Pacific Island rugby: Histories, mobilities, comparisons

Abstract

The migration of rugby players from Fiji and neighbouring Pacific Island nations poses fundamental questions about the way in which sport is embedded in historical, political, social and global dynamics, all of which give specific meanings to sports and those who play it. An approach that bestows a central role on comparison focuses equally on how sport can include and exclude, as well as create and maintain structures of inequality with implications far beyond the confines of sport. When geographical mobility through professional sport is a major means of attaining social mobility, as is the case in Fiji, we must compare these dynamics with other avenues for social mobility – for indigenous Fijians, recruitment in the Fijian or British military – which share many features with recruitment in overseas rugby markets. Colonial and ethnic stereotypes continue to hold sway in the sport industries, with both positive and negative consequences, but their persistence is the result of both global and local dynamics, self-representations and representations by others.

Keywords::

• Pacific Islands
• Fiji
• rugby
• migrations
• politics

Notes

^1. I thank Karen Brison, Gyozo Molnar and Yoko Kanematsu for their comments on an earlier draft of this text. It was written in the context of a five-year project (2012–17) entitled ‘Globalisation, Sport, and the Precarity of Masculinity’ (GLOBALSPORT) funded by the Advanced Grant Programme of the European Research Council. No financial interest or benefit arises from the direct applications of this research.

^2. Dewey (unpublished presentation at the Fiji Rugby Union Centenary Conference) quotes British colonial administrator Basil Thompson's (1908, 332–333) ‘famous last words’ about Fiji's climate being entirely unconducive to playing rugby, which in his opinion was very unlikely to become Fiji's national game. At the Fiji Rugby Union Centenary Conference, the president of Fiji, Rātū Epeli Nailatikau, explained that in his youth, he and his rugby teammates could never understand why the early team photographs hanging on the wall of their rugby club showed 11 players rather than 15, with one dressed differently from the rest.

^3. What is certainly the case is that, while contemporary Māori people are of Polynesian descent (among many other things, after more than a century and half of inter-marriage with immigrants from Europe, Asia and the Pacific Islands) and thus related in pre-historical times to Tongans and Samoans (and even more distantly to indigenous Fijians), they are emphatically not tangata Pasifika in Aotearoa New Zealand, but rather tangata whenua or ‘people of the land’. Māori people have complex and occasionally hostile relationships with immigrants from the Pacific Islands, whom they see as yet another wave of newcomers competing for scarce resources. These subtleties may break down once Pacific Islanders, Māori and Pākehā (white) New Zealanders cross the Tasman Sea to settle in Australia, which they do in large numbers and with great enthusiasm.

^4. Despite the considerable contribution of Pacific Islanders to New Zealand sports, particularly rugby, since they managed to overcome systematic discrimination in the 1970s (Mallon, 2012), standard accounts of the country's history (e.g. Bellich, 2001) make no mention of it in their discussion of the important role that sport plays in the country's society.

^5. The programme of the 2013 Fiji Rugby Union Centenary Conference included presentations by under-represented constituencies, including Indo-Fijians (represented by Edwin Murti, president of the Fiji Indo Rugby Union), women (represented by Alice Cava) and people with disabilities (represented by Samisoni Nainoca). In their thoughtful presentations, the speakers (perhaps wisely) did not address the structural conditions that exclude these groups from participation in the national sport.

^6. French anthropologist Sébastien Darbon (2003) proposed that Indo-Fijians’ lack of involvement in rugby was due to their fear of contamination through body contact between people of different Hindu castes. This hypothesis overlooks the fact that caste (and the prescriptions of which it is constitutive) disappeared very early in the history of Indian immigration in Fiji, aided by a good dose of authoritarian ‘encouragement’ from the British masters (Kelly, 1991; Lal, 1983). Furthermore, this culturally reductive hypothesis, while seemingly holding explanatory power, in fact contributes to the obliteration of socio-political factors and the ‘naturalization’ (albeit of an immanent cultural nature) of the relationship between sport and identity.

^7. This situation finds many commonalities with the enormous importance that the US military has acquired in American Sāmoa, in parallel to gridiron football in that context (Kahn, 2011).