Arthur Maurice Hocart

Arthur Maurice Hocart (26 April 1883, Etterbeek – 9 March 1939, Cairo) was an anthropologist best known for his eccentric and often far-seeing works on Polynesia, Melanesia and Sri Lanka.

Hocart's family had resided for several hundred years in Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands between France and England) but are traceable to Domrémy-la-Pucelle, birthplace of Joan of Arc. Both his father, James and grandfather, also James, were Protestant missionaries in Switzerland, France and Belgium. Although Arthur was born in Etterbeek, near Brussels, he maintained his British nationality, as did the rest of his family. This juxtaposition between the English and Francophone worlds captures not only Hocart's education, but his status as an outsider to British academia. His work often seemed to predict developments in French anthropology, such as structuralism.

After attending school at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, Hocart matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1902. He graduated with honors in "Greats", a degree combining Latin, Greek, ancient history, and philosophy. After his graduation in 1906 he spent two years studying psychology and phenomenology at the University of Berlin. With this broad and idiosyncratic training in hand, he was picked by W.H.R. Rivers to accompany him on the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1908. Their ethnographic work on 'Eddystone Island' (today known by its local name of Simbo) and in nearby Roviana, stands as one of the first modern anthropological field projects, and was the inspiration behind sections of Pat Barker's novel The Ghost Road. Some of the data from the expedition appeared in Rivers' History of Melanesian Society in 1914, but most of their work did not make it into print until 1922, when Hocart began to publish a series of articles describing the core material. Immediately after his fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, Hocart travelled further east to Fiji, where he became the headmaster of Lakeba School, on the island of Lakeba in the Lau archipelago. At the same time, he maintained a research affiliation with Oxford and traveled widely through western Polynesia, conducting research in Fiji, Rotuma, Wallis Island, Samoa, and Tonga. The result was roughly six years of ethnographic fieldwork that formed the basis for Hocart's reputation today as one of the most important early ethnographers of Oceania.

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