Home on the Fijian Farmscape: Agricultural Attachments to Land and Place

Abstract

This dissertation explores how Indo-Fijians operationalize narratives of plantation labor and contemporary farmwork to produce a non-settler local identity that reconfigures relations between diaspora, indigeneity, and nationalism. Through multiple government coups and violent anti-Indian rhetoric, indigenous politics in Fiji has repeatedly attempted to render Indo-Fijians, whose ancestors arrived en masse to Fiji as indentured laborers to work on sugarcane plantations, alien to lands they consider home. Drawing from ethnographic research among farmers in the Sigatoka Valley, I demonstrate how Indo-Fijians imagine farm practices as simultaneous projects in nation-building, heritage/traditional knowledge preservation, and environmental protection. Thus, Indo-Fijian farmers simultaneously mirror and challenge ethnonationalist interpretations of indigeneity to produce a local identity that protests the exclusivity of belonging in Fiji today. Engaging theoretical frameworks in historical consciousness and geographic imaginaries, I introduce and situate the Sigatoka Valley as a “farmscape,” a site where colonial pasts, racial tensions, and climate anxieties are diversely (re)imagined through agriculture. In Chapter One, I draw from ethnographic work on an agro-forestry biodiversity conservation initiative at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes National Park to examine how plantation logics of land distribution and property-defined personhood shape how locals design and envision shared environmental futures. In Chapter Two, I study how colonial-era notions of “hard work” persist in racially charged discourse that shapes Indo-Fijians' claims to local identity through narratives of nation-building plantation labor and landscape-tethering agricultural work. Chapter Three explores how Indo-Fijians use agricultural “miracles” and unexplained phenomena on the farm to affirm their metaphysical relation to the landscape, paralleling indigenous articulations of land custodianship. In Chapter Four, I take a phenomenological approach to studying Indo-Fijian local sensory knowledges of the farmscape, often expressed through weather forecasting, seedling selection, and taste. I argue that local knowledge in Sigatoka draws from Indo-Fijian plantation memory and thus becomes a dynamic record of landscape transformation, introduced plants, and built environments, challenging colonialist interpretations of indigenous knowledge as ethnobiology limited to endemic species and ecosystems. I position the Sigatoka Valley as a place of expanding relational possibilities between iTaukei (indigenous) and Indo-Fijians that imagines Fijian identity outside of categorical and agonistic ethnic accounting.