Raymond Firth - The Work of the Gods in Tikopia

First published 2004 by Berg Publishers

Published 2020 by Routledge

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Raymond Firth 2004

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ISBN 13: 978-1-8452-0305-4 (hbk)

By the passage of time this book has now acquired the character of an historical document in Polynesian ethnography. The Tikopia religious cycle which, adopting a title from doe vernacular, I termed Work of the Gods and which I observed in 19289 and again (with James Spillius) in 1952, has now been completely abandoned for more than ten years. That small sector of the Tikopia community which in 1952 still carried out the pagan rites converted to Christianity soon after a disastrous epidemic in 1955. This book then describes a vanished past, a set of institutions not known to many of the younger Tikopia themselves.

On the second expedition to Tikopia in 1952 my observations, confirmed and enlarged by those of Spillius, paralleled very closely those made on my first expedition. The degree of similarity and variation noted in 1952 was examined in Study in Ritual Modification: The Work of the Gods in Tikopia in 1929 and 1952 (Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper no. 19), 1963, by Firth and Spillius. (This work is referred to as RM in the postscripts to chapters and elsewhere in this book.)

In 19661 was able to make a third visit to Tikopia, accompanied by Dr Torben Monberg, and together we studied the effects of abandonment of the pagan Tikopia religion.

Material from the original monograph has been cited by various writers and in particular has been used extensively by William J. Goode (Religion Among the Primitives, Glencoe, 111., 1951). In the light of these circumstances the main body of the work has been left almost exactly in its original form, though it has had to be re-paginated. Postscripts to some chapters indicate points of comparative interest which I observed on the 1952 expedition, and an Epilogue describes the aftermath of the Work of the Gods by 1966. A new Introduction indicates the significant of the religious cyde in more general terms than did the original treatment, which was primarily empirical. In order to reduce the volume of the work much Tikopia vernacular text has been eliminated, since this can be of interest only to linguistic specialists. A few small corrections have been made to the spelling but in the absence of a systematic study of Tikopia language, inconsistencies still remain occasionally. For better reproduction the diagrams have been redrawn and some new Plates have been substituted. I have retained the present tense throughout the book although all rites have now been abandoned.

The Work of the Gods can be regarded as Volume I of my studies of Tikopia religion. Volume II consists of a series of collected papers to be published with the title of Tikopia Ritual and Belief (Allen & Unwin, 1907); Volume III will be Rank and Religion in Tikopia, a general account which was originally intended as a companion work to the present ethnographic study, but which has been long delayed, partly in order that I might complete the analysis after the major change from paganism to Christianity.

In addition to the acknowledgments made in the first edition of this work, I should like to express my recognition of the great help I received from James Spillius on my second expedition to Tikopia. Together we participated in a number of rites of the Work of the Gods, and his comments and further observations after I left reinforced my own findings. I would like to acknowledge here too my recent companionship with Torben Monberg, which helped me greatly in my inquiries in 1966.

I am indebted for finance of my first expedition to the Australian National Research Council, of my second to the Australian National University, and of my third to the University of London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; to all these bodies I express my gratitude. I wish to acknowledge particularly the generous help received from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in the pursuit of my Tikopia studies as a whole. For many facilities in the field I am very grateful to members of the Melanesian Mission and to government officials of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. I also owe thanks to Mrs D. H. Alfandary for help in preparing this work for publication.

Finally, I am much indebted to Anthony Forge, not only for his technical advice in the preparation of this new edition, but also for several helpful suggestions of substance in the Introduction.

London RAYMOND FIRTH

October 1966