Anthropology

Raymond William Firth (was born in Tamaki, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand in 1901) was a New Zealand ethnologist, especially well-known for his study of Maori culture. He was a pioneer of economic anthropology. His parents were Wesley and Marie Firth. He was educated at Auckland Grammar School, and then at Auckland University College, where he graduated in economics in 1921. He took his MA there in 1922, and a diploma in social science in 1923. In 1924 he began his doctoral research at the London School of Economics.

His doctoral thesis was published in 1929 as Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Māori. Firth was a long serving Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics, and is considered to have singlehandedly created a form of British economic anthropology.

Work:

   Firth spent almost his whole life studying the Maori culture. He wanted to discover the meaning behind those external manifestations. He investigated the values of the people he studied, and the complex relationships within their society, He was particularly interested in the role of social institutions how family, kinship, religious, and economic organizations.

In his book from 1929, Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori, Firth analyzed the Maori system of land ownership and the principles of their economy.

   He was the first person in gathered and compiled material for created the first dictionary of the Tikopian language, which was quite similar to Maori. He then analyzed their family system, described in his book We, The Tikopia (1936); economic system, in Primitive Polynesian Economy (1939); values and beliefs, in The Work of the Gods in Tikopia (1940), and social structure, in Social Change in Tikopia (1959) as well as History and Traditions of Tikopia (1961).

   Firth wrote extensively on the traditional religious thoughts and practices of Tikopians. When he first visited Tikopia, the 1300 inhabitants were still mostly non-Christian, although some attempts of conversion have been made earlier by Christian missionaries. Firth recorded many religious practices, and grew rather fond of them. He later wrote on the effect churches had on local people when Christian missionaries arrived. He became particularly critical of proselytizing, seeing it as a form of pressure to give up one's own identity.

On his death, Sir Hugh Kawharu, then president of the Polynesian Society, composed on their behalf a Maori lament (poroporoaki) for Sir Raymond Firth

  

You have left us now, Sir Raymond

Your body has been pierced by the spear of death

And so farewell. Farewell,

Scholar renowned in halls of learning throughout the world

"Navigator of the Pacific"

"Black hawk" of Tamaki.

Perhaps in the end you were unable to complete all

the research plans that you had once imposed upon yourself

But no matter! The truly magnificent legacy you have left

will be an enduring testimony to your stature.

Moreover, your spirit is still alive among us,

We, who have become separated from you in New Zealand,

in Tikopia and elsewhere.

Be at rest, father. Rest, forever,

in peace, and in the care of the Almighty.

   His early work was precisely the primitive economy of the Maori (1927). All his work is traversed by the study of primitive economies, especially that of Tikopia of the South Pacific. His conclusion is that in the simplest economies never lack the choice between alternative ends, just like what happens in complex societies, although there may be differences in scale.

John Derek Freeman ( was born in Wellington, New Zealand 15 August 1916 and died in Canberra, Australia 6 July 2001 ) was a New Zealand anthropologist best known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work in Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His effort "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology. Freeman initially became interested in Boasian cultural anthropology.

   His 1953 doctoral dissertation described the relations between Iban agriculture and kinship practices. In 1961 he suffered a nervous breakdown, this experience profoundly altered his view of anthropology and from then on Freeman argued strongly for a new approach to anthropology which integrated insights from evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis, and he published works on the concepts of aggression and choice. In 1983 he published his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth in which he argued that Mead's data and conclusions were wrong and that Samoan youths suffered from the same problems as Western adolescents. He later published "The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead" in which he argued that Mead's misunderstandings of Samoan culture were due to her having been hoaxed by two of her female Samoan informants, who had merely joked about sexual escapades that they did not in fact have. Freeman's critique of Mead sparked intense debate and controversy in the discipline of anthropology.

   The so-called Mead-Freeman controversy spanned three decades, and he published his last rebuttal of a critique of his arguments only weeks before his death in 2001.