William Halse Rivers Rivers

 1864 - 1922

English Social Anthropologist and Psychiatrist 

Photograph of W.H.R. Rivers

Strenths:  pioneer fieldworker, meticulous ethnographer, humane psychologist

Weaknesses:  crackpot diffusionist; thought all culture originated in Egypt

Special features: got to be protagonist of a novel

sign:  Pisces

William Rivers was a medical doctor who participated in the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898.  He tested color vision in Melanesian people and determined that they saw color the same way we do.  He then became fascinated with kinship systems.  For anthropologists his most enduring work is The Todas, a meticulous description and analysis of kinship and marriage among this polyandrous Indian people.  During WWI he treated shell shocked soldiers with psychoanalysis, including the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.   Their relationship is fictionalized in the novel The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.  Always in delicate health, he died suddenly at age 58.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Todas (1906) 

•  The History of Melanesian Society(1914) 

• The Repression of War Experience' paper in The Lancet  (1918)
• Conflict and Dream (1923) 
• Social Organisation, with William James Perry (1924).