Paper short abstract:

Against the supposed ontological quality of ethnic conflict in Fiji, I compare live (often auto-) ethnography and informant memories of the past "ethnic" coups to argue that crisis, rather than peace, creates conditions for the constitution of positive and not simply disruptive social relations.

Paper long abstract:

In 1987and 2000, Fiji experienced so-called "ethnic" coups. This led to talk of Fiji's culture of coups. Before leaving for fieldwork in 2002, I imagined myself researching in the shadow of a presumed ontological ethnic conflict between the country's Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Entangled in life in Suva, the capital city, my research opened up two ethnographic windows on to the intimacies of crisis in Fiji: on one hand, my presence and embodiment as a presumed Indo-Fijian seemed indexical of the subtleties of ethnic conflict; on the other hand, listening to my informants talk of the 1987 and 2000 coups I became aware of how crisis dynamises social relations in ways that might otherwise remain unexplored, unimagined, unperformed and therefore ethnographically absent. In this paper, I use the collusion and collision of different ethnographic presents in my research, bringing together informant memories of the 1987 and 2000 coups in Fiji alongside my own live and partly auto-ethnography, to re-imagine the epistemologies of conflict that animate academic analysis as well as national politics in Fiji. It has become fashionable to speak of crisis and violence in terms of rupture, fear, loss and phenomenological reorientation of the worst kind. I argue in this paper that socio-political conflicts manifesting as (ethnic) coups create intimacies of crisis in which narratives of conflict give way to spaces of social action, and that it is when conflict transforms from discourse to performance that the dynamics of positive social relations emerge most fully.