ABSTRACT
Most anthropological field studies of religion have been concerned with a single religious form related to a single society. The religious system has been seen as a symbolic frame significant for the life of the community as a whole, beliefs and practices in the ritual sphere being closely linked with those in the secular sphere. But at the two first periods of my observation of Tikopia the society had two religions. Tikopia paganism, essentially traditional, local and polytheistic, had a structure of religious control closely identified with the structure of socio-political control; Tikopia Christianity, essentially modern, introduced and monotheistic, had a structure of religious control basically separate from the Tikopia political structure. Yet while the island community was roughly divided regionally by differential adherence to the two religions, Tikopia was emphatically ‘one society’ in the broad sense. The introduction of Christianity had had perceptible effects upon social relations; but the major system of village residence, land holding, descent-group structure, chieftainship, with all its associated values and complex interrelations, was still a unitary one.
