User:LondonStill1/Felix keesing

Felix M Keesing.

Felix “Fee” Maxwell Keesing was an important figure in American anthropological and also Pacific Studies. Married to fellow anthropologist Marie Keesing, he started the anthropology departments at the University of Hawaii, and Stanford University, he also worked closely with the United States government form the 1940s-1960s, and published extensively. He had a particular interest in ethnohistory and culture-change.

Early Life

Born in Taiping, British Malaya, on January 5, 1902 to New Zealand born parents, he spent his childhood in New Zealand. He excelled at school and won multiple scholars, including one to study art in the United States whilst still a teenager. He was also athletic, playing several sports in high school.

He married Marie Martin, a fellow Auckland resident, in 1928, after a two year engagement. Together they had two children: economist Donald Beaumont Keesing (b. 1933, London, died 29 Apr 2004 in Washington DC) and anthropologist Roger Martin Keesing (b 1935 Honolulu, died 1993, Canada). The family lived in Chicago, New Haven, London, Honolulu, Washington DC, before settling at Stanford University in the 1940s with both Keesings taking American citizenship in 1940s. Both Donald and Roger were undergraduates at Stanford University and maintained strong relationships with the institution throughout their lifetimes.

Keesing died suddenly on April 21 1961 of a heart-attack whilst paying tennis.

Education

Keesing won a scholarship to attended University of New Zealand, graduating with his BA in 1924, and his M.A. in 1926 in Education with a diploma in Journalism. Under the auspices of a multi-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Felix Keesing attended the Yale University (1928/29) and the University of Chicago (1929/30). He received his Doctor of Letters (D Litt.) from the University of New Zealand in 1933.

Career

In 1930, before he received his doctorate, Felix Keesing and his wife Marie moved to Honolulu to take up research positions at the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The IPR, established in 1925, was an international NGO that provided a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. Marie and Felix conducted fieldwork in Samoa and the Philippines in the early 1930s. Their interests in cultural change, transformation and structures of power, as well as ethno-historical approaches, culminated in the publication of Taming Philippine Headhunters: a Study of Government and of Cultural Change in Northern Luzon (1934).

After a brief stint at the London School of Economics (1933), Felix took up the challenge of helping to establish the first department as Chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Hawaii.

In 1942, during World War II, Felix Keesing was called to Washington DC where he worked in the Office of Strategic Services. After a year in DC, Felix relocated his family to Stanford University, where whilst establishing the Stanford Anthropology Department, he would continue to work with the United States government in a range of capacities through the 1950s. This included training Navy personnel about Pacific cultures and conducted surveys of former Japanese occupied Pacific territories.

Their work there culminating in the publication of Elite Communication in Samoa: A Study of Leadership (1956). At the time of his death, Keesing was working on a new ethno-historical project revisiting earliest work on the Philippines. The book, published posthumously is attributed only to Felix but Roger Keesing, their son, writes in the preface, that his mother “played a tireless role as editor, critic, contributor and companion, as she did in all of his [Felix’s] work”.

Government Relations

Impact of his work

ethnohistory -- Menominee book, 1939. early and important example of what ethnohistory might look like. helped shape that whole field of study studying-up before the name -- power and relationships of power culture and change

Partial Bibliography

1939. Menominee Indians of Wisconsin. American Philosophical Society. 1947. with Marie Keesing, Ernest Beaglehole & EG Burrows. Specialized studies in polynesian anthropology. Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 193. Bernice P. Bishop Museum

1956 with Marie Keesing. 1956. Elite Communication in Samoa: A Study of Leadership. Stanford University Press.

1960. with Marie Keesing, & Thomas Blair. Social Structure and information exposure in rural brazil. Rural Sociology, 25: 65-75.