FIRTH, RAYMOND. Raymond Firth (1901–2002) was born in New Zealand and grew up in a rural area on the edge of Auckland. He attended Auckland Grammar School, where, at the age of fourteen, he found a copy of F. E. Maning's Old New Zealand, which, he said, laid a foundation for his interest in the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, the Maori. As a schoolboy he also discovered the Journal of the Polynesian Society in the Auckland Public Library, became a reader, and later a contributor. In 1925 he published an article in the journal on a Maori pa site, and seventy-six years later, at the age of one hundred, an article by him on Tikopia dreams was published in the same journal.

Growing up in New Zealand, Firth had Maori friends and learned their language, which helped him acquire fluency in the cognate language of Tikopia...