The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of CustomThomson, Basil
History
The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom
Thomson, Basil
Ethnology -- Fiji; Fijians
The word _tauvu_ means literally "Sprung from the same root," or "of
common origin." It is applied to two or more tribes who may live in
different islands, speak different dialects, and have, in short, nothing
in common but their god. They do not necessarily intermarry; they may
have held no intercourse for generations; yet, though each may have
forgotten the names of its chiefs three generations back, the site of
its ancient home, and the traditions of its migrations, it never forgets
the tribe with which it is _tauvu_. Members of that tribe may run riot
in its village, slaughter its animals, and ravage its plantations, while
it sits smiling by; for the spoilers are its brothers, worshippers of
its common ancestor, and are entitled in the fullest sense to the
"freedom of the city." In several instances I have traced back the bond
of tauvu to its origin, the marriage of the sister of some high chief
with the head of a distant clan. Her rank was so transcendent that she
brought into her husband's family a measure of the godhead of her
ancestors, and her descendants have thenceforth reverenced her
forefathers in preference to those of her husband. But in the majority
of cases--and it is the exception to find a clan which is not tauvu to
some other--the bond is too remote for tradition to have preserved its
origin, and in these the two clans were probably offshoots from the same
stock. Perhaps there was a quarrel between brothers, and one of them was
driven out with his family to find another home; or a young swarm from
an overcrowded hive may have crossed the water to seek wider planting
lands for their support, as the first Aryan emigrants burst through the
barriers of their cradle-land and overran Europe. Had the Aryans been
ancestor-worshippers Rome would have been _tauvu_ with Athens, and the
descendants of the youths driven forth in the Ver Sacrum _tauvu_ with
Rome.
The general tendency of the bonds of _tauvu_ in the western portion of
the group is to confirm the sagas of Nakauvandra in suggesting that the
cradle-land of the Fijians was the north-western corner of Vitilevu,
whence the tide of emigration set northward to Mbua, eastward along the
Tailevu coast, and south-eastward down the Wainimbuka branch of the Rewa
river. Besides the saga of Turukawa, printed in another chapter, there
are fragments of a still earlier poem relating the first arrival of the
_Kalou-Vu_ in a great canoe, the _Kaunitoni_, tempest-driven from a land
in the far West. The fragmentary saga of the _Kaunitoni_ must be
accepted with caution, since it was committed to writing so late as
1891, when educated Fijians were already aware that Europeans were
seeking evidence of their arrival in the group.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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