Thomas Williams’s Fiji spirit and sacred-place accounts

Record summary

Thomas Williams’s Fiji and the Fijians, published in 1858, records Fijian religious practices, spirit beliefs, sacred locations and accounts of encounters interpreted within local cosmology. It is a useful Pacific comparison because it preserves nineteenth-century missionary descriptions of place-based religious traditions during major social and political change. The work should be treated as a mediated ethnographic and missionary text, not as a catalogue of verified hauntings. Names, translations and the attribution of statements to particular communities require checking against later Fijian scholarship and, where possible, Indigenous-language sources.