Arthur Maurice Hocart was an anthropologist best known for his eccentric and often far-seeing works on Polynesia, Melanesia and Sri Lanka. He was born in Etterbeck on 26 April 1883, and died in Cairo on 9 March 1939.
Hocart's family were originally French protestants (both his father and grandfather were ministers) who settled in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between France and England and assumed British citizenship while Hocart was still a child. This situation between English and Francophone world captures not only Hocart's education, but his status as an outsider to the British Academy whose 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 that combined Latin, Greeks, 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 undertake one of the first modern anthropological field projects to the Solomon Islands. This work on Roviana and 'Eddystone Island' (today known by its local name of Simbo) formed the basis of several publications. Hocart then shifted further east to Fiji, where he became the headmaster of Lakeba School , on the island of Lau . 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.
In 1914 Hocart returned to Oxford to pursue postgraduate studies in anthropology, a position that also included some teaching. However, World War One interrupted his progress and he spent the next four years in France, fighting in the front lines. In 1919 he mustered out of the army having reached the rank of captain. Hocart then began what was to be a long exile from the British academy to a series of posts in the British Empire. After a year-long study of Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, and Singhalese he moved to Sri Lanka to become the Archaeological Commisioner of Ceylon (as it was then called), where he oversaw the excavation and preservation of monumental architecture and other archaeological sites. With experience of the ancient Mediterranean, Polynesia and Melanesia, and South Asia now under his belt Hocart began publishing widely comparative studies on many topics, including that of Kingship. In 1925 Hocart suffered a bout of severe dysentery and returned to England to recover. By the late 1920s his poor health and politics within the colonial bureaucracy made Ceylon seem a poorer and poorer choice for him. He once again attempted (and failed) to obtain a position at Cambridge before finally retiring to England in 1929 on a pension.
Beginning in 1931 Hocart served for three years as an Honorary Lecturer in Ethnology at University College London which allowed him to give classes occasionally. He applied to Cambridge once more -- this time for the chair in social anthropology - but was again unsuccessful. In 1934 he moved to Cairo where he served as the Professor of Sociology, the only academic position he held in his life. Poor health dogged him and died in 1939 when he contracted an infection in the course of research in Egypt.
Hocart's professional career took place at a time when British anthropologists were moving from an emphasis on diffusion and historical reconstruction to a more 'scientific' form of functionalism. Hocart's broad training and willingness to explore a wide variety of approaches produced work that was often poorly received by colleagues who repudiated past work in order to legitimize anthropology as a hard science. Interest in his work was revived in the 1960s when authors such as Lord Raglan, Rodney Needham , and Louis Dumont returned to Hocart's work as a source of theoretical inspiration. Today he is remembered for his ethnography of the Pacific and as an author whose work presaged the advent of structuralism.
Further reading
- Editor's Introduction to Kings and Councilors (University of Chicago Press 1970), by Rodney Needham.