Fiji

Fiji's religious division follows the same line as its politics, and the line was drawn by colonial labour policy. The indigenous iTaukei are overwhelmingly Christian and predominantly Methodist, the Methodist mission having converted the chiefly hierarchy from the 1830s onward, so that conversion moved down through the ranked social order rather than across it. The Indo Fijian population, descended from indentured labourers brought between 1879 and 1916, is largely Hindu with a substantial Muslim minority and a Sikh presence.

The British administration then compounded the separation deliberately, restricting the alienation of iTaukei land, keeping the two populations in different economic roles and governing the iTaukei through their chiefs. Independence in 1970 inherited two communities of roughly equal size with almost no shared institutions other than the state.

The Methodist Church has been a political actor throughout. It supported the coups of 1987, which were carried out in the name of indigenous paramountcy, and campaigned for years afterward for Fiji to be declared a Christian state and for Sunday observance laws. Hindu temples were attacked in the periods around the 1987 and 2000 upheavals, in numbers that made temple arson a recognised category of crime.

The 2013 constitution settled the question in the opposite direction, declaring Fiji a secular state, providing that religious belief is personal and that religion and the state are separate, and prohibiting the invocation of religion to divide the nation. The Methodist Church has since moved away from the Christian state position, and its leadership has publicly apologised for its role in the coups.

Fiji is one of the few places where two entirely unrelated firewalking traditions are practised in the same country, by different communities, for different reasons.

The vilavilairevo, literally the jumping into the oven, belongs to the Sawau people of Beqa island. It is a hereditary privilege, held by descent within a specific lineage, and the account of its origin concerns an ancestor who spared a spirit he had caught while fishing for eels and received the gift in return. Stones are heated in a pit for hours, the walkers enter the pit and cross the stones, and the ritual is surrounded by a set of preparatory restrictions: those who will walk observe a period of separation beforehand, and there are prohibitions on coconut and on contact with women during it. The right is not transferable to people outside the lineage, and the tradition is described by Sawau people as belonging to them specifically. Its performance for tourists at hotels is a live argument within the community.

Indo Fijian firewalking is a separate matter entirely, brought with indentured labourers from South India. It is performed at Hindu temple festivals, above all in the observances associated with the goddess in her Mariamman and Draupadi forms, and it follows a period of vows, fasting and abstinence by the participants. The best known occasions are at temples in Suva and Nadi, where the walk follows a procession and, in some observances, piercing.

They look superficially similar and share nothing else: different peoples, different centuries of arrival, different theology and different rules about who may take part.