PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 497 



At the present moment we have before our eyes an object-lesson in the 

 spread of our own people over the earth's surface, and we are thus able to 

 study how external influence affects different elements of culture. What we 

 find is that mere contact is able to transmit much in the way of material 

 culture. A passing vessel which does not even anchor may be able to transmit 

 iron, while European weapons may be used by people who have never even 

 seen a white man. Again, missionaries introduce the Christian religion among 

 people who cannot speak a word of English or any language but their own, 

 or only use such European words as have been found necessary to express 

 ideas or objects connected with the new religion. There is evidence how readily 

 language may be affected, and here again the present day suggests a mechanism 

 by which such a change takes place. English is now becoming the language of 

 the Pacific and of other parts of the world, through its use as a lingua franca, 

 which enables natives who speak different languages to converse not only with 

 Europeans but with one another, and I believe that this has often been the 

 mechanism in the past; that, for instance, the introduction of what we now 

 call the Melanesian structure of language was due to the fact that the language 

 of the immigrant people who settled in a region of great linguistic diversity came 

 to be used as a lingua franca, and thus gradually became the basis of the lan- 

 guages of the whole people. 



But now let us turn to social structure. We find in Oceania islands where 

 Europeans have been settled as missionaries or traders perhaps for fifty or a hun- 

 dred years ; we find the people wearing European clothes and European ornaments, 

 using European utensils, and even European weapons when they fight; we find 

 them holding the beliefs and practising the ritual of a European religion; we 

 find them speaking a European language often even among themselves, and yet 

 investigation shows that much of their social structure remains thoroughly 

 native and uninfluenced not only in its general form but often even in its 

 minute details. The external influence has swept away the whole material 

 culture, so that objects of native origin are manufactured only to sell to tourists ; 

 it has substituted a wholly new religion and destroyed every material, if not 

 every moral, vestige of the old; it has caused great modification and degenera- 

 tion of the old language; and yet it may have left the social structure in the 

 main untouched. And the reasons for this are clear. Most of the essential 

 social structure of a people lies so below the surface ; it is so literally the 

 foundation of the whole life of the people that it is not seen; it is not obvious, 

 but can only be reached by patient and laborious exploration. I will give 

 a few specific instances. In several islands of the Pacific, some of which 

 have had European settlers on them for more than a century, a most important 

 position in the community is occupied by the father's sister. 13 If any native 

 of these islands were asked who is the most important person in the determina- 

 tion of his life-history, he would answer, ' My father's sister,' and yet the place 

 of this relative in the social structure has remained absolutely unrecorded, and, 

 I believe, absolutely unknown to the European settlers in these islands. Again, 

 Europeans have settled in Fiji for more than a century, and yet it is only 

 during this summer that I have heard from Mr. A. M. Hocart, who is working 

 there at present, that there is the clearest evidence of what is known as the 

 dual organisation of society as a working social institution at the present time. 

 How unobtrusive such a fundamental fact of social structure may be comes 

 home to me in this case very strongly, for it wholly eluded my own observation 

 during a visit three years ago. 



Lastly, the most striking example of the permanence of social structure 

 which I have met is in the Hawaian Islands. There the original native culture 

 is reduced to the merest wreckage. So far as material objects are concerned, 

 the people are like ourselves; the old religion has gone, though there probably 

 still persists some of the ancient magic. The people themselves have so dwindled 

 in number, and the political conditions are so altered, that the social structure 

 has also necessarily been greatly modified, and yet I was able to ascertain that 

 one of its elements, an element which I believe to form the deepest layer of the 

 foundation, the very bedrock of social structure, the system of relationship, is 



18 See Folk-Lore, 1010, xxi., 42. 

 1911. KS 



