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The method of hope anthropology philosophy and Fijian
knowledge 1st Edition Hirokazu Miyazaki Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Hirokazu Miyazaki
ISBN(s): 9780804748865, 0804748861
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.82 MB
Year: 2004
Language: english
The Method of Hope
The Method of Hope

ANTHROPOLOGY,

PHILOSOPHY,

AND FIJIAN KNOWLEDGE

Hirokazu Miyazaki

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Published with the assistance of
the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California
© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miyazaki, Hirokazu.
The method of hope : anthropology, philosophy, and Fijian
knowledge I Hirokazu Miyazaki.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8047-4886-r (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Ethnology-Fiji-Suva-Philosophy. 2. Ethnophilosophy­
Fiji-Suva. 3· Fijians-Land tenure-Fiji-Suva. 4· Fijians-Fiji­
Suva-Government relations. 5· Fijians-Legal status, laws, etc.­
Fiji-Suva. 6. Suva (Fiji)-Social life and customs. 7· Suva (Fiji)­
Politics and government. I. Tide.

GN671.F5M59 2004
305.8'oo996r r-dc22 2004004764

This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Original printing 2004

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
IJ 12 II IO 09 08 07 06 05 04

Designed and typeset at Stanford University Press in IOIIJ Sabon

For Annelise, my hope
F- Acknowledgments

This book is an ethnographic demonstration of a very simple argu­

ment: hope is a method of knowledge formation, academic and
otherwise. In more specific terms, it is a method for apprehending
a present moment of knowing. As an instantiation of this method,
the book juxtaposes hope in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin, and Richard Rorty with the long-standing hope of a
group of dispossessed Fijians, Suvavou people, to reclaim their
ancestral land. Ultimately, it seeks to bring into view the work of
hope in anthropological knowledge.
In the spirit of hope in this sense of the term, the book is also an
instantiation of my own hope as a response to the hope friends and
colleagues of mine have had in this project. The book draws upon
archival and field research done in Fiji between August 1994 and
March 1996, funded by the Division of Pacific and Asian History
at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the
Australian National University. I thank Donald Denoon for gener­
ous arrangements and my mother, Keiko Miyazaki, for additional
financial support.
For granting a research permit expeditiously, I thank the Fiji
government. The National Archives of Fiji provided me with a
research base during the entire period of my fieldwork, and I thank
Margaret Patel, then government archivist, and her staff for their
assistance.
From August 1994 until June 199 5, I lived at the Australian
National University, Suva Flats, in Laucala Bay and engaged in
extensive archival research at the National Archives of Fiji, as well
as at other government departments. For generous access to gov-
VIII Acknowledgments

ernment records, I thank Ratu Jone Radrodro, then permanent sec­

retary for Fijian Affairs, Ratu Viliame Tagivetaia of the Native
Lands and Fisheries Commission, Seru Naqase of the Native Land
Trust Board, Samu Levu of the Ministry of Lands and Mineral
Resources, and Samisoni Sawailau of the Ministry of Tourism. I
also thank the office of Roko Veivuke (Suva/Beqa) for assistance in
obtaining permission to access records at the Native Lands and
Fisheries Commission.
In late October 1994, I began my work in Suvavou, a Fijian vil­
lage near Suva, and I spent almost every day thereafter in the vil­
lage. From the beginning of July I 99 5, I lived near the village and
participated in Suvavou people's daily activities. I thank the chief of
the village, Tui Suva Ratu Epeli Kanakana, for generously allowing
me to conduct research in the village. I also thank Metui Muduna­
vosa, Seruveveli Dakai, and Pastor Samuela Ratulevu for their hos­
pitality. I also thank members of both Methodist and Seventh-Day
Adventist churches in Suvavou. In particular, I thank the vakatawa
(catechist) of the Suvavou Methodist church, Avisai Bokosa, and
William Dyer, Sakeasi Tuni Koroi, Uraia Kerekerelevu Rabuatoka,
and other senior members of the SDA church. Special thanks are
due to the Suvavou Soqosoqo Vakamarama (women's association)
for letting me participate in their meetings and activities. I thank
Alumita Koroi, Atelina Turagabeci, and Niko Tamani for research
assistance during the last five months of my fieldwork. Last, but
not least, I thank the Koroi family in Suvavou for taking such good
care of me during my research. In particular, I thank Makeresi,
who worked at the National Archives of Fiji, and Laisani, who is
now in Hawaii, for introducing me to the Tui Suva in October
1994. Subsequently, Sikeli and Ana accepted me into their family.
For critical comments in the early stages of this project, I thank
my teachers at the Australian National University, especially Don­
ald Denoon, Bronwen Douglas, Jim Fox, Margaret Jolly, Brij Lal,
Nicholas Thomas, and R. Gerald Ward, as well as my dissertation
examiners, Don Brenneis, Stephen Hugh-Jones, and Marshall
Sahlins.
For their careful reading of an entire draft of this book and for
Acknowledgments IX

their insightful comments, I thank Tom Boellstorff, Jane Campion,

Tony Crook, Jane Fajans, Iris Jean-Klein, George Marcus, Adam
Reed, Nicholas T homas, Matt Tomlinson, Christina Toren, and
especially Don Brenneis and Bill Maurer. Erica Bornstein, Vincent
Crapanzano, Patrick Deneen, Davydd Greenwood, Jane Guyer, Bill
Hanks, Naoki Kasuga, Webb Keane, Donald Moore, Bill Murphy,
Kathy Rupp, and Allison Truit also read portions of the manuscript
and provided me with consequential advice. Special thanks are due
to Naoki Kasuga and Matt Tomlinson for generously sharing their
knowledge of the Fijian language with me. Participants in my grad­
uate and senior seminars at Cornell University during the
2002hoo3 academic year also read an entire draft of the book. I
thank them all for their challenging comments. The core argument
of the book was presented at the 2001 meeting of the American
Ethnological Society held in Montreal, the 2002 meeting of the
American Anthropological Association held in New Orleans, and a
conference on pragmatism held in March 2003 at Cornell Uni­
versity's Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. I thank
Webb Keane, Joel Robbins, and Steve Sangren for their helpful
comments at these occasions. I am also deeply indebted to Muriel
Bell for taking a leap of faith in this somewhat unusual project and
for all her support and patience ever since. I also thank my copy
editor, Peter Dreyer, for his careful reading. Special thanks are due
to Jason Ettlinger for his assistance of many kinds at the last stage
of this project.
The book could not have been written without witnessing first­
hand the making of Annelise Riles's exemplary work. I am grateful
for her care as well as for her uncompromising criticism at every
step of this project. More than anything else, it is her faith in me
and my work that has sustained my hope. In anticipation of and in
the spirit of the argument of this book, she gave me both hope and
method.
The argument of this book has developed in a series of essays I
have written in both English and Japanese over the past few years,
portions of which appear in the book. All chapters were written
anew as book chapters, however, and the core argument of the
X Acknowledgments

book is presented here for the first time. More important, my

argument is predicated on the particular shape of the entire book
developed over the seven chapters. Portions of the following essays
appear in this book, and I thank their respective editors and pub­
lishers for permitting me to use them here:
"Faith and Its Fulfillment: Agency, Exchange and the Fijian Aes­
thetics of Completion," American Ethnologist [American Anthro­
pological Association] 27 (1 ) (2ooo): 3 1 -p.
"The Limits of Politics," People and Culture in Oceania Uapa­
nese Society for Oceanic Studies] 1 6 (2ooo): 1 09-22.
"Hobo toshite no kibo" ["Hope as a method"], Shakai jin­
ruigaku nenpo [Tokyo Metropolitan University Society for Social
Anthropology annual report on social anthropology] 27 (2001 ):
3 5-55.
"Bunka no seiji niokeru bubun to zentai" ["Parts and wholes in
the politics of culture"], Minzokugaku kenkyu Uapanese Society
for Ethnology journal of ethnology] 66 (2) (2001 ): 240-57.
"Delegating Closure," in Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and
Hawai'i, edited by Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis (Santa
Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp. 23 9-59.
The publication of this book was generously supported by the
Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. A grant
from Cornell University's Department of Anthropology made pos­
sible the speedy preparation of the index.

Throughout the book, Bible passages are quoted from the King
James Version and the standard Fijian translation. Some of the
names of Suvavou kin groups (i tokatoka, mataqali, and yavusa)
and individuals I use in this book are fictitious. As is the common
practice in Fiji, I use the term "Fijian" to refer to "ethnic Fijian."
F- Contents

A Note on Fijian Orthography X Ill

I Hope as a Method I

2 A History of Thwarted Hope 31

3 A Politics of Self-Knowledge so
4 Setting Knowledge in Motion 69

5 Intimating Fulfillment 86

6 Repeating Without Overlapping I08

7 Inheriting Hope I30

Notes I43

References I67

Index I93
F- Maps and Photographs

Maps

I The Suva Peninsula 34

2 The Suvavou and Lami area 35

Photographs

I Tui Suva Ratu Epeli Kanakana signing a report 44

2 Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka at a foundation-laying
ceremony rr 7
F A Note on Fijian Orthography

b is pronounced mb as in number
c is pronounced th as in thus
d is pronounced nd as in mend
g is pronounced ng as in sing
q is pronounced ng as in anger
The Method of Hope
1 F- Hope as a Method

This book examines the place of hope in knowledge formation,

academic and otherwise, in response to ongoing efforts in social
theory to reclaim the category of hope (see, e.g., Hage 2003 ;
Harvey 20oo; Zournazi 2002; cf. Williams 1979, 1989). These
efforts are part of divergent searches for alternative modes of criti­
cal thought that have followed the apparent decline of progressive
politics and the rise of right-wing politics (cf. Lasch 1991). As
David Harvey puts it: "The inability to find an 'optimism of the
intellect' with which to work through alternatives has now become
one of the most serious barriers to progressive politics. . . . I believe
that in this moment in our history we have something of great
import to accomplish by exercising an optimism of the intellect in
order to open up ways of thinking that have for too long remained
foreclosed" (Harvey 2000: 17).
Because these efforts constitute social theorists' response to con­
servative politicians' appropriation of the language of hope, for
most social theorists, hope as a subject immediately triggers a series
of ethical concerns regarding its content and its consequences (see
Crapanzano 2003 : 6; Zournazi 2002: 218). For example, in a
series of interviews with renowned thinkers on the subject of hope,
the philosopher Mary Zournazi has recently observed,
The success of right-wing governments and sentiments lies in rework­
ing hope in a negative frame. Hope masquerades as a vision, where the
passion and insecurity felt by people become part of a call for national
unity and identity, part of a community sentiment and future ideal of
what we imagine ourselves to be. It is a kind of future nostalgia, a "fan­
tastic hope" for national unity charged by a static vision of life and the
2 Hope as a Method

exclusion of difference. When, for the benefit of our security and

belonging, we evoke a hope that ignores the suffering of others, we can
only create a hope b ased on fear. (Zournazi 2002: 1 5)

Zournazi instead seeks to carve out a space for "a hope that does
not narrow our visions of the world but instead allows different
histories, memories and experiences to enter into present conversa­
tions on revolution, freedom and our cultural sense of belonging"
(ibid.: 1 8).
In a more sociologically inspired effort, the anthropologist
Ghassan Hage contends that we need to conceptualize societies as
"mechanisms for the distribution of hope," arguing that "the kind
of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates
among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distrib­
ute hope," and that neoliberal regimes have contributed to the
"shrinking" of this capacity (Hage 2003 : 3 ).
Although I am sy mpathetic to these efforts to reclaim hope in
progressive thought, the focus of my investigation in this book does
not concern either the ethical question of what the proper object of
hope should be or the sociological question of what social condi­
tion increases or decreases actors' capacity to hope. Rather, I
approach hope as a methodological problem for knowledge and,
ultimately, as a method of knowledge deployed across a wide spec­
trum of knowledge practices, as well as of political persuasions. It
is my conviction that any effort to reclaim the category of hope for
a greater cause must begin with an examination of the predication
of knowledge, academic or otherwise, on hope, and vice versa.
My investigation into hope draws on a comparative examina­
tion of very specific hopes in particular knowledge practices. The
book is first of all my own response to the long-standing hope kept
alive by the Fijians I came to know during ethnographic fieldwork
in Suvavou, Fiji. Since the late nineteenth century, Suvavou people,
the descendants of the original landowners of the Suva Peninsula,
where the city of Suva stands today, have sought proper compen­
sation from the government for the loss of their ancestral land.
Because of its economic and political importance, the government
has repeatedly maintained that the case cannot be reopened. De-
Hope as a Method 3

spite this repeated rejection, Suvavou people have continued to pe­

tition the government.
For Suvavou people, seeking this compensation has been more
than a matter of either monetary gains or identity. The long series
of petitions that they have sent to the government, I argue, repre­
sent an enduring hope to confirm their self-knowledge, the truth
about who they really are . In the Fijian context, what is true ( dina )
is effective ( mana ), and vice versa. For Suvavou people, to receive
a large amount of compensation from the government for their
ancestral land would be an effect of and proof of the truthfulness
of their knowledge about themselves. In this book, I seek to answer
a seemingly self-evident question: How have Suvavou people kept
their hope alive for generation after generation when their knowl­
edge has continued to fail them ? In order to answer this simple
question, the book investigates the work of hope across different
genres of Suvavou people's self-knowledge, ranging from archival
research to gift-giving, Christian church rituals, and business prac­
tices. An investigation of the semantic peculiarity of the Fijian term
i nuinui ( hope ) and its relationship to Christian and more secular
discourses of hope would be an important ethnographic exercise
(cf. Crapanzano 200 3 : rr-14; Franklin 1997; Good et a!. 1990;
Verdery r99 5 ) , but as I discuss below, the goal of the present study
is to shift from hope as a subject to hope as a method.
Ultimately, this book is an enactment of Suvavou people's hope
on another terrain, that of anthropological knowledge. In this sense,
the book is also an effort to bring into view the place of hope in aca­
demic knowledge. Some readers may find this juxtaposition contro­
versial. As discussed in chapter 2, by the time of my field research
( 1994-96), Suvavou people's struggle had been entangled with Fij i's
rising ethnic nationalism; moreover, the compensation Suvavou peo­
ple had demanded from the government might also be seen as hav­
ing potentially serious consequences for the country's economy (cf.
M. Kaplan 2004: 18 5 , n. 7). How is it possible, the reader may ask,
to equate Suvavou people's hope with academic hope ? My response
is to draw attention to a parallel between the ways in which Suva­
vou people, on the one hand, and philosophers such as Ernst Bloch,
4 Hope as a Method

Walter Benj amin, and Richard Rorty, on the other, generate hope,
or prospective momentum. In other words, my focus is not so much
on the divergent objects of these hopes as on the idea of hope as a
method that unites different forms of knowing.
I did not go to Fij i to study hope, and neither did I have the
philosophies of Bloch, Benj amin, and Rorty in mind when I went
there. The way my research focus shifted points to a broader theo­
retical issue that defines the character of my approach to the sub­
j ect of hope. I arrived in Fij i in early August 1994 intending to con­
duct ethnohistorical research into contemporary Fij ian perceptions
of turaga ( "chiefs " ) and vanua ( " land " and " people " ) . The ritual
complementarity of turaga and vanua has long been a central con­
cern in Fijian ethnography ( Hocart 1929; M. Kaplan 1988; M.
Kaplan 199ob: 8; M . Kaplan 1995; Sahlins 1985; Toren 1990,
1999), and my ambition was to follow Marshall Sahlins's lead
( Sahlins 1981, 1985, 1991) to examine this ritual relationship in
the context of Fij ian conceptions of the past (cf. M. Kaplan 1995 ) .

More specifically, my proj ect concerned the character of the rela­

tionship of turaga to vanua as a context and consequence of land
alienation during the mid nineteenth century.
I began archival research at the National Archives of Fij i in
August 1994. My target was the extensive body of government
records concerning land alienation during the nineteenth century,
and in particular the so-called Land Claims Commission's reports
( hereafter LCC reports ) on the history of each tract of land origi­
nally claimed by European settlers. My archival research led, how­
ever, to the unexpected discovery of something more intriguing
than archival records. Each day, I noticed a number of Fijian re­
searchers at the archives who requested and read the same LCC re­
ports as I did. Some were heads of mataqali (clans ) , and others
were interested persons from throughout Fij i, including a number
of Fij ian lawyers and "consultants " in Suva who specialized in pro­
viding legal advice on land disputes. My project turned to archival
research and its associated evidential practices, and, ultimately, to
the hope that the researchers, including myself, all shared in our re­
spective pursuits of documents. Numerous lawyers and consultants
Hope as a Method 5

and Suvavou people had themselves conducted extensive archival

research into the Suva land case, and Suvavou emerged as the focus
of my ethnographic project.
The parallels among the divergent Fijian, philosophical, and
anthropological forms of kno·.v ledge, and the unity I seek to bring
to l ight, rest on a particular notion of hope. In the terms of this
book, hope is not an emotional state of positive feeling about the
future or a religious sense of expectation; it is not even a subject of
analysis. Rather, following Bloch, Benjamin, and Rorty, I approach
hope as a method. In these philosophers' work, hope serves as a
method of radical temporal reorientation of knowledge. My insis­
tence on using the category of hope derives precisely from this
potential of hope as a method. As subj ects of analysis, desire and
hope are not easily distinguishable from each other, and the cate­
gory of hope can easily be collapsed into the more thoroughly the­
orized category of desire. 1 Anthropologists have recently adopted
desire as a cornerstone of analytical perspectives ranging from psy­
choanalysis to structural Marxism (see, e.g., Allison 2ooo; Sangren
2000 ) . Unlike the subj ect of desire, which inherently invites one to
analyze it with its infinitely deferrable quality, I argue, the concep­
tualization of hope as a method invites one to hope.
My investigation of hope as a common operative and method in
Fijian, philosophical, and anthropological knowledge practices
owes a particular debt to Marilyn Strathern's conscious efforts to
j uxtapose Melanesian knowledge and a nthropological knowledge
as comparable and parallel " analytical " forms (see Strathern 1 988,
1 990, 1 9 9ra, r9 9rb, 1 9 9 7 ) . Strathern has drawn attention to a
series of aesthetic devices such as decomposition and substitution
through which, according to her, Hageners in Papua New Guinea
make visible their " inner capacities " (Strathern 1 9 9ra: r98 ) .
Strathern has made use of the parallel a n d contrast between
" indigenous " and social analyses in her efforts, not only to ques­
tion assumptions behind anthropological analytical constructs such
as gender and part-whole relations (Strathern 1 9 9 7 ; see also chap­
ter 3), but also to extend Hageners' analytical devices to the shape
of her own analysis (see Crook, in press ) .
6 Hope as a Method

Annelise Riles's work The Network Inside Out extends Strath­

ern's concerns with analytical forms to analytical forms that resem­
ble forms of social analysis such as the network form ( Riles 2000 ) .
Whereas the distance and contrast between indigenous and social
analyses has enabled Strathern to extend the former to the latter,
the formal affinity and lack of distance between the knowledge
practices of NGO workers and those of social analysts has led Riles
to other analytical possibilities, not predicated on the existence of
distance. Here Riles tackles the broader analytical issues at stake in
divergent efforts to reinvent ethnography after the crisis of anthro­
pological representation (see, e.g., Clifford 1 9 8 8 ; Clifford and
Marcus 1 9 8 6; Comaroff and Comaroff 1 9 9 2 ; R. G. Fox 1 9 9 1 b;
Marcus and Fischer 1 9 8 6; and see also Rabinow 1 9 9 9 : 1 67-8 2 ),
and, in particular, in ethnographic studies of expert knowledge
where the idea of difference, whether cultural, methodological, or
even epistemological, cannot be sustained as a useful analytical
framework (see Boyer 200 1 ; Brenneis 1 9 9 9 ; Holmes and Marcus,
in press; Jean-Klein, in press; Marcus 1 9 9 8, 1 9 9 9 ; Maurer 2002,
2003; Miyazaki and Riles, in press; Reed 2003; Strathern 2000 ) .
In this book, I seek t o contribute t o this broader debate by
proposing a somewhat different ethnographic possibility. Specif­
ically, my investigation of the character of hope across different
forms of knowing, Fijian, philosophical, and anthropological,
points to replication as an anthropological technique ( cf. Strathern
1 9 8 8 ). By replication, I mean to allude to both the structuralist
notion of formal resemblance across different domains of social life
(see Faj ans 1 9 9 7 : 5-6, 2 6 7 ) and the notion of replication as proof
in scientific methodology. Although Harry Collins and other sci­
ence studies scholars have complicated our understanding of the
latter (see Collins 1 9 8 5 ; Dear 1 9 9 5 : 9 5 ; M . Lynch 1 9 9 3: 2 1 2; Sha­
pin 1 9 9 4 : 2 1 ; and see also Gooding et al. 1 9 8 9 ), I hope to demon­
strate during the course of my argument that replication is a useful
analytical metaphor for the present investigation into the character
of hope. Throughout the book, I have consciously sought to repli­
cate Suvavou people's hope as a modality of engagement with one
another, with their God, and with their government in my own
Hope as a Method 7

ethnographic engagement. In this sense, the book seeks to present

a modality of ethnographic engagement that is predicated not so
much on obj ectification, in the sense of analysis or critique, as on
reception and response. It was once again through Strathern's work
that I learned how acts of receiving and responding can be creative
work ( see, in particular, Strathern's response to Annette Weiner's
critique in Strathern 1 9 8 1 ) . It is equally important to note that my
discussion of Suvavou people's hope should not be mistaken as an
effort to draw attention to a seemingly more general mode of en­
gagement with the world that dispossessed people seem to exhibit
elsewhere in the world. What is at issue for me is at once both more
personal and more universal . More specifically, in this book, I seek
to develop an account of hopeful moments whose shape replicates
the way those moments are produced and experienced. Indeed, ulti­
mately, I hope to generate a hopeful moment.

Hope as a Methodological Problem

Hope first of all emerged for me as a methodological problem. In

the course of Fijian gift-giving, characterized by the interaction of
two parties "facing" ( veiqaravi) each other, there is a moment at
which the gift-giving "side " subj ects itself to the gift-receivers'
evaluation, and quietly hopes that the other side will respond pos­
itively. After finishing a speech consisting of a series of apologies
for the inadequacy of gifts, the spokesman for the gift-givers
remains motionless holding a tabua ( whale's tooth ) in front of him
until a spokesman for the gift-receivers takes it from him. In this
moment of hope, the gift-givers place in abeyance their own
agency, or capacity to create effects in the world (cf. Strathern
1 9 8 7 : 2 3 -24; Strathern 1 9 8 8 : 2 6 8-74 ), at least temporarily ( see
Miyazaki 2oooa ) . But what interests me most for present purposes
is that once the gift-receivers accept the gifts, they deny the impor­
tance of the act of gift-giving among humans and collectively pre­
sent the gifts to God. I have, for example, heard a spokesman for
gift-receivers say, in accepting gifts: "Your valuables have been
offered to Heaven so that we all may be given Heavenly blessing.
8 Hope as a Method

May [your chief] be blessed. May your descendants be blessed . . . .

May God love us and may our duties be possible. Our love is the
only valuable . " At the moment at which the gift-givers' hope is ful­
filled, it is replaced by another hope, hope of God's blessing on all
those involved. My interpretation is that this second moment of
hope is an echo of the first fulfilled hope: The first moment of ful­
fillment in ritual is an intimation of God's ultimate response. The
production of hope of God's blessing, then, is a product of a care­
fully orchestrated discursive play of human agency.
It soon became clear to me, however, that my own analytical
treatment of hope as the product of a ritual process was temporal­
ly incongruous with the prospective orientation of hope itself ( see
Miyazaki n.d. ) . The analysis was predicated on the assumption that
the manipulation of ritual language produces something (a sense of
collectivity, religious faith, hope, etc . ) . The retrospective treatment
of hope as a subject of description forecloses the possibility of
describing the prospective momentum inherent in hope. As soon as
hope is approached as the end point of a process, the newness or
freshness of the prospective moment that defines that moment as
hopeful is lost.
I am seeking here to ask a somewhat different set of questions
than those long explored in anthropological studies of the gift since
Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss ( Malinowski 1 9 22;
Mauss 1 9 66 [ 1 9 2 5 ] ) . First of all, the focus of my attention is not
so much on the question of reciprocity and the Maussian notion of
hau, or the "spirit of the thing given, " that prompts a return gift,
which have preoccupied generations of anthropologists ( see, e.g.,
Godelier 1 9 9 9 ; Sahlins 1 9 7 2 : 1 4 9 - 8 3; A . Weiner 1 99 2 ) . Second,
my attention to the temporal dimension of gift-giving may recall
Pierre Bourdieu's attention to temporal strategies in gift-giving in
the context of his critique of Claude Levi-Strauss's structuralist
treatment of exchange ( Bourdieu 1 9 7 7 : 4-6 ), but, unlike Bourdieu,
the methodological problem at stake for me is not the tension
between subjective and objective standpoints but the interconnec­
tion between the hope entailed in gift-giving and the hope entailed
in its analysis.
Hope as a Method 9

The argument of this book is that hope presents a set of method­

ological problems that in turn demand the temporal reorientation
of knowledge. Looking at hope as a methodological problem, and
ultimately a method, rather than a product or a strategic moment
in a language game or a semiotic process, leads us to reconsider
hope as a common operative in all knowledge formation. My claim
is that thinking through hope as a method allows us to begin to
confront the most fundamental problem-what knowledge is for.
My encounter with Fij ian hope resonates with the German
Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's discussion of a "not-yet" ( Noch­
Nicht) consciousness at the very moment at which hope is fulfilled
in his philosophy of hope ( Bloch 1986). I first encountered Bloch's
concept of the not-yet through the work of the Japanese anthro­
pologist and cultural theorist Naoki Kasuga, who has conducted
extensive ethnographic and historical research in Fij i . In an article
published in Japanese, Kasuga seeks to explain how Fijians main­
tain their faith in land as the ultimate source of everything good
even when land continually fails to fulfill this faith . According to
Kasuga, "Fij ians' persistent attachment to land is a daily reminder
of what has 'not-yet' come, to borrow Ernst Bloch's phrase (Noch­
Nicht), and of its immanent arrival. In the midst of disappoint­
ment, [the attachment to land] once again allows them to discover
that reality is still in a state of not-yet. This cycle in turn sustains
Fijians' persistent attachment to land" ( 1999: 386; my translation ) .
I shall return to this repetitive quality o f Fij ian hope later i n the
book.
Bloch's best-known work, The Principle of Hope ( 1986), has
received enthusiastic praise (e.g., Hobsbawm 1973: Steiner 1967:
90-91), as well as criticism ( e.g., Habermas 1983; Ricoeur 1986:
xiv), from influential thinkers .2 Bloch's argument has arguably had
its most prominent influence in the German theologian Jiirgen
Moltmann's Theology of Hope (1993a [1967]).3 Nevertheless,
although there have been numerous efforts to recuperate the
contemporary relevance of Bloch's philosophy ( see, especially,
Daniel and Moylan 1997; Hudson 1982; Jameson 1971; Jay 1984;
Levinas 1998: 33-42; Roberts 1990),4 unlike much-celebrated con-
10 Hope as a Method

temporaries and close friends of his such as Theodor Adorno,

Walter Benj amin, and Georg Lukacs,5 Bloch ( 1 8 8 5- 1 9 7 7 ) remains
a marginal figure in anthropology and in social theory more gener­
ally ( see Malkki 200 1 for a notable exception ) .6
From my point of view, what emerged at the intersection of
Bloch's philosophy of hope and my ethnographic encounter with
Fij ian hope was a methodological problem . In The Principle of
Hope, Bloch focuses on the question of how to overcome the incon­
gruity between the retrospective orientation of philosophy as a con­
templative form of knowledge and the prospective orientation of
hope. According to Bloch, it is this temporal incongruity that has
prevented philosophy from apprehending the nature of hope. In
Bloch's view, therefore, hope is a methodological problem, that is, a
problem of the retrospective character of contemplative knowledge. 7
Bloch's methodological framing of the subject of hope prompt­
ed me to rethink the temporal orientation of my analysis of Fij ian
gift-giving, referred to earlier ( Miyazaki 20oob; Miyazaki n . d . ) . To
the extent that my analysis followed the flow of the gift-giving
event, tracking every step of the ritual, in sequence, the temporal
orientation of my analysis mirrored that of the gift-giving event
itself. However, this prospective orientation was enabled by a ret­
rospective perspective of my own. My analysis was predicated on
the assumption that the moment of hope of God's blessing was an
effect of and part of the strategic manipulation of ritual language,
that is, it foregrounded what was analytically conceived as an end
point, or result. More precisely, my focus on the production of
hope followed the studies of Michael Herzfeld, Webb Keane, and
others of how actors' manipulation of the formal properties of rit­
ual language results in the emergence of certain particular forms of
consciousness ( Herzfeld 1 9 9 0, 1 9 9 7 ; Keane 1 9 9 7 c ) . From this
point of view, I understood the exchange of words and obj ects in
Fijian gift-giving as carefully designed to generate hope of God's
blessing among ritual participants ( see chapter 5 ) . The focus of my
analysis, in other words, was on the ritual process as seen from the
vantage point of its effects . As I would later come to understand,
any analysis that foresees its own end point loses its open-ended-
Hope as a Method II

ness. The temporal orientation of this analysis and that of the ritu­
al practices it described were incongruous. However, where the
focus on production demands a retrospective perspective from the
point of view of what is produced, ritual participants maintained a
forward-looking orientation at every step of the ritual. More pre­
cisely, from ritual participants' point of view, the maintenance of a
prospective perspective was at the heart of ritual performance. This
was true even though the same participants engaged in the same rit­
ual form repeatedly, and hence could be said to know the ritual 's
outcomes or effects (cf. Bourdieu 1 9 7 7 : 5 ) .
Upon discovering this temporal incongruity, my initial urge was
to pursue a framework of analysis that would replicate the tempo­
rality of every moment in the gift-giving event. In approximating
the structure of the ritual moment, analysis would in a sense be in
that moment. A framework of analysis that is completely synchro­
nous with a present moment is an illusion, however. The challenge
I faced is pertinent to a more general problem of how to approach
the infinitely elusive quality of any present moment. As William
Hanks has noted, "To say 'now' is already to have lost the moment.
To say 'here' is to obj ectify part of a lived space whose extent is
both greater and lesser than the referent" ( Hanks I 9 9 6b: 29 5 ) .
This paradox o f the present, according to Hanks, "produces a syn­
chrony, only to be superseded, overtaken by its own momentum,
unable to stop the motion of meaning" (ibid . : 2 9 5 -9 6 ) .
M y investigation of hope in this book begins with the impossi­
bility of achieving analytical synchronicity. Here, I once again turn
to Bloch, whose solution to the problem of the incongruity between
the direction of philosophy and that of hope is to reorient philoso­
phy toward the future. In his view, hope can only be apprehended
by hope. On the face of things, this move would seem to come up
against the same limit. However, I argue below that the difference
lies in the fact that Bloch's proposal does not treat hope as a sub­
ject of knowledge. Rather, it is a proposal to regard hope as a
method. From this point of view, the impossibility of achieving syn­
chronicity foregrounded in Bloch's concept of the "not-yet" be­
comes the means of apprehending hope itself. The remainder of this
I2 Hope as a Method

chapter is devoted to explicating this idea and examining its theo­

retical implications for anthropology and social theory more gen­
erally. For anthropology, this idea takes on the relevance of prob­
lems of agency and temporality. For social theory, it suggests an
unexpected point of confluence between German social thought
and American pragmatism as exemplified by the work of Bloch,
Benj amin, and Rorty. The ultimate goal of this exercise, however,
is not to theorize hope but to construct an analytical framework for
approaching concrete moments of hope that I encountered across
different domains of knowledge in Suvavou, ranging from archival
research to religious discourse to gift-giving rituals to business. I
first turn to philosophical arguments about the temporal orienta­
tion of knowledge entailed in efforts to capture hope as a subject
of contemplation. The question of hope in turn naturally invites the
question of God, that is, of the problem of the limits of human
agency. The next section therefore turns to questions of agency to
show how, for Bloch and others, questions of temporality displace
questions of agency. The chapter concludes that this displacement
is instrumental to hope as a method, that is, to these philosophers'
efforts to deploy hope as a means of apprehending hope. I follow
with an overview of the argument of the book as a whole, as it
unfolds in each of the individual chapters.

Reorienting the Directio n o f Knowledge

If there is little empirical ground for hope, on what grounds and for
what should one hope? For many philosophers, this deceptively
simple observation is at the heart of the problem of hope . 8 Just as
the focus of Christian eschatology shifted from a concrete hope for
the second coming of Christ to an abstract hope for an afterlife ( see
Bultmann 1 9 5 7 : 5 1 ; Kermode 2ooo: 2 5 ; Moltmann 1 9 9 3a [ 1 9 67] ),
the insufficient empirical foundation of hope has led many philoso­
phers to make a purely moral argument for hope ( see Ricoeur
1 9 8 6 : xv) . In Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Immanuel
Kant asks the famous question, "What may I hope? " ( 1 9 29 [ 1 7 8 1 ] :
6 3 5 ), or " I f I do what I ought t o do, what m a y I then hope? " ( 6 3 6 ) .
Hope as a Method 13

Kant's answer to this question derives from his assumption that

"there really are pure moral laws which determine completely a
priori ( without regard to empirical motives, that is, to happiness)
what is and is not to be done, that is, which determine the employ­
ment of the freedom of a rational being in genera l " ( 6 3 6 ) . For
Kant, "hope in the moral progress of human society " comes down
to "moral faith, " or faith beyond knowledge, the philosopher
Robert Adams observes ( 1 9 9 8 : xxv, xxvi), that is, faith in the pos­
sibility of "a moral world" ( Kant 1 9 29 [ 1 7 8 1 ] : 6 3 7 ), which is itself
also the condition of that possibility ( see also Peters 1 9 9 3 : 1 4 3 ) .
This understanding o f hope i s not s o different from the notion of
"hope against hope " often attributed to Saint Paul's comment on
Abraham, who "against hope believed in hope" (Rom. 4 : 1 8 ; see
Muyskens 1 9 7 9 : 1 3 6 ) or indeed of Kierkegaard's existentialist phi­
losophy (cf. Adams 1 9 8 7 ) .
Ernst Bloch's philosophy o f hope represents a significant depar­
ture from this conventional framework of philosophical contem­
plation on the subj ect of hope. In his magnum opus, The Principle
of Hope, Bloch seeks to "bring philosophy to hope " ( Bloch 1 9 8 6:
6 ) and analyzes a variety of hopeful visions ranging from day­
dreams to fantasies about technology to detective stories and the
Bible ( see also Bloch 1 9 8 8 ) . However, I read The Principle of Hope
not so much as a study of various manifestations of hope as an
effort to reconstitute philosophy on what he calls the "principle
hope " (das Prinzip Hoffnung). In my terms, Bloch's philosophy is
a proposal for hope as a method of knowledge.
In The Principle of Hope, Bloch confronts the limits of philoso­
phy in its capacity to comprehend "the world [as an entity] full of
propensity towards something, tendency towards something, laten­
cy of something" ( Bloch 1 9 8 6: r 8 ) . According to Bloch, the limits
of philosophy derive from its retrospective character: "Contempla­
tive knowledge [such as philosophy] can only refer by definition to
What Has Become " ; in other words, it "presuppose [s] a closed
world that has already become . . . . Future of the genuine, proces­
sively open kind is therefore sealed off from and alien to any mere
contemplation" ( ibid . : 8 ) .
 Hope as a Method

What Bloch points out here is the incongruity between the tem­
poral orientation of knowledge and that of its obj ect, the world .
According to Bloch, this incongruity has also prevented philosophy
from appreciating the character of hope. He proposes to substitute
hope for contemplation as a method of engagement with the world.
Bloch's philosophy of hope in this sense is a methodological move
to reorient the direction of philosophy: he thus proposes to turn
philosophy toward the future and to what has " not-yet " become.
Bloch introduces the notion of the not-yet consciousness as the
antithesis of the Freudian notion of the subconscious. If the power
of psychoanalysis is predicated on the rebounding power of the
repressed or suppressed, the power of hope as a method rests on a
prospective momentum entailed in anticipation of what has not-yet
become: "a relatively still Unconscious disposed towards its other
side, forwards rather than backwards. Towards the side of some­
thing new that is dawning up that has never been conscious before,
not, for example, something forgotten, something rememberable
that has been, something that has sunk into the subconscious in
repressed or archaic fashion " ( Bloch I 9 8 6: I I ) .
Moreover, according to Bloch, the philosophy that is open to the
future entails a commitment to changing the world: " Only think­
ing directed towards changing the world and informing the desire
to change it does not confront the future ( the unclosed space for
new development in front of us) as embarrassment and the past as
spell" ( Bloch I9 8 6: 8 ) .
The German Marxist philosopher's intense concern with hope
resonates, albeit in an unexpected manner, with the American prag­
matist Richard Rorty's own turn to hope.9 In a series of essays enti­
tled " Hope in Place of Knowledge, " Rorty reads John Dewey's
pragmatism as a proposal to replace knowledge with hope . As in
the case of Bloch, this turn to hope demands shifting the temporal
orientations of philosophy. According to Rorty, Dewey's criticism
of metaphysical philosophy for simply being "an attempt to lend
the past the prestige of the eternal " ( Rorty I 9 9 9 : 29 ) sought to sub­
stitute " the notion of a better human future for the [metaphysical]
notions of 'reality,' 'reason' and 'nature . ' . . . [Pragmatism] is 'the
Hope as a Method

apotheosis of the future' " (ibid . : 27 ) . The resonance between Bloch

and Rorty derives from their efforts to anchor their critique of phi­
losophy in the problem of the temporal direction of knowledge.
More concretely, their shared pursuit of a transformative philoso­
phy leads them to a shared concern with the future, that is, with the
direction of knowledge. American pragmatists' commitment to the
task of changing the world ( that is, making it more democratic )
could also be described as a future-oriented faith in themselves.
Rorty emphasizes that Dewey sought to make philosophy "an
instrument of change rather than of conservation, " even denying
that "philosophy is a form of knowledge " (ibid . : 29 ) . "American
pragmatism is a diverse and heterogeneous tradition. But its com­
mon denominator consists of a future-oriented instrumentalism
that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective
action, " Cornel West observes ( 1 9 8 9 : 5 ) .
Underlying Bloch's and Rorty's turn to the future is their critique
of the philosophical understanding of essence, or truth about
humanity that is given but is hidden from humans, captured in the
Greek notion of history as a teleological course of disclosure of this
essence. Bloch notes, for example, that "essence is not something
existing in finished form . . . [but] is that which is not yet " ( Bloch
1 9 8 6 : 1 37 3; emphasis removed ) . As Wayne Hudson puts it, Bloch
"replaces any conception of a settled world with the thought exper­
iment of a world kept open by the presence of futuristic properties
within it" ( Hudson 1 9 8 2 : 9 2 ) . Rorty similarly says: "What [prag­
matists] hope is not that the future will conform to a plan, will ful­
fill an immanent teleology, but rather the future will astonish and
exhilarate . . . . [What pragmatists share] is their principled and
deliberate fuzziness" ( Rorty 1 9 9 9 : 2 8 ) . Underlying Bloch and
Rorty's turn to the future is their critique of the Greek idea of
anamnesis and its associated teleological course of the world taken
for granted in metaphysics . For both, therefore, there is no God's
plan, no essential disposition of the world that will automatically
unfold. Both stress the indeterminate character of the direction of
the world; both abandon the notion of a predetermined end.
At the intersections of Bloch and Rorty's philosophy, therefore,
16 Hope as a Method

hope emerges as a method of engagement with the world that has

particular implications for the temporality of knowledge forma­
tion . In their view, hope invokes the limits of the retrospection of
philosophical contemplation and serves as a method for a philoso­
phy that is open to the future . In other words, the introduction of
hope to philosophy reorients philosophy to the future. This reori­
entation of knowledge has some significant consequences for a
range of issues that are central to the current concerns of social and
cultural theory. I wish to focus here, in particular, on the problems
of agency and temporality.

Sources of Hope: The Problem of Agency

The predication of hope on an understanding of the world as inde­

terminate is for both Bloch and Rorty preconditioned by a rejection
of the possibility of God . This raises a question about the source of
hope. For Rorty, that source is human agency. Rorty's self-con­
sciously aggrandizing concept of human agency explicitly rej ects
humility as instrumental to the production of hope.
The notion of humility "presupposes that there is, already in
existence, something better and greater than the human, " accord­
ing to Rorty, who proposes instead the notion of finitude, which
"presupposes only that there are lots of things which are different
from the human. " He adds: "A pragmatic sense of limits requires
us only to think that there are some projects for which our tools are
presently inadequate, and to hope that the future may be better
than the past in this respect " ( Rorty 1 9 9 9 : 5 1 -p ) .
Underlying Rorty's preference for the notion of finitude over
humility is his anti-essentialist rej ection of the pursuit of the essence
of humanity as the goal of philosophy: "humanity is an open-ended
notion, that the word 'human' names a fuzzy but promising proj ect
rather than an essence " ( Rorty 1 9 9 9 : 5 2 ) . This rej ection of the
notion of essence in turn leads him to emphasize human agency (or
human capacity to create a better future ) in place of God's agency:
pragmatists transfer to the human future the sense of awe and mystery
which the Greeks attached to the non-human; it is transformed into a
Hope as a Method 17

sense that the humanity o f the future will be, although linked with us
by a continuous narrative, superior to present-day humanity in as yet
barely imaginable ways. It coalesces with the awe we feel before works
of imagination, and becomes a sense of awe before humanity's ability
to become what it once merely imagined, before its ca pacity for self-cre­
ation. ( Rorty 1 9 9 9 : 5 2 )

For this reason, following Christopher Lasch's distinction

between hope and optimism ( I 9 9 I ), Patrick Deneen has argued
that Rorty's ( and Dewey's ) "hope " cannot be called hope. Rorty's
hope is simply "optimism without hope , " that is, "the disposition
that human problems are tracta ble without needing to resort to any
appeals to transcendence or the divine in their solution , " according
to Deneen, who contrasts Rorty's optimism without hope with
Vaclav Havel's "hope without optimism , " which, he says, is based
on "a fundamental mistrust in the belief that humans have the abil­
ity to solve political and moral problems, but that the appeal to a
transcendent source-through hope-can serve as a guiding stan­
dard, as well as an encouragement to action " ( Deneen 1 9 9 9 : 5 7 8 ) .
I n other words, for Deneen, Rorty's optimism cannot b e considered
hope, because hope is predicated on a concept of God, that is, of
transcendent agency, which in turn implies limits to human agency.
Rorty's move to eliminate the notion of transcendence from his
hope is deliberate and strategic. In fact, Rorty anticipates Deneen's
line of criticism:
A typical first reaction to antiessentialism is that it is too anthropocen­
tric, too much inclined to treat human ity as the measure of all things.
To many people, antiessentia l ism seems to lack humility, a sense of mys­
tery, a sense of human finitude. It seems to lack a common-sensical
appreciation of the obdurate otherness of things of this world. The
antiessentialist reply to this common-sensical reaction is that common
sense is itself no more than the habit of using a certain set of descrip­
tions . In the case at hand, what is called common sense is simply the
habit of using language inherited from the Greeks, and especially from
Plato and Aristotle. ( Rorty 1 9 9 9 : 5 1 )

Bloch's hope surfaces as an interesting counterpoint to both of

these positions. The question for Bloch as a committed atheist is
how to hope after the death of God (cf. Habermas 1 9 8 3) . Bloch's
18 Hope as a Method

starting point is that God is not a possible solution. " [N]o one, not
even the most religious person, today still believes in God as even
the most lukewarm, indeed the doubters, believed in him two hun­
dred years ago, " he observes in The Principle of Hope ( 1 9 8 6 :
1 29 1 ) . He therefore seeks to decouple the problem of hope from
the question of agency ( human versus God ) per se. More precisely,
for Bloch, hope actually replaces the problem of agency: imagined
nonhuman agents such as God are simply a manifestation of hope.
From this point of view, it is not God that is the source of hope but
hope that is the source of God:
The place that has been occupied in individual religions by what is con­
ceived as God, that has ostensibly been filled by that which is hyposta­
tized as God, has not itself ceased a fter it has ceased to be ostensibly
filled. For it is at all events preserved as a place of projection at the head
of utopian-radica l intention; and the metaphysical correlate of this pro­
j ection remains the hidden, the still undefined-underdefi nitive, the real
Possible in the sense of mystery. The place allocated to the former God
is thus not in itself a void; it would only be this if atheism were nihilism,
and furthermore not merely a nihilism of theoretical hopelessness but
of the universal-material annihilation of every possible goal- and per­
fection-content. ( Bloch 1986: II99)10

For Bloch, in other words, the important choice is not so much

between God and humans as between nihilism and hope. Upon the
death of God, the question of agency, whether human or nonhu­
man, fades into the background to the extent that it is understood
as a simple manifestation of human hope. For Bloch, the source of
hope is neither faith in God nor faith in humans. Hope is the source
of such faith.

Moments of Hope: The Problem of the Present

Bloch thus practically substitutes the question of temporality for

the question of agency. Underlying Bloch's turn to hope is his con­
cern with the problem of the present.11 In a series of essays entitled
" On the Present in Literature, " for example, Bloch confronts the
difficulty of accessing the present. For Bloch, the difficulty arises
from the lack of distance between oneself and the present moment
Hope as a Method 19

i n which one finds oneself:

Without distance . . . you cannot even experience something, [much]
less represent it or present it in a right way. . . . In general it is like this:
all nearness makes matters difficult, and if it is too close, then one is
blinded, at least made mute. This is true in a strict sense only for a pre­
cise, on-the-spot experience, for the immediate moment that is as a dark
" right-now " lacking all distance to itself. But this darkness of the
moment, in its unique directness, is not true for an a lready more medi­
ated right-now, which is of a different kind and which is a specific expe­
rience called " present. " . . . Nevertheless, something of the darkness of
the immediate nearness is conveyed . . . to the more mediated, more
widespread present by necessity, i.e., an increased difficulty to represent
it. ( Bloch 1 9 9 8 : 1 20 )

For Bloch, therefore, the problem of the present is emblematic of

the problem of one's alienation from self-knowledge. In his first
major work, The Spirit of Utopia, originally published in 1 9 1 8,
Bloch points out that our knowledge about who we are "represents
only an untrue form, to be considered only provisionally. We . . .
are located in our own blind spot, in the darkness of the lived
moment " ( Bloch 2000: 200 ) . For Bloch, hope emerges from this
condition of alienation from self-knowledge. Hope, according to
Bloch, "is in the darkness itself, partakes of its imperceptibility "
and "lifts itself precisely out of the Now and its darkness, into
itself" (ibid . : 20 1 , 20 2 ) .
The problem o f how t o approach the present has been one of the
most difficult puzzles in philosophy and exemplifies the problem of
the lack of analytical distance more generally. One solution has
been to move away from the idea of linear and clocklike temporal
flow that treats the present as an instant and to introduce uneven­
ness into the past-present-future relationship, of which the present
is the focal point (cf. Munn 1 9 9 2 : 1 1 5 ) . The phenomenologist
Edmund Husser!, for example, understands actors' perception of
the present as an intersection of what he terms retention, or the
accumulation of past actions and their consequences, on the one
hand, and protention, or plans for future actions (Husser! 1 9 64
[ 1 8 8 7 ] ; see also Schutz 1 9 70: 1 37-38 ) . From this perspective, Al­
fred Gell observes, as against the philosophical problem of the
20 Hope as a Method

"nothingness " of the present ( Sartre I 9 5 6 : I 7 5-79 ), Husserl sug­

gests that the present has its own "thickness " ( Gell I 9 9 2 : 2 2 3 ) . The
pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce calls the present "inscruta ble, " a
"Nascent State between the Determinate and the Indeterminate, "
adding, "the consciousness of the present is . . . that of a struggle
over what shall be; and thus we emerge from the study with a con­
firmed belief that it is the Nascent State of the Actual" ( Peirce
I 9 6o: 5 : 4 5 9, 4 6 2, quoted in E. V. Daniel I 9 9 6 : I 2 5-2 6 ) . William
James's theory of the consciousness of self also draws on his redef­
inition of the notion of the present: "the practically cognized pre­
sent is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of
its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two
directions into time " (James I 9 8 I [ I 8 9 o] : 5 74 ) . In a similar fash­
ion, George Herbert Mead famously develops the notion of the
present as "the locus of reality " in his theory of the emergent self:
A present then, as contrasted with the a bstraction of mere passage, is
not a piece cut out anywhere from the temporal dimension of uniform­
ly passing reality. Its chief reference is to the emergent event, that is, to
the occurrence of something which is more than the processes that have
led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance,
adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have pos­
sessed . ( Mead 1 959: 23 )

Nancy Munn ( I 9 9 0 ) shows that the present as a site of reality con­

struction contains intersecting temporalities that actors seek to
control.
In contrast to these efforts to develop a general theory of actors'
apprehension of the present, Bloch and Benj amin theorize the prob­
lem of how to apprehend a particular kind of present that they call
the "now " Uetzt]. "The now Uetzt] moves and propels itself
through each day, whenever. It beats in all that happens with its
shortest time span, and it knocks on the door, " Bloch writes ( I 99 8 :
I 27 ) . Yet, a s h e notes, the now i s not always accessible:
[N]ot every present opens up for it. The actual impulses, the socially
driving pu lses, do not beat in each present fresh and vita l . Not every
time opens up for the now and the next now that stands exactly at that
moment in front of the door and that has never " entered " before. It has
Hope as a Method 21

not unloaded its true contents with which and toward which it is on its
way. . . . That which we call the propelling now evidently does not
mean a nything other than the tendencies within all that exists project­
ed onto and atomized within the course of time. ( Bloch 199 8 : 1 2 7 )

Access t o the now, in other words, demands another "now, " that
is, a moment of hope.
The problem of the now is precisely the problem Walter
Benj amin tackles in his famous "Theses on the Philosophy of
History " ( 1 9 9 2 [ 1 9 6 8 ] : 2 4 5 - 5 5 ) . Let us consider for a moment
Benj amin's discussion of "hope in the past" to which Peter Szondi
has drawn attention ( 1 9 8 6; see also Didi-Huberman 2ooo: 9 9 ) .
Benj amin was once a close friend of Bloch's, and the two thinkers'
interests intersected (cf. Kaufmann 1 99 7 ; Geoghegan 1 9 9 6 ) . In
"Theses on the Philosophy of History, " Benj amin criticizes the idea
of history as a chain of cause and effect ( see Weber 200 1 : 20 1 ) by
pointing to the messianic role of the historian:
To a rticulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it " the
way it really was " ( Ranke ) . It means to seize hold of a memory as it
flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to
retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man sin­
gled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger a ffects both the
content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over
both : that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes . In every ear the
attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a con­
formism that is a bout to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as
the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that histori­
an will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is
firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if
he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious . ( Benjamin
1 9 9 2 [ 19 6 8 ] : 247; my emphasis; original emphasis removed )

Benj amin's messianic historian searches for unfulfilled hope in the

past and facilitates its fulfillment. We might call this attitude
toward the now retrospective from the perspective of the past's
future moment of its own salvation. 1 2
In Benj amin's "hope i n the past, " Szondi sees the "joining of
hope and despair" ( 1 9 8 6 : 1 5 6 ) . In other words, the historian's self­
assigned messianic mission becomes the basis for hope of the his-
22 Hope as a Method

torian's own salvation. The historian's messianic retrospection is

the source of hope in the future messianic historian even at a mo­
ment of despair. Benj amin therefore carves out a space for hope by
changing the character of the direction of historical knowledge. We
might say that Benjamin's hope is predicated on a dialectic of the
past and the present, defined as the past's eschatological future
moment (cf. Szondi 1 9 8 6 : 1 5 7 ) .
According t o Benjamin, this dialectic o f the past and its own
eschatological moment is conditioned by the past itself: "the past
carries with it a temporal index, according to which it is assigned
to salvation " ( Benjamin 1 9 8 0, vol. r : 49 5, quoted in Szondi 1 9 8 6 :
1 5 7 ) . In other words, the past points to the future moment of its
own salvation. This view of the past is predicated on a view of the
present as having an internal drive toward its own end point. What
fans "the spark of hope in the past" is the historian's retrospective
attention from the past's future end. The past has its own direc­
tionality, in other words, that invites the historian to participate in
its internal drive toward its own fulfillment.
What Benj amin's critique of history and Bloch's critique of phi­
losophy have in common are precisely this attention to the direc­
tion of knowledge and its associated reorientation of knowledge .
Just as described in the previous section, Bloch introduces a
prospective perspective to philosophy's retrospective contempla­
tion, Benjamin reverses the direction of historical knowledge, and
counters the linear temporality of conventional historical writing
that relates past and present as cause and effect with a retrospec­
tive intervention that relates past and present as the past's eschato­
logical future.
More important, both Bloch and Benjamin draw attention to the
character of a hopeful moment. For both, hope is always disap­
pointed . Yet, in Benj amin's view, hope in the present points to its
own future moment of salvation . Likewise, Bloch draws attention
to unfulfilled hope as "the repressed, the interrupted, the undis­
charged on which we can in one and the same act fall back upon
while it reaches forward to us in order to develop in a better way "
and points to how in this unfulfilled hope, "the corresponding
Hope as a Method 23

points of the now sparkle and transmit each other" ( 1 9 9 8 : 1 29 ,

1 3 0 ) . Both seek t o apprehend a moment of hope, in other words,
by striking it with a perspective whose direction is opposite to that
of the moment. In other words, to borrow Benj amin's expression,
the spark of hope flies up in the midst of the radical temporal reori­
entation in their own analyses.
For both Bloch and Benj amin, therefore, moments of hope can
only be apprehended as other moments of hope. Any attempts to
obj ectify these moments and turn them into outcomes of some
process, as both philosophy and history tend to do, are destined to
fail to capture the temporality of these moments. Bloch and
Benj amin succeed in recapturing the temporality of these moments,
rather, by reproducing another hopeful moment, the moment of
hope in their own writing. According to Bloch, the hopeful
moment, or the now-time, is "a turning point [that] gathers all the
undischarged corresponding elements within this time that is to be
shaped . . . [and that] is the resource that enables now-time to be
seen and yet not contemplated, thus without the loss of goal, with­
out the loss of its frontier characteristic " ( Bloch 1 9 9 8 : 1 3 1 ) .
From this perspective, I now wish to revisit my own initial
impulse for synchronicity between the temporality of my analytical
framework and that of the hope of Fijian ritual participants for
God's blessing. I mentioned at the outset that my initial response to
Fijians' ritual production of hope was an impulse to construct an
analytical framework that would be synchronous with the tempo­
rality of every moment of hope in the ritual. Note that this hopeful
impulse for synchronicity emerged for me at the moment of my
apprehension of the temporal incongruity between my analytical
attention and its obj ect, that is, others' hope. In other words, for
me, hope was simultaneously a cause and an effect of that incon­
gruity.
In light of the above discussion, the problem of incongruity
between the retrospective framework of production and that of
hope becomes a methodological opportunity. It was precisely at
that moment of incongruity that hope emerged as a driving force
for my own inquiry. At the moment when I apprehended the tern-
 Hope as a M ethod

poral incongruity between my own analysis of the ritual produc­

tion of hope and Fijians' hope, in other words, I replicated Fij ians'
hope on a methodological terrain. My point is that the real chal­
lenge posed by moments of hope is not so much the impossibility
of achieving the temporal congruity between knowledge and its
object as the immediacy of hope thus engendered, that is, hope's
demand for its own ful filment. In the method of hope, this hope for
synchronicity is a "representation" of the hope to which it is
deployed. Moments of hope can only be apprehended as sparks on
another terrain, in other words. The sparks provide a simulated
view of the moments of hope as they fade away.
In the five ethnographic chapters that follow, I wish to recapture
what Benj amin calls the sparks of hope that have flown up from
my encounter with the hope of Suvavou people. As I already have
suggested, these sparks are mostly products of incongruities
between the temporal direction of my own anthropological inter­
vention and that of Suvavou people's hope as a method of self­
knowledge. The challenge I face is how to preserve these sparks
while resisting the immediate demand of hope for synchronicity
that emerges in these incongruities. In these chapters, I examine the
work of hope across different domains of Fij ian knowledge rang­
ing from archival research (chapter 2) to distribution of rent money
(chapter 3) to petition writing (chapter 4) to religious and gift-giv­
ing rituals (chapters 5 and 6) and to business activities (chapters 3
and 6 ) .

A n Overview of the B o o k

Underlying my turn t o Bloch's philosophy is my hope t o carve out

a space for a new kind of a nthropological engagement with philos­
ophy. Recently, against earlier efforts to deploy non-Western
thought to challenge Western metaphysics (e.g., Levi-Strauss 1 9 6 2 ),
anthropologists have begun to engage in a more substantial man­
ner with the work of philosophers such as Wittgenstein ( Das 1 9 9 8 ),
Heidegger (J. F. Weiner 1 9 9 2, 1 9 9 3, 200 1 ), Peirce ( E . V. Daniel
1 9 84, 1 9 9 6 ; Lee 1 9 9 7 ), and Charles Taylor ( Geertz 2000 ) . AI-
Hope as a Method 25

though I am sympathetic to these anthropological attempts to tack­

le philosophical problems, this book is not such an attempt. 13 That
is, I am not interested in either extending Bloch's theoretical con­
structs to anthropology or reinterpreting the location of his work
in social and cultural theory.14 To do so would violate the spirit of
Bloch's work. In other words, Bloch's particular concept of hope as
a method has consequences for the character of the relationship
between knowledge and its obj ect that in turn demand a particular
kind of response. That is, if as suggested above, the conception of
hope as a problem has led many philosophers to look to moral
faith for a solution, I argue that the reconceptualization of hope as
a method simply demands its application and replication on a new
terrain.
My investigation into the character of Fijian hope is therefore
not so much a study of the hope of others as an effort to recapture
that hope ( Fijians' as well as Bloch's ) as a method for anthropolo­
gy. This general aim of the book manifests itself in the trajectory of
my investigation as unfolded in the next six chapters. In this chap­
ter, I have j uxtaposed my encounter with hopeful moments in
Fij ian gift-giving with Ernst Bloch's conceptualization of hope as a
methodological problem . Ultimately, I have suggested that a solu­
tion to this problem inheres in turning hope into a method of my
inquiry, that is, in retrospectively making explicit my own analyti­
cal hope as a replication of the hope as an analytical obj ect that had
prompted me to strive for temporal congruity between knowledge
and its object at the outset. In the following five chapters, with this
hope in mind, I retrospectively investigate hopeful moments across
different genres of Suvavou people's knowledge practices. My hope
is that the constellation of "sparks of hope " in this zigzag j uxtapo­
sition between my own analytical hope and Suvavou people's hope
will in turn point to yet another moment of replication, that is,
hope latent in the present of anthropological knowledge of which
this work is part. In this sense, the book is an ethnographically
informed speculation about what comes after hope. This seems to
be a particularly appropriate response to Bloch's philosophy of
hope given that it is "a doctrine of hope and ontological anticipa-
 Hope as a Method

tion, is itself an anticipation , " as Fredric Jameson puts it ( r97r:

rs8-s9).
In more concrete terms, in the chapters that follow, I demon­
strate that for the Fijians I knew, as for Bloch, hope was a method
of knowledge. More concretely, it was a method of self-knowledge,
that is, knowledge about who they were. As a method of knowl­
edge, I shall show, hope consistently introduced a prospective
momentum that propelled their pursuit of self-knowledge. I wish to
show how hope allowed the Fijians I knew to experience the limits
of self-knowing without abandoning the possibility of self-knowing
altogether.
Chapters 2 and 3 comprise an ethnographic introduction to Su­
vavou and also seek tb situate Suvavou people's hope at the inter­
section of their pursuit of compensation for the loss of their ances­
tral land and their effort to confirm their knowledge about them­
selves. In chapter 2, "A History of Thwarted Hope, " I discuss the
shifting location of Suvavou people's hope in Fij i's political econo­
my. My focus is on a history of Suvavou people's engagement with
the government since the late nineteenth century and, in particular,
on the government's evaluation of Suvavou people's knowledge
about themselves. At the time of my research, the government
treated Suvavou people with a certain degree of sympathy and also
perceived Suvavou people's affairs to be " sensitive " because of
their history. However, both colonial and postcolonial government
officials approached Suvavou people with a patronizing and even
condescending attitude. In these officials' view, Suvavou people
were " i lliterate " and " ignorant" ; moreover they were not authen­
tic traditional Fijians because of the negative effects of their long­
time exposure to city life . Following the two military coups in 1987
that toppled the democratically elected coalition government of the
multi-ethnic Labour Party and the Indo-Fijian dominated National
Federation Party, however, Suvavou sympathizers emerged within
and outside of the government owing to their status as an arche­
typical disenfranchised and dispossessed indigenous people. Yet
even these sympathizers expressed some doubt about the authen­
ticity of Suvavou people's self-knowledge. The ultimate goal of this
Hope as a Method 27

chapter is to point to gaps between these sympathizers' hope for

Suvavou people, as dispossessed indigenous people, and Suvavou
people's own hope. This incongruity in turn sets the stage for my
examination of the incongruities between the direction of anthro­
pological intervention and that of Suvavou people's hope in the
chapters that follow.
If chapter 2 situates Suvavou people in the wider politics of
indigenous knowledge, in chapter 3, "A Politics of Self-Knowl­
edge , " I turn to the internal politics of Suvavou. My focus is on the
character of reorientation of knowledge in the context of disputes
among Suvavou mataqali over the method of distribution of rent
money received from the government for the use of their lands. The
disputes revolved around a contest between two notions of a
whole: the whole defined by the act of combination of parts, and
the whole defined by the act of division. In recent years, the emer­
gence of a village company and associated concepts of company
shares had introduced a new notion of a whole defined by
exchangeable parts ( shareholders ) . My argument is that these com­
peting conceptions of wholes had different temporal implications
for the politics of self-knowledge.
In chapters 4, 5 , and 6, I address the question of how Suvavou
people have kept alive their hope. My focus is on the interplay of
agency and temporality in the production of hope. Drawing on my
discussion of the politics of self-knowledge in chapters 2 and 3, I
investigate how Suvavou people have striven to introduce a
prospective momentum to a present moment constantly invaded by
retrospection. In these three chapters, I also address three themes
that are central to Bloch's philosophy of hope, that is, ( 1 ) indeter­
minacy as a condition of the possibility for hope; ( 2 ) the back­
grounding of the problem of agency in the production of hope; and
( 3) the repetitive quality of hope.
In chapter 4, "Setting Knowledge in Motion, " I draw attention
to the predication of Suvavou people's hope on a delicate balance
between an emphasis on future-oriented openness and an anticipa­
tion of a moment of closure. My focus is on the content and form
of petitions that Suvavou people have sent to the government over
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 »Senpä minä juuri pyydän saada kertoa teidän ylhäisyydellenne.»
»Pyydän, tehkää se, ja Jumalan nimessä, tehkää se nopeasti, mies.
Sillä jos minun täytyy vaivautua kuuntelemaan jokaista petturikoiraa,
niin täytyy minun istua tässä kevätkäräjiin saakka.»

»Olin siellä, teidän ylhäisyytenne, lääkärin asioissa, sitomassa

lordi
Gildoyn haavoja.»

»Mitä tämä merkitsee? Kerrotteko meille, että muka olisitte

lääkäri?»

»Oppiarvon suorittanut Kolminaisuuden yliopistossa Dublinissa.»

»Hyvä Jumala!» huudahti lordi Jeffreys korottaen ääntään ja

katsoen juryyn. »Mikä häpeämätön roisto! Te kuulitte todistajan
äsken sanovan, että hän oli tuntenut hänet Tangerissa vuosikausia
sitten ja että hän silloin oli Ranskan palveluksessa oleva upseeri. Te
kuulitte syytetyn myöntävän, että todistaja oli puhunut totta.»

»Niin hän olikin. Mutta se mitä minä nyt kerron teille, on myös
totinen tosi. Muutama vuosi sitten olin sotilas, mutta sitä ennen olin
jo lääkäri ja olen sitä ollut taas viime tammikuusta saakka asetuttuani
Bridgewateriin, kuten sadat todistajat voivat todistaa, jos tarvitaan.»

»Siihen ei ole tarpeellista tuhlata aikaamme. Tahdon omalla

roistomaisella suullanne näyttää valheeksi puheenne. Kysyn teiltä
vain: Kuinka jouduitte Monmouthin herttuan armeijaan, vaikka
esitätte itsenne tässä lääkärinä, joka harjoittaa rauhallista
ammattiaan Bridgewaterin kaupungissa?»
 »En ole koskaan kuulunut siihen armeijaan. Ei kukaan ole
todistanut sitä eikä tule todistamaankaan, sen vannon. Minulla ei
ollut mitään tekemistä äskeisen kapinan kanssa. Pidin sitä
mielettömänä seikkailuna. Rohkenen kysyä teidän ylhäisyydeltänne,
(hänen irlantilainen murteensa tuli entistä tuntuvammaksi) mitä
minulla, joka olen syntynyt ja kasvatettu paavin uskossa, saattoi olla
tekemistä armeijassa, joka taisteli protestanttisuuden puolesta?

»Tekö paavin uskolainen?»

Ylituomari tuijotti häneen hetken. »Pikemminkin te muistutatte

honottavaa, määkivää presbyteeriläis-Taavettia. Vakuutan, mies, että
haistan presbyteeriläisen jo neljänkymmenen mailin päästä.»

»Siinä tapauksessa rohkenen ihmetellä, ettei niin tarkka nenä

haista paavinuskolaista neljän jalan päästä.»

Parvekkeelta kuului naurun hihitystä, mutta tuomarin tuima katse

ja oikeudenpalvelijain ääni vaimensivat sen heti.

Lordi Jeffreys nojasi eteenpäin pöytää vasten. Hän kohotti hienon

kätensä, jossa hän vieläkin piteli pitsiröyhelöistä, hyväntuoksuista
nenäliinaansa.

»Jätämme uskontokysymyksen sikseen tällä kertaa, ystäväni»,

sanoi hän. »Mutta huomatkaa tarkoin, mitä sanon.» Hän korosti
hennolla etusormellaan jokaista sanaa. »Tietäkää, ystäväni, ettei ole
mitään uskontoa, joka antaisi luvan valehtelemiseen. Teillä on kallis
kuolematon sielu, eikä ole mitään koko maailmassa, joka olisi
arvokkaampaa kuin se. Ajatelkaa, että suuri taivaan ja maan Jumala,
jonka tuomioistuimen edessä te ja me ja kaikki ihmiset viimeisenä
päivänä seisomme, on kostava teille jokaisen valheen ja
oikeudenmukaisesti heittävä teidät iankaikkiseen tuleen, pudottava
teidät tulisen pätsin pohjattomaan kuiluun, jos väistytte hivenenkään
totuuden tieltä, hivenenkään, sillä minä vakuutan teille, että Jumala
ei anna itseään pilkata. Tämän perusteella vaadin teitä vastaamaan
totuuden mukaisesti:

Miten jouduitte vangituksi näiden muiden kapinallisten kanssa?»

Peter Blood tuijotti hetken hämmästyneenä yli tuomariin. Mieshän oli
uskomaton, epätodellinen, mielikuvituksellinen painajaistuomari.
Sitten hän kokosi ajatuksensa ja vastasi:

»Minua pyydettiin tuona aamuna auttamaan lordi Gildoyta ja minä

pidin velvollisuutenani noudattaa pyyntöä, koska olin sen ammatin
harjoittaja.»

»Vai piditte velvollisuutenanne!»

Ylituomari, jonka kasvot olivat pelottavan näköiset — ne olivat

kalmankalpeat, ja hänen vääntyneet huulensa olivat punaiset kuin
veri, jota hän janosi — katsoi Peter Bloodia häijyn pilkallisesti. Sitten
hän hillitsi itsensä, kuten näytti, vaivoin. Hän huokasi ja puhui
aikaisempaan, hiljaisen valittavaan tapaansa. »Hyvä Jumala, miten
te tuhlaatte kallista aikaamme! Mutta minä koetan olla kärsivällinen
kanssanne. Kuka teitä pyysi sinne?»

»Master Pitt tuossa, kuten hän voi todistaa.»

»Oh! Master Pitt todistaa — hän, joka itse on tunnustanut

olevansa maanpetturi. Siinäkö teidän todistajanne ovat?»

»Täällä on myös master Baynes, joka voi todistaa samaa.»

 »Master Baynesin on vastattava omista synneistään, ja minä
luulen että hänellä tulee olemaan täysi työ koettaessaan vapauttaa
kaulansa hirttosilmukasta. No, sir, eikö teillä ole muita todistajia?»

»Voisin saada Bridgewaterista muitakin todistajia, jotka näkivät

minun lähtevän sinä aamuna master Pittin hevosen selässä
matkaan.»

Hänen ylhäisyytensä hymyili. »Se ei ole tarpeellista. Sillä

huomatkaa, minä en aio tuhlata enempää aikaa teidän vuoksenne.
Vastatkaa minulle ainoastaan: Tiesittekö, kun master Pitt, kuten
väitätte, tuli teitä noutamaan, että hän, kuten kuulitte hänen
tunnustavan, oli kuulunut Monmouthin kapinallisiin.»

»Tiesin, teidän ylhäisyytenne.»

»Te tiesitte! Vai niin!» Lordi katsoi pelokkaaseen juryyn ja naurahti

lyhyesti. »Ja siitä huolimatta menitte hänen kanssaan?»

»Auttamaan haavoitettua ihmistä, kuten pyhä velvollisuuteni

vaati!»

»Pyhä velvollisuutenne, sanoitte?» Lordi raivostui taas. »Hyvä

Jumala! Missä käärmeitten sukukunnassa elämmekään! Teidän pyhä
velvollisuutenne, roisto, kuuluu kuninkaalle ja Jumalalle. Mutta
olkoon. Kertoiko hän teille, ketä teidät pyydettiin auttamaan?»

»Kyllä — lordi Gildoyta.»

»Ja te tiesitte, että lordi Gildoy oli haavoittunut taistelussa ja millä

puolella.»

»Tiesin sen.»
 »Ja sittenkin, vaikka koetatte uskotella meille, että olette
herramme kuninkaan uskollinen alamainen, menitte auttamaan
häntä?»

Peter Blood menetti kärsivällisyytensä hetkeksi.

»Minulla oli tekemistä vain hänen haavojensa eikä hänen

valtiollisten mielipiteittensä kanssa, teidän ylhäisyytenne.»

Hyväksymisen mutinaa kuului sekä parvekkeelta että juryn

puolelta. Se oli omiaan vain saamaan ylituomarin täyteen raivoon.

»Jeesus Jumala!» huusi hän. »Onko maailmassa koskaan nähty

hävyttömämpää vintiötä kuin te?» Hän kääntyi kalmankalpeana juryn
puoleen. »Minä toivon, herrat juryn jäsenet, että te otatte huomioon
tämän petturiroiston kauhistuttavan käytöksen, ja siitä te ette voi olla
havaitsematta, millainen mielenlaatu tämänkaltaisilla ihmisillä on,
kuinka konnamaista ja pirullista heidän menettelytapansa on. Omalla
suullaan on hän lausunut hirttotuomionsa moneen kertaan ja vielä
siinä on lisää. Vastatkaa minulle, sir: Kun te saitte petetyksi kapteeni
Hobartin valheillanne tämän toisen petturin, Pittin, yhteiskunnalliseen
asemaan nähden, missä ominaisuudessa te silloin toimitte?»

»Pelastaakseni hänet joutumasta ilman tutkintoa hirtetyksi, kuten

häntä uhattiin.»

»Mitä teillä oli sen asian kanssa tekemistä, joutuiko hän hirteen ja
miten se tapahtui?»

»Oikeudenmukaisuus on jokaisen uskollisen alamaisen asia, sillä

oikeudenrikos, jonka kuninkaan valtuutettu tekee, tuottaa häpeää
hänen kuninkaalliselle majesteetilleen.»
 Se oli ovelasti ja terävästi sinkautettu huomautus jurylle ja se
ilmaisi, miten valpas ja maltillinen miehemme äly oli ja miten se juuri
äärimmäisen vaaran hetkellä oli terävimmillään. Jokaiseen muuhun
juryyn se varmaan olisi tehnyt tarkoitetun vaikutuksen. Se olisi
saattanut tehdä sen tähänkin juryyn, joka oli kokoonpantu aroista
lampaista, ellei ylituomarin pelottava hahmo olisi tehnyt sitä tyhjäksi.

Lordi Jeffreys nojautui raskaasti eteenpäin ja haukkoi ilmaa

hämmästyksestä.

»Herra taivaassa!» myrskysi hän. »Onko koskaan nähty

hävyttömämpää roistoa? Mutta asia on selvä. Minä näen jo, mikä te
olette miehiänne. Näen hirttonuoran kaulallanne.»

Sanottuaan sanottavansa loppuun silmät häijysti mulkoilevina hän

rauhoittui ja istuutui takaisin paikalleen. Oli kuin esirippu olisi
pudonnut. Kaikki mielenliikutus hävisi hänen kalpeilta kasvoiltaan.
Niille palasi taas entinen, hiljainen surumielisyys. Kun hän taas
hetken perästä puhui, oli hänen äänensä pehmeä, miltei hellä, ja
kuitenkin kuului joka sana selvästi suuressa oikeussalissa.

»Jos tunnen sydämeni oikean laadun, niin en tahtoisi vahingoittaa

ketään, vielä vähemmän iloita siitä, että joku menee iankaikkiseen
kadotukseen. Ainoastaan säälistä teitä kohtaan olen tuhlannut näin
paljon sanoja tähtenne, koska tahtoisin, että panisitte jotakin arvoa
kuolemattomalle sielullenne, ettekä saattaisi sitä iankaikkiseen
kadotukseen itsepintaisesti turvautumalla valheeseen ja
kiroilemiseen. Mutta huomaan, että mitkään yritykset siihen
suuntaan eivät vaikuta teihin nähden mitään, ja sen vuoksi en aio
sanoa teille enempää.» Hän käänsi taas kauniit, tarkkaavat
kasvonsa juryn puoleen. »Hyvät herrat, minun täytyy lain puolesta,
jonka tulkitsijoita me olemme ettekä te, selittää, että jos joku henkilö
on tosiasiallisesti noussut kapinaan kuningasta vastaan ja joku
toinen henkilö — joka ei todella vielä asiallisesti ole tehnyt sitä —
tieten ottaa luokseen ja majoittaa, hoivaa ja auttaa häntä, niin on hän
yhtä suuressa mitassa kapinallinen kuin se, joka kantoi asetta. Me
olemme valamme ja omantuntomme velvoituksella sidotut
osoittamaan teille, mitä laki on, ja te olette valanne ja omantuntonne
perusteella velvolliset lausunnossanne ilmaisemaan ja päättämään,
minkä tuomion lain totuus teitä vaatii langettamaan.»

Sitten hän jatkoi tulkintaansa selittäen, millä tavalla Baynes ja

Blood olivat syypäitä valtiopetokseen, ensinmainittu sen vuoksi että
hän oli ottanut luokseen maanpettureita, ja jälkimmäinen sen nojalla,
että hän oli auttanut petturia hoitamalla hänen haavojaan. Hän
sovitteli puheensa lomaan teennäisiä viittauksia luonnolliseen
herraansa ja lailliseen ruhtinaaseensa, kuninkaaseen, jonka Jumala
oli heidän valtiaakseen asettanut, sekä moitti nonkonformisteja ja
Monmouthia, josta — omien sanojensa mukaan — uskalsi varmasti
sanoa, että alhaisimmallakin alamaisella, joka oli laillisesti avioliitosta
syntynyt, oli suurempi oikeus kruunun perimiseen kuin hänellä.

»Jeesus Jumala! Että meidän pitääkin elättää keskuudessamme

sellaista kyykäärmeitten sukukuntaa», lopetti hän vihdoin retorisin
elein vimmaisen purkauksensa. Sitten hän vaipui paikalleen
väsyneenä ponnistuksestaan. Hetken hän oli aivan hiljaa pyyhkien
vain huuliaan. Sitten hän liikahti levottomasti. Uudelleen vääntyivät
hänen kasvonsa tuskaisesti ja muutamin kähein, miltei hajanaisin
sanoin hän lähetti juryn tekemään päätöstään.

Peter Blood oli kuunnellut hänen hillitöntä, jumalatonta ja miltei

iljettävän herjaavaa sanatulvaansa osoittaen mielenmalttia, mikä
häntä perästäpäin ihmetytti. Hän hämmästyi siinä määrin miestä,
hänen sielullisesti ja ruumiillisesti vaihtelevia tilojaan ja hänen
uhkailevaa ja verenvuodatukseen pakottavaa menettelyään juryyn
nähden, että hän miltei unohti, että hänen oma elämänsä oli
kyseessä.

Häikäistyn juryn poissaolo ei kestänyt kauan. Lausunto julisti

kaikki kolme vankia syyllisiksi. Peter Blood katsoi ympärilleen
punaiseen verhotussa salissa ja hetken hänestä näytti kuin
kalpeitten kasvojen muodostamat rivit olisivat huojuneet. Sitten hän
oli taas oma itsensä ja hän kuuli äänen kysyvän, mitä hänellä oli
sanomista siihen ja miksi hän ei saisi kuolemantuomiota, kun hän
kerran oli todistettavasti ollut mukana maanpetoksellisessa
toiminnassa.

Hän nauroi ja hänen naurunsa kuulosti aavemaisen kamalalta

kuoleman hiljaisuuden vallitessa oikeussalissa. Koko toimitus oli ollut
äärimmäisen luonnoton. Sanomatonta oikeuden pilkkaa, jota tuo
punaviittainen, tutkivasilmäinen ilveilijä oli jakanut, kostonhimoisen ja
raa’an ilkeämielisen kuninkaan lahjottava kätyri, jonka koko olemus
oli rienaajan. Peter Bloodin nauru taittoi kokonaan kärjen ilveilijän
ankaruudelta.

»Nauratteko, sir, hirttonuora kaulallanne, aivan iankaikkisuuden

kynnyksellä, jonka yli te aivan kohta olette astuva.»

Silloin Peter Blood kosti.

»Totisesti minulla on parempi syy nauruun kuin teillä, teidän

ylhäisyytenne. Sillä minulla on, ennen kuin lausutte tuomioni, vielä
jotakin sanomista teille. Teidän ylhäisyytenne näkee minut —
viattoman miehen, jonka ainoa rikos on siinä, että harjoitin
armeliaisuutta — hirttonuora kaulassa. Teidän ylhäisyytenne puhuu
minulle oikeusoppineena asiantuntevasti, mitä minulle on tapahtuva.
Minä saanen lääkärinä sanoa yhtä varmalla asiantuntemuksella,
mitä teidän ylhäisyydellenne on tapahtuva. Vakuutan teille, etten nyt
vaihtaisi osaani teidän kanssanne, että en vaihtaisi sitä nuoraa,
jonka te heitätte kaulaani, siihen kiveen, jota te kannatte
ruumiissanne: Se kuolema, jonka te ehkä nyt sanelette minulle, on
kepeä huvi siihen kuolemaan verrattuna, johon teidät on tuominnut
se suuri Tuomari, jonka nimeä te niin kevyesti käyttelette.»

Herra ylituomari jäykistyi, hänen kasvonsa muuttuivat

tuhkanharmaiksi ja hänen huulensa vavahtivat. Olisi voinut laskea
kymmeneen ennen kuin kuului ääntäkään hämmästyksestä
halvaantuneessa oikeussalissa Peter Bloodin lopetettua puheensa.
Kaikki, jotka tunsivat lordi Jeffreysin, käsittivät sen myrskyn edellä
vallitsevaksi tyveneksi ja varustautuivat rajuilman puhkeamisen
varalle. Mutta se ei puhjennut. Hitaasti, heikosti palasi väri
tuhkanharmaille kasvoille. Punaviittainen mies menetti jäykkyytensä
ja kumartui eteenpäin. Hänen ylhäisyytensä alkoi puhua. Hiljaisella
äänellä ja lyhyesti — paljon lyhyemmin kuin hänen tapansa oli
sellaisissa tilaisuuksissa ja aivan koneellisesti kuten ihmisien, jonka
ajatukset ovat kaukana siitä mitä huulet puhuvat — hän julisti
kuolemantuomion asiaankuuluvassa järjestyksessä ja viittaamatta
sanallakaan siihen, mitä Peter Blood oli sanonut. Lopetettuaan hän
vaipui peräti uupuneena tuoliinsa, silmät puoleksi ummessa ja otsa
kiiltävänä hiestä.

Vangit marssivat ulos.

Herra Pollexfenin — whig-puoluelainen huolimatta asemastaan

ylimpänä syyttäjänä — kuuli eräs juryn jäsenistä kuiskaavan
vierustoverinsa korvaan:
 »Sieluni kautta, tuo musta roisto säikähdytti hänen ylhäisyytensä
perin pohjin. Oikein käy sääliksi häntä, kun hänen täytyy kuolla
hirsipuussa. Sillä mies, joka pystyy pelottamaan Jeffreysiä, menisi
varmaan pitkälle.»

Neljäs luku

IHMISKAUPPAA

Herra Pollexfen oli yhtaikaa sekä oikeassa että väärässä, seikka

joka sattuu paljon useammin kuin yleensä luullaankaan.

Hän oli oikeassa lausuessaan välinpitämättömästi ajatuksensa,

että mies, jonka ilmeet ja sanat saattoivat pelästyttää niin pelätyn
miehen kuin lordi Jeffreys oli, pystyi luomaan luonteensa voimalla
huomattavan tulevaisuuden. Hän oli väärässä — vaikkakin
anteeksiannettavasti — otaksuessaan, että Peter Blood joutuisi
hirteen.

Olen sanonut, että niihin harmeihin, joita hänen

armeliaisuuskäyntinsä Oglethorpessa aiheutti hänelle, sisältyi —
vaikkei hän silloin sitä tietenkään käsittänyt — kaksikin syytä
kiitollisuuteen. Toinen oli se, että hän ylimalkaan joutui oikeuden
eteen, ja toinen taas, että oikeudenkäynti sattui syyskuun
yhdeksänneksitoista päiväksi. Yhdeksänteentoista päivään saakka
oli oikeuden tuomiot pantu täytäntöön pilkulleen ja siekailematta.
Mutta yhdeksännentoista päivän aamuna saapui Tauntoniin lordi
Sunderlandin, valtiosihteerin, lähetti, joka toi kirjeen lordi Jeffreysille.
Kirjeessä oli ilmoitus, että hänen majesteettinsa oli armollisesti
suvainnut käskeä, että yksi toistasataa kapinallista oli varattava
lähetettäviksi joillekin hänen majesteettinsa uutisviljelyksille
Jamaikaan, Barbados- tai jollekin Pienten Antillien saarelle.

Ei suinkaan pidä luulla, että tämä käsky johtui jonkinlaisesta

armollisuuden tunnosta. Lordi Churchill oli vallan oikeassa, kun hän
sanoi, että kuninkaan sydän oli yhtä tunteeton kuin marmori.
Havaittiin, että tuollainen summittainen hirttohomma oli mitä
häikäilemättömintä arvokkaan aineksen tuhlausta. Uutisviljelyksille
tarvittiin kipeästi orjia, ja terveen, voimakkaan miehen laskettiin
olevan ainakin kymmenen- viidentoista punnan arvoinen. Sitä paitsi
oli hovissa monta herrasmiestä, jotka mikä mistäkin syystä odottivat
kuninkaan puolelta jotakin suosionosoitusta. Tässä tarjoutui helppo
ja vaivaton keino suorittaa nuo pikku velat. Kapinallisten joukosta
saattoi erottaa osan, jonka voi lahjoittaa näille herroille heidän
vapaasti käytettävikseen.

Lordi Sunderlandin kirje antaa tarkat yksityistiedot siitä, miten

anteliaasti kuningas jakeli ihmislahjojaan. Tuhat vankia piti jaottaman
kahdeksan hoviherran ynnä muiden kesken, samalla kun kirjeen
jälkikirjoituksessa määrättiin sata vankia kuningattaren tarpeita
varten. Vangit piti heti lähetettämän kuninkaan eteläisille viljelyksille
ja heidän tuli jäädä sinne kymmeneksi vuodeksi ennen kuin he taas
pääsisivät vapauteen, ja oli niihin osiin siirtomaita, joihin heidät oli
määrätty, hetimmiten ilmoitettava heidän saapumisestaan ja muuten
huolehdittava siitä, että lähettämiseen heti ryhdyttiin.

Tiedämme ylituomarin sihteerin muistiinpanoista, miten lordi

Jeffreys sinä iltana raivohumalaisen tavoin moitti sitä
epäonnistunutta lempeyttä, johon kuningas oli saatu viekoitelluksi.
Me tiedämme, miten hän kirjeellisesti koetti saada kuningasta
peruuttamaan määräyksensä. Mutta Jaakko pysyi päätöksessään.
Se oli — puhumattakaan siitä hyödystä mitä se hänelle tuotti —
erinomainen osoitus siitä lempeydestä, joka oli hänelle ominaista.
Hän tiesi, että hän säästämällä täten heidän henkensä saattaisi
heidät suorastaan elävään kuolemaan. Monen heistä oli pakko
sortua Länsi-Intian kauheassa orjuudessa eloonjäävien hartaasti
kadehtimana.

Ja niin tapahtui, että Peter Blood ja hänen kanssaan Jeremias Pitt

ja Andrew Baynes, sen sijaan että olisivat joutuneet roikkumaan
hirressä kuten heidän tuomionsa määräsi, vietiin Bristoliin ja siellä
noin viidenkymmenen muun vangin kanssa sullottiin Jamaikan
kauppiaaseen.

Laivan ruumassa vallitseva ahtaus, kehno ravinto ja pilaantunut

juomavesi aiheuttivat pian heidän joukossaan vaikean taudin, johon
yksitoista kuoli. Heidän joukossaan oli myös onneton Oglethorpen
isäntä, joka oli raaisti raahattu rauhallisesta kodistaan, kukoistavan
puutarhansa keskeltä vain sen vian vuoksi, että oli tehnyt armeliaan
teon.

Ellei Peter Bloodia olisi ollut, olisi kuolleisuus varmaan noussut

paljon korkeammaksi. Alussa oli Jamaikan kauppiaan kapteeni
kiroillen ja uhkaillen vastannut tohtorin vastalauseisiin sen johdosta,
että sallittiin ihmisten kuolla sillä tavoin, ja hänen vaatimukseensa
saada haltuunsa lääkekirstu ja hoitaa sairaita. Mutta pian havaitsi
kapteeni Gardner, että hän saattoi joutua vastaamaan niin suuresta
inhimillisen kauppatavaran hukkaamisesta, ja sen vuoksi hän
vihdoinkin tajusi, että hän ilolla saattoi käyttää Peter Bloodin taitoa
hyväkseen. Tohtori kävi työhön innokkaana ja määrätietoisesti ja
menetteli niin taitavasti hoitaessaan sairaita ja parantaessaan
onnettomuustovereittensa oloa laivalla, että hän sai taudin enemmän
levenemisen estetyksi.

Joulukuun keskivaiheilla laski Jamaikan kauppias ankkurinsa

Carlisle-lahden poukamassa ja päästi maihin neljäkymmentäkaksi
eloonjäänyttä tuomittua kapinallista.

Jos nämä onnettomat olivat kuvitelleet — kuten monet näyttivät

tehneen — että he olivat tulossa johonkin villiin, asumattomaan
seutuun, niin oli varmaan se näky, joka heitä kohtasi jo ennen kuin
heidät oli laskettu laivan kupeella odottaviin veneisiin, omiaan
karkottamaan sen harhaluulon. He näkivät päinvastoin verraten
uljaan kaupungin, jonka talot olivat rakennetut eurooppalaiseen
malliin, mutta ei niin tiheään sulloutuneina kuin Euroopan
kaupungeissa oli tavallista. Kirkon torni kohosi hallitsevana
punaisten tiilikattojen yllä. Laajan sataman suuta vartioi linnoitus,
jonka tykkien suut pistivät esille muurin aukoista, ja hallitustalon pitkä
julkisivu näkyi kauaksi pieneltä mäeltä kaupungin yläpuolella. Tämä
mäki oli yhtä eloisan vihreä kuin konsanaan englantilainen
huhtikuinen kunnas, ja päiväkin muistutti elävästi huhtikuista päivää
Englannissa, sillä runsaiden sateiden kausi oli juuri päättynyt.

Laajalla mukulakivisellä rantaäyräällä he tapasivat punatakkisen

sotaväenosaston, joka oli heitä vastaanottamassa, sekä väkijoukon
— jonka heidän tulonsa oli sinne viekoitellut — joka puvuissaan ja
tavoissaan sangen vähän erosi siitä joukosta, jota kotoisissa
merisatamissa tavallisesti näki, paitsi siinä, että siinä oli vähemmän
naisväkeä ja enemmän neekereitä.

Kun heidät oli järjestetty riviin sillalle, tuli heitä tarkastamaan

kuvernööri Steed, lyhyt, ryhdikäs ja punakka herrasmies,
taftikankaisessa puvussa, jossa oli suunnaton määrä kultapunosta,
ontuen hieman ja nojaten raskaasti tukevaan eebenpuiseen keppiin.
Hänen jäljessään astui kookas, lihava mies, pystyssä päin ja hartiat
paljon korkeammalla kuvernööriä, puettuna Barbados-saaren miliisin
everstin pukuun, ja häijy ilme mahdottoman suurilla kellahtavilla
kasvoillaan. Hänen sivullaan ja omituisena vastakohtana hänen
korkeudelleen asteli kepeän poikamaisesti hoikka nuori neitonen
muodinmukaisessa ratsastuspuvussa. Leveälierinen harmaa hattu,
jossa hulmusi punertava kamelikurjen sulka, peitti osaksi hänen
soikeat kasvonsa, joiden hienolle värille ei edes etelän syövyttävä
aurinkokaan ollut mahtanut mitään. Punaruskeat, pitkät kutrit
riippuivat hänen hartioilleen saakka. Rehellisyys ja suoruus paistoi
hänen utuisista silmistään, jotka olivat aivan selkosellaan, ja sääli oli
vaimentanut veitikkamaisuuden, joka tavallisesti karehti hänen
raikkailla, nuorilla huulillaan.

Peter Blood hämmästyi huomatessaan tuijottavansa tytön pirteitä

kasvoja, jotka näyttivät niin huonosti sopeutuvan tähän ympäristöön,
ja huomattuaan, että häneen kohdistui yhtä tarkkaava katse, hän
liikahti levottomasti. Hän havaitsi itse, miten surkea nähtävyys hän
mahtoi olla. Pesemättömänä, tukka takkuisena ja hajallaan, musta,
siivoton parta leuassa ja hänen kerran niin hieno kamlottikankainen
pukunsa, jossa hänet oli vangittu, niin repaleisena, että se olisi ollut
häpeäksi variksenpelätillekin, hän ei suinkaan ollut mitään herkullista
silmänruokaa niin suloiselle olennolle. Siitä huolimatta tyttö ei
kääntänyt hämmästynyttä, miltei lapsellista ja säälin ja ihmetyksen
sekaista katsettaan hänestä. Hän kosketti kädellään kumppaninsa
punaista hihaa, ja tämä käänsi pahantuulisesti murahtaen suuren
ruhonsa niin, että joutui aivan päin tyttöä.

Katsoen miestä suoraan silmiin puhui tyttö hänelle vakavana

jotakin, mutta eversti ei ilmeisesti kuunnellut puolella korvallakaan.
Hänen pienet helmenkaltaiset silmänsä, joiden välissä oli pitkä ja
paksu nenä, olivat kääntyneet tytöstä poispäin ja suuntautuivat
Bloodin vieressä seisovaan vaaleatukkaiseen ja vankkarakenteiseen
nuoreen Pittiin…

Kuvernööri oli myös pysähtynyt hetkeksi, ja pieni kolmihenkinen

seurue jäi siihen keskustelemaan. Peter Blood ei voinut kuulla, mitä
tyttö sanoi, sillä tämä alensi ääntään. Everstin ääni kuului hänen
korviinsa sekasortoisena rummutuksena, mutta kuvernööri ei sen
sijaan ollut varovainen eikä pieniääninen. Hänellä oli kimakka ääni,
joka kantoi kauaksi, ja luullen itseään sukkelaksi hän tahtoi, että
kaikki olisivat kuulleet häntä.

»Mutta rakas eversti Bishop, teidän on tietenkin ensin valittava

tuoreimmat tuosta kukkavihosta ja vielä omaan määräämäänne
hintaan. Sitten vasta lähetämme heidät huutokaupattaviksi.»

Eversti nyökäytti päätään myöntymykseksi. Hän korotti äänensä

vastaukseksi. »Teidän ylhäisyytenne on kovin hyvä, mutta tottavie,
tuo joukko näyttää niin kehnolta, ettei siitä juuri paljoakaan ole
hyötyä viljelyksillä.» Hänen pienet silmänsä tutkivat vankeja
uudelleen, ja halveksunta, jota hän tunsi heitä kohtaan, korosti
hänen häijyä ilmettään. Näytti siltä kuin häntä olisi harmittanut,
etteivät he olleet sen paremmassa kunnossa. Sitten hän viittasi
luokseen kapteeni Gardnerin ja he keskustelivat jonkin minuutin
erään luettelon johdosta, jonka kapteeni hänen pyynnöstään oli
ottanut esille.

Sitten hän työnsi luettelon syrjään ja lähti yksin vankeja kohti,

katsellen heitä huulet nyrpällään. Nuoren somersetshireläisen
merikapteenin eteen hän vihdoin pysähtyi ja seisoi hetken tuumien
hänen arvoaan. Sitten hän koetteli nuoren miehen käsivarsilihaksia
ja käski hänen avata suunsa, jotta näkisi hänen hampaansa. Hän
pisti huulensa pitkään tönölle ja nyökäytti.

Olkansa takaa hän virkkoi Gardnerille:

»Viisitoista puntaa tästä miehestä.» Kapteeni näytti

kauhistuneelta.

»Viisitoista puntaa! Se ei ole puoltakaan siitä, mitä aioin pyytää

hänestä.»

»Se on puolta enemmän kuin aioin antaa hänestä», murahti

eversti.

»Mutta kolmekymmentäkin on helppo hinta, teidän armonne.»

»Sillä hinnalla saan neekerinkin. Nämä valkoiset siat eivät jaksa

elää täällä. He eivät kelpaa täkäläiseen työhön.»

Gardner alkoi kehua Pittin terveyttä, nuoruutta ja voimia. Hän ei

kehunut ihmistä hänessä, vaan kuormajuhtaa. Pitt, tunteellisena
miehenä, seisoi mykkänä ja liikkumattomana. Ainoastaan
värinvaihtelut hänen kasvoillaan ilmaisivat sitä sisäistä taistelua, jolla
hän sai säilytetyksi mielenmalttinsa.

Peter Bloodia iljetti inhottava tinkiminen.

Taempana vankirivin suuntaa käveli neiti keskustellen kuvernöörin

kanssa, joka hymyili ja pöyhisteli kävellessään hänen vieressään.
Tyttö ei tiennyt mitään siitä inhottavasta kaupankäynnistä, jossa
eversti paraikaa askaroi. Oliko hän myös välinpitämätön siitä,
ihmetteli Blood itsekseen.
 Eversti Bishop kääntyi kantapäillään jatkaakseen kaupantekoa.

»Nostan kahteenkymmeneen asti. Penniäkään ei enempää ja

sekin on jo puolta enemmän kuin Grabstonilta saatte heistä.»

Kapteeni Gardner huomasi, että tarjous oli lopullinen, joten hän

huokasi ja suostui. Bishop oli jo menossa eteenpäin vankiriviä pitkin.
Peter Bloodiin ja hänen vieressään seisovaan kuihtuneeseen
nuorukaiseen eversti katsahti vain ohimennen halveksivasti. Mutta
seuraava mies, keski-ikäinen jättiläinen nimeltä Wolverstone, veti
hänen huomionsa puoleensa ja tinkiminen alkoi uudelleen.

Peter Blood seisoi loistavassa auringonpaisteessa ja veti

keuhkoihinsa ilmaa niin hyväntuoksuista, ettei hän eläissään ollut
sellaista hengittänyt. Se oli täynnä outoa tuoksua, kukkivan
havumetsän, maustepippurin ja hyvänhajuisten setrien sekoitusta.
Hän vaipui hyödyttömiin mietteisiin, joihin suloinen tuoksu hänet
viekoitteli. Hänellä ei ollut pienintäkään halua keskusteluun, eikä
myöskään Pittillä, joka seisoi synkkänä hänen vieressään ja jonka
mieltä pääasiassa painoi sillä hetkellä se ajatus, että hänen nyt täytyi
erota siitä miehestä, jonka vierellä hän oli seissyt viimeiset raskaat
kuukaudet ja jota hän oli oppinut rakastamaan erinomaisena
neuvonantajana ja auttajana. Turvattomuuden ja yksinäisyyden
tunne, jonka rinnalla kestetyt vaivat eivät tuntuneet miltään, valtasi
hänet. Pittistä ero tuntui kestettyjen kärsimysten huipulta.

Muitakin ostajia tuli, tarkasteli heitä ja meni taas menojaan. Sitten

syntyi rivin päässä levotonta liikehtimistä. Gardner puhui kovalla
äänellä ilmoittaen jotakin ostajille, jotka olivat odottaneet vuoroaan,
kunnes eversti Bishop oli valinnut parhaimmat inhimillisestä
kauppatavarasta. Kun hän oli lopettanut, huomasi Blood
katsoessaan sinnepäin, että tyttö puhutteli Bishopia ja viittasi
hopeahelaisella ratsupiiskallaan rivin toiseen päähän. Bishop varjosti
kädellään silmiään tytön osoittamaan suuntaan. Sitten hän lähti
hitaasti, astuen raskasta, vyöryvää käyntiään Gardnerin kanssa
takaisin rivin alkupäähän, tytön ja kuvernöörin seuratessa perässä.
He astelivat eteenpäin, kunnes eversti oli Bloodin kohdalla. Hän aikoi
kävellä edelleen, mutta silloin tyttö kosketti ratsupiiskallaan hänen
käsivarttaan ja sanoi:

»Tätä miestä minä tarkoitin.»

»Tätä?» kuului halveksiva vastaus. Peter Blood huomasi

tuijottavansa pariin helmentapaisia ruskeita silmiä, jotka olivat
painuneet kellahtavaan, rasvaiseen naamaan kuin pari korinttia
vehnäkohokkaaseen. Hän tunsi, kuinka halveksivan loukkaava
tarkoitus nostatti hänen verensä kasvoihin. »Pyh, luukasa, mitä minä
sillä tekisin.»

Hän oli kääntymässä, kun Gardner tuli väliin.

»Olkoon, että hän on hoikka, mutta hän on sitkeä, sitkeä ja terve.

Kun toinen puoli heistä oli sairaana ja toinen puoli sairastumaisillaan,
niin pysyi tämä roisto jaloillaan ja lääkitsi vielä toisia. Ellei häntä olisi
ollut, niin heitä olisi kuollut paljon enemmän. Sanokaamme viisitoista
puntaa. Se on kohtuullinen hinta. Hän on sitkeä, vakuutan teidän
armollenne, hän on sitkeä ja voimakas, vaikka onkin laiha. Hän on
juuri niitä miehiä, jotka kestävät kuumuutta kun sen aika tulee.
Ilmanala ei tapa häntä, ikävä kyllä.»

Kuvernööri Steed nauraa hykerteli. »Kuulittehan, eversti. Uskokaa

vain veljentytärtänne. Hänen sukupuolensa tuntee heti miehen
nähdessään hänet!» Ja hän nauraa hytkytti hyvillään
sukkeluudestaan. Mutta hän nauroi yksin. Suuttumuksen puna
valahti everstin veljentyttären kasvoille, kun taas eversti itse oli liian
kiintynyt kaupanhierontaansa kuunnellakseen kuvernöörin
sukkeluuksia. Hän pyyhkäisi kädellään leukaansa ja mutristi huuliaan
hieman. Jeremias Pitt pidätti hengitystään jännityksestä.

»Annan kymmenen puntaa hänestä», sanoi eversti vihdoin.

Peter Blood rukoili sisimmässään, ettei tarjousta hyväksyttäisi.

Syistä, joita hän ei olisi voinut selittää, hän tunsi tavatonta
vastenmielisyyttä ajatellessaan joutuvansa tuon raa’an, eläimellisen
miehen omaisuudeksi ja sen kautta tavalla tai toisella myös
samettisilmäisen tytön omaisuudeksi. Mutta kohtalon määräykseltä
säästyäkseen tarvittiin enemmän kuin mitä vastenmielisyys saattoi
aikaansaada. Orja on orja eikä hänellä ole voimaa muuttaa
sallimuksen säädöksiä. Peter Blood oli myyty eversti Bishopille —
vastenmieliselle ostajalle — häpeällisestä kymmenen punnan
hinnasta.

Viides luku

ARABELLA BISHOP

Eräänä tammikuun aurinkoisena sunnuntaiaamuna, noin kuukausi

Jamaikan kauppiaan saapumisen jälkeen Bridgetowniin ratsasti neiti
Arabella Bishop setänsä kaupungin pohjoisenpuoleisilla mäkimailla
sijaitsevasta upeasta talosta. Häntä seurasi kaksi neekeripalvelijaa,
jotka ravasivat hänen jäljessään kunnioittavan välimatkan päässä, ja
hänen matkansa päämääränä oli kuvernöörin talo, jonne hän oli
menossa tervehtimään kuvernöörin puolisoa, joka vastikään oli
sairastellut. Noustuaan pienen heinäisen kukkulan laelle hän näki
hoikan, pitkän ja tavalliseen herrasmiehen pukuun pukeutuneen
miehen tulevan vastaansa. Mies oli hänelle outo, ja outo henkilö
saarella oli harvinainen ilmiö. Ja kuitenkaan hän ei näyttänyt
Arabellasta aivan vieraalta.

Arabella-neiti pysähdytti hevosensa ollen ihailevinaan näköalaa,

joka kyllä olikin katsomisen arvoinen. Mutta — salaa hän katseli
syrjäsilmällä tarkkaavasti vastaantulevaa miestä. Hän sai hieman
korjata äskeistä havaintoaan hänen vaatetukseensa nähden. Se oli
kylläkin siisti, mutta kaukana gentlemannin puvusta. Takki ja housut
olivat yksinkertaista kotikutoista, ja jos ne istuivat hyvin, oli se
pikemminkin hänen siron vartalonsa kuin räätälin ansiota. Hänen
sukkansa olivat raakaa, karkeaa puuvillaa, kangashattu, jonka hän
kunnioittavasti nosti päästään tullessaan tytön kohdalle, oli vanha ja
nauhoja tai töyhtöä vailla. Se, mikä tytöstä äsken oli näyttänyt
tekotukalta, olikin läheltä nähtynä vain miehen oma tuuhea ja
aaltoileva tukka.

Hänen kasvonsa olivat puhtaiksi ajetut ja vakavat, ja hän katsoi

hämmästyttävän sinisillä silmillään tarkkaavasti tyttöä. Mies oli
menossa tytön ohi, mutta tämä esti sen.

»Luulen että tunnen teidät, sir», hän sanoi.

Hänen äänensä oli reipas ja poikamainen, ja muutenkin oli hänen

käytöksessään jotakin poikamaista, jos nyt niin somasta tytöstä voi
sellaista sanoa.

Se pohjautui hänessä ehkä eräänlaiseen vapaaseen, suoraan

luonteenpiirteeseen, joka halveksi hänen sukupuolensa tavallista
teennäisyyttä ja joka saattoi hänet hyviin väleihin koko maailman