2002 Annual Report Of The Royal Society of New Zealand

Incorporating the 2002 Academy Council Yearbook

Sir Raymond (William) Firth

CNZM PhD Lond HonDPh Oslo HonLLD Michigan HonDSc British Columbia HonDLitt ANU East Anglia, Exete HonDLettHum Chicago FBA

1901 - 2002

Sir Raymond being farewelled from Hawaii for a field trip to Tikopia.

Photograph: Nancy Pollock
RAYMOND FIRTH was a founding father of British social anthropology and is regarded as the most eminent social anthropologist of the 20th Century.

The son of an Auckland building contractor, he spent 80 years studying, talking and writing about the structure of people's relationships with and within their societies. A traditional study of, say, Petone, would have looked at the structures Maori and subsequent settlers established, but not reported on the values residents held or how their communities fitted together. Firth changed all that.

Social anthropology is his principal legacy to the world. Once a peripheral social science, it is now a discipline in its own right, and much of what we know today about people who went before us is due to methods he put in place.

Firth's reputation was built in Britain, but he started out at Auckland University College, majoring in economics. His 1924 MA thesis was about the kauri gum industry. Its defining element was that it was the first to receive the Firth treatment: more than 70 years ago he did the unthinkable in an economics thesishe interviewed the people involved, including gum diggers, about their work and lives.

He went to London as a graduate student at the London School of Economics in 1924, intent on an economics PhD on the frozen meat industry. Instead, after coming into the orbit of the celebrated anthropologist Bronsilaw Malinowski, the frozen meat carcasses were abandoned. In 1929, he published Primitive Economics Of The New Zealand Maori. It is an essential work because it was the first document to assess the Maori system of land tenure and how Maori had become "a people compressed from total land ownership into limited areas". The immorality of the expropriations is made very clear. It also contains one of the first understandings of Maori economic principles.

There was change afoot in Firth himself, who had been raised in a strict Methodist household and taught Sunday school. He never tasted liquor until he landed in London, though it was not the cause of turning him from his Christian beliefs. Firth came to realise when he adopted anthropology as his principal interest that religions were so disparate in nature and often so strident in their determinations that their pervasive influences were more interesting when studied than enjoined. He became a humanist, and was never swayed from it.

Firth held that any society had to be studied in its entirety. Big or small, it required intimate study and comprehensive field work. It was no use, he argued, sitting in a library in London without having first-hand knowledge of the people in the field.

In 1928, Firth began the work that established his reputation. That year, he went to Tikopia, an island on a line due north of New Zealand and Vanuatu. The tiny volcanic speck, miles from anywhere, today falls within the political boundaries of the Solomon Islands. It is midway between Fiji (the eastern perimeter of Melanesia), and the Solomons archipelago, but its people are Polynesian. Firth visited there several times. What we know today about Tikopia is due to him. When he first went there, the 1300 inhabitants were non-Christian. He was there when missionaries arrived, and he reported on the effects churches had on the people.

Field work included gathering material for a dictionary of the Tikopean language, which has similarities to Maori. Firth also arranged for two Tikopians to work with him in London to compile their first dictionary.

Tikopia would seem to many people to be a stereotypical location for a field anthropologist, but what Firth did there broke moulds. Importantly, he was not in the business of building templates by which to measure people and their activities anywhere, irrespective of the size of their turf or their populations. He held a large view of the world, and not even a tiny island was going to shrink it.

Firth's interventions in anthropology had taken him far beyond his original intentions with economics, not that he abandoned the study of economics altogether. What exactly could be learned from the tenets of Western (economic) theory about the activities of peoples such as the Maori or Tikopia? Significant categories of Western knowledge were there for anthropologists' edification, if only they would apply a bit of professionalism.

Tikopia grew under his labours. The nine books he wrote about this tiny Polynesian population began with family life, We, The Tikopia (1936), which became the most well known, and continued with Primitive Polynesian Economy (1939), his monumental The Work Of The Gods In Tikopia (1940) and, after his return, Social Change In Tikopia (1959) as well as History And Traditions Of Tikopia (1961). His last was published in 2000. Together, they comprise the most comprehensive observational records anyone has ever produced.

The people of Tikopia have never forgotten what he did, nor have Pacific Islanders at large. On his 100th birthday, the Polynesian Society presented him with the Rusiate Nayacakalou Medal; he had already become a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

In his full spate of publishing on Tikopia there was still room for other interests. The year 1936 saw the beginnings of a lifetime of what he would have called intellectual collaboration with his wife Rosemary. Together they went to Malaya, and Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (1946) opened up a fresh world.

Firth wrote and talked endlessly. He was an innovative mentor to students across the world. He taught and lectured at universities in the United States, at the Australian National University in Canberra as well as at the London School of Economics. He was instrumental in helping establish the Colonial Social Science Research Council towards the end of the Second World War, and was its first secretary. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1949, and knighted in 1973.

Firth was loyal to New Zealand. Durable as he was in intellect and body, however, he had not been able to visit his homeland recently. He once remarked he was immensely fond and proud of his father, a teetotalling Methodist who is said to have painted his roof for the last time when he was 103. Raymond Firth was becoming an old man when his father greeted him at Auckland Airport, and insisted on carrying his son's suitcase to his car.

Raymond Firth is survived by his son.

Text: Peter Kitchin, The Evening Post, Thursday 7 March 2002 and The Independent

Sources: Post library, N. Pollock, and others