Narrative
The Threshold of the Pacific
Charles Elliot Fox · 1924
Synopsis
A description of the peoples of San Cristobal, present-day Makira: the clans of each district, the spirit beings, serpent spirits, ghosts and adaro spirits, the prayers, charms and sacrifices, then birth, marriage, death and magic. Tales collected on the island find their place there: tales of the kakamora, small wild beings of the forest, tales of the masi, a people of fools who make the storytellers laugh, and wondrous tales. One also encounters familiar sharks, which have exchanged their souls with men, and a cult of trees.
Context
The book appeared in 1924 in London from Kegan Paul and in New York from Knopf, in the History of Civilisation series, with a preface by Grafton Elliot Smith, who prepared it for printing. Its first part reuses two papers published in the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, one on social organisation (1919), the other on beliefs and tales, written with F. H. Drew (1915); the Melanesian versions of the tales are omitted. Fox argues there that the island's clans arrived in successive waves, a thesis the preface discusses.
Who it is for
A dense volume of ethnography, in English, in which tales sit alongside the description of rites; the 1924 text can be read freely online.
Prizes and reception
The journal Nature reviewed it in 1925; on Makira, some still look in it for keys, and one of them reads a prophecy in its title.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.