Fa‘asāmoa Forever – The Sacred Circle. The Politics of Encompassment and Consensus

Abstract

This article examines the remarkable permanence of fa‘asāmoa, Sāmoan custom, throughout the upheavals of history. The strength of this permanence lies in a particular configuration of what brings the community together at meetings when an important decision has to be taken: an equality of positions in the community circle where everyone faces one another, in the sense that everyone is seated at the same level. But this equality is maintained by a bond of higher value, sometimes called the ‘country’, ‘custom’ or even ‘God’. This is what the Sāmoans call the ‘sacred circle’. Each time, this hierarchy of references makes it possible to find a way not to ignore but to position the conflict at an ‘encompassed’ level, leaving the community value at the ‘encompassing’ level. The article describes how this works through historical examples, from German colonization via the construction of independence in the 1960s to the latest national elections in 2021, which saw fierce competition between two political parties, as well as considering the way in which consensus is favoured over majority voting.