With "The Sex Lives of Cannibals", Maarten Troost established himself as one of the most engaging and original travel writers around. "Getting Stoned with Savages" again reveals his wry wit and infectious joy of discovery in a side-splittingly funny account of life in the farthest reaches of the world. After two grueling years on the island of Tarawa, battling feral dogs, machete-wielding neighbors, and a lack of beer on a daily basis, Maarten Troost was in no hurry to return to the South Pacific. But as time went on, he realized he felt remarkably out of place among the trappings of twenty-first-century America. When he found himself holding down a job—one that might possibly lead to a career—he knew it was time for him and his wife, Sylvia, to repack their bags and set off for parts unknown.
"
Getting Stoned with Savages" tells the hilarious story of Troost’s time on Vanuatu—a rugged cluster of islands where the natives gorge themselves on kava and are still known to “eat the man.” Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles against typhoons, earthquakes, and giant centipedes and soon finds himself swept up in the laid-back, clothing-optional lifestyle of the islanders. When Sylvia gets pregnant, they decamp for slightly-more-civilized Fiji, a fallen paradise where the local chiefs can be found watching rugby in the house next door. And as they contend with new parenthood in a country rife with prostitutes and government coups, their son begins to take quite naturally to island living—in complete contrast to his dad.

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

RONALD WRIGHT'S EXPLORATION OF THE FIJI ISLANDS BEGINS IN THE FIJI MUSEUM WHERE A CAPTION IDENTIFIES THE OBJECT DISPLAYED AS THE "FORK USED IN EATING MR BAKER". PERHAPS NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD IS THERE A CULTURE THAT HAS COME THROUGH THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE WITHOUT BEING DEEPLY SCARRED BY IT:IN ONLY A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE WESLEYAN MISSIONARY BAKER WAS EATEN BY NATIVES,FIJI HAS BECOME A CIVILIZATION THAT HAS ADAPTED,EVEN EMBRACED the 20TH CENTURY. WRIGHT BELIEVES THAT THIS ABSENCE OF TRAUMA IS IN PART DUE TO THE INSULARITY OF THE MANY COEXISTENT BUT INTROVERTED COMMUNITIES THAT EXIST ON THE ISLANDS IN THE FIJI GROUP - THE SEPARATION ALLOWS A "UNITY" THAT IS HARMONIOUS IN COMPARISON TO OTHER COUNTRIES WITH PARALLEL HISTORIES. WRIGHT WILL EXAMINE THIS THEME AND ITS RELATED TOPIC OF THE INSULARITY OF MODERN TRAVELLERS AGAINST THE HISTORICAL,POLITICAL,AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL BACKDROP OF THE FIJI ISLANDS - SEEMINGLY ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST EXOTIC LOCALES. AS IN THE AUTHOR'S HIGHLY-PRAISED "CUT STONES AND CROSSROADS",WRIGHT WILL DRAW THESE STRAINS TOGETHER SKILLFULLY,ALLOWING THE READER BOTH A VIVID PORTRAIT (18/3/87). OF THE ISLANDS AND A RARE EXPOSURE OF THE NUANCES OF A FOREIGN CULTURE.

On Fiji Islands

Read all the critically-acclaimed, historical adventure novels of Lance &amp; James Morcan – available now in one box set at a discounted price. FOUR HISTORICAL ADVENTURES spans over 2,000 action-packed pages. Each epic tale is set in the 19th Century and each has strong romantic themes.

White Spirit (A novel based on a true story)
Into the Americas (A novel based on a true story)
World Odyssey (The World Duology, Book 1)
Fiji: A Novel (The World Duology, Book 2)

White Spirit (A novel based on a true story):
This epic novel is based on the remarkable true story of Irish convict John Graham who escapes the notorious Moreton Bay Penal Settlement on Australia’s east coast to find sanctuary with the Kabi, a tribe of Aborigines who eventually accept him as one of their own. John is torn between two women – one black, one white – and is forced to choose between them.

Into the Americas (A novel based on a true story):
A gritty, real-life adventure based on one of history’s greatest wilderness survival stories. It’s a tale of two vastly different cultures – North America’s First Nations people and European civilization – colliding head on in the early 1800’s in the Pacific Northwest. One reviewer says the action is relentless. Another describes it as a Romeo and Juliet story set in the wilderness.

World Odyssey (The World Duology, Book 1):
This novel follows the fortunes of three young travelers. Their adventures span sixteen years and see them engage with Native Americans, Barbary Coast pirates, Aborigines, Maoris and Pacific Islanders as they travel around the world – from America to Africa, from England to the Canary Islands, to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Their adventures continue in Fiji.

Fiji: A Novel (The World Duology, Book 2):
A continuation of the dramatic adventures of the travelers who feature in book one in the duology, this novel is set entirely in Fiji. English missionary Susannah Drake wants to convert the Fijians while American adventurer Nathan Johnson wants to trade muskets to them. There’s conflict ahead. The unlikely pair soon have to depend on each other for their very survival.

Four Historical Adventures (White Spirit / Into the Americas / World Odyssey / Fiji: A Novel)

The author, a Fiji Islander of Scottish descent, describes the 1987 coup d'etat and political life in Fiji.

Kava in the Blood

Two men, two different worlds, one destiny.
 
Gunner has spent half his life running from his past, and the other half trying to protect himself from ever being vulnerable again. He’s escaped his old club and worked hard to earn the VP patch on his cut after joining the Broken Chains. But his entire life is turned upside down when Gunner’s past comes back to haunt him, and the club’s Deaf delivery guy ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time. 
 
When his president asks him to protect the injured man, Gunner wants to say no. After all, he hasn’t been able to take his eyes off Logan since the day they met, and Gunner can’t afford that kind of distraction. But ignoring him is damn near impossible when every time he looks at Logan, he starts to feel something. And Gunner doesn’t think he has the power to resist him for much longer.
 
There will be no promise of a future though, if the Broken Chains can’t protect Logan from the mess he’s in, but even if they succeed, Gunner isn’t sure there’s a place for Logan in his world.

Tidal Wave (Broken Chains MC, #1)

Men from Under the Sky: The Arrival of Westerners in Fiji

Growing up in the Fiji Islands in the late 1960s, Kalyana Mani Seth is an impressionable, plump young girl suited to the meaning of her name: blissful, blessed, the auspicious one. Her mother educates Kalyana about her Indian heritage, vividly telling tales of mischievous Krishna and powerful Mother Kali, and recounting her grandparents’ migration to the tiny, British colony.

While the island nation celebrates its recently granted independence, new stories of the feminist revolution in America are carried over the waves of the Pacific to Kalyana’s ears: stories of women who live with men who are not their husbands, who burn their bras, who are free to do as they please. Strange as all this sounds, Kalyana hopes that she will be blessed with a husband who allows her a similar sense of liberty.

But nothing prepares her for the trauma of womanhood and the cultural ramifications of silence and shame, as her mother tells her there are some family stories that should never be told.

Kalyana

Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, "Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles "shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding.

Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the cannibal isles of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonization in 1874, extraterritorial Americans had, she argues, as much impact on Fiji as did the British. While the American economy invested in the extraction of sandalwood and sea slugs as resources to sell in China, individuals who went to Fiji had more complicated, personal objectives.

"Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles" considers these motivations through the lives of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on Fiji: a runaway whaleman who settled in the islands, a sea captain's wife, and a merchant. Shoemaker's book shows how ordinary Americans living or working overseas found unusual venues where they could show themselves worthy of others' respect--others' approval, admiration, or deference.

Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Strap yourself in for a wild ride!

"Dodging Machetes" is sometimes dramatic and thrilling, other times flat-out funny. And it's always compelling!

Will Lutwick, a quirky misfit, gets an MBA at 22, but soon realizes he and the American corporate world are a horrid mismatch. He joins the Peace Corps and is sent to the Fiji Islands, the quintessential tropical paradise. Will finds himself attracted to prohibited pulchritude when Rani Gupta, a beautiful, rebellious 20-year-old from a traditional Hindu family, begins working in his office. Dating is taboo in Fiji's large Indian community, and an interracial couple would be unprecedented. But Rani and Will soon discover their mutual attraction impossible to resist. Their liaison is clandestine, but word gets out, and a cultural firestorm engulfs Rani's community. The two lovers are under constant threat of attack, and violence ensues. Will must confront his personal demons about courage and commitment, while Rani is treated like a pariah by her people. Will the besieged lovers stay together, or will a hostile world tear them apart?

In between the dramatic scenes, this seriocomic memoir is savvy and often hilarious. Lutwick deliciously skewers his own behavior and satirizes the people, practices, and protocols he encounters in Fiji and in backstory about his youth.

Will Lutwick has woven his provocative insight with the dramatic events of a singular, but timeless, forbidden-love story. The result is "Dodging Machetes"--a story-driven page-turner from an exceptional writer.

Dodging Machetes: How I Survived Forbidden Love, Bad Behavior, and the Peace Corps in Fiji

A powerful book on Girmit in Fiji (1879-1919) that will leave the reader in awe, wonder and tears. Conditions were so horrific that Fiji had the highest rate of suicide in the world. The Girmitiyas bore the brutality of the Girmit with courage, resilience and fortitude and Tears in Paradise eloquently echoes their struggles, pain and suffering that will take the reader ask – “Was it really that brutal?” Yes, it was! The second part of the book (1920-2004) reflects on the contemporary history of Indo-Fijians, expounding on the theme “An Uncertain Future.”

Tears In Paradise: Suffering And Struggles Of Indians In Fiji, 1879-2004

Disturbing History focuses on Fiji's people and their agency in responding to and engaging the multifarious forms of authority and power that were manifest in the colony from 1874 to 1914. By concentrating on the lives of ordinary Fijians, the book presents alternate ways of reconstructing the island's past. Couched in the traditions of social, subaltern, and people's histories, the study is an excavation of a large mass of material that tells the often moving stories of lives that have largely been overlooked by historians. These challenge conventional historical accounts that tend to celebrate the nation, represent Fiji's colonial experience as ordered and peaceful, or British tutelage as benevolent. In its contribution to postcolonial theory, Disturbing History reveals resistance as a constant but partial and untidy mix of other constituents such as collaboration, consent, appropriation, and opportunism, which together form the colonial landscape. In turn, colonialism in Fiji is shown as a force shaped in struggle, fractured and often fragile, with a presence and application in the daily lives of people that was often chaotic, imperfect, and susceptible to subversion.



The book divides the period of study into two broad categories: organized resistance and everyday forms of resistance. The first examines the Colo War (1876), the Tuka Movement (1878-1891), the Seaqaqa War (1894), the Movement for Federation with New Zealand (1901-1903), the Viti Kabani Movement (1913-1917), and the various organized labor protests. The second half of the book addresses resistance manifested in the villages and plantations, including tax and land boycotts, violence and retributive justice, avoidance protest, petitioning, and women's resistance. In their entirety these forms reveal a complex web of relationships between powerful and subordinate groups and among subordinate groups themselves. The author concludes that resistance cannot be framed as a totality but as a multilayered and multidimensional reality. In the wake of Fiji's present volatile climate, this book will aid readers in understanding the continuities and disjunctures in Fiji's interethnic and intraethnic relations.

Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands' most enduring psychiatric institution--St Giles Psychiatric Hospital--established as Fiji's Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji's indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages, workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within colonial worlds and practices. The "community within" the asylum is a feature in Leckie's study, with attention to patient agency to show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds, confinement, and constraints--ranging from straitjackets to electric shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the community, and that "reading" asylum archives sheds new light on race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji.



Exploring the meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define normality and abnormality and also how communities respond. Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a reality for all in postcolonial societies.

Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji

On May 14, 1879, the Leonidas, the first ship carrying indentured Indians, arrived in Fiji with 463 immigrants aboard. They were the answer to Fiji's dwindling supply of labor. From May 1879 until 1919, 87 shiploads of Indians travelled to Fiji to work out their five years of indentured slavery-the girmit (from the word agreement). Conditions on the cane plantations were miserable and the Indians called that part of their lives narak (hell). Once the five years of servitude were over, the Indians were given a certificate of residence. Only after another five years would they become eligible for a paid ticket back to India. Bittersweet celebrates the 125th anniversary of the arrival of the first girmitiyas in Fiji and introduces the reader to Indo-Fijians. This collection crosses the generations. The writers tell of schooldays and festivals, family and village relationships, suffering and discrimination, sharing and achievements, education and psychology, sports and marriage. Illustrated with rich color photographs, the beauty of these images masks the turmoil that has marked the people of Fiji for generations.

Bittersweet: An Indo-Fijian Experience

Chalo Jahaji: On a journey through indenture in Fiji

This is the first account of the Lapita peoples, the common ancestor of the Polynesians, Micronesians, and Austronesian-speaking Melanesians who over the last 4000 years colonized the islands of the Pacific, including New Zealand and territories as far afield as Fiji and Hawaii. Its purpose is to provide answers to some of the most puzzling archaeological and anthropological questions: who were the Lapita peoples? what was their history? how were they able to travel such great distances? and why did they do so? Recent discoveries (several by the author of this book) have begun at last to yield a coherent picture of these elusive peoples.
 
 Professor Kirch takes the reader back many thousands of years to the earliest evidence of the Lapita peoples. He describes the research itself and conveys the excitement of the first discoveries of Lapita settlements, tools and pottery. He then traces the remarkable cultural development and spread of the Lapita peoples across the unoccupied islands of Eastern Melanesia, Micronesia and Western Polynesia. He shows how they became the progenitors of the Polynesian and Austronesian-speaking Melanesian peoples.
 
 The author describes Lapita sites, communities and landscapes, the development of their decorated ceramics, and their shell-tool industry. He reveals the means by which they accomplished such prodigious voyages and explains why they undertook them. He illustrates his account with specially drawn maps and with a wide range of photographs, many published for the first time.
 Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, anthropology, biology and linguistics, and written in clear, non-specialized language, this is an outstanding book of great importance to the history of South-East Asia and the Pacific.

The Lapita Peoples: Basis in Mathematics and Physics

The book tells the tale of Taku the turtle. He has a very dangerous encounter with a plastic bag. Can his many fishy friends save this friendly little turtle?

Taku And The Plastic Bag

Robyn hadn't seen nearly enough over the years of her brother Johnny, so she was doubly excited when he invited her to go and help him run his guesthouse -- in Fiji!

 But she arrived in the Pacific to discover that it wasn't only Johnny who was running the guesthouse. There was that disturbing David Kinnear as well ...

Flame in Fiji

It is 1918 and Spanish Flu is epidemic in Suva, the capital of Fiji. Twelve year old Olive is sent with her brothers and grandmother to Taveuni to stay with her childless aunt and uncle on their sugar plantation to escape the disease as her mother lies dying of the flu in their family home. The months that follow hold magic and sorrow for Olive, as she uncovers well kept family secrets and grieves for her dying mother.

"The Sailmaker's Daughter" is dedicated to the memory of Stephanie Johnson's grandmother, who was born in Fiji in 1905. Like Olive in the book, her grandmother was one of a large family; her father was the sailmaker in Suva and her mother died of the Spanish Flu at the end of the Great War. "The Sailmaker's Daughter" is both a tribute to Stephanie Johnson's grandmother and a powerful evocation of a mystical paradise lived and lost.


The Sailmaker's Daughter: A Novel

This study concerns the differentials of economic growth among the Fijian people. It brings together relevant factors drawn from social, cultural, economic and political analysis. As a case study in economic growth, it portrays the interplay between individuals and the social and economic conditions which surround them, and demonstrates the limitations of the institutions within which they function. Controversial points of interpretation are discussed and supported with documentation gathered from field-work. 
 Originally published in 1964.

Under the IVI Tree: Society and Economic Growth in Rural Fiji

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in "Represented Communities", John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.

Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization

From coverage of Fiji's top-rated resorts to the newest adventure tourism facilities and little-known backpacker areas, travellers of all interests will find the destination to suit them.

Moon Handbooks Fiji

In May 2006 Fiji held its tenth general election since independence in 1970. In a country with an unenviable history of electoral trauma, the mood was apprehensive if not tense - not least because of controversial public statements against the incumbent Qarase government being made by the commander of Fiji's military forces.

Despite a record number of parties and candidates, the winners were the two big parties - the heavily church-backed SDL, the party of choice of the majority of indigenous Fijians; and the Fiji Labour Party, the party preferred by most Indo-Fijians.

Although the result was ethnically polarized, for the first time in Fijian history the successful candidates came together to share power in a constitutionally ordained multiparty cabinet, with Laisenia Qarase retaining the prime ministership. But the fragile collaboration was short-lived. On 5 December 2006, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama ordered a military takeover, declaring himself ‘President’, ousting the elected government and replacing it with an ‘interim’ government of his choice, and once again throwing Fiji into political turmoil.

With contributions from ex-Vice President Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi, ousted Prime Minister Laesenia Qarase, leader of the Fiji Labour Party and now interim Minister for Finance Mahendra Chaudhry, and an impressive array of leading commentators on Fijian affairs, this book provides a comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the lead-up to, the outcome and the aftermath of Fiji's historic 2006 election. Shedding light on the complex weave of traditional chiefly systems, race relations, economics, constitutionality, the military ethos and religion, From Election to Coup in Fiji is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Fiji, the South Pacific and the politics of divided societies.

From Election to Coup in Fiji: The 2006 Campaign and Its Aftermath

A fourth revised edition of a handbook to the 322 islands of the Pacific that make up the Fiji Islands, covering Viti Levu, Yasawa islands, the Lomaiviti group, Vanua Levu, Taveuni, the Lau group and Rotuma. Offers recommendations for the traveller on accomodation, airfares, air routes and tour services and inter-island travel.

Fiji Islands Handbook

The World in Conflict series gives readers an unbiased historical perspective on some of the major wars and conflicts recently in the news. Each volume aims to present a thorough picture of the people and groups involved in these conflicts, while also presenting those working to end them. World in Conflict is a wonderful supplement to current event classes. Supports the national curriculum standards Culture; Time, Continuity, and Change; Individuals, Groups, and Institutions; Power, Authority, and Governance; and Global Connections as outlined by the National Council for the Social Studies.

Fiji

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

J. Maarten Troost

On Fiji Islands

Ronald Wright

Four Historical Adventures (White Spirit / Into the Americas / World Odyssey / Fiji: A Novel)

Lance Morcan

Kava in the Blood

Peter Thomson

Tidal Wave (Broken Chains MC, #1)

E.M. Lindsey

Men from Under the Sky: The Arrival of Westerners in Fiji

Stanley Brown

Kalyana

Rajni Mala Khelawan

Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Nancy Shoemaker

Dodging Machetes: How I Survived Forbidden Love, Bad Behavior, and the Peace Corps in Fiji

Will Lutwick

Tears In Paradise: Suffering And Struggles Of Indians In Fiji, 1879-2004

Rajendra Prasad

Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji

Robert Nicole

Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji

Jacqueline Leckie

Bittersweet: An Indo-Fijian Experience

Brij V. Lal

Chalo Jahaji: On a journey through indenture in Fiji

Brij V. Lal

The Lapita Peoples: Basis in Mathematics and Physics

Patrick Vinton Kirch

Taku And The Plastic Bag

Sharon Light

Flame in Fiji

Gloria Bevan

The Sailmaker's Daughter: A Novel

Stephanie Johnson

Under the IVI Tree: Society and Economic Growth in Rural Fiji

Cyril S. Belshaw

Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization

John Dunham Kelly

Moon Handbooks Fiji

David Stanley

From Election to Coup in Fiji: The 2006 Campaign and Its Aftermath

Jon Fraenkel

Fiji Islands Handbook

David Stanley

East Timor: Island in Turmoil

Taro McGuinn