ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the interplay of desire and compassion and how, for Fijian villagers, it informs relations between people and the ancestors, and people and the Christian God. Desire and compassion between people constitute the ideal emotional axis of Fijian kinship; in the more inclusive domain of relations between the Christian God, ancestors, chiefs and people, desire and compassion become cosmogonic. Here desire references the old Gods’ oral and sexual desires for people, and compassion is a residual category-one that becomes dominant in the relation between people and the Christian God.
