Jokes or ribbing carried out in traditional iTaukei circles may not necessarily be perceived favourably in professional settings.
This week on The Lens@177, Suva lawyer Jon Apted was asked whether people could use the traditional iTaukei tauvu ties to justify such jokes, so it would not be seen as cyberbullying.
“Personally, I am not full Fijian so I may not be qualified to comment but as a kailoma, as a vasu, I don’t think so,” he said.
“I have to deal with this because I do a lot of employment law and I’ve had to deal with this issue in more than one employment situation with my clients, where somebody has said something nasty to another worker, who has taken offence.
“And the first person says ‘oh, that’s my tauvu and I’m allowed to’, but the other person doesn’t like it. And it has ended up quite ugly.
“The point is, yes, that’s a culture, yes, that has a place. It has a place in cultural, social and personal interactions.”
He said when people were with each other in a small group, they were the only people who witnessed the embarrassment of the subject.
However, Mr Apted said it was quite a different thing if this was done in the workplace, where people who did not understand the relationships heard such nasty things about the subject, which they would interpret differently.
“You are embarrassed in front of those people. You would not be embarrassed in front of people who understand the traditional context and then you take it to social media, those web pages and groups like Chat Fiji are global.
“If I banter with you, it’s acceptable around a grog bowl but it’s not the same when thousands of people around the world are witnessing it and laughing at you.
“They are not your tauvu, they don’t understand that. They just know that somebody has said something really derogatory about you so that kind of behaviour is not appropriate for public pages. It may be appropriate for (private) messages but not for public shaming.”
