Problem: This chapter explores the impasses an ethnographer has encountered while collecting kinship information to map traditional knowledge in a Fijian village when his host refuses to acknowledge a parental tie. Central to the discussion is the Fijian firewalking ceremony, vilavilairevo, traditionally performed only by members of the Sawau people, upon which a genealogical chart of the ceremony's "custodians" had needed to be drafted. The chart could amend some of the bureaucratic errors present in the Vola ni Kawa Bula (an official register of native landowners), and also the Tukutuku Raraba (oral histories of Fijian groups recorded in past centuries by the Native Land Commission), reestablishing analogical relations between past and present events. Thus, navigating through village gossip, cultural faux pas, unhappy hosts, and government bureaucracies, this chapter unveils the local political economy of sentiment, respect, and reciprocity.