George Kingsley Roth was once a colonial administrator in colonial Fiji between the late 1920s and the 1950s.
He had in his collection some papers on Fijian affairs.
According to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), hundreds of objects, pictures, archive documents, and sound recordings were collected by Roth.
According to records, Roth had a diploma and masters in Anthropology from Cambridge under a man named Alfred Haddon and he maintained his ties to Cambridge by donating Fijian artefacts to the Museum over a period of several decades.
The Museum highlighted that Roth, during his colonial service in Fiji, became fluent in the language and dedicated his time to studying and recording various aspects of the Fijian culture.
“Unlike his Victorian predecessors, his attention focused on processes, techniques, and variations. His collection was a series, containing everything from raw materials to the finished product as well as the tools employed in an object’s manufacture,” the museum said.
“After his retirement from the position of Secretary for Fijian Affairs, he was appointed Honorary Curator for the Fijian collections, a task continued by Jane Roth after her husband passed away.
“The Roth material at MAA is exceptionally welldocumented and covers a broad geographical range, including artefacts from the island of Vanua Levu.”
A journal titled Henry Ling Roth’s and George Kingsley Roth’s Pacific Anthropology, discussed the studies of the Roth family and how their contributions to the Pacific were not well known.
The authors, Russell MacDougall and Julian Croft of the highlighted how Roth produced two important books based on Fiji.
The books were the fourth edition of Fiji: Handbook of the Colony (1936) which described in detail the history, economy, culture and administrative organisation of the colony and Fijian Way of Life (1953) which celebrated both the traditional culture and the contemporary administrative and social structure.
“George Kingsley Roth was the second generation in a family remarkable for the cultural and geographical diversity of its very major contribution to colonial administration, anthropology and public health.”
It was in 1928 after he applied for a posting in the Far East that he was accepted for the position of district officer in Fiji.
“No doubt he accepted it with some enthusiasm, as he would have already been exposed to aspects of Fijian traditional life in his father’s collection of Fijian artefacts in the Bankfield Museum (Halifax,UK).” Roth followed in the step of another ethnographer and Fijian artefacts collector, Baron Anotole von Hugel.
“Although he arrived in Fiji several generations after the passing of the cultural environment which would have produced the objects which his father collected, and 60 years after the assembly of Baron von Hugel’s collection of Fijian material culture in the 1870s, Kingsley Roth continued that tradition of 19th-century empirical observation of custom and culture.
“Much of the writing-up of the great wealth of information he collected in his almost 30 years in Fiji was planned for his retirement, which his early death unfortunately forestalled.”
“Kingsley Roth’s early empirical research can be seen in the pages of Man in the early 1930s.
“The first note was on one of those Pacific customs which, along with cannibalism and tattooing, has always attracted European interest: fire walking.”
Another subject of Roth’s great interest was the tabua where his first description of the object involved an “xray analysis” to establish how many whales’ teeth had been used and how they were pieced together.
“The result showed an intricate piece of joinery and a skilful preparation of the tabua’s surface.
“For Kingsley Roth, the tabua and the rituals associated with its presentation were important as potent symbols of the survival of traditional values.
“…as a colonial administrator conscious of the traditions that bound him to the 1870s Deed of Cession, the survival of the tabua as object and ritual was a reassurance that those policies were working and were viable into the future.”
Another publication on Roth’s Fiji ethnography was in the 1930s which was bout the belief in spells and its treatment where he showed there were certain measures that could counter spells successfully in village life.
But the arrival of the second world war on Fiji’s dorsteps and its aftermath, and the reorganisation of Fijian colonial administration, seemed to have stopped Kingsley Roth’s ethnographic output.
“In 1950, 1951 and 1953, several short articles appeared on the same subject, the evolution of Fijian local government and a historical review of 75 years of indigenous administration.
The journal noted that these articles reflected Kingsley Roth’s concern with technology and craft, primarily house building and, in an interesting cross-over into spiritual and ritual matters, model spirit houses and chiefly customs. In 1957, Roth retired from the colonial service.
He had intended to use this time to write about the material he had collected throughout his professional career. However, he was unable to do this as he got ill which caused his early death in 1960, which the authors noted, was two years after the death of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna whom he had worked with.
“Sukuna and Roth both held key positions in Fijian colonial administration (Roth as assistant colonial secretary and Sukuna as speaker of the legislative council) in the 1950s, when pressure was building for a reassessment of the political and social balance in Fiji.
“In a series of articles that followed the 75th anniversary of the Deed of Cession in 1949, Kingsley Roth energetically defended the administrative order that he and Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna had worked so diligently to nurture and protect.”
“While many would see Kingsley Roth as an embodiment of the ‘old order’s’ resistance to change and as an (imperial) agent of the ‘invention of tradition’, it is possible to see his concern with the maintenance of village life as an essential administrative response…”
The authors noted that Roth shared similar extinction theories to Fiji’s earlier governors such as Gordon and had policies that supported and developed the native administration. However, his name did not appear in many written history books of Fiji.
