Wilson Duff
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Wilson Duff (March 23, 1925 in Vancouver – August 8, 1976) was a Canadian archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and museum curator.
He is remembered for his research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast, notably the
Biography
Duff obtained a B.A. from the
In 1958, Duff and his assistant curator
In 1958-59, while he was a professor of anthropology at the
In 1960 he did fieldwork in Gitksan and Nisga'a communities, and in 1969 he served in court as an expert witness in the Nisga'a land-claims case Calder vs. Attorney-General of B.C., the famous "
In his later years he was consumed with studying Haida art in all its formalistic and cosmological complexity—taking in structuralist and psychoanalytical insights—an endeavour which he undertook with his friend the Haida artist Bill Reid but which never resulted in a comprehensive published articulation. His immersion in the Haida thought-world was so total that, as he wrote in the early 1970s, colleagues "are concerned about my sanity and reputation."
His students included the anthropologist Marjorie Halpin.
He committed suicide in his faculty office with a shotgun on August 8, 1976. The subsequent death of Lilo Berliner, a correspondent of Duff who left their letters on the doorstep of poet Phyllis Webb, led to the creation of the memorial poetry sequence "Artifacts" in the collection Wilson's Bowl (1980).
Selected works
- (ed.) (1959) Histories, Territories, and Laws of the Kitwancool. (Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir no. 4.) Victoria, B.C.: Royal British Columbia Museum.
- (1964) "Contributions of Marius Barbeau to West Coast Ethnology." Anthropologica (new series), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 63–96.
- (1964) The Indian History of British Columbia: Volume 1 The Impact of the Whiteman. BC Provincial Museum
Sources
- Abbott, Donald N. (ed.) (1981) The World Is as Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honour of Wilson Duff. Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum.
- Nowry, Laurence (1995) Marius Barbeau, Man of Mana: A Biography. Toronto: NC Press.
External links
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