HONORARY FELLOW NOMINEE

Robert (Bob) Tonkinson

Lamont Lindstrom and Mac Marshall nominate Robert (Bob) Tonkinson (MA UWA; PhD U. British Columbia) for an ASAO Honorary Fellowship. Bob has been an ASAO member and supporter for many years. In 2002, he delivered our Distinguished Lecture at the Auckland, NZ meeting. Currently, Bob is Professor (and Chair) Emeritus at the Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Western Australia. Despite his official retirement, he remains an active scholar, drawing on more than forty years of field research at two principal field sites—SE Ambrym, in Vanuatu, and the Australian Western Desert’s Mardu people. He also continues to serve as Editor of the journal Anthropological Forum. Bob has, moreover, contributed in various practical ways to the people with whom he has worked. He was, for example, Consultant Anthropologist for the Mardu Native Title Claim that was successfully concluded in 2002, and he has been Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra.

Bob, in his on-going career, has pursued a range of important interests within Pacific Studies and beyond. These include identity construction, the politics of tradition (kastom), native title issues, Christianity, traditional religious systems, and change, post-colonial sorcery, and more. He has written extensively on both Vanuatu and Australian desert people. In addition to dozens of articles, his publications include three important books about Ambrym and the Mardu including Maat Village, Efate: A Relocated Community in the New Hebrides (1968), The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade (1974), and The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert (1979). Bob, along with Roger Keesing, also edited the first collection of papers on Melanesian kastom which appeared as a special issue of the journal Mankind in 1982 and he has subsequently remained engaged within ensuring analyses of the politics of tradition. His deep experience in two field sites has recently led him to return to the classic anthropological concern with cross-cultural comparison, notably of the course of social change in each of his field locations, including the uses and politics of tradition in relation to contemporary political action and current issues of personal and group identity. In three recent essays, for example, he investigated indigenous reactions to the invasion of Europeans; discussed comparative dreams and dream experiences and their status and functioning in the two cultures; and the different politics of tradition in independent Vanuatu versus metropolitan Australia.

Alongside his own research and scholarship, Bob has assisted and mentored many younger anthropologists and Pacific Scholars in Perth, in Vanuatu, and beyond. His kindness, his good humor, and his steady encouragement of students and younger colleagues over the years have added much to ASAO itself and also to the wider world of Pacific Studies. We believe ASAO’s membership would overwhelmingly support Bob’s nomination to the ranks of our honorary, and honorable, fellows.

Lamont Lindstrom and Mac Marshall