JAMES B. WATSON

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)