FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA: AN APPRECIATION OF RAYMOND FIRTH

For Anthropology Today, Summer 2002

Dr. Rima A Morrell

This year saw the passing of Sir Raymond Firth, one of Britain’s most distinguished anthropologists, at the age of 101. Some anthropologists at Cambridge University when I studied in the 1980’s, remarked that his vitality was because he was sensible enough to do fieldwork on an island in the South Seas. Others said that his wonderful constitution was due to a happy marriage (his wife Rosemary only just predeceased him), and his enduring interest in scholarly matters, which led to his giving speeches, writing papers and interacting with students and colleagues right up until his death.

Raymond William Firth was born in New Zealand in 1901. He studied at Auckland University, moving to the London School of Economics in 1924. There, guided by the inspiring influence of Bronislaw Malinowski, he changed his Ph.D topic from economics to anthropology. He received his Ph.D in 1927 and his book ‘The Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori’ was published in 1929. He taught anthropology at the LSE from 1932 until his retirement in 1968, becoming a full professor in 1944. Among his many other achievements, he was the President of the Association of Social Anthropologists, and his 100th Birthday was marked by celebrations held at New Zealand House, where he gave a speech on the role of indigeneous anthropologists in the gathering of knowledge. He was knighted in 1973.

As a New Zealander, Firth’s association with Polynesia went back a long way. He was most famously associated with the Polynesian people of Tikopia, one of the Solomon Islands. Firth’s books are a rare illustration of how fieldwork should be performed, and a model for the generations who came after him. Yet it is not usually seen as necessary for the anthropologist to go to Polynesia, but rather to ‘do fieldwork’ Firth fashion, but do it elsewhere. For example, I was told at Cambridge I would ‘come to no good’ as an anthropologist unless I studied in Africa. Getting a Ph.D. in Polynesia from a British University when there was no area specialist at the time to supervise me certainly had its challenges (Chris Tilley at UCL stepped into the breach brilliantly on a theoretical level). There were yet more challenges in terms of grants, for instance Polynesia does not fall under any of the regional areas for available money for fieldwork. Raymond Firth, from the perspective of a specialist on Polynesia, was a great, and rare, inspiration. He went to the Pacific for fieldwork from his studies in London. His studies of Tikopian society are the most thorough written records we have of life on a Polynesian island. One of the advantages of studying life on a small island is that it provides a relatively discrete unit for observation. Arguably functionalism thrived on the ordering of the visible into clearly-delineated categories, and undoubtedly Firth with his mentor Malinowski, helped form this model for fieldwork, which has influenced so many since.

In the post-modern world, even in Polynesia, things have become more problematic. How does one study a society where many of its inhabitants say the ocean unites the different islands, and the appearance of the sea as a dividing force is just that – an appearance? The Tongan writer Epeli Hauofa talked of Polynesia as ‘our sea of islands’ and the Australian historian Greg Dening described island beaches as places of contact, and locii of cultural change, not sites of separation. How does one study a society where the inhabitants want to represent themselves? The Hawaiians, for instance, have taken to siting websites on the internet, like the proverbial duck to water. How does one study a society where the inhabitants do not want anyone else to talk about them? They have had enough of the damage done by imperialism in all its forms, and wish to claw back the right to speak. No-one else has the right to do it. It is virtually impossible to take a degree in the Department of Hawaiian Studies, at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa for example, unless you have Polynesian ethnicity. The political sphere has become paramount, and some of the other categories that Firth so aptly described such as religion, economics, and even kinship, have been collapsed into it. It could be said that even the ideal of intellectual independence has been lost, in the predomination of the viewpoint that people do not have a right to study certain societies because of their race. As a young scholar who has just finished my Ph.D, I found the only way I could gather information in Polynesia was to go to the people who would talk to me. Not the younger, politicized scholars, but the kupuna, the elderly inhabitants of the ‘boundary zone’, the mountains and valleys, still largely living the traditional lifestyle. Luckily these were the holders of the ‘old knowledge’, the subject of my quest. Hence my own research was just possible. Sympathetic as I am to the right of Polynesians to determine their own future, there are certain areas of research that are closed to me – for instance nationalism – because of my race. I cannot help feeling that in Firth’s day it was easier to for the non-Polynesian anthropologist to study there.

Firth was obviously no stranger to the effects of cultural change. For example his later study of Tikopia (1959) may have helped form the idea, held by many social anthropologists, that Polynesian culture had changed a great deal, and may be no longer worthy of serious study. Perhaps this is one explanation, together with the tradition started by Malinowski, why far more British social anthropologists now go to Melanesia for their fieldwork. Writers such as Gananath Obeyesekere apotheistically say that it is only possible to find out why the Hawaiians killed Captain Cook in libraries. In my own experience that is not true – several of my informants were descendants of the chiefs involved in his death – yet it would certainly appear that way. One must be prepared to literally tread into those valleys where previous scholars have not stepped, and go beyond the libraries to get information.

Firth was a brilliant example of how to literally do that. He is remembered for many things, his analyses of economics, kinship and social structure, his contribution to formalism and kinship theory. Yet his reputation most rests on his work as an ethnographer, particularly in Polynesia. His years on Tikopia have resulted in masterly, and thorough descriptions, of many aspects of that society no-one else thought to describe at the time. For example the games made with string figures, and lists of songs and poetry. Now Polynesian studies has become increasingly politicized, there is a movement against works on Polynesia by white people, and Firth’s work has not been getting the attention it deserves. I anticipate that in due course, his material will reappear in Polynesian studies. The quality of such early detailed descriptions will endure longer than the political outrage that motivates its suppression. His historical relevance, for these societies simply were not described by anyone else in an accessible form, will outlast the theoretical fashions.

To my mind, the unity in Polynesian culture, is far greater than its more superficial divisions. For example, the same language stretches from New Zealand to Hawai‘i, through Easter Island, Samoa, even Tikopia. With dialectical variations true, yet a Hawaiian scholar, I can understand Tikopian. Although not a linguistic scholar, Firth’s account of the meanings of Tikopian, and New Zealand Maori words for example, is useful to me today, and informs my analysis of Hawaiian words. The importance of the islands of Polynesia sharing the same language cannot be overstated, and work done on one island, though it may be situated thousands of miles away, can, and perhaps should, infuse work done on another island. Distance is deceptive. Language unites. Geography can channel and bridge, as well as separate.

Today, with the passing of the last of the great Founders of Social Anthropology, we see a new era of the social sciences, one that the aptly-named Firth helped to create. In geographic terms, the word firth means ‘the opening of a river into the sea’. Raymond Firth’s contributions to anthropology; from the dedication of his teaching, to the encouragement he gave his students, and the setting up of social science funds; helped channel the river of social anthropology into something greater than itself. The ‘islands of functionalism’ he helped form remain an important stop. That sea is now greater than the sum of its parts, informed by the passages of other disciplines, each flowing into the other, and forming the other. The need for Sir Raymond’s ‘more refined methodology, as objective and dispassionate as possible’ (1936), in which the investigator faces his biases as consciously as (s)he can, is being superceded by more personal accounts. For instance Polynesian anthropologist Vili Hereniko (1995) said that his account of clowning in Rotuma is best written in a ‘playful and experimental style’ in which there is an ‘interplay between my many selves and the many kinds of discourses’. As Sir Raymond Firth so aptly pointed out, the search for those kinds of knowledges is characteristic of the new millennium. Not only are Firth’s own family, the academic community, and the community of Highgate the poorer for his passing. So are the islanders of Tikopia, and other areas around the word where he lived. His last, and greatest, epithet must be that his influence, like the passage of the river into the sea, remains immeasurable.