ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on data concerning death, birth and sacrifice to suggest that, in conceiving of the person as consumer, nineteenth-century Fijians created a subject/object relation between the self and lived experience. To refuse to eat is a denial of kinship, but cannibalism is an annihilation at once of kinship and personhood, and as such it is the most powerful of Fijian tropes. Nevertheless, production, exchange, tribute and consumption are still recognizable as transformations of pre-colonial processes and, as such, still distinctively Fijian. Today, however, the consumptive process as an aspect of hierarchy is linked not to cannibalism, but to compassion, to veilomani, to mutual love or pity. To be able to compel compassion from the other threatens the hierarchical pretensions of pity with competitive equality. It is by virtue of this compassion that what is given can be consumed without implying the possibility that the consumer might ultimately have to become the sacrifice.
