ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Fijian villagers construct cognitively an understanding of above/below; how this process merges with an understanding of hierarchical social relations; and what are the conditions that underlie the process and the course of its transformation over time. The notion of above/below as the cognitive product of a process of modulated construction, taken together with the historical and ethnographic data, at once confirm the doxic function of symbolic practice and question its supposed imperviousness. Meaning can be constrained, but it cannot be fixed; thus Volosinov argued as long ago as 1929 that understanding language 'amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity'. The fact that a woman's status varies as a function of her relation to a man raises the question of which relationship, that of wife or that of sister, is most salient for Fijian hierarchy.
