Anthony Forge Author

Prof. dr. Anthony Forge was born in London in 1929. A student at Downing College, Cambridge, he studied anthropology with Edmund Leach, and went on to undertake research with Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics. Over 1958-63 he undertook several periods of fieldwork among the Abelam of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, made major collections for the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, and went on to write a series of essays which were enormously influential for the anthropology of art and for studies of Melanesia. He was appointed Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in 1974 and taught there until his death in 1991. Dr. Alison Clark is a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She currently works on the ERC funded Pacific Presences project. Both her masters (2007) and PhD (2013) theses on the Indigenous Australian collections of the British Museum drew on the work of Anthony Forge. Her current research is focused on Kiribati, where she is interested in the contemporary resonance of historic museum collections, and the revival of certain cultural practices. She has previously worked on projects at the British Museum, and the October Gallery in London. Key publications: 2014, ‘What Happens Next? Sustaining Relationships Beyond the Life of a Research Project’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, No.27. 2013, ‘Eliciting a History, Reflections on a Photograph Album’, in Adams, Burt, Bonshek, Bolton and Thomas (eds.) Melanesia Art and Encounter 2013 pp.64-66. Prof. Dr. Nicholas Thomas was an undergraduate at the Australian National University from 1979 to 1982; his BA (Honours) thesis, on Fijian politics, was supervised by Anthony Forge. He visited the Pacific first in 1984 to undertake doctoral research in the Marquesas Islands and has since written extensively on exploration and cross-cultural encounters and on art histories in the Pacific. He has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006.