Reviews. 279
The book has been submitted to a severe test, in that soon after pubhcation an opportunity was taken of putting it into the hands of a pure bred Fijian who, while retaining to the full his sympathy with and knowledge of his own folk, has had the good fortune to superimpose on this an English University education, and the further and sterner education afforded by several years of good field service during the late war. This critic's considered verdict is that Mr. Deane's book is very good indeed, in that the writer has evidently understood Fijian institutions better than any of his predecessors, and has drawn a truer picture of the origin and present state of Fijian society.
In telling the story of the development of the way of thought of the Fijian of to-day, Mr. Deane deals with most of the more prominent phases of that thought, with their view of what we regard as the supernatural but in which the Fijian recognizes nothing supernatural, with their communism, and with such individualism as is manifested among them, with their moral character (chiefly as illustrated by their habit of Kerekere and tahoo, and in their great use of symbolism), with their curiously great observance of etiquette (very remarkable in folk who still are sometimes described as ' savages '), and he uses these and other such habits of thought to show how the Fijians have become what they are.
A good example may be seen in Mr. Deane's study of the strange custom of Kerekere (or, as he also calls it, ' Fiji Beggary'), which at first sight looks as if it were, in its modern form, the unrestricted right of one Fijian desiring some article of property of another, to obtain this for the asking. Mr. Deane clearly shows that this custom is founded on the natural right of every member of a purely communal society to use such personal property of any other member of the same commune — such as food or other necessaries of life — and that the present-day abuse of the custom of asking and receiving is due to the falling into abeyance of the salutary restriction formerly enforced by public opinion, or if that proved inefficient by club law, of the commune now much weakened by the all-environing British law.
In this case, as in most of the others, it must never be for- gotten that the natural and healthy growth of the communistic
