Tom Harrisson

Major Tom Harnett Harrisson, DSO, OBE (26 September 1911 – 16 January 1976) was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist and writer. Although often described as an anthropologist, and sometimes referred to as the "Barefoot Anthropologist", his degree studies at University of Cambridge, before he left to live in Oxford, were in natural sciences. He was a founder of the social observation organisation Mass-Observation. He conducted ornithological and anthropological research in Sarawak (1932) and the New Hebrides (1933–35), spent much of his life in Borneo (mainly Sarawak) and finished up in the US, the UK and France, before dying in a road accident in Thailand.

Harrisson was born on 26 September 1911 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Geoffry Harnett Harrisson (1881–1939), an engineer, and Marie Ellen Cole (1886–1961). Another son, William Damer Harrisson, was born in 1913. The family lived in Concordia, Entre Ríos where his father had been working as a railway engineer and then manager since 1907. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the family sailed to the United Kingdom where Geoffry Harrisson joined the British army. He was highly decorated for his service and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier-General.

...
Wikipedia