Thomas Williams’s Fiji and the Fijians

Record summary

Thomas Williams’s Fiji and the Fijians, published in 1858, records Fijian political life, religious practices, sacred places, priests, spirit beliefs, warfare, and conversion. It is a major nineteenth-century source for studying how concepts such as vu, tabu, divination, and ritual authority were represented in English-language missionary literature. The book can be compared with later Fijian scholarship and oral histories to track translation and classification. Williams’s perspective is explicitly Christian and colonial, and his descriptions of religious practices may combine observation, informant reports, polemic, and generalization.