Ian Hogbin

Who was Ian Hogbin?

Herbert Ian Priestly Hogbin was a British-born Australian anthropologist. He conducted field work in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea.

Ian Hogbin was born in Bawtry, Yorkshire, England and died at Potts Point, Sydney, Australia.

Hogbin began his study of anthropology with Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who founded the anthropology department at the University of Sydney, and his earliest field work was carried out under Radcliffe-Brown’s supervision in Ontong Java, a Polynesian colony in the Solomon Islands. Some of the results were published in his book Law and Order in Polynesia. He then went to London to work with Bronislaw Malinowski, at whose suggestion he returned to the Solomons, where he stayed in Guadalcanal and afterwards in Malaita. Subsequently, he made an investigation of the people of Wogeo, an island off the north coast of New Guinea.

During World War II he served in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force and later in the Australian Army in New Guinea as an adviser on native rehabilitation problems. He continued working in New Guinea, and, in 1963, published the second of two volumes on the Busama villagers, who occupied a settlement near the town of Lae.