Alfred Cort Haddon

Alfred Cort Haddon (1855 to 1940) was a British anthropologist and ethnologist who began as a biologist. Educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, he became professor of zoology at the College of Science in Dublin in 1880, and a study of coral reefs in the Torres Strait Islands first drew him to anthropology. In 1898 he led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait with W. H. R. Rivers, Charles Gabriel Seligman and Sidney Ray; its results fill the Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, and its recordings are held by the British Library. He became lecturer in ethnology at Cambridge in 1900 and reader in 1909 and effectively founded its School of Anthropology. He was the first to recognise the ethnological importance of string figures, and he wrote Head-hunters, Black, White and Brown (1901) and The Races of Man (1909). He advised and supported younger fieldworkers, among them Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, and served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and of the Folk Lore Society. He died in 1940.