Forge, Anthony

Biography

Born in West London, England, on February 27, 1929, Anthony Forge was educated at Highgate School. In 1948 he went on to do national service in Intelligence. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1953, where he studied anthropology under Edmund Leach. After graduation he spent three years in the printing industry, his father's profession, before enrolling in the London School of Economics, where he began graduate studies in anthropology and formed a close and lasting friendship with anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth.

In 1958, Forge undertook the first of two fieldwork studies among the Abelam people of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. This initial period in the field sharpened his anthropological interests and narrowed his focus to Abelam social organization, aesthetics and ritual. Forge's study methods included photography, daily journals and notes on basic cultural ideals (e.g. kinship, ritual, etc.).

In 1960, on returning from the field, Forge became a research officer for the London School of Economics "London Kinship Project." A year later he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and in 1962 he returned to Papua New Guinea.

Forge's second fieldwork investigation (1962 - 1963) with the Abelam centered on the art of the region. He commissioned the production of 363 works of original Abelam art housed in this collection, of which over 150 came from the village of Kwanimbandu in the North Wosera. Much of this original artwork was documented piece by piece as it was being produced, both in field journals (i.e., through sketches and descriptive narrative) and photographically (i.e., sequential photos were taken every 15 - 20 minutes as the work was being created). Many of these photographs were used in Sheila Korn's formal study on the properties of Abelam painting, completed as her thesis: THE STRUCTURE OF AN ART-SYSTEM (University of London, 1974).

Forge spent a year as a Visiting Professor at Yale University in 1969, and by 1970 he had been appointed Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 1970 he coauthored a book with Raymond Firth and Jane Hubert entitled, FAMILIES AND THEIR RELATIVES: KINSHIP IN A MIDDLE-CLASS SECTOR OF LONDON. In 1973 Forge completed the editing of PRIMITIVE ART AND SOCIETY, which included a chapter he authored entitled "Style and Meaning in Sepik Art." Soon after, he delivered the prestigious Malinowski Memorial Lecture entitled "The Golden Fleece."

Subsequently, fieldwork took Forge and his family to Bali for a year to study art and ritual. While on Bali, he was invited to visit the Australian National University and was selected to become the Foundation Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of the Arts, where he built a strong research and teaching department.

During the late 1980s, Forge spent much time editing a draft entitled "Sepik Culture History," a collection of papers presented at the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Symposium in 1986. Although this volume was never published, the collection contains Forge's original introduction as well as much of the correspondence (dated 1984-1989) with other potential contributors. Forge also completed an important nine-chapter work titled "Abelam Exchange and Society," which was never published but survives in draft form in this collection.

Anthony Forge was heavily involved in collecting, most notably for the Museum of Ethnography in Basel, Switzerland, for which he assembled an impressive collection of Sepik art. He also assembled a large collection of traditional Balinese paintings for the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Anthony Forge died on October 7, 1991.

From the guide to the Anthony Forge Papers, 1908-1991, (University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.)