Donald F. Tuzin was an American social anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work on the Ilahita Arapesh, a horticultural people living in northeast lowland New Guinea, and for comparative studies of gender and sexuality within Melanesia. Tuzin was born in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in Winona, Minnesota, and spent his teen years again in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he became interested in anthropology and participated in the excavation of Native Americanarchaeological sites left by the Mound Builders. He also received his master's degree from Case Western Reserve. While studying at the University of London, Tuzin became interested in Sepik cultures and decided to go to the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, where he worked with the famous and controversial social anthropologist Derek Freeman. Tuzin conducted fieldwork among the Ilahita Arapesh in New Guinea's East Sepik Province. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology at ANU in 1973 and joined the anthropology department at University of California, San Diego that same year. Tuzin's most significant book was probably The Cassowary's Revenge, a study of culture change and the construction and enactment of masculinity. The following summary is taken from the book jacket: In addition to teaching and mentoring students in anthropology, he co-founded and directed UCSD’s , the world’s largest depository of unpublished materials on the societies and cultures of Melanesia. In part because of Tuzin's work, UCSD was known during the 1970s and 1980s as one of the top institutions in the world for the anthropological study of Melanesia. Professor Tuzin was also a professor for Eleanor Roosevelt College's, Making of the Modern World sequence. To augment his lectures, he wrote the book, Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea. Don Tuzin was twice chair of UCSD's department of anthropology, and in 2004-2005 was chair of UCSD's Academic Senate. In his later years, Tuzin was working on a biography of Derek Freeman in collaboration with Peter Hempenstall, a professor of history at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. At the age of 61, he died of complications of pulmonary hypertension after a brief hospitalization.
Select bibliography
Authored books
Tuzin, Donald F. The Ilahita Arapesh: dimensions of unity, with a foreword by Margaret Mead. Berkeley: University of California Press.
—— Social Complexity in the Making: A case study among the Arapesh of New Guinea. London: Routledge.
Edited books
Brown, Paula, and Donald F. Tuzin, eds. The Ethnography of Cannibalism. Society for Psychological Anthropology, Special Publication. Washington, D.C.: Society for Psychological Anthropology.
Tuzin, Donald F., and Thomas Gregor, eds. Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An exploration of the comparative method. Berkeley: University of California Press. With.
Articles
Tuzin, Donald F. "Miraculous Voices: The Auditory Experience of Numinous Objects." Current Anthropology 25:579-589, 593-596.
—— "Sex, Culture, and the Anthropologist." Social Science and Medicine, 33:867-874.
—— "The Forgotten Passion: Sexuality and Anthropology in the Ages of Victoria and Bronislaw." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 30:114-137.
—— "Discourse, Intercourse, and the Excluded Middle: Anthropology and the Problem of Sexual Experience." In Paul R. Abramson and S.D. Pinkerton, eds., Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 257–275.
—— "Derek Freeman ". American Anthropologist 104, 1013-1015.
