Gender in a Land‐Based Theology

In F ijian Methodist discourse, the vanua (land and people) is often characterised as the foundation of the traditional order and all it entails. Indigenous theologians attend to the vanua in novel ways, especially as it is paired in a half‐complementary, half‐oppositional way to C hristianity. The question of whether the vanua might be understood in gendered terms highlights a gap between theoretically universal values and practically patriarchal norms. In this article, I discuss several innovative thinkers on this subject: (1) women in the ‘Weavers’ theological collective; (2) the Methodist theologian and former church P resident I laitia S evati T uwere; and (3) a female M ethodist minister, T ima, whom I interviewed in 2009. I focus especially on T uwere's description of the ‘feminine face’ of the vanua and T ima's continual and wrenching conflict with the church's male‐dominated hierarchy. Whereas T uwere uses a quasi‐feminist C hristian theology to reconcile C hristianity and the vanua in terms of gender, T ima implies that her experiences of conflict with older men demonstrate how C hristianity and the vanua might not be fully reconcilable.