Abstract
THE curiosity which Polynesia excited in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not of the scientific kind which searches for facts on which to base generalizations ; it was the curiosity of dilettantes. Explorers, sailors and missionaries did not pursue their inquiries to the point at which they would begin to demonstrate but cease to amuse, nor were they prepared to subject the blossoms of imagination to the icy blasts of scientific criticism. To entertain they had to be intelligible, and to be intelligible they had to transpose Polynesian customs into a European mode. The European mind was imbued from childhood with Greek mythology, so Williams arranged the Fijian gods into a pantheon on the Greek model, an arrangement more convenient than true.
Religion and Social Organisation in Central Polynesia
Robert W. Williamson Dr. Ralph Piddington Pp. xxx + 340. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1937.) 25s. net.
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HOCART, A. Religion and Social Organisation in Central Polynesia. Nature 140, 1080 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401080a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401080a0