W. H. R. RiversBorn 12 Mar 1864; died 4 Jun 1922 at age 58. William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English medical psychologist and anthropologist who originally trained as a doctor, then did work as a pioneering psychologist in the First World War. This background enabled Rivers to bring a scientific approach to anthropology and to set the trend for anthropologists to go and visit the cultures they are studying rather than stay at home and theorize. Rivers did his major field work with Torres Strait Australian aborigines and with a hill tribe in Southern India, the Todas. He is known principally for The Todas (1906), a model of precise documentation of a people, and the important History of Melanesian Society, 2 vol. (1914). |