South Seas Lore

In 1940, as war in Europe, the Middle East and China raged, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) – a multi-national, regional learned organisation – commissioned New Zealand-raised and British-educated, University of Hawaii anthropologist Felix M. Keesing to write a monograph that would gather together in a single volume ‘the most complete comparative studies of every aspect of [Pacific] islander life’. ¹ With Japanese–American relations becoming frostier by the day, the IPR’s executive realised that the South Pacific would soon acquire a new importance in international affairs. Despite its significance, however, no comprehensive synthesis of the Pacific region had been published. In Keesing’s field of anthropology, the South Pacific had waned in popular and academic interest since the halcyon days of the 1920s, when Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski’s studies had captured international attention and wide readerships. ² The decline in scholarly interest was reflected in Keesing’s own work. A few years before being asked by the IPR to write the book, he had put to one side his own research interests in the Maori and Samoan peoples and commenced a project on Native Americans that culminated in his 1939 study The Menomini Indians of Wisconsin: A Study of Three Centuries of Cultural Contact and Change. ³