ABSTRACT
Vaclav Havel reminded his audience that Karl Popper had written The Open Society and Its Enemies in New Zealand during World War II, when the latter took refuge there from the "tribal fury" of Nazism. Later than Sigmund Freud, Popper too suggested that the idealization of tribal life is an unconscious reaction to the "strain of civilization". But "culture in the anthropological sense" was very important to the man who was Popper's departmental head in New Zealand, the anthropologist Ivan Sutherland, and Sutherland was soon at logger-heads with his newly arrived lecturer from overseas. By the time of Popper's arrival in New Zealand in 1937 he had become a specialist in Maori affairs. Any visitor to New Zealand can see that modern Maori have the same needs for housing, education, and jobs as everyone else. Maori culture had a number of interesting customs.
