Basil Thomson - Writing Career

Writing Career

After three years at the Native Lands Office in Suva, Thomson resigned from colonial service, and returned to England in 1893, due in no small part to the deteriorating health of his wife. There he embarked on a career as a writer, drawing on his experiences in the South Sea Islands to produce South Sea Yarns (1894; written in Fiji), The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894, about his government work in Tonga), and The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath (1898). Basil Thomson used his Fijian assistants to organize the first ever done census of Fijian marriage on Viti Levu. He found that the Fijians did not marry, as claimed in the specialized literature, their mother's brother's daughter, but married any girl and recalculated her kinship status after the marriage so as to address her by the term meaning mother's brother's daughter. This result was anathema to Radcliffe-Brown's anthropology school and was ignored. Later, Lévi-Strauss would not take it into account either. But anthropologists of the time would not try to build any complete census of any culture trait. The result was that their material was partly insufficiently documented, but they would not recognize it, even today.