Donald Tuzin

Don Tuzin was twice chair of UCSD's department of anthropology, and in 2004-2005 was chair of UCSD's Academic Senate. In his later years, Tuzin was working on a biography of Derek Freeman in collaboration with Peter Hempenstall, a professor of history at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand.

Tuzin's most significant book was probably The Cassowary's Revenge (1997), a study of culture change and the construction and enactment of masculinity. The following summary is taken from the book jacket:

While studying at the University of London, Tuzin became interested in Sepik cultures and decided to go to the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), where he worked with the famous and controversial social anthropologist Derek Freeman. Tuzin conducted fieldwork among the Ilahita Arapesh in New Guinea's East Sepik Province. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology at ANU in 1973 and joined the anthropology department at University of California, San Diego that same year.

In addition to teaching and mentoring students in anthropology, he co-founded (with Fitz Poole) and directed UCSD’s Melanesian Archive, the world’s largest depository of unpublished materials on the societies and cultures of Melanesia. In part because of Tuzin's work, UCSD was known during the 1970s and 1980s as one of the top institutions in the world for the anthropological study of Melanesia.

Donald F. Tuzin (June 14, 1945 – April 15, 2007) was an American social anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work on the Ilahita Arapesh, a horticultural people living in northeast lowland New Guinea, and for comparative studies of gender and sexuality within Melanesia. Tuzin was born in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in Winona, Minnesota, and spent his teen years again in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Western Reserve University in Ohio (shortly before its merger with Case Institute of Technology), where he became interested in anthropology and participated in the excavation of Native American archaeological sites left by the Mound Builders. He also received his master's degree from Case Western Reserve.