Land, memory and the state: 'Official' and other histories in Waya Island, Fiji

This dissertation examines the intersections of land, memory, and the state in history-making for Waya Island, Fiji. I focus my analysis on how local Wayans and representatives of the Fijian state have interacted at different times to shape historical accounts for Waya. In these interactions, land and its various entailments---legal, social, even supernatural---have been central to the content and purpose of the historical narratives being created. My research centers on two periods of local/state interactions over Wayan history: (1) During the first, the early colonial period in Fiji (1896-1925), a state-sponsored "official history" of Waya was created. Prepared in the context of land tenure reforms, this history was endowed with legal significance and used to assign Wayans to a hierarchy of social groups with claims to specific Wayan lands; (2) During the second, the period of 2000--2001, I observed contemporary local Wayan history-making in complex interplay with Waya's official history records and the state authorities who regulate them. Today, official history for Waya---as for other areas in Fiji---is classified knowledge, kept relatively inaccessible to most Wayans by the government. Yet the details of this official history still have legal ramifications for the organization of people and land and thus continue to shape local Wayan lives and memory practices in profound ways. Local historical narratives continue to emerge for Waya, but they are to some degree constrained by the existence of Waya's official history and not always tolerated by the Fijian state.;In my ethnography of history-making for Waya in these two time periods, I address how the official history project has shaped memory practices in Fiji and on Waya. I also address the different, sometimes competing, ways in which Wayans and representatives of the Fijian state have conceptualized Wayan land and its relations to people and history. I argue that such conceptual differences may be tied to deeper epistemological differences, differences in historical understanding that have complicated both the borderzones of local/state interaction and the varying accounts of Waya's past that emerge from them.