My Experiences At Scotland Yard

New York: A. L. Burt Company. Very Good+. 1923. Reprint. Hardcover. This book is in Very Good+ condition and is lacking a dust jacket. The book and its contents are in mostly clean, bright condition. The spine ends and corners of the book covers have some light bumping and rubbing. The lettering on the spine has dulled. The text pages are mostly clean and bright. There is a previous owner's inked name on the front pastedown page. "After three years at the Native Lands Office in Suva, Thomson resigned from colonial service, and returned to England in 1893, due in no small part to the deteriorating health of his wife. There he embarked on a career as a writer, drawing on his experiences in the South Sea Islands to produce South Sea Yarns (1894; written in Fiji) , The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894, about his government work in Tonga) , and The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath (1898). Basil Thomson used his Fijian assistants to organise the first ever done census of Fijian marriage on Viti Levu. He found that the Fijians did not marry, as claimed in the specialised literature, their mother's brother's daughter, but married any girl and recalculated her kinship status after the marriage so as to address her by the term meaning mother's brother's daughter. This result was anathema to Radcliffe-Brown's anthropology school and was ignored. Later, Lévi-Strauss would not take it into account either. But anthropologists of the time would not try to build any complete census of any culture trait. The result was that their material was partly insufficiently documented, but they would not recognise it, even today." (from Wikipedia) .