Ben Finney


Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the cultural and social anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization. As “surfing’s premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century” and “the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face” of the Hokulea project, he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia in the 1960s and his co-founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in the 1970s.

Biography

The son of a United States Navy pilot, Ben Finney was born in 1933 and grew up in San Diego, California. He earned his B.A. in history, economics, and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1955. In 1958, after serving in the U.S. Navy and working in the steel and aerospace industries, he went to Hawaii, where he earned his M.A. in anthropology at the University of Hawaii in 1959. His master's degree thesis, “Hawaiian Surfing: a Study of Cultural Change”, became the basis for Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, a book that Finney co-authored with James D. Houston in 1966. Finney earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard University in 1964.
Finney held faculty appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Australian National University, the University of French Polynesia, and the International Space University. From 1970 through 2000 he was a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his courses included Human Adaptation to the Sea and Human Adaptation to Living in Space. From 1994 through 2003 he was the co-chair of the department of Space and Society at the International Space University.
In the 1990s, Finney was a National Research Council Associate with the SETI project at NASA Ames Research Center and involved in the Sandia National Laboratories planning and implementation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for the disposal of nuclear waste. He was on the panel of experts for the 1998 PBS program Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey. During 2004-2006 he was a curator of the Vaka Moana canoe voyaging exhibit at the Auckland Museum in New Zealand. He was the featured guest speaker at the 2007 National Conference for Educational Robotics.
He later served as a professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa, and also as a distinguished research associate of the Bishop Museum. He and his wife, Mila, lived most of the year in Hawaii. Finney died on May 23, 2017 at the age of 83.

Polynesian voyaging

When Ben Finney was a University of Hawaii graduate student in 1958, working toward his master of arts degree and writing his dissertation on surfing, scholars were not yet in agreement that any canoe voyages over great distances on the Pacific Ocean had been intentional. The prevailing view was exemplified by a New Zealand historian with a low opinion of Polynesian navigation methods and canoes, Andrew Sharp, who believed that such voyages could only have been accidental.
Finney did not agree with this view and became determined to disprove it. He built the first 40-feet-long replica of a Polynesian sailing canoe while he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1960s. When it was finished, he shipped it to Hawaii, where ancient Hawaii scholar Mary Kawena Pukui named it Nalehia, which in the Hawaiian language means The Skilled Ones, because of the grace with which its twin hulls rode the sea.
In 1973, Finney co-founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with artist Herb Kawainui Kane and sailor Charles Tommy Holmes. Within three years, they had designed, built, and sailed the Hōkūleʻa on its first historic voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti with a crew led by captain Kawika Kapahulehua and navigator Mau Piailug.

Awards

The awards that were bestowed upon Finney include:

Selected books

A character in Launch Out, a Philip Robert Harris science fiction novel that is set in the year 2010, is based on Finney, a University of Hawaii professor of anthropology who is also the president of the fictional Unispace Academy.