Sitting on a tarp, leaning against a bamboo pole supporting the bolabola, I break myself out of my daydream about icebergs and aliens. I scan the scene. There’s a languid anticipation amidst the cool, night air. We are all waiting for our truck to take us home.  Seeing headlights luminating the village below us, we are filled with a nervous excitement. Two have already come to pick up other women’s groups. “Will it be me? Or am I just getting my hopes up?” we all think. Somehow, we are more content to sit in transit than to sit idle.

To my left, I catch a stray comment spoken by a woman from my village. I glance over - arms crossed, she’s looking out towards the silhouettes of the dark hills. Another women from my village, sitting beside her looking equally disinterested, casually responds. I pick out a few key words and names. Money, roof, tin. My Fijian isn’t perfect, but I could understand what she was talking about. She was commenting about the meeting that occurs earlier in the day. Now, a few hours later, I could still sense the turgid mood lingering from that tense discussion. Shouting and crying, accusing and apologizing - apparently, there was some misconduct that needed to be addressed publicly, and some attendants asserted themselves breathlessly. The new conversation that I witnessed the start of was discussing this, remarking on the characters who took part.in the scene.

I quickly see what is taking place. They’re gossiping - putting together their own beliefs and experiences to form a coherent narrative. How one conducts themself today is contextualized when their actions are put in front of the background of their past behavior. In the same way an academic might collaborate with another to write a history, these women were picking out particular details, memories, and judgements to coauthor a story, one to make sense of the day’s events. It’s something that I witness often in the village, and something I frequently partake in. Sometimes, it's about a topic as banal as who went to town today. Other times, its moral outrage, like which youth was caught smoking marijuana. Regardless, the process serves the same purpose - to animate the characters of key people. 

The way the women urgently asked each other questions felt familiar. The cadence and tone was reminiscent of the conversations from before, where the Stranger felt the need to have the Neighbor introduce me. It was the same interrogative demand for information and the same attention the reply elicited.  

“Is he staying in the village?” [asked intensely, eyes raised, mouth grimaced]

“Yeah, next to Inoke’s house.” 

“Is he alone or staying with a family?” [The question is being begged. A picture is starting to form, I can see it in her face]

“Alone, but he eats with other families.”

“Fijian food?” [Still inquisitive]

“Yeah, all of them. Cassava, dalo, bele. He just doesn’t like sausages.”

The ladies from before who were talking about me were, essentially, gossiping, except their object of conversation was standing right in front of them, listening. The Stranger, seeing someone new, needed to conceive a story about this new character - who they were, what their intentions are, what their background is - all to inform her narrative and how she should act within it. To fill her information gap, to attenuate the prediction error in her theory of mind, she did what she was accustomed to do; she asked someone else to fill her in, even if the person being gossiped about was there. She gathered data from trusted sources, not necessarily people she knew, but just people who spoke her language. From here, she could figure out how to proceed, saving her any potential confusion or extra effort. 

This behavior is natural. I have heard before that language itself has been theorized to have developed tens of thousands of years ago to trade social information - to gossip. It makes sense. Hunter-gatherer tribes were small, highly social, and dependent on one another. They needed to know the proclivities of their neighbors and their moral characters. Trust was critical; any difficulty cooperating could break the web of relationships which made their band reliable. Over thousands of years, our capacity for language was evolved to form gossip networks; it’s become a part of our biology, and this same behavior is used today to form narratives about those closest to us. If this is the case, then the Stranger was just using language as it was meant to be used.

Even if Fiji is not a hunter-gatherer society, this penchant to gossip is still common in the village. Fijian villages are small communities of anywhere between 50 to 600 people. They are mostly static, with people rarely moving out. Having lived their entire life with one another and being so close in proximity, their knowledge and interest in one another is intimate. They see they’re neighbors everyday and expect to for the rest of their lives. Because of that, gossip is common here, so much so that people cheekyly call it “coconut wireless” (the phrase is also common in Hawaii and Samoa). Its connection is so powerful that everyone seems to know everything about everyone almost as soon as it happens. Getting most of their information from coconut wireless, it seems fitting that their conversations about me would reflect the same rhythms. 

Although it may be somewhat obfuscated in the West, our conversations still orbit around gossip. Whether this be within a friend circle, in a workplace, or among a community group, how others present themselves takes up a significant portion of our conversations. However, I see it manifesting in surprising ways in a Western, individual-centric culture with modern-day technology. Even in the 21st century, much of the media we consume has some sort of gossip-flavored residue. The early 2000s saw the rise of celebrity-scoop programs like TMZ which focused on the affairs and drama of actors and artists - people we didn’t know but who we find interesting because of their art and/or status. With the advent of social media, this kind of entertainment relocated, with updates from strangers and friends alike being allocated to one feed. Social media is its own gossip network, with ways to comment on people and topics as well as display beliefs and actions. You would even hear about different groups, all of which became their own character. Rewind before social media, and you will still see nations, governments, companies and political parties being personified to have a narrative of their own, with their own beliefs, tendencies, and identities. There are good guys and bad guys, despite the fact that these organizations are not “guys” at all but conglomerates of people. Even the journalistic parlance about inanimate conceptions like nations uses human language. “US does not have good relationships with Iran because of this, this, and this reason.” It seems even in a culture that has become more self-focused, it has not escaped our nature to gossip.

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