Griffin, Percival Bayonne

Percival Bayon Griffin (born February 10, 1941) is an American ethnologist, anthropologist and archaeologist, formerly the deputy dean of the College of Social Sciences, currently an honorary professor at the College of Social Sciences of the University of Hawaii, a specialist in archeology and ethnology of Southeast Asia, a member of the research Naga Research Group In 2005, he received a mentoring award from the university.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Maine in 1963 and his Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Arizona in 1969, after which he was appointed professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Until 2005, he was the dean of the university’s college of social sciences, the head of the anthropology department and the East-West center. Initially, he specialized in the anthropology of hunter-gatherer societies, and almost immediately after his appointment, he became interested in the anthropology of the Philippines, especially the life of the Aeta (agta) people living in the eastern part of Luzon Island.

For the first time he went to field research in the Philippines in 1972, in 1974 he settled for several years in the southern part of Palan Island. From late 1980 to mid 1982, he lived with one of the Agt tribes in the south of Kagayan province, studying in detail their lifestyle and hunting practices among local women; He is the author of a new concept about the role of women in hunting. In the first half of the 1990s, he headed the Department of Hawaiian, South Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii, at that time he became significantly interested in Indonesia, but since 1996 shifted his interest to Vietnam. At the same time since 1994, Griffin joined the leadership of the archaeological and anthropological program of the Kingdom of Cambodia, specializing in ethnography of elephant breeding and ceramics.

He published a large number of works on archeology, anthropology and ethnology of the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, and trained several dozen well-known specialists in these areas. It is considered one of the creators of modern ethno-archeology of Southeast Asia and Oceania.