Blinding the Snake: Women's Myths as Insubordinate Discourse in Western Fiji

Abstract

How and in what cultural arenas do women contest, contradict or invert dominant ideologies of gender? This article examines how myths told by women in western Viti Levu, Fiji, represent a site of resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990) wherein hegemonic understandings of gender are contested. This is achieved through a "transformation of signs" (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, 1978) that sees authoritative male figures depicted as powerless, challenges a spatial order that privileges men, and attacks an order of knowledge that declares vision the dominant mode for the apperception of knowledge. By contravening dominant meanings, these myths present a "rupture of representation" (Sharpe, 1995) that subverts reigning constructions of truth. I argue that anthropology's understanding of the legitimizing role of myth must be tempered by an appreciation of its potential as a "risk to the sense of signs" (Sahlins, 1987:149).