Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social and cultural anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization.
10 Facts About Ben Finney
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The son of a United States Navy pilot, Ben Finney was born in 1933 and grew up in San Diego, California.
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Ben Finney was on the panel of experts for the 1998 PBS program Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey.
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Ben Finney was the featured guest speaker at the 2007 National Conference for Educational Robotics.
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Ben Finney later served as a professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa, and as a distinguished research associate of the Bishop Museum.
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Ben Finney vividly remembers his advisor handing him a copy of Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific [published by the Polynesian Society in 1956], a book by New Zealander Andrew Sharp that suggested that Polynesian canoes were no good, that Polynesian navigation was lousy, and that the Pacific had been settled randomly, and accidentally.
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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.
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Ben Finney did not agree with this view and became determined to disprove it.
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Ben Finney 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.
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In 1973, Ben Finney co-founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with artist Herb Kawainui Kane and sailor Charles Tommy Holmes.