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4. The Jungle and the City: Perceptions of the Urban among Indo- Fijians in Suva, Fiji by Susanna Trnka is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is 4. The Jungle and the City: Perceptions of the Urban among Indo- Fijians in Suva, Fiji about?

The city of Suva is located on the southeast side of Viti Levu, Fiji's largest island. With a population of over 167,000 and a downtown packed with bars, nightclubs, internet cafés and ethnic restaurants, Suva is, as tourist guidebooks like to point out, 'the most cosmopolitan city in the South Pacific' (Bienstock 2003: 406). It is also a city plagued by increasing levels of crime, contagious disease and environmental hazards. This chapter examines how Indo-Fijians, Fiji's second largest cultural group and roughly thirty nine percent of Suva's population, perceive of the City in opposition to the Jungle. 1 Mindful of the complex cultural understandings of 'clean' versus 'unclean' which for many Indo-Fijians shapes their identity as Hindus, I suggest how Indo-Fijian perspectives of urban spaces posit urban 'development' in relation to fears of an encroaching unruly 'jungle'. I do so by probing two moments of crisis, the destruction of parts of Suva during the May 2000 coup and the accidental burning of the Lami rubbish dump in July 2005, to demonstrate how urban spaces not only represent prosperity and progress, but can also be sites of intense distress.1. Approximately another fift

Author

Susanna Trnka

Publisher

Berghahn Books

Published

2022

Language

EN