Anthropologists such as Jack Golson, Roger Green and Les Groube were researching the recently "discovered" Lapita pottery, long-distance canoes voyages and Polynesian languages (Thor Heyerdahl had earlier sailed a balsa raft from Chile to French Polynesia thus establishing the possibility of an east-west occupation of thePacific.) Harry Maude was chronicling Gilbert and Ellice Islands culture. His son Alaric was researching Tongan land use patterns, and population geographers such as Peter Pirie and myself were tracing internal migration patterns in Tonga and later Fiji.**
I can remember the hours Alaric and I spent on our knees on his lounge floor as we sorted 1956 Census cards into piles of males, females, where born, and so on. The cards had been lost but I found them in a large box in the PM's garage, chewed on a little by silverfish.
Amid this array of reseachers was anthropologist Dr Adrienne Kaeppler, an American with degrees from the University of Hawai'i with a special interest in the intangible knowledge that material culture holds, as well as the role of music, dance, poetry, and the visual arts in reflecting and constructing social and cultural systems.
I knew Adrienne while I was teaching at Tonga High School. She helped revive old Tongan dances on the verge of being lost, and passed on her enthusiasm to my senior students. (See photo above). She died last week, aged 86. R.I.P., Adrienne. You will long be rembembered by those who knew you.
To read more fully of Adrienne's immense contribution to Tonga and the Pacific, read this article in Matangitonga. You will be inspired by how some people really "can make a difference."
-- ACW
** Other researchers about this time include Cyril Belshaw, Raymond Firth, Rusiate Nayacalou, Tony Hooper, Judith Hunstman, Janet Davidson, and a little later Ron and Margorie Tuainekore Crocombe, Grant Anderson, Ray Watters, Roger Frazer and .... There were so many.
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