On Understanding Too Quickly: Colonial and Postcolonial Misrepresentation of Indigenous Fijian Land Tenure

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From the very beginning of British colonial rule, government attempts to understand Fijian land tenure led to confusion about its nature and the development of a European understanding that oversimplified and misrepresented it as simple communal ownership. Indigenous land ownership was officially recognized and standardized over most of Fiji, as communal rights in the collective hands of a mid-level descent group within the sedentary lineage system, the mataqali. Actual land tenure is, however, more complex, and in many areas continues to be followed today. Recently, the common property theoretical model has been applied in many parts of the non-Western world, based on a similar oversimplification and misrepresentation of actual practice, as well as on a similar conviction that such tenure systems can be reduced to communal land rights. Drawing on a critique of the common property approach and empirical observations from the interior of Vitilevu, this paper shows how Fijian land tenure cannot be reduced to its superficial common property aspect, but has simultaneous, multilayered sets of rights, both communal and individual. A land tenure theory must be able to take into account such systems if it is to have any serious analytic value.