KENELM BURRIDGE

In the Harry Hawthorn Lecture, delivered before the Canadian Anthropology Society in May 1989, Ken Burridge presents a "parable of history" in which he eloquently weaves a personal retrospective with a meditation on anthropology. The central theme of that stimulating talk is that anthropology has come "through a Vico spiral" and seems "to be returning to its etymological origins: a gossiping or talking about humankind" (1989:92). This talking continues to draw from listening "to the ignored, disadvantaged and disenfranchised--who will not necessarily be the same sorts of people, the same sorts of things, tomorrow as they are today or were yesterday" (1989:96). One is reminded of other dynamics Burridge has explored in Melanesia and beyond--millenarianism, the moral and the divine, structure and event, the encounter with the Other, missionary metanoias, and the person and the individual. A concern with renewal and transcendence runs through all of Burridge's writings.

These are heady themes and, indeed, Burridge often challenges his readers with the breadth of his interests and knowledge. He has never respected disciplinary boundaries. Beginning with his earliest work, Burridge broke with functionalist conventions by placing his rich ethnographic descriptions of the Tangu people of Papua New Guinea in the historical contexts of internal cultural innovations and colonialism. Anticipating current reflections on anthropological writing, he showed, in Encountering Aborigines (1973), that ethnographic portraits of aboriginal Australians had to be understood in the context of European intellectual and moral traditions and the long history of imagining the "Other." Burridge also insisted that anthropologists accord all subjects the ethnographic respect necessary to understand their motivations and actions. He thus began researching and writing about missionaries and new Christians in Third World countries long before these became acceptable topics within the anthropological tribe (1979a). His most ambitious book, Someone, No One (1979b), combines anthropology, history, philosophy and theology in a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of being an individual.

I suspect that Burridge's lack of respect for disciplinary fads and boundaries, along with his wide erudition, has at times cost him anthropological readers. In my experience it has mostly been historians and ethnohistorians who have expressed admiration for his work. Yet it has been fascinating to watch anthropologists discover and rediscover Burridge's writings and recognize their continuing significance for contemporary issues. To give a few examples: Burridge's (1971) important analysis of the cultural interactions of the manager (big man) and sorcerer in Melanesian society; his pioneering study of mythology, Tanu Traditions (l969a); and his classic comparative work on millenarian movements, New Heaven, New Earth (1969b). Burridge's writings on Melanesia and elsewhere continue to offer important alternative insights on indigenous cultures and the ethnographers and others who encounter them.

Burridge belongs to the first generation of post-War British-trained anthropologists working in Oceania. He was the first student in the new Anthropology department at the Australian National University, then under the chairmanship of Siegfreid Nadel. Along with Peter Lawrence, he resisted the pressures to study in the New Guinea highlands, choosing instead to work nearer the coast in Madang. His main interest was with indigenous politics, but the Tangu and Manam Islanders drew him, most reluctantly, into the study of cargo cults (see the preface to Mambu (1960]).

After securing the first Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1953, Burridge worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Malaya, Professor and Head of Anthropology at the University of Baghdad, Lecturer at the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford, and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He came to the University of British Columbia in 1968 as Professor and served there until his retirement in 1987.

Ken is a superb teacher, individually and before a class. He has a gift for combining theoretical insight with the telling anecdote; his classes were among the most popular in the Department. Among my early recollections of Ken are interminable waits in the hail outside his office with a small crowd of other students. Trying to cope with the ever-growing demands for meetings from undergraduate and graduate students, Ken set up scheduled meetings, but he was never able to send a student out of his office when the time was up. He insisted on the best that his students could give, and he, with Cyril Belshaw, supervised the dissertation research of some of our most gifted oceanic scholars, including Eric Schwiinmer, Robert Tonkinson, John LeRoy, Dan Jorgensen and John-Marc Philibert.

Ken Burridge lives in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island with his wife, Ann. His latest book, In the Way: An Essay on Christian Missionary Endeavours will be published by the University of British Columbia Press later this year.

John Barker, University of British Columbia (June 1991 Newsletter)