The Derek Freeman papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.

The personal papers of the late Derek Freeman, including correspondence from 1938 to the time of his death, field notes, and documents concerned chiefly with Samoa and the so-called Mead-Freeman controversy, but also covering other aspects of his career, have been deposited in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. The acquisition of this collection began in 2000, a year before Derek Freeman's death, and was largely completed in 2002.

When I visited the Library with my wife on 3-5 September 2002, the greater part of the Papers were already catalogued, except for the most recent acquisitions and a collection of personal diaries and journals that are still in the possession of Monica Freeman, Derek's widow. Among the latter, of special interest, is Monica Freeman's own journal which she kept during the years 1949-51, when she and Derek lived with the Baleh Iban in what is now the Kapit Division of Sarawak. By singular good fortune, Monica and her daughter Jennifer were in San Diego at the time of our visit, staying with Professor Donald Tuzin and his wife, and we were able to enjoy a delightful picnic lunch together, all of us, on the University of California-San Diego campus, under the shade of eucalyptus trees in an especially Canberra-like setting. Professor Tuzin is a former student of Derek's and will, many of us hope, become, in the future, his intellectual biographer. With the encouragement of Professor James J. Fox, Monica Freeman is currently editing her Sarawak journal for eventual publication by the Australian National University's Pandanus Press.

While the Tun Jugah Foundation library in Kuching, Sarawak holds the original copies of Derek Freeman's Iban field notes, together with photographs, pencil sketches, tape recordings, and other documents relating to Freeman's Iban field research, there are a number of things in the Mandeville Collections of special interest to those concerned with the Iban and, more generally, with Sarawak. Included in the Freeman Papers, for example, are drafts of a number of published papers, including Freeman's Curl Prize essay, "On the Kindred," which centrally concern the Iban, but which also have exerted notable influence on the analysis of other Bornean societies.

The Derek Freeman Papers are divided into two parts: a "first accession (2001)" and a "second accession (2002)." The first accession documents much of Freeman's research and publication career, covering his training in the tradition of British social anthropology at the University of London and Cambridge University and also reflects, in particular, his later shift of interest towards a synthesis of human biology and anthropology. The first accession also includes most of Freeman's Samoan research materials. After completing his B.A. degree at Victoria University, New Zealand in 1939, Freeman became a language teacher in Western Samoa, where he remained until 1943. During that time he made frequent visits to a Samoan village called Sa'anapu, and in 1948 he wrote a M.Phil. thesis based on his study of Sa'anapu entitled "The social structure of a Samoan village community." Between 1966 and 1968 he returned to Samoa for further research. The second accession contains his thesis and all of the remaining research materials and field notes not included in the first accession. Like his Iban field notes, Freeman's Samoan notes were originally kept in ring-binders, arranged alphabetically by subject and cross-referenced. Again, as with his Iban research notes, there were also special binders for primary sources, indigenous texts, historical material, charts, drawings, and statistical data, all carefully cross-referenced by Freeman himself. While the extent of Freeman's Samoan material is impressive, his Iban material is even more impressive, reflecting the fact, as he himself acknowledged, that of the two peoples, he always felt a stronger affinity to the Iban. Compared to the stratified, more restrictive society of Western Samoa, he particularly relished the social equality and democratic tenor of the upriver Iban life that he and Monica experienced a half century ago, in the early 1950s. The second accession supplements the first with additional research materials from Samoa, notes used in drafting professional papers, a collection of photographs of Samoa and of Freeman taken at various times in his life, and a substantial file of correspondence with anthropologists and colleagues in other disciplines. A good deal of this correspondence, particularly from 1948 through the 1980s, relates to Freeman's Iban writings. However, in other respects, the bulk of the second accession is weighted heavily towards Freeman's activities of the 1990s and year 2000, most notably to the Mead-Freeman controversy. At the time of our visit, some parts of the second accession were still being cataloged.

Within each of the two accessions, the Papers are arranged in eight parallel series, consisting, essentially, of: 1) correspondence, 2) subject files, 3) Samoan research notes, 4) general notes, 5) writings by Freeman, 6) writings by others, 7) the Mead-Freeman controversy, and 8) miscellany. "Miscellany" was a category created by Freeman himself and includes a wide variety of things, including graphics and images photocopied from other sources to which Freeman often added captions and then sent on to friends and others. The correspondence series are particularly rich, especially those of the second accession, and contain Freeman's files of personal and professional correspondence, arranged alphabetically by correspondent and chronologically by date. Until the 1980s, Freeman corresponded with nearly every anthropologist who had worked in Borneo. Particularly full, of course, are the files of his former students. In addition, there is much in the correspondence that illuminates Freeman's Iban writings, the issues that concerned him at the time particular works were written, comments and advice of colleagues, and the circumstances of publication. As the cataloger observes in the website notes to the Papers, the correspondence files are an especially rewarding place "to investigate Freeman's ideas, since in his letters, Freeman was able to engage friends and colleagues on all of the issues that interested him." This was his intellectual work style, and in the early days, these issues were very much related to his Iban research. In this regard, the Edmund Leach correspondence is an especially rich background source to Freeman's writings on the bilek family, kindred, cognatic kinship, augury, and swidden cultivation. Leach's comments and advice, written to Freeman while Freeman and Monica were in the field, are detailed and run to many pages. Not only do they suggest possible theoretical directions, but they are surprisingly encyclopedic in terms of ethnographic issues. Although Leach's own stay in Sarawak was relatively brief, his grasp of the comparative ethnography was remarkable. Also, Leach clearly saw the significance of what Freeman was reporting from the field. Later on, when Freeman was again in Samoa, Leach helped see the Report on the Iban through publication. He also encouraged Freeman in his interest in religion, an interest, regrettably, that was never to be fully realized in Freeman's Iban writings. Also notable is the Meyer Fortes correspondence. Fortes and Freeman began writing to one another when Freeman was still a graduate student at the University of London, before his Iban fieldwork, and continued regularly thereafter until Fortes' death in 1982. Fortes was clearly a lifelong mentor, friend, and intellectual sounding board, and their letters record every major change in Freeman's intellectual and professional life. For me, having suffered as an undergraduate through the desiccated prose of The Web of Kinship, Fortes' letters to Freeman were a revelation of lucidity and feeling, and though always supportive, they often challenged or gently disputed whatever newly-embraced truth that was then exercising Freeman's thoughts. Fortes' letters also provide a chronicle of what he saw as the decline of British social anthropology in the 1970s and 80s, and in his letters he often lamented the dearth of brilliant students who had once, like Freeman himself, flocked to British universities from all over the world.

Also of interest are some of the materials contained in the Subject Files and General Notes. These include notes, quotations, and bibliographic references on a range of general and theoretical subjects of interest to Freeman, arranged alphabetically by subject matter. A number of these subjects directly relate to Freeman's Iban work, for example, "Dreams," "Augury," and "Heads."

For scholars who would like to consult the Derek Freeman Papers, it may be worth noting that modest financial assistance of up to USD 400 may be applied for from the "Friends of the UCSD Libraries" by writing to the Head of the Mandeville Special Collections, Ms. Lynda Claassen.

More generally, information on the Derek Freeman Papers, including accession abstracts and a summary of the collection's contents, may be found on the University of California, San Diego, Library website, or may be obtained by writing to the Head of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, Ms. Lynda Claassen ([e-mail]), University of California, San Diego 0175S, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 USA.

Clifford Sather

Cultural Anthropology

P.O. Box 59 (Unioninkatu 38D)

FIN-O0014 University of Helsinki 

Finland