While Marquesan societies were, in the terms of my polarities, “non-conversion” systems — though they were nevertheless very different from the “non-conversion” systems that might be identified elsewhere, such as in Papua New Guinea — Fiji did and in many ways still does exemplify the opposed type, being characterized by great scope for value-conversion, by exchange entailing like-for-unlike transactions and by hierarchical ranking rather than competitive inequality.

The main occasions for ceremonial exchange in Fiji were known generically as solevu; though of diverse kinds, these mostly either marked some life crisis event — betrothal, marriage, birth, presentation of children to their mother’s people, death, and so on — or recompensed some service or assistance in warfare or need of some other kind. The substance of these presentations were iyau, valuables or manufactured articles for exchange, which in particular localities might consist mainly of pots (where local styles gave signatures to particular forms), wooden articles such as headrests or kava dishes, barkcloth (again usually of a particular, locally recognizable type), mats, and, in the post-contact period, a variety of introduced goods, particularly kerosene, items of household furniture, and manufactured fabric. Often accompanied, at least now, by live pigs and cattle, these presentations were encompassed in gifts of whale teeth, which were the focus of formal speeches and were handed between the senior men of giving and receiving groups. These teeth, tabua, were the “heaviest” and “most chiefly” of valuables, were the substance of any important request or gift of atonement, and were strongly identified with women, not in the sense of standing for them symbolically, but in the sense that they figured as the proper exchange objects through which alliance was initiated and periodically expressed. Those presenting valuables at solevu were generally immediately given a feast (magiti), which figured as the acknowledgement of the prestation rather than as a counter-prestation or reciprocation.

Although some kinds of iyau ni vanua — the valuables of a particular land or polity — were the singular products of particular groups; other kinds, such as mats, were widely distributed and carried no local signature. However, there was a basic element of differentiation in the system that arose from the fact that any particular prestation did not recompense a previous offering of iyau but related to debts associated with kinship which were expressed rather than eradicated by presentations, and debts arising from assistance or from other activities. While it would in some ways be wrong to suggest that women were convertible into whale teeth or valuables generally — since their presentation produced a manifold state of indebtedness that had to be addressed in a variety of behavioural ways rather than a particular debt that could be repaid — this was a conversion-oriented system in the sense that its prestations were structured by difference, that is, by the matching of things against each other in a fashion that produced or displayed relationships. While the sheer quantity of food and manufactured articles presented was of course important, it was of less structural significance than the oppositions between particular kinds of things, and particularly between activities and relationships on one side and objects on the other.

In upland Fiji, the most prominent feature of alliance relationships was enduring indebtedness to the wife’s people, or to the mother’s side, from the point of view of the offspring. This was (as it still is) marked by substantial presentations of whale teeth and other valuables at various stages of betrothal and marriage, but was further expressed in presentations on the birth of the first child, on the occasion that children were presented to their mother’s people, and particularly on their deaths when whale teeth would flow back marking the enduring debt of substance to the maternal uncle. Because marriage exchange was generally restricted, the ranking implied at particular moments in alliance relations was generally equivalized through reciprocity. Hence an economy of kinship was articulated through the movement of iyau with a system of specialized trade in paths of alliance that entailed a dense mesh of obligation mutual indebtedness and political and military reciprocity. These links, then, were significant during warfare as they were in the Marquesas but with the important difference that valuables could be converted into assistance and services of various kinds; whale teeth could even be seen as a kind of capital available for strategic investment with different people or in different kinds of operations (in marriage, or in paying for assassinations).

This upland Fijian system can be understood, despite the restricted character of the exchange, as a relation entailing a series of groups (A, B, C) and a variety of valuables (r, s, t, u, v, etc.).

The picture is of course more complicated, because each polity would offer to another not only its own singular iyau, but often an accumulation, drawn partly on its own production and partly on material that was drawn in from outside; there was no stipulation that iyau had to be manufactured by the presenting group. While this sketch could be considerably elaborated upon, it is the basic principle that I want to draw attention to here, that the open-ended character of the system and the differentiated character of valuables make it highly receptive to new items and extended exchange relations, which become directly articulated with the reproduction of local affinal relations.

In coastal and insular Fiji this system existed in a more regionally and hierarchically differentiated form. The distinction is marked particularly by a difference in the character of the all-important vasu relationship, that is, the relation between sister’s son and mother’s brother, or, among chiefs, between a man’s place and that the whole domain of his maternal uncle. While the vasu relationship, in upland Fiji, certainly has a special character, it does not and did not have the feature which struck the attention of various commentators on Fijian society from Williams to Hocart: the right of the vasu to appropriate property from the mother’s people, and specifically from anywhere within the domain of a chiefly uncle. In the centralized confederacies of Bau, Rewa, Cakaudrove, and Lau — to mention only the most important — vasu relations provided a context for tribute payments, since lesser chiefs anxious to forge alliances with the paramount families gave their daughters in marriage, thus providing for offspring able to liberally appropriate pigs, valuables, canoes, or virtually anything else, from their home domains. The content of the vasu relation was not uniform and although it is generally stated as a categorical entitlement in ethnographic accounts, those who were vasu to the central places such as Bau could not appropriate in an unrestrained way, although some sources suggest that their relationship was a means through which Bauan wealth was dispersed, thus making the polity a fount of prosperity for its subjects. There is also, however, some evidence that Bauans reversed the relationship as they became more powerful, such that vasu were expected to bring property rather than take it away; this could only have been true of thoroughly subordinated subjects; relatively powerful allied groups certainly also paid tribute, but relations had a more reciprocal character, as is apparent from Williams’ account of the visit of the Bauan paramount Cakobau to Lakeba, central place of the Lauan polity in eastern Fiji. While the Bauans received a particularly large canoe which was being manufactured probably with the assistance of Tongan craftsmen on the island of Kabara, they also brought some goods with them — “two handsome spears, more than 30 clubs wrapped in fine cynet, 20 whales’ teeth, an immense root of yangona [kava] and several hundred fathoms of lichi or masi [barkcloth] from Kandavu” (Williams 1931:162-166). Only a few months earlier, however, another major presentation had taken place, associated with the presentation of the chief’s daughter as another bride for Cakobau’s father, Tanoa: the party took “an immense new canoe, 15 large packages of native cloth … 7 large balls of cynet, 10 whales’ teeth of from 1½ to 4 lb. weight” (ibid.:145). It was quite fundamental to Fijian polities that property of this kind did not remain with the receivers, but could be deployed in a great variety of ways to solicit a marriage, to secure military assistance, for redistribution within an elite, to consolidate a particular faction’s power base, and so on.

While a great deal more could be said about the functioning and history of this system, the contrast with eastern Polynesia should be apparent: hierarchical relations in Tonga and Samoa as well as Fiji were indissociable from relations of exchange and alliance; in eastern Polynesia, on the other hand, dominance was grounded in “theocratic feudalism” and, where it was contested and insecure, as in the Marquesas, what was crucial was production of food and pigs, not access to or control over exchange.