In the year 2000, Fiji was the site of chaos: a coup d'etat; martial law; near civil war; local takeovers of police stations, factories, resorts, even military bases. Why has the social contract of the nation-state been unsustainable there? What is this social contract in real history, especially since World War II?
This book reconfigures the issues for the anthropology of nations and nationalism, away from nationalism as the culture of modernity, toward the nation-state as an artifact of American power. Benedict Anderson's vastly influential "Imagined Communities" led a generation of scholars to study national imaginaries, print capitalism, shared memories and identities. Now, "Represented Communities" offers an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's approach. The authors focus not on imagination but on legal, ritual, and electoral representation in the formation of communities. They stress not modernity, but decolonization. They track consequences of nationalist sentiments, but also of nation-state realities. Their emphasis is not on memory and identity, but on will and power.
Fiji's story is one of legally entrenched racism and struggles for, against, and about democracy. Its dramatic crises reveal the force and limits of changing global political structures, empires to nation-states. Sophisticated and impassioned, this book portrays the era of decolonization not as the last wave as modern nationalism, but as the actual onset of the nation-state, with a fundamentally different politics of representation.

In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult. Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture. A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.