BEN FINNEY

For four decades, Ben Finney has been a major contributor to Pacific Anthropology. He received his doctorate in from Harvard University in 1964 under the tutelage of ASAO Honorary Fellow Douglas Oliver. In the 1960s, he conducted ethnographic research in New Guinea, resulting in an important contribution to economic anthropology and development studies: Big-Men and Business: Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth in the New Guinea Highlands (1973, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press and Canberra: Australian National University Press). He has also written on economic anthropology in Polynesia, publishing Polynesian Peasants and Proletarians (Cambridge: Schenkman Books) in 1973. Ben is best known, however, for his contributions to our understanding of Polynesian voyaging and navigation.

During the 1960s and 70s, Ben was one of a select group of scholars, including Thomas Gladwin, David Lewis, and ASAO Fellow William Alkire, who effectively challenged Andrew Sharp's contention that Pacific Islanders were incapable of accurate navigation on journeys of any substantial length. Thanks to Ben's efforts, and those of a few close colleagues, we now understand that most of Oceania was populated as a result of purposeful voyages of exploration and colonization--not accidental drift voyages as Sharp had proposed.

Along with the Herb Kane and Tommy Holmes, Ben was a founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) in 1973 and was a major contributor to the Hōkūle'a project. He sailed with Satawalese navigator Mau Piailug on Hōkūle'a's first voyage, to Tahiti, in 1976. On the canoe's arrival after 33 days at sea, the crew was greeted by a crowd of 17,000 people--over half the island's population. Since then, he has continued his association with the PVS and has been involved with several subsequent voyages of Hōkūle'a and Hawai'iloa throughout the Polynesian Triangle. In 1995, he accompanied a fleet of six Polynesian voyaging canoes, five of which sailed without instruments, from the Marquesas to Hawai'i.

Ben has documented these projects and drawn theoretical lessons from them in a number of books and articles. In several publications he has drawn attention to the importance of the voyaging revival around the Pacific for assertions of cultural identity and pride. And he has applied the lessons of Oceanic voyaging to the exploration of space as a consultant for NASA and visiting professor at the International Space University, with which he was associated for over a decade. In 1970, Ben joined the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s anthropology faculty, and he chaired the anthropology department from 1986 to 1995. Lastly, Ben is no stranger to ASAO, having attended a number of meetings, participated in several ASAO sessions, and delivered two "special lectures." The first of these, in 1977, helped launch the association’s Distinguished Lecture series.

Rick Feinberg