London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xvii, 195 pp. US$114.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-350-04334-3.
In this theoretically detailed and ambitious ethnography on modern Fijian masculinity, anthropologist Geir Henning Presterudstuen delves deep into theories of modernity and gender in urban Fiji to make a significant contribution to the growing field of masculinity studies set outside the global north.
The book is divided into two sections. Chapters 1 through 4 make up the first section, and are rich in theory, covering an ambitious amount of material with a focus on dominant discourses of masculinity and modernity. Chapter 1 is predominantly theoretical, setting up the core themes of modernity, gender, masculinity, and the body. The next three chapters continue to theorize these concepts, situating them within the ethnographic context. Chapter 2 tackles how they manifest specifically in Christianity; chapter 3 focuses on Indo-Fijian practices of masculinity; and chapter 4 analyzes some of the historical foundations of contemporary masculinity in Fiji. The second section moves into the more strictly ethnographic and explores how performative practices of men challenge the dominant discourses set out in section 1. This section focuses on alcohol consumption (chapter 5), gambling (chapter 6), and sexual practices and identities (chapter 7). It ends with a brief postscript positioning the research once again in a larger tome of anthropology on gender and masculinities.
Most of the fieldwork is set in urban Nadi on the west coast of Fiji, which, as the author notes, despite its rich cultural and historical diversity, has been the subject of little ethnographic enquiry compared to the eastern and more rural parts of Fiji. This setting allows for a detailed exploration into the lives of men in a modern urban area of the global south, and makes some headway into balancing the rural focus of much of Pacific Studies. The multiple elements of a complex urban modernity—the different religions, ethnicities, generations, genders, and cultural influences—are unavoidable in Nadi, and Presterudstuen does a fine job at tackling them in this book.
The determination to use the now rather unfashionable terms of “traditional” and “modernity” work well in this book. Presterudstuen avoids the lure of more fashionable concepts to thoroughly address how the unique combination of pressures, influences, desires and duties felt by men in Fiji’s urban centres are experienced and embodied as a tussle between traditional and modern elements. As he notes, many of his interlocutors “talk a lot about being modern” (3). This insistence on centring the concepts people actually use to experience and make sense of their identities is commendable, particularly as the book’s other two key concepts—the body and masculinity—are not ones his interlocutors frequently used.
He draws on the Gramscian feminist theories of R.W. Connell (see Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Allen & Unwin, 1987, and Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science, Allen & Unwin, 2007), to discuss the concepts of the body and masculinity, and for the most part it is a thorough and thoughtful explanation that positions itself somewhere between classic feminist theory, and contemporary Pacific research. As he remarks in the preface, he found it difficult to engage men in overt discussions on gender identities and performance (viii). This is a productive finding in itself, as Presterudstuen acknowledges, but he only comes back to it briefly in the final chapter, missing out on what could have been some interesting insights. He explains his aversion to what he describes as “the phenomenological turn in anthropological research” (142) that sees self-reflection as integral, and makes a fair point about this often being more for the “comfort” of the researcher, than for aiding the research (142). There is room in this book, however, for more reflexivity, as it is in the brief mentions of his own positionality and engagement with his field site that the book truly captivates, and the reader gets a visceral sense of how the theories around embodiment and sexualities are actually experienced.
The author acknowledges the importance of storytelling in the Pacific Islands, and how sociality is centred on it, and with this in mind, the work could have benefitted from some more storytelling of its own. In the ethnographically rich sections where this happened, the book flowed wonderfully, but in other parts it was easy to get bogged down in the deep theory. It would make a great resource for higher-level university studies as it would not suffer from being read separately as chapters, rather than having to be read as a whole.
The book largely achieves its goal of aiding our “understanding of gender, modernity and some of the key challenges of our present time” (vi), through its anthropological insights into how men perform masculine identities outside the Euro-American centre. It can at times be a little unclear what exactly Presterudstuen sees as the “key challenges of our time” due to the sheer breadth and depth of theoretical categories addressed, but there is no doubt that many of them are well-tackled in this detailed ethnography of contemporary Fijian men and masculinity.
By including analyses and explorations on phenomena as varied as gambling, drinking, fighting, sex, sport, family roles, work and labour, religion, the Fijian chiefly system, and ethnicity, this book offers fascinating insight into the specific construction and performance of masculinities outside the global north, and makes an important contribution to scholarship on masculinities, both in the Pacific and further afield.
Gina Louise Hawkes
University of Wollongong, Wollongong