WILLIAM LESSA
1908-1997

One of the pillars of anthropology in Micronesia, and one of the older ASAO Honorary Fellows, William Armand Lessa died on October 14, 1997, at age 89 in Los Angeles, California. Upon completion of his PhD in 1947 under Frederick Eggan at the University of Chicago with a dissertation based upon his World War II experiences in the European theater (see Lessa 1985), Lessa joined the faculty at UCLA, where he remained for the duration of his academic career. Almost immediately after taking up his new university appointment, however, he participated in the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA) project, directed by George Peter Murdock. In 1947, Lessa began to conduct fieldwork on Ulithi Atoll in the outer islands of what is now Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). His association with the people of Ulithi spanned the remainder of his career, and it is for his numerous and wide-ranging publications on Ulithi that he is best known in Pacific anthropology. This will be discussed in more detail below, but there are other less well known aspects of Lessa's background to which I will turn first.

As an undergraduate chemistry major at Harvard, Lessa enrolled in a course in human evolution taught by Earnest A. Hooten, and this convinced him that he wanted to be an anthropologist, somewhat to the dismay of his Italian immigrant parents who had made great financial sacrifices to fund his college education and who encouraged his early inclination toward a career in medicine. But Lessa was "hooked" on anthropology by the time he graduated, and even though he had already been admitted to the two medical schools to which he had applied, in 1928 Hooten put him in charge of his laboratory preparing statistical analyses of anthropometric data on the physiques of ca. 12,000 criminals. From this job, and on Hooten's recommendation, at the beginning of 1929 Lessa became a Research Associate in the Constitution Clinic of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, under the supervision of Harry L. Shapiro of the American Museum of Natural History. This second involvement with human constitution as a field of research included the collection of anthropometric data on about 1,500 patients, in a search for associations between their physiques and their susceptibilities to specific medical ailments. This assignment to work with Shapiro was significant to Lessa's subsequent research career in Oceanic anthropology because it was through Shapiro that Lessa first encountered the Pacific.

Shapiro already had begun to work in Polynesia by 1928, and in July 1929 he sent Lessa to Honolulu as a Research Associate of the University of Hawai‘i to conduct an anthropometric and population genetic study of the mixed Chinese-Hawaiian population, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. This study took Lessa throughout the Hawaiian Islands, where he measured 5,700 subjects and gathered several hundred blood samples for simple blood group determination. Unfortunately, even though these data were analyzed statistically in Hooten's laboratory at Harvard, Shapiro never published the results. Ancillary to his work for Shapiro on the Chinese-Hawaiian population, Lessa was caught up in an effort to discover every "pure" Hawaiian above the age of 5 then alive in the islands. After traveling to virtually every hamlet on every island (including Ni‘ihau), Lessa's heretical conclusion was that no more than perhaps 1,500 such people existed at that time. The above-mentioned work occupied Lessa for 20 three years, when in August 1932 Shapiro and the University of Hawai‘i sent him to Kwangtung Province, China, to gather a sample of Chinese who were known to be related biologically to the Chinese subjects who already had been examined in Hawai‘i. Lessa obtained a sample of about 1,200 such persons by June 1933, and then traveled back to the USA via Manila, Bali, Java, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, and Europe to confront the Great Depression and more than a year of idleness. The sole exception was his participation in the Inter-Cultural Education seminar at Yale during summer 1934, whose binding force was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's daily lecture in social anthropology. This was Lessa's first serious encounter with a field of anthropology not dominated by human biology, and it made a lasting impression. It may come as no surprise, then, that Lessa eventually studied under Eggan, who had been Radcliffe-Brown's student at Chicago.

In the mid-1930s, frustrated by unemployment and depressed by the death of his mother and several close friends and relatives, Lessa returned to Honolulu and worked initially as a clerk in the US Army Post Exchange at Schofield Barracks (for $55/month!). Over the next three years he switched first to a position in a photography store in Honolulu, and then became a supervisory timekeeper for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He also became actively involved in helping to organize the longshoremen at the Honolulu docks, and, as an Associate Editor of Hawai‘i's first labor newspaper (The Voice of Labor), he penned an anonymous weekly column called, "Races and Bosses." When retrenchment in the WPA eliminated his position, and upon the strong recommendation of Chicago PhD John Embree, who was then teaching at the University of Hawai‘i, Lessa entered the University of Chicago‘s graduate program in anthropology.

Although by that time Radcliffe-Brown had left Chicago, Lessa thrived under courses from Robert Redfield, W. Lloyd Warner, Wilton M. Krogman, and Frederick Eggan, and he later also studied with Manuel Andrade, Fay-Cooper Cole, and Harry Hoijer. Out of these experiences he determined that he preferred social anthropology to physical anthropology, and in 1940 he passed his PhD qualifying examinations. In the face of financial stringency and uncertainty about the pending war, at Warner's encouragement, beginning in the summer of 1941, Lessa accepted a position as an Instructor at Brooklyn College, where he joined Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Walter Dyk, and Conrad M. Arensberg. Soon thereafter, World War II intervened and Lessa entered the US Army, in which he served as a military government officer attached to various British 8th Army combat units, mostly in the Italian campaign. Having been awarded the Bronze Star for "heroic action," Lessa returned to the University of Chicago after the war, determined to complete his doctorate. This he did in 1947, upon which he went immediately to UCLA.

In accepting the position at UCLA, Lessa had to curtail a projected one-year research period on Ulithi, and he stayed there only for the summer of 1947 before returning to Los Angeles to begin teaching. He then returned to the field under CIMA auspices in 1948–49, with subsequent visits in 1960 and 1961. Lessa's extensive bibliography based upon his Ulithi research covers a very wide range of subjects from folktales to projective tests (Lessa 1961; Lessa and Spiegelman 1954), and from demography to social organization (Lessa 1950, 1955, 1966; Lessa and Myers 1962). He also published on everything from the effects of typhoons to plants to Carolinian traditional martial arts, and late in his career he wrote a number of meticulously researched pieces on Micronesian ethnohistory, notably a delightful and informative book on Sir Francis Drake's voyages to the area (Lessa 1975). Lessa's name is also widely recognized in anthropology for his coeditorship (with Evon Z. Vogt) of the 1958 Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, which went through four editions.

Lessa served as Secretary-Treasurer of both the Central States Anthropological Society and of the American Anthropological Association, and he was also elected First Vice President of the American Folklore Society. In 1980 and 1984, Lessa transmitted his research notes, maps, photographs, and related materials to the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where they are accessible to any interested scholar. These include information, data, and unpublished manuscripts from his early work in physical anthropology, and a very detailed collection from Ulithi and his ethnohistorical research on Micronesia. Although to my knowledge he never attended an ASAO meeting, Lessa was very proud to have been elected an Honorary Fellow of ASAO in 1976, and he mentions this in his unpublished autobiographical notes as "a title given to only a handful of international scholars." His broad contributions to scholarship will be missed, and his excellent published work will continue to influence future scholars working in Micronesia and Oceania in myriad ways.

References Cited

Lessa, William A.
1950 The Ethnology of Ulithi Atoll. CIMA Report No. 28. Washington, DC: Pacific Science Board, National Research Council

1955 Depopulation on Ulithi. Human Biology 27 (3): 161–183.

1961 Tales from Ulithi Atoll: A Comparative Study of Oceanic Folklore. University of California Publications, Folklore Studies No. 13. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1966 Ulithi: A Micronesian Design for Living. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

1975 Drake's Island of Thieves: Ethnological Sleuthing. Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i.

1985 Spearhead Governatore: Remembrances of the Campaign in Italy. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications.

Lessa, William A. and George C. Myers
1962 Population dynamics of an atoll community. Population Studies 15 (3): 244–257.

Lessa, William A. and Marvin Spiegelman
1954 Ulithian Personality as Seen Through Ethnological Materials and Thematic Test Analysis. University of California Publications in Culture and Society, Volume 2, No. 5. pp. 243–301. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lessa, William A. and Evon Z. Vogt (eds.)
1958 Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. First edition. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Mac Marshall, University of Iowa (December 1997 Newsletter)