A LOCUS OF EXOGENISATION IN FIJI.

Whilst classical anthropological perspectives have tended to ground social disjuncture in the personalisations and inventions of Human Nature, more recent approaches have peered into cultural process for sources of discontinuity and renewal. In his studies of the rise of charismatic Protestant churches, Joel Robbins has argued persuasively that Pentecostal conversion heralds the effective adoption of a new cultural logic and the ontological and moral reformation of the world after conversion. Robbins 'discontinuity thinking' has been critiqued by Mosko and others for failing to take account of formal continuities in the structure of personhood across the arc of conversion that just as convincingly explain the appeal of charismatic Protestant Christianity. Extrapolating its terms to a Western Polynesian case (Fiji), this paper re-visits this debate arguing that, whilst Pentecostal conversion in Fiji discontinues 'tradition' in the way that Robbins proposes, it does so at a locus ofexogenisation that has long served as a portal through which tradition has been renounced and forms of immortality have been quested abroad. The nature of this tradition of disjuncture in pre- modern polities in Fiji is briefly contrasted with other recent discussions of alterity and indigeneity in Amazonian and other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]