DOUGLAS L. OLIVER
1913–2009

Douglas L. Oliver was born in Rushton, Louisiana in 1913. After completing his undergraduate degree in anthropology at Harvard University, he took a D.Phil. from the University of Vienna. His initial fieldwork was done among Siwai speakers on Bougainville Island, but his work for the U.S. government during World War II and thereafter prevented major publication until 1949. In that year, his fine-grained enthographic Studies in the Anthropology of Bougainville, Solomon Islands was published by the Peabody Museum of Harvard. Some of his work for the government, surveying economic conditions in postwar Micronesia, led to the volume he edited entitled Planning Micronesia's Future (1951).

The first edition of The Pacific Islands also appeared in 1951. Since that time, generations of students and general readers have learned about the cultures and history of the region from that seminal work. A Solomon Island Society was published in 1955, and is widely regarded as the classic description of "big-man" leadership in Melanesia.

During 25 years of teaching at Harvard beginning in 1948, Oliver influenced scores of anthropologists who worked in the Pacific and elsewhere. Some, like Martin Silverman, he taught as undergraduates. Others did their Ph.D.s with him on an individual basis (e.g., Greg Dening), or as members of larger research projects he helped organize. In 1954-59, scholars under his direction studied various aspects of modern culture in the Society Islands. With W. W. Howells and the late Albert Damon, Oliver initiated the Solomon Islands Medical Project, linking physical anthropology and epidemiology with ethnography and studies of social change. Probably less well known to younger association members is Oliver's role in planning the Indonesian project in which Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, Alice Dewey, Robert Jay, and Edward Ryan did their Ph.D. research.

However, Oliver himself would probably be the first to point out that there is no Oliver "school." The role of guru is antipathetic to his nature. Indeed, many of those who have worked with him appreciate most of all the fact that he provided encouragement and facilitated financial support without ever trying to force his own viewpoint on them. So long as research has the goals and follows the methods of scholarship, he is remarkably willing to "agree to disagree" about the results.

In 1969 Oliver was appointed to a Pacific Islands Chair in Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i. He taught there initially on a half-time basis until his retirement from Harvard in 1973; then full-time until he retired from teaching altogether in 1978. However, the connotations of the word "retirement" hardly fit his activities since then. While still at Hawai'i, he published Ancient Tahitian Society (1974). This was followed by Two Tahitian Villages (1981). The past two years have seen an extraordinary output: Return to Tahiti: Bligh's Second Breadfruit Voyage; the encyclopedic Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific, an abridged textbook version of which is also available; and a new revision of The Pacific Islands.

Whether as ethnographer in Melanesia and Polynesia, applied anthropologist in Micronesia, or ethnologist and historian of the entire Pacific, Douglas Oliver continues to influence and inspire all scholars seriously interested in the islands.

Gene Ogan, University of Minnesota (Winter 1990 Newsletter)