Christianity is the dominant religion in the Fiji islands today. However, this was not the case in the early eighteen hundreds. Back then, the Fijians had lived a life and culture of their own that was not known to the world. This all changed when different groups of Europeans started to arrive in the early eighteen hundreds. Of these, the group that had the most influence on the Fijians was the English Wesleyan missionaries. The result of their evangelism was the establishment of the Methodist church in 1835. This church is the dominant denomination in Christian Fiji and has been closely meshed with concepts of Fijian identity. However, the church's dominance is being challenged, partly because of the entwining of concepts of church and the vanua (land, people). Additionally the arrival of other, new denominations with their different ideologies has also affected the standing and influence of the Methodists. In this thesis the way in which the missionaries had introduced themselves to the Fijians and how they influenced and converted them to Christianity are outlined. This was not a one-way affair, where only the missionaries' ways of living and ideologies were involved. They first had to accept the structure and some of the customs of the vanua before their mission could proceed. It was found that the influence and ideologies brought by the missionaries was incorporated into the vanua ideologies and has formed the basis of what became the Fijian way of life. When Fiji became a colony of Britain in 1874, the incorporation of the vanua and Methodist Christian ideologies and structure was well established. However, all these views, and the previously accepted local views of Fijian culture, have changed in response to the challenges from the new denominations. The effect of these new approaches and ideologies on the vanua and the Methodists in Fiji is discussed. The outcome of this on-going situation is not yet clear.

This thesis explores the ways community-based ecotourism development in the Bouma National Heritage Park was negotiated at the nexus of Western entrepreneurship and the vanua, an indigenous epistemology. In 1990, the Bouma tribe of Taveuni, Fiji established the Bouma National Heritage Park. A growing dependence on the market economy and a desire to find an economic alternative to commercial logging on their communally-tenured land, led to their decision to approach the New Zealand government for assistance to establish the Park. The four villages involved have since developed their own community-based ecotourism enterprises. Despite receiving first place in a British Airways Tourism for Tomorrow Award category in 2002, there was a growing sense of social dysfunction in Bouma during the research period. According to my participants, this was partly due to the community-based ecotourism development process which had paid little attention to the vanua. Largely through talanoa as discussion, the people of Bouma have become increasingly conscious of references to the vanua values in their own evaluation and management of the projects. This thesis draws on Tim Ingold’s (2000) ‘taskscapes’ as, like the vanua, they relationally link humans with other elements of the environment within their landscape. This contrasts with a common Western epistemological approach of treating humans as independent of other cosmological and physical elements and as positioned against the landscape. Largely due to its communal nature, it may be argued that the vanua is incompatible with values associated with Bouma’s Western, capitalist-based ecotourism models. However, in this thesis I argue that despite numerous obstacles, the Bouma National Heritage Park is one example of a tribe’s endeavours to culturally hybridise the vanua with entrepreneurship to create a locally meaningful form of indigenous entrepreneurship for the wellbeing of its people. The Bouma people call this hybrid ‘business va’avanua’. Informal talanoa is presented in this thesis as a potential tool for political agency in negotiating issues surrounding community-based ecotourism and business va’avanua.