Peter Lawrence (1921 – 21 December 1987) was a British-born Australian anthropologist and pioneer in the study of Melanesian religions.
Lawrence was born in Lancashire, and read classics at the University of Cambridge. Supervised by Meyer Fortes, he received his PhD following military service in the Royal Navy during World War II, conducting fieldwork with the Garia people in southern Madang Province, Papua New Guinea.[1]
Lawrence held teaching positions at the Australian National University (1948-1957), the Australian School of Pacific Administration (from 1957), the University of Western Australia (1960-1963), the University of Queensland (1966-1970), and the University of Sydney (1963-1965 and 1970-1986).[2]
He is noted for his work on cargo cults.[3] He died of a stroke in Sydney.[4]
Peter Lawrence was one of the rare authors, with the French author Jean Guiart, they were friends, to introduce a political analytical view in the study of the so called Cargo Cults, considered à irrational by most European responsible agents, be they missionaries or administrators. He described the long resistance of the Garia people against the German, then the Australian, then the Japanese, then the Australian administration again, and the different traditional and modern ideas and experiments they have made use of to this end. His description of the career of the leader Yali is a model of anthropological and historical objectivity. He had also found that the workings of Pacific Islands kinship rules did not exactly the rules being taught in Oxford or Cambridge. He got in great trouble then with intolerant British colleagues who savaged him, which brought him to drink and to a early death. Raymond Firth's lessons about the way Tikopians manipulated at will their traditional behaviour had not yet caught on.