ABSTRACT
In Polynesia the institution of taboo was closely entwined with the social and political constitutions of the various states; taboos were imposed by the priests and the nobility, and the unwritten code of taboo corresponded in many important respects with the legal and social codes of more advanced civilisations. It is not, therefore, surprising that the earlier students of the system regarded it as an artificial invention, a piece of state-craft, cunningly devised in the interests of the nobility and priests. This view is, how ever, now generally abandoned. Wider researches have shown that the institution is not due to state-enactment or to priest-craft, for the simple reason that it is most at home in communities which have no state-organisation, and flourishes where there are no priests or no priesthood. Above all, the belief is not artificial and imposed, but spontaneous and universal.
