Faith and its fulfillment: agency, exchange, and the Fijian aesthetics of completion

In this article, I develop a theory of what I call the abeyance of agency, drawing upon a comparison between Fijian Christian church and gift‐giving rituals. I argue that from religious practitioners' viewpoint, religious faith concerns not so much the intentions of an anthropomorphic God as the limits that are temporarily placed on ritual participants' agency. Such abeyance and subsequent recovery of their agency enables them to experience the intimations of an ultimate response, [agency, form, temporality, gift exchange, Christianity, Fiji]