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.
Read more about this topic: Basil Thomson
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or career:
“You may be used to a day that includes answering eleven phone calls, attending two meetings, and writing three reports; when you are at home with an infant you will feel you have accomplished quite a lot if you have a shower and a sit-down meal in the same day.”
—Anne C. Weisberg (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partners job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)