Harrisson’s biographer, Judith Heimann, describes it as one of the “few works of scholarship in the social sciences to have survived so well the sixty-odd years” since its publication.
Fairbanks was sailing around the world and, after sending some time with Harrisson, decided that a film about the Big Nambas would be popular back home.
[2] His arrival back in the United Kingdom also attracted the attention of the Royal Geographical Society which arranged for him to give a talk in March 1936.
Harrisson begins the book with him standing at the top of Mount Tabwemasana on Espiritu Santo Island, using the view out to the ocean as a means to segue into a general description of the geography and natural history of the New Hebrides.
Every man had more than enough for himself and success …” [3] In the following chapter, 'The Last Conquistador,' Harrisson proceeded to write a history of the first encounter with Europeans – a shipload of Spaniards under the command of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros.
He summarizes the experience of the locals: “These unfamiliar people whom they had welcomed as something supernatural, turned out to be not only sudden, unaccountable butchers … but also treacherous thieves, men who mutilated corpses and even broke the rules of war so far as to kill a chief.
"[4] In the rest of the first part of the book, Harrisson recounts the history of the years following de Quiros’ visit: the exploitation of the sandalwood trees, the arrival of missionaries (often Polynesians at first), the infestation of “blackbirds” (Europeans who went to the islands to persuade or coerce the local men to sign on as labourers for plantations in Australia), and later still, the activities of white plantation owners on the islands themselves.
But the focus quickly changes in the next chapter to an account of his travels where he sees first hand the culture of the people and the effects of the various diseases introduced by the whites.
There is also a moving portrayal of Antonio Bruno Siller, a poverty-stricken white trader whom Harrisson befriended and eventually helped to bury.
The final two chapters cover his time with the Big Nambas, his tenure as British official on Malekula and then his encounter with Hollywood in the person of Douglas Fairbanks.
Here he is quite candid about his part in creating fictional cannibals for the projected movie, but he also notes how it got him out of the depression he was experiencing because of his encounter with the savage (white) civilisation on the islands.
In Man, the anthropologist John Layard wrote that “the book unfolds itself, as an Elizabethan drama with scenes, short and long, trenchant sketches of black and white kaleidoscopically mixed.
"[6] And although Harrisson wrote in “a light vein as a concession both to his own vitality and to the need of publication, the work also demonstrated his skills as “a serious student” of anthropology.
"[6] But he was also quick to note that this attempt to produce a serious work of anthropology that would at the same time appeal to a popular audience had its drawbacks as his descriptions, although “thrilling to read” lack “detail.
"[11] Harrisson iconoclastic methods and views attracted the reviewer’s attention: “At frequent intervals remarks of a sort not customarily made by well brought up anthropologists are injected into the narrative.
"[11] The review ended with an extensive quotation from the book giving Harrisson’s frank opinion of what at that time was seen as the standard work on the people of the region.
[12] Rod Edmond includes a discussion of Savage Civilisation in his chapter on Harrisson in the edited volume, Writing, Travel, and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology.
[13] He argues that the title of Harrisson’s book was chosen to cast doubt in the readers’ mind about the common oppositional relationship between these terms.
Harrisson’s census work, adapted from his knowledge and study of ornithology, showed that it was only in the mountainous interior that population decline continued.