Religious discourse as metaculture

Abstract

Religious discourse heard in rural Fijian Methodist contexts is often metacultural, that is, it is a cultural product that comments on 'culture' itself. In this article, I examine the implications of religious discourse's metacultural functions, including the ways in which senses of time's movement are constructed and inflected with moral evaluation, and the ways in which senses are generated of the present's inferiority compared to the past. Drawing on linguistic data from a variety of sources, and examining it at progressively finer levels of analysis, I argue that Fijian Methodist metacultural statements can have profound political impact and effectively circulate 'culture' in the general anthropological sense.