ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how in Fijian thought and practice sexual love or desire is constituted in opposition to compassionate or familial love and how compassionate love is wrested violently out of desire, which is thus transformed and apparently contained by the hierarchy thought proper to social order. It focuses on the beginnings of the developmental cycle of love in the manifold relations of childhood, whose interactions at once enter into and are the outcome of love. The contrast between dodomo and loloma, between sexual love or desire and compassionate or familial love, is assimilated to an ideal contrast between ‘the European way’ and ‘the Fijian way’. The chapter also shows how men and women are represented as situated differently with respect to sexual love, which implicitly poses a threat to hierarchical relations between kin. It explains the domain of transcendent power, where the Christian god may be represented as having both sexual and compassionate love for his human flock.
