Another BBC video about an anthropologist discovered on YouTube. (See previous post on BBC & Youtube here.) This one, narrated by Sir. David Attenbourgh, is about Tom Harrisson, a rather eccentric figure in the history of anthropology:

He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he neglected his studies in favour of drinking, fighting and walking the streets barefoot with red-painted toenails. Although he left in 1931 without obtaining a degree, he served as ornithologist on Oxford Society expeditions to St Kilda (1930), Norwegian Lapland (1931), Sarawak, (1932), and the New Hebrides (1934), where, rather than returning with the rest of the party, he went on alone to Malekula to spend time with its cannibal inhabitants and write the book Savage Civilisation defending their way of life. Harrisson was now more interested in watching people than birds, and attempted to apply similar ethnological methods to observing the inhabitants of Bolton, working in a mill and asking them questions about their daily lives. Along with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, Harrisson founded Mass Observation, an organisation that attempted to use ethnological methods to study British society – an “anthropology of ourselves”. Soon, a network of volunteer ‘Mass Observers’ was reporting back on ordinary people’s experience of everything from sport and leisure to housing, the Police Force and the 1937 Coronation.

As the film says, Mass-Observation developed many of the techniques used in all market research today. Interestingly, we learn that at the age of 19 he organized a huge team of volunteer observers to study a single species of bird, skills that served him well with the nation-wide polling network he set up in the period before England joined the war. I’m sure Harrison would have loved YouTube.

Harrison is also interesting with regard to another theme we have discussed extensively on Savage Minds, the role of anthropology in wartime:

In 1942, Harrisson joined the Army. By 1945, he was working with the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted behind Japanese lines into Borneo, where he recruited 1,000 native soldiers armed with blowpipes. This unique army gathered behind-the-lines intelligence, disrupted enemy supply lines and killed or captured some 1,500 Japanese troops in what must stand as one of the most unusual campaigns of World War II.

(Some of those “Japanese troops” were likely Taiwanese Aborigines.) Harrison was also a museum curator, amateur archaeologist, and filmmaker. He seems to have been somewhat patronizing towards those he worked with, both in Borneo and in England, but was nonetheless quite a fascinating character and a good subject for a film. A 1998 biography, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, which formed the basis for this documentary, seems like a fun read.