This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Arthur Maurice Hocart | |
|---|---|
| Name | Arthur Maurice Hocart |
| Birth date | 1883 |
| Death date | 1939 |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Notable works | The Cult of the Dead, Kingship |
Arthur Maurice Hocart was a British anthropologist known for comparative studies of kinship, ritual, and kingship across the Pacific, South Asia, and Europe. He conducted fieldwork in Samoa, Fiji, Sri Lanka, and Niger, engaging with contemporaries and institutions across Oxford, Cambridge, and the British Museum. His writings influenced debates in anthropology and intersected with scholarship in folklore, comparative religion, and history.
Hocart was born in 1883 in England and educated at Balliol College, Oxford and trained under scholars associated with Oxford University and Cambridge University. He read classics and oriental studies, connecting with figures from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the British Academy. His early influences included work by James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, F. H. Bradley, A. C. Bradley, and contemporaneous debates at All Souls College. He developed linguistic and philological skills relevant to fieldwork in Polynesia and South Asia.
Hocart served in colonial administrative and scientific posts that brought him to Samoa, Fiji, Ceylon, and parts of West Africa. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Samoans, Fijians, and communities in Kandy and the Tamil areas of Ceylon. He worked in association with the British Museum and contributed materials to collections in London and Cambridge. During his career he corresponded with scholars at the London School of Economics, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Oxford. He held positions that linked him to the colonial administrations of British Ceylon and the Colonial Office and took part in academic networks including the Royal Geographical Society.
Hocart advanced comparative theories of kingship, ritual, and social organization that bridged field data from Polynesia, Melanesia, Sri Lanka, and West Africa. He challenged prevailing functionalist and diffusionist paradigms promoted by figures such as Bronisław Malinowski and Edward Evans-Pritchard by emphasizing ritual symbolism and historical continuity resonant with the work of Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Emile Durkheim. Hocart analyzed proto-historic institutions through comparative lenses shared with Max Müller, J. G. Frazer, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, arguing for structural analogies connecting kingship and rites of passage noted in James George Frazer's corpus and in ethnographies by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. He proposed that sacred kingship and ancestor cults functioned as central integrative systems in societies studied by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict-era observers. His attention to symbolism and archaic ceremonial echoed themes in studies by Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Victor Turner.
Hocart's principal works include monographs and essays that circulated widely among anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religion. Key titles are The Cult of the Dead and Kingship, along with numerous articles in journals edited by the Royal Anthropological Institute and publishers associated with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. His essays appeared alongside contributions by T. H. Huxley-influenced writers and in volumes commended by critics from The Times Literary Supplement and academic reviews in Man and The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He also published field reports and notes used by later scholars such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronisław Malinowski, and Edmund Leach.
Hocart's work received mixed contemporary reception: praised by some for its erudition and criticized by others for speculative reconstruction. Early reviewers included members of the Royal Anthropological Institute, editors at the Oxford University Press, and historians at the University of Cambridge. Later scholars such as Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, and Max Gluckman acknowledged elements of Hocart's comparative method while reworking his ideas within structuralist, symbolic, and processual frameworks. His influence extended to studies of kingship in Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and South Asia, informing ethnographies by Nicholas Thomas, Marshall Sahlins, Michael G. Peletz, Philippe Descola, and David Schneider. Institutional legacies include citations in curricula at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, and Australian National University.
Hocart's personal papers and correspondence were deposited with repositories such as the British Museum archives and collections at Oxford University and Cambridge University Library. Colleagues included contributors to the Royal Anthropological Institute and contemporaries from the British colonial service. Posthumous reassessments by historians of anthropology and editors at Cambridge University Press have positioned Hocart as a transitional figure linking 19th-century comparative traditions to 20th-century theoretical developments by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner. His work continues to be cited in studies of ritual, kingship, and comparative religion by scholars at institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies, Australian National University, and Harvard University.
Category:British anthropologists Category:1883 births Category:1939 deaths