obituary
ROBERT PAINE: 1926-2010
Robert Paine, who died in July, was an innova‑
tive and prolific anthropologist, a scrupulous
and committed scholar of rare imagination.
He was arguably the doyen of nomadic and
pastoralist Saami ethnography, a lifelong
engagement which led him also into compara‑
tive studies of Aboriginal peoples and their
relationships with their dominating neighbours,
and even to the contested claims for rights to
the occupied West Bank. From his adopted base
in Newfoundland, he inspired and mentored
the development of northern anthropological
research, and cast his anthropological eye
widely across the contemporary world.
Following undergraduate studies at
Edinburgh and Oxford, interrupted by war ser‑
vice in Hong Kong, he went on to the Oxford
Institute to take a DPhil. Despite resistance
from Evans‑Pritchard, who he greatly admired,
but with the support of his supervisor Franz
Steiner, he insisted on fieldwork in northern
Norway and Sweden. To his great frustration,
he had to defer his work with Saami-speaking
reindeer herders and, supporting himself as an
itinerant labourer, he did fieldwork for his doc‑
torate on Lapps who had become sedentarized
on the Finnmark coast. But after this fieldwork,
and before returning to Oxford to write his
thesis, he went inland, attaching himself to
nomadic herders as a herdsboy. He learned to
speak Saami fluently, if eccentrically.
As well as working with herders, he travelled
throughout the north of Scandinavia, and spent
some months working for Robert Redfield on
the manuscript of The little community. By the
time his doctoral thesis was published in the
early 1960s, he was already recognized and
valued by his Scandinavian colleagues as an
outstanding ethnographer. From the outset,
he recognized that the social organization
of nomadic herders had to be understood as
grounded in the complex ecology and biology
of the herding cycle. He mapped in exquisite
detail the routes and tactics used by different
and intensely rivalrous herding families over
enormous distances.
He held a succession of posts in Bergen and
Oslo which enabled him to amass a huge store
of ethnographic data and experience with the
Saami herders. He was to mine this seam for
the rest of his life. Sadly, he did not live to see
into print the third volume in his exceptional
trilogy of herding monographs.
In 1964, he was offered the headship of the
anthropology department at Oslo, but was
uncomfortable with the prospect for various
reasons, only one of which was that he was
wary of the possibility that he would be seen
as creating a rival school to Barth’s. They were
friends and colleagues, although not always
easy with each other, and Paine was to pub‑
lish an important reconsideration of Barth’s
transactionalism, Second thoughts about
Barth’s models (RAI Occasional Paper, 1974).
24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 5, OCTOBER 2010
TROMSØ UNIVERSITY MUSEUM
Fig. 1. Robert Paine as a herdboy.
He moved instead to the Memorial University
of Newfoundland to direct its Institute of
Social and Economic Research. He developed
Memorial as arguably the leading centre for
northern North Atlantic anthropological studies,
and built its major publication series. With only
a brief interruption following his retirement, he
lived in Newfoundland for the rest of his life,
resisting offers of chairs elsewhere (including
Sussex, Edinburgh and McGill), and using it
as a base for his academic travels as a visiting
professor around the world, at universities
including Cambridge, McGill, Jerusalem, Duke
and Adelaide.
In 1968 Robert secured a large grant to fund
and direct a major programme of ethnographic
studies of social change in the Canadian east
Arctic. Throughout the 1970s his writing
ranged over both the herding and wider social
aspects of his research, generating seminal
work on the ‘tragedy’ of the commons, on
patronage and brokerage, political rhetoric and
the micropolitics of communication. He even
wrote, but did not publish, a book on Goffman.
He then began to cast his anthropological eye
beyond the conventional ethnographic ‘field’,
becoming a prolific essayist of exceptional
range. He contributed hugely to the develop‑
ment of the Fourth World concept and to the
study and practice of anthropological advocacy.
Both as a research director and in his own
work Paine always insisted on anthropol‑
ogy’s obligation to be socially responsible and
responsive to contemporary issues and events.
In the 1980s he became active in the contro‑
versy over the Norwegian government’s plan
to dam the Alta River, a project that would
destroy nomadic reindeer herding. He produced
a brilliant report for the Norwegian Supreme
Court on the implications of the project, later
published by the International Working Group
for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), and a series of
dazzling articles analysing the symbolic content
of the Saami protests against the project.
He returned later to document for the gov‑
ernment the consequences of the Chernobyl
disaster for reindeer pastoralism. Following an
invitation to teach in Jerusalem, he embarked
on a 20-year effort to understand and describe
conflicting attitudes to the Zionist project,
especially on the West Bank. With no previous
background in Judaism or Islam, he steeped
himself in texts, travelled repeatedly throughout
the region, interviewed extensively, and tried to
use anthropology to make some sense of it all.
Paine continually delayed the comple‑
tion of his major monographs on the Saami
herders, prioritizing other work which he felt
was more urgent. However, after retiring from
the Henrietta Harvey Distinguished Chair at
Memorial, he set to with a will to bring his
life’s work to fruition. He wrote two stunning
books, Herds of the tundra and Camps of the
tundra, beautifully written and illustrated, pub‑
lished by Smithsonian. Publication of the final
volume in the series was still under negotiation
when he died. He also continued to maintain
his astonishing output of essays across the
entire range of his interests. Just weeks before
he fell ill and died, he was working on what
was sadly to be his last article, an anthropo‑
logical reconsideration of Giddens.
He was a man of great passions, enormous
energy, discipline and industry, and absolute
scholarly integrity, capable when writing of
amazing concentration, extraordinarily well-
read and open-minded, genuinely fascinated
by people he met everywhere, and a dedicated
estuary ‘twitcher’. He could be rumbustuous,
with a vivid personality, a man about whom
wonderful and extravagant stories were told,
some of which were true. Although his personal
life was repeatedly touched by misfortune, he
was entirely lacking in self-pity. His first two
marriages ended in divorce; his third wife,
the anthropologist and refugee advocate, Lisa
Gilad, was tragically killed in a road accident;
his fourth wife, the Israeli writer, lawyer and
human rights activist, Rachel Kimor, died
in 2007 following a protracted struggle with
cancer. In his last years, he had the friendship,
love and companionship of Moyra Buchan.
Robert enriched the lives and work of
anthropologists around the globe – he was
outstanding in seminar, and had an extensive
network of close friends and interlocutors
among who he circulated successive drafts of
his writing. To all of us he was an irreplaceable
friend, and an unfailingly honest, generous and
constructive critic, quite without conceit. He
was honoured in Canada, the UK and Norway,
receiving, among others, the Order of Canada,
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada,
honorary Life Fellowship of the RAI and the
Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and honorary
degrees at Tromsø, Edinburgh and Memorial.
He was an endlessly interesting and interested
man, and an authentic path-breaker in anthro‑
pology. Robert is survived by Moyra Buchan,
and by his children Michael and Jessica. l
Anthony Cohen
University of Edinburgh
anthony_cohen@btconnect.com