SAUL RIESENBERG
1911 - 1994

U. S. government policy has been responsible for producing four large cohorts of Micronesian anthropologists. In the 1980s, Historic Preservation funds recruited numbers of archaeologists. In the late 1960s and '70s, many who had first gone to the islands as Peace Corps Volunteers returned as ethnographers. In the 1950s, there were district anthropologists working on most of the larger islands. And in the 1940s the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA) made it possible for nearly 30 graduate students to do fieldwork in living societies.

Saul Riesenberg was part of that earliest cohort. As Saul puts it, he would have done his work with a few old men, the last survivors of a Native American group in southern California's Tehachapi Mountains, had the government not come up with the funds for him to travel to a living society in the Pacific. Saul went to Pohnpei (still known as Ponape in those days) with CIMA in 1947 and '48. His report, "Ponapean Political and Social Organization," later became The Native Polity of Ponape (1968), one of the finest studies of Micronesian social life ever published. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1950.

Saul taught at the University of Hawai'i from 1949 to 1957, also serving as the Trust Territory's Staff Anthropologist (1953-54) and as an adviser to the government of American Samoa (1955-56). In 1957, he joined the Division of Ethnology (later the Department of Anthropology) at the Smithsonian Institution, where he worked until his retirement in 1979.

Though the use of history has only recently become fashionable in anthropology, Saul has long been an ethnohistorian. He edited Charles O'Connell's A Residence of Eleven Years in New Holland and the Caroline Islands (1972) after years of study in nearly every available Pacific island archive, and with Jack Fischer and Marjorie Whiting translated and edited the Pohnpei-language manuscript history The Book of Luelen (1977). While he is best known for is Pohnpei research, Saul also worked on Puluwat (1967) and has published a good deal of material on the Central Carolines in addition to his voluminous writings on Pohnpei culture, society, and history.

Retired now in Miami, Saul remains as interested and as helpful as he was when I first dropped unannounced into his office in 1971, to tell him I planned to go to Pohnpei. Over the years he has provided data and good advice to every one of us who has come to him for assistance.

Glenn Petersen, Baruch College, CUNY (Spring 1990 Newsletter)