Establishing Anthropology and Maori Language (Studies), Auckland University College: The Appointment of Ralph Piddington, 1949

Easily the largest anthropology department in New Zealand resides at the University of Auckland (formerly Auckland University College), but sixty years ago it had only begun to exist with the appointment, in 1949, of Ralph Piddington as the foundation chair. Even then, Auckland anthropology's remoter origins began some thirty years earlier. At the end of World War I there were a number of conferences to discuss the future of the colonies, the governance of colonized peoples and the usefulness of anthropology to colonial administration in Oceania. The Pan-Pacific Science Congress, at its first conference in 1920 in Honolulu, addressed the state of ethnographic inquiry in Oceania. Subsequent meetings of the Congress in Sydney and Melbourne in September 1923 proposed that Oceania should be divided into four main ethnographic areas—Australia, New Guinea and Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It was suggested that Australia take responsibility for Australian ethnology; that Australia "should more particularly investigate Papua, the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and Melanesia, but Great Britain and France should assist in this work"; and that the investigation of [End Page 49] Maori be the responsibility of New Zealand. The rest of Polynesia was regarded as "pre-eminently the field" for American research, with the cooperation of France and New Zealand; and finally the study of Micronesia was the "particular province" of Japan and America. This proposal was described by Ernest Beaglehole, psychologist and anthropologist, as a "gentlemen's agreement" that "fairly placed the responsibility for anthropological research in New Zealand and presumably in its Pacific dependencies upon the shoulders of New Zealand research institutions" (Beaglehole 1938:156-157).