1. The Levuka Study
Health, well-being, religious change and cooperation networks on the periphery of Fiji’s market-economyWinds of change are sweeping the Pacific Islands. Traditional cooperative systems of resource and labour sharing – the very practices that bind a community together – are being challenged and replaced by the exchange logics of the market economy. At the same time, new insurgent churches are threatening the extant socio-ritual order. The rapid rise of Pentecostalism – and possibly a spreading secularisation too – is undermining the old governing authority of the chiefs and their establishment churches. How, then, does this massive social upheaval – reforging social relations and introducing new worldviews and behaviours – affect a population’s health and well-being?
The New Zealand Royal Society Marsden-Te Apārangi funded project, The Levuka Study, is the first longitudinal study to systematically measure these broad social changes against individual self-reports of personal well-being. As the lead field researcher, my role has been to work on the design, planning, piloting and overall day-to-day management of this project, entailing the year-on-year collection of survey data from a cohort of 560 adult Fijians living in two villages and two informal settlements in the port town and former capital of Fiji, Levuka.
The project chose Levuka because of pre-existing social connections with the community. But we also chose Levuka because it is an ideal fieldsite for studying how different communities adapt their social systems when challenged by market change and uncertainty, and for studying how such social change affects individuals’ health and well-being differently. Even before Fiji’s capital moved to Suva in the 1880s, Levuka’s economy relied on a single primary export commodity: first sandlewood, then beche-de-mer, then copra, and now tinned tuna. In 2013, Levuka also became a UNESCO World Heritage site, but many of its 19th Century colonial builidings require urgent repair. With the devastation of Cyclone Winston and Covid-19, tourism in Levuka’s has further struggled, while capital flight and brain drain remain big problems. Quiet, beautiful and historically unique, Levuka also has a demography of different communities living in close proximity to each other, all seeking to respond to these same challenges. These range from the high-ranking Methodist chiefly village of Levuka-Vakaviti, to the informal settlement of Wailailai inhabited by Anglican ni-Solomoni (many descended from Fiji’s ‘blackbirded’ labourers), to the kailoma (Fijians of part-European decent) villagers of Vagadaci, and lastly, the ethnically and religiously diverse settlement of Baba, the largest of them all. For a comparative study of social change in the Pacific, few places could be more informative.
Now, quantifying and comparing how complex and dynamic social processes affect individual health and well-being is clearly extraordinarily difficult. It requires the thorough, systematic and culturally-nuanced collection of a wide range of data from the same individuals, and repeatedly over time as their lived conditions change. For example, research tools need to quantify how a person’s health and well-being might be affected when they move from subsistence living to paid employment, have children, marry, move to a city or to a new church. How might these changes also affect (or be affected by) the strength and breadth of their support networks (how often and who with do they share food, money or tasks ), or their practise of certain lifestyle behaviours, such as smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol or kava? Moreover, what role does age, gender, inherited wealth, customary rank, religiosity, ethnicity or land tenure, to name but a few potential factors, also play in these calculations?
The project began as early as 2021, but suffered delay due to Covid. Though finally, in late 2022, working alongside Dr John Shaver (Baylor University) and Professor Patrick Vakaoti (Otago), we undertook initial consultations with local leaders, completed cultural protocols and piloted the questions and translations of our large-scale survey. In addition to conducting GIS and kinship mapping, as well as ethno-histories for each site and an extensive census for every household, we decided that an effective annual survey must acquire data on the following conditions and behaviours:
- income and work-type,
- major changes to household wealth or composition in the last year (e.g. births, deaths, inheritances…etc,not listed in initial census)
- current residency (if migrated out, why?)
- self-reported social rank from 1-10 (in the village or settlement, and in wider Levuka),
- money sharing networks (with amounts shared and biographical data on cooperating partners)
- food sharing networks (with biographical data on cooperating partners)
- labour sharing networks (with the type of task shared and biographical data on cooperating partners),
- self-reports on physical health (1-10),
- illness frequency,
- alcohol consumption,
- tobacco consumption,
- kava consumption,
- perceptions on illicit drug use (cannabis and meth),*
- religious affiliation,
- church denomination switching,
- church and prayer group attendance,
- prayer frequency,
- church donations,
- self-report on personal happiness (1-10), and
20. self-report on personal life satisfaction (1-10).
* to avoid compromising either the informant or the study – and to mitigate socially desirable reporting – this question asked the informant to say ‘how bad is cannabis/meth from 1-10, rather than about possible illegal behaviour.
In early 2023, I led the training and coordination of five local researchers in their collection of this ethnographic survey data. We successfully collected data from 227/228 households in the greater Levuka area, and from 560/567 of all adults aged 18-65 living at the sites. In early 2024, I returned to Levuka and the research team (with two new members) successfully completed the Year 2 data collection for the cohort, with the cohort size growing to 571.
Analysis of the data is on-going, but presentations have been made locally, including at a research seminar for the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of the South Pacific in late 2023. Moreover, early results are showing important and sometimes surprising correlations. For example, a strong correlation between tobacco and alcohol avoidance and prayer frequency holds across all denominations – yet a similar correlation does not hold true across all denominations when looking at church attendance. We see also marked differences in how personal income more prominently affects self-perceived social status for women than it does for men. We have also seen how levels of happiness and life satisfaction grow with age (which – at least until recently – has been the opposite for Western societies). Crucially, we have also seen how historical and cultural differences between the two villages and the two informal settlements – such as levels of patri-localism and chiefly status – translates into different economic and religious behavioural trends.
Should you wish to know more about the study please contact me at tomwhitesmailbox@gmail.com
Other relevant materials can be found here…
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