations. Such reconfigurations of place and ethnicity, based mainly on enmeshments between the Banabans' new island home, Rabi, and their island of origin in the Central Pacific, Banaba, have let them position themselves as an autonomous community living out a diaspora existence. Central to this identity politics of positioning are ethnic performances in which neo‐traditional enactments are deployed to produce embodied knowledge of Banaban existence and to communicate such knowledge to a wider world. We argue that the Banabans of Fiji, caught in a post‐colonial environment of ethnic‐nationalist discourses and practices, make strategic use of such ethnic performances to affirm and advance, both internally and externally, their own politics of spatial and ethnic positioning on Rabi.