Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience

Ben Rudolph Finney was born in San Diego, California on October 1, 1933. He received a bachelor's degree in history, economics and anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955, a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1959, and a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University in 1964. After teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Australian National University, he joined the anthropology department at the University of Hawaii in 1970 and taught there until his retirement in 2000. His main accomplishment as an anthropologist was to prove that the settlement of Polynesia came about through deliberate exploration, rather than by accidental settlement. He wrote several books including Polynesian Peasants and Proletarians: Socio-Economic Change Among the Tahitians of French Polynesia, Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, Big-Men and Business: Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth in the New Guinea Highlands, Hokule'a: The Way to Tahiti, Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, From Sea to Space, and Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia. He died from complications of a stroke on May 23, 2017 at the age of 83.