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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 874 



which enables natives who speak different 

 languages to converse not only with Euro- 

 peans, but with one another, and I believe 

 that this has often been the mechanism in 

 the past; that, for instance, the introduc- 

 tion of what we now call the Melanesian 

 structure of language M'as 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 languages 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 hundred 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 re- 

 ligion ; 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 modiflcation 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 speciflc 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.^* If any native of these islands were 

 asked who is the most important person 

 in the determination 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 unre- 

 corded, 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 organization 

 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 ob- 

 servation during a visit three years ago. 



Lastly, the most striking example of the 

 permanence of social structure which I 

 have met is in the Hawaiian Islands. 

 There the original native culture is re- 

 duced 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 neces- 

 sarily 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 still in use unchanged. I 

 was able to obtain a full account of the 

 system as actually used at the present time, 

 and found it to be exactly the same as that 



" See Folk-Lore, 1910, XXI., 42. 



