- Title
- 'White Man’s Kava’ in Fiji: entangling alcohol, race and insanity, c. 1874-1970
- Creator
- Leckie, Jacqueline
- Relation
- Alcohol, Psychiatry and Society. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, c. 1700–1990s p. 126-156
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.7765/9781526159410
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Within colonial contexts, ‘race’ was intertwined with the consumption of alcohol in varied and complex ways. This chapter explores the entanglement of the local and the global regarding ideas and policies concerning alcohol and its misuse. The author identifies also the related discourses that were imbued with ideas of race, and reflected assumptions about degeneracy, entitlement and civilisation among Fiji’s plural indigenous and immigrant communities of indigenous Fijians, Indo-Fijians, other Pacific Islanders and Europeans. Conceptions of alcoholic insanity and ‘race’ were transferred to Fiji from Britain, other colonies and the USA. Mental hospital records reveal that before World War II, ‘alcoholic insanity’ was overwhelmingly considered to be the burden of the white man. This gendered and ethnic attribution changed after the war, when increasing numbers of Indo-Fijians but fewer Fijians than Europeans were diagnosed with alcohol-related mental disorders. The chapter explores how the global flow of alcohol across cultures was deeply embedded in assumptions of race and that power dynamics, especially those between coloniser and colonised, are central for an understanding of past patterns of alcohol consumption.
- Subject
- Fiji; alcohol; alcohol abuse; Fijians
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1483627
- Identifier
- uon:51150
- Identifier
- ISBN:978 1 5261 5940 3
- Language
- eng
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