On discourse and power: "cults" and "orientals" in Fiji

Essences are not origins, as is made clearer when approaching discourse via methods of Latour rather than Foucault Tracking the emergence of power in the alignment of heterogeneous agents, institutions, and objects, we contra st the fates of efforts by two British colonial officials in Fiji, one who sought to outlaw a "dangerous" movement in 1887 and a second who sought to thwart union organizing among "orientals" in 1935. Though the second effort fit more closely with an existing grand discourse ("orientalism") the firs t aligned changing fields of interest in Fiji and empire. The first gained the power to represent the real, and the second did not Realities of coloni al power contradict Latour's principle of symmetry, but not the rest of his approach to the making of power.