Robert Tonkinson

 

Bob Tonkinson was born and raised in Perth, trained as a school teacher and studied anthropology/sociology at UWA under the Berndts, D’Arcy Ryan and Peter Lawrence. From his research in the 1960s and 1970s at Jigalong Mission came two case studies: The Jigalong Mob (1974) and The Mardudjara/Mardu Aborigines (1978/1991), and data for both his MA and PhD theses (the latter at UBC under Ken Burridge and Cyril Belshaw). He has since published extensively on that region. His Vanuatu fieldwork began in 1966, and an associated monograph was published in 1967. He was one of the early writers on the politics of “kastom” in the Pacific and Australia and contributed significantly to this development in anthropology.  He has held teaching/research positions at University of Oregon and ANU, and visiting fellowships in Europe, North America and New Zealand. He is a past President of the Australian Anthropological Society and Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (which honoured him with Life Fellowship in 2010), and has for decades been an AIATSIS Council member and, since 1988, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.  He has been a Berndt Memorial Lecturer and Wentworth Lecturer. Besides his prolific research publications output, Professor Tonkinson is an outstanding teacher. He was the first UWA Professor to win a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1988, the inaugural year of these honours. He has served on review and selection committees for Departments of Anthropology at various universities in Australasia. His decade as Editor of the international journal Anthropological Forum has enhanced the discipline’s standing at UWA.