ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the specific ways masculinity is constructed and played out in the Indo-Fijian community are deeply rooted in this historical process, and that contemporary masculine performances among Indo-Fijians are to be understood as a negotiation between gender as a collective, socio-historical construct and the individual's personal aspirations for status and social standing. A key point throughout my analysis is that urban Fiji is a site for sustained, continuous interaction between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, as well as between these groups and visitors from elsewhere in the world. The Indo-Fijian identity is created in the transitory moments between an Indian past, the traumatic indenture experience and a long history of relative social and political marginalization in Fiji. Public social life among the author's Indo-Fijian respondents is consequently a thoroughly male-dominated arena, where notions of manhood and masculinity are played out and contested on a regular basis.
