JAMES B. WATSON
1918–2009
James B. Watson was born on August 10, 1918 in Chicago,
Illinois. His early education was in the public schools of Bangor, Maine,
and he finished his first year of college at the University of Maine.
He spent two years at New Jersey State College, Montclair, then transferred
to the University of Chicago where he completed his undergraduate education
in 1941. He went on at Chicago to finish his A.M. in 1945 and his Ph.D.
in 1948, the latter under the supervision of Fred Eggan.
Watson’s teaching career began in the 1940s with
positions at the Escala Livre de Sociologia e Politica, Sao Paula
(1944-45), Beloit College (1945-46), University of Oklahoma (1946-47),
and Washington University, St. Louis (1947-1955). He moved to the
University of Washington, Seattle, where he spent the majority of
his career and is now Professor Emeritus.
For members of the ASAO, Watson is most noted for his
work in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, where he was one of the first
generation of Highland ethnographers. His earliest research, however,
was conducted with the Hopi, and it was the Hopi and their economy
that was the topic of his Chicago master’s thesis. His interests
shifted to Brazil for his dissertation research, where he examined
the process of culture change among the Cayua people. This work was
published later in the American Anthropological Association Memoir
series (1952).
Watson took his interests in cultural change with him
to the Pacific where his work centered on the Kainantu peoples of the
Eastern Highlands. His first research there with the Agarabi dealt with
change. Still interested in the effects of one group upon another, as
well as the dynamics of regional systems, his work shifted to a neighboring
Kainantu group, the Tairora, in the 1960s. This research resulted in
a number of important papers on patterns of leadership and social organization
in the Highlands. The Tairora work was most fully described in his monograph,
Tairora Culture: Contingency and Pragmatism (1983). Watson’s
contributions to our understanding of the Highlands also were embodied
in several comparative projects. As editor of the American Anthropologist
special publication on the Highlands (1964), he was responsible
for one of the first general compilations of information on the region.
Other publications of his looked at the environmental transitions the
region had undergone, such as the shift from hunting to horticulture.
As the principal investigator of the “Micro-evolution Study in
New Guinea,” he directed a team of researchers examining the interconnections
of the Kainantu peoples from the perspectives of ethnography, linguistics,
archaeology, and physical anthropology. Along with his University of
Washington colleague, Kenneth Read, he was coprincipal investigator
on a Bollingen Foundation funded comparative study of New Guinea religions.
In addition to his own work, these projects funded several generations
of students who have added to our store of knowledge of the Highlands.
With retirement, Watson had continued to be an active participant in
ASAO sessions and publications, along with other contributions in teaching
and reviewing articles and books concerned with Papua New Guinea and
the Pacific Islands.
George Westermark, Santa Clara University (September
1999 Newsletter) |
