ABSTRACT
This book is a study of a brief period in the history of a social system. Tikopia had changed between the time of earliest European contact and the time when I first saw it in 1928/9; it has continued to change since I left in 1952. But this period of a generation in the lives of its inhabitants was probably more significant for the form of the social system than any which preceded it for a long time. I am not referring here to the effects of famine—this was only one episode in a recurrent cycle of natural disasters. But the modernization of the social system as exemplified by the incorporation into it of the recognition of the use of money, by the acceptance of a wide range of new foods and other consumer goods, by the radical alterations in the religion of the people and, above all, by the acceptance of the view that a section of Tikopia society could live abroad, seemed to be of critical importance.
