Arthur Maurice Hocart

Arthur Maurice Hocart was a British anthropologist and archaeologist noted for fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, Fiji and other Pacific societies. He later served as Archaeological Commissioner of Ceylon and professor of sociology in Cairo, producing comparative studies of kingship, caste, ritual and social organisation.

Arthur Maurice Hocart was born in Etterbeek and died in Cairo. Hocart carried out early ethnographic fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and Fiji, later served as Archaeological Commissioner in Ceylon and taught sociology in Cairo; his comparative work on kingship and social organisation was reassessed favourably by later anthropologists.

In Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, His memories return to the 1908 Percy Sladen Trust expedition with Arthur Maurice Hocart in the Solomon Islands, where he observed healing, ritual, colonial disruption and population loss.