Social Mimesis, Commemoration, and Ethnic Performance: Fiji Banaban Representations of the Past

A society’s mimetic practice is of pivotal importance for creating (and further developing) binding representations of a collective past. The concept of social mimesis is based on the interplay of corporeality, internalization, and performance. Therefore social interactions can be construed as a field of relationships in which acting persons incorporate, interpret, and perform historically and culturally prefigured discourses and practices. Such mimetic practice also takes in the appropriation and re-enactment of representations of the past by social actors. My chief focus here will be the annual commemoration of the Banabans, an ethnic group from the Central Pacific, who were resettled on Fiji’s Rabi Island some sixty years ago. What began as a thanksgiving service marking the anniversary of the Banabans’ arrival on their new island developed, as the decades went by, into an official festival of commemoration lasting several days. The program for the festival has begun in recent years to feature ethnic performances as well. These are dance theater spectacles in which Banabans enact episodes from their society’s precolonial and colonial past. Thus "The Arrival of Christianity," the piece I select for analysis, treats how religious tradition has been transformed on Banaba. Based on this articulation of home island, religious tradition, and Christianity, I show how by means of ethnic performances core domains of Banaban identity are constituted, interwoven, and handed on as embodied memories. Dance theater and commemorative festival on Rabi Island are central to the mimetic practice of a diaspora society bent on preserving in collective memory the history of their island of origin and the fact of their survival. Social mimesis is instrumental here in reclaiming the past as a place of ruptures and continuities alike.