ABSTRACT
Our survey of the economic life of the Tikopia has revealed the complex fabric of social institutions which serve to regulate the satisfaction of material wants among a primitive island community. We find here no trace of the artificial concepts by which the economic behaviour of primitive man has been sometimes interpreted: the opposed figments of “primitive communism” and the “individual search for food” now appear as equally barren principles of interpretation, “Man Friday” and the “nuts for arrows” savage alike disappear, while the popular idyllic picture of the Golden Age primitive man sitting beneath his tree and waiting for the fruit to fall before him is seen to find no place in a community where the struggle to wrest a livelihood from the environment is a very definite reality.
