Tom Harrisson

Who was Tom Harrisson?

Major Tom Harnett Harrisson DSO OBE 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 and the New Hebrides, spent much of his life in Borneo and finished up in the US, the UK and France, before dying in a road accident in Thailand.