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William H. Davenport, well known for his wide-ranging scholarship, including studies of kinship, aesthetics, economics, and exchange systems, died in Philadelphia on March 12, 2004. Professor and curator emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Anthropology and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Davenport was one of the few scholars to conduct research and publish on all three culture areas of Oceania. He also carried out fieldwork in Jamaica, Indonesia, and Malaysia. His writings crossed disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries, including contributions to archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and human sexuality, as well as to social and cultural anthropology.
Davenport's life experiences had a mythic quality and he regaled his students and colleagues at the museum's Potlatch restaurant, as well as other gathering places, with fascinating tales from his travels and fieldwork. Born in Upland, California, on May 22, 1922, he had a passion for the ocean that lured him away from his childhood home in Cucamonga, California, at the age of 14, when he stowed away on a boat to Singapore (this reportedly landed him in jail for a short stay). He went to Hawaii to surf, was a photographer in Hollywood, worked in Shanghai until the communist revolution, and ran a small shipping company. He became acquainted with the islands of the Pacific while serving with the U.S. Naval Merchant Marine. He was in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack and earned a Purple Heart during the war. Davenport's interests in the ocean carried over to his choice of field sites, most of which were close to salt water. His sailing skills and knowledge of navigation enriched his studies of Micronesian navigation (1964a), Santa Cruz seafaring (1964b), and the canoes of Santa Ana and Santa Catalina Islands (1990). He continued sailing after his 1992 retirement, and he was still able to bring his boat into dock under sail when in his late seventies.
A fascination with Japanese and Chinese philosophy led Davenport to the University of Hawaii where, under the influence of Peter Buck and Kenneth Emory at the Bishop Museum, he switched his attentions to anthropology and received his B.A. in 1952. Graduate studies in anthropology and an interdisciplinary program in the behavioral sciences followed at Yale University, where he received his doctoral degree in...