No doubt about it – when it comes to leaders and talk of leadership, Fiji has few rivals. In Government, political parties, high schools, unions, universities, or rugby 7s, they are rarely out of the news.
Only last week, Premila Kumar, the Minister for Education, in her new portfolio spoke forcibly to school principals about the “adaptive leadership”.
And embattled USP vice-chancellor Pal Ahluwalia still in loggerheads with Government took a full-page newspaper advertisement to promote the university and record its strong performance in the area –ironically- of “crisis management”.
Meanwhile, former prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka seeks to establish a People’s Alliance party – old wine in a recycled bottle, perhaps- while two-time Olympic 7s gold medallist captain, Jerry Tuwai, was rewarded (by the taxi industry) with a car.
Against this backdrop it is therefore timely to recall the passing earlier this year of Marshall Sahlins, the death a year ago of political anthropologist F.G. Bailey, the 19th anniversary of Prof Sir Raymond Firth’s death, and – glad to say – the continuing vitality of Adrian Mayer who wrote of rural Fiji Indians in the 1950s.
Sahlins, Firth, and Mayer studied Oceanian communities in-depth, Firth and Bailey fulfilled academic roles at USP in the 1960s and 1970s. All four were profoundly interested in politics and leadership.
This briefest of articles aims merely to remember them: four outstanding anthropologists committed lifelong to learning and collegiality.
Marshall Sahlins was Emeritus Professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago, a man of prodigious scholarship whose career started with Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (1962). Among his books and countless papers one on Melanesian “big men” and Polynesian “chiefs” remains a seminal text in the comparative study of traditional Oceanian leadership. He was also an activist who got the University of Chicago and other many American universities to jettison the Confucius Institutes he judged incompatible with university autonomy.
Sahlins was 90. A figure associated with USP as external assessor in sociology in the 1970s was Emeritus Prof F.G. Bailey who passed away last year.
Freddy, as he was affectionately known, came to Suva as external assessor in sociology to evaluate the program, its staff performances, student standards, and to present seminars on ‘development’. And though the details of those presentations now escape me, I am pretty sure they draw on his field-research and theory a on political change at village and state levels in post-imperial India. Throughout his career, mostly at the University of California, San Diego, where he moved from England, Bailey focused on the politics (and micro-politics) of leadership in a variety of social settings, universities included.
Morality and Expediency: The Folklore of Academic Politics appeared in 1977 around the same time as his visit to Fiji where he took an interest in the rhetoric and ploys of one or two key manager academicians.
His list of archetype players and ploys in morality and expediency remain uncannily familiar and would profitably bear revisiting. F.G. Bailey wrote 18 books in all and was 97 when he died. A book of essays extolling his legacy is currently in production at Manchester University Press.
Longevity and anthropological/sociological productivity here are common factors. The late Emeritus Prof Sir Raymond Firth, of the London School of Economics, London University, founding father of sociology when USP opened over 50 years ago, and external assessor before being succeeded by Bailey. A New Zealander by birth his interest in Maori economics led to extensive field research in Tikopia, a Polynesian society in Solomon Islands, and later in Malaya.
A prolific writer he died in 2002 aged 100. Adrian Mayer is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Oriental Studies, London University, where for a time Bailey was also a lecturer, and like Bailey Mayer was an India specialist.
Peasants in the Pacific, A Study of Fiji Indian Rural Society (1961) was suggested and supervised by Raymond Firth who also he supervised Rusiate Nyacakalou’s research on Fijian Leadership (1975). Mayer also published on caste and kinship in central India as well as on culture and society in Japan and other parts of Asia. Aged 99 he lives in London.
The author taught at USP in the 1970s and early ‘80s and returned to live in Fiji when he retired. He now resides in Perth, Australia. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of their employer or The Fiji Times.
