Figurative vanua as archive under erasure: Semiotics of the delayed arrival of stranger‐kingship in contemporary Fiji

Abstract

This article examines a prolonged “delay” of a chief installation ritual in Dawasamu, Fiji, conducted in 2010 by a lineage group not recognized in the colonial archives as the rightful kingmaker. It argues that this incident signals a broader socio‐semiotic transformation in the understanding of how land as a spatiotemporal place relates to the people as its components in Fiji. In particular, drawing on semiotic notions of interpretants, the article argues that this transformation is a “downshift” from a “dicent” to a “rhematic” interpretant in the entextualization of Fijian vanua (i.e., land and people). That is, whereas the colonial archives signified Fijian vanua as a contiguous, developmental, or hypotactic entity of land and people, the diagrammatic frame of entextualization in the archives came to be self‐grounded, thereby figurating vanua as a formal, figurative, or paratactic entity of land and people. The article further characterizes the self‐reflexive nature of this socio‐semiotic transformation as a shift from “archive state” to “ archive state,” in which efforts to disavow colonial archives and to long for the delayed arrival of “unwritten” truth nevertheless reanimate and ultimately adhere to the diagrammatic frame of vanua that was itself a product of the colonial‐era archival work.