Ben Rudolph Finney was an Americananthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social andcultural anthropology ofsurfing,Polynesian navigation, andcanoe sailing, as well as in the cultural andsocial anthropology of humanspace colonization. As "surfing's premierhistorian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century"^[1] and "theintellectualmentor, driving force, and international public face" of theHokulea project,^[2] he played a key role in theHawaiian Renaissance following his construction of theHokulea precursorNalehia^[3] in the 1960s and his co-founding of thePolynesian Voyaging Society^[4] in the 1970s.

The son of aUnited States Navy pilot, Ben Finney was born in 1933^[5] and grew up inSan Diego, California.^[6] He earned hisB.A. in history, economics, andanthropology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1955. In 1958, after serving in the U.S. Navy and working in the steel and aerospace industries, he went to Hawaii, where he earned hisM.A. in anthropology at theUniversity of Hawaiʻi in 1959. His master's degree thesis, "Hawaiian Surfing: a Study of Cultural Change",^[7] became the basis forSurfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, a book that Finney co-authored withJames D. Houston in 1966.^[8] Finney earned hisPh.D. in anthropology atHarvard University in 1964.

Finney held faculty appointments at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara,^[9] theAustralian National University, theUniversity of French Polynesia,^[10] and theInternational Space University.^[11] From 1970 through 2000 he was a professor of anthropology at theUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his courses included Human Adaptation to the Sea and Human Adaptation to Living in Space. From 1994 through 2003 he was the co-chair of the department of Space and Society at theInternational Space University.^[11]

In the 1990s, Finney was aNational Research Council Associate with theSETI project^[12] atNASA Ames Research Center and involved in theSandia National Laboratories planning and implementation of theWaste Isolation Pilot Plant for the disposal of nuclear waste.^[13][14] He was on the panel of experts for the 1998PBS programWayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey.^[15] During 2004-2006 he was a curator of the Vaka Moana canoe voyaging exhibit at theAuckland Museum in New Zealand.^[16] He was the featured guest speaker at the 2007 National Conference for Educational Robotics.^[17]

He later served as a professor atUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa,^[18] and also as a distinguished research associate of theBishop Museum.^[19] He and his wife, Mila, lived most of the year in Hawaii. Finney died on May 23, 2017, at the age of 83.^[20]

Finney vividly remembers his advisor handing him a copy ofAncient Voyagers in the Pacific [published by thePolynesian Society in 1956], a book by New Zealander Andrew Sharp that suggested that Polynesian canoes were no good, thatPolynesian navigation was lousy, and that the Pacific had been settled randomly, and accidentally. Finney, in Hawai‘i to do a master's of anthropology onsurfing, took umbrage—inside. "I was already in trouble doing a master’s thesis on surfing, which was considered renegade and lower-class then," he explains. It was no time to hatch what professors might have considered wacky schemes, but silently Finney thought: Why not recreate a sailing canoe and prove Sharp wrong?

— Julia Steele, 'Among the Stars' article,Hana Hou!^[21]        

When Ben Finney was a University of Hawaii graduate student in 1958,^[21] 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 thePacific Ocean had been intentional.^[22] The prevailing view was exemplified by a New Zealand historian with a low opinion of Polynesian navigation methods and canoes, Andrew Sharp, who believed that such voyages could only have been accidental.^[23]

Finney did not agree with this view and became determined to disprove it.^[21] He built the first 40-feet-long replica of a Polynesian sailing canoe while he was teaching atUniversity of California, Santa Barbara in the 1960s. When it was finished, he shipped it to Hawaii, whereancient Hawaii scholarMary Kawena Pukui named itNalehia, which in theHawaiian language meansThe Skilled Ones,^[21] because of the grace with which its twin hulls rode the sea.

In 1973, Finney co-founded thePolynesian Voyaging Society with artistHerb Kawainui Kane and sailor Charles Tommy Holmes. Within three years, they had designed, built, and sailed theHōkūleʻa on its first historic voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti^[22][24] with a crew led by captainKawika Kapahulehua and navigatorMau Piailug.

The awards^[25] that were bestowed upon Finney include:

• 1994:Royal Institute of Navigation Bronze Medal for the outstanding paper, "Rediscovering Polynesian Navigation through Experimental Voyaging" in theJournal of Navigation, Volume 46, 1993
• 1995:French University of the Pacific Medal for contributions to the revival of traditional voyaging and the study of Polynesian culture and society
• 1995:Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of CosmonauticsTsiolkovsky Medal for contributions to the study ofcosmonautics and theexploration of space
• 1997: University of Hawaiʻi Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research
• 2004: Hawaiʻi Book Publisher's Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for writing nonfiction
• 2007: Honorary Doctorate, University of French Polynesia

(These are incomplete listings.)

• 1966:Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings. With James D. Houston.^[8] Tokyo andRutland:Charles E. Tuttle Company.ISBN 0-8048-0557-1.
  • 1996 30th anniversary edition:Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport.Petaluma:Pomegranate Communications.ISBN 0-87654-594-0.
• 1976:Pacific Navigation and Voyaging.Auckland, New Zealand: ThePolynesian Society.ISBN 0-8248-0584-4.
• 1979:Hokulea: The Way to Tahiti. New York:Dodd, Mead and Company.ISBN 0-396-07719-6.
• 1985:Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience.^[26] Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones,^[27] eds.Berkeley:University of California Press.ISBN 0-520-05898-4.
• 1992:From Sea to Space (The Macmillan Brown Lectures 1989).Palmerston North:Massey University. Distributed by theUniversity of Hawaiʻi Press.ISBN 0-908665-59-8.
• 1994:Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia.Berkeley:University of California Press.ISBN 0-520-08002-5.
• 2003:Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging.^[2]Honolulu:Bishop Museum Press.ISBN 1-58178-025-7.

• 1977: "Voyaging Canoes and the Settlement of Polynesia",Science, Volume 196, Number 4296: pages 1277–1285.
• 1981: "Exploring and Settling Pacific Ocean Space—Past Analogues for Future Events?"^[28]Space Manufacturing 4:Proceedings of the FifthPrinceton/AIAA Conference May 18–21, 1981 (page 261). New York:American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
• 1988: "Voyaging Against the Direction of the Trades: A Report of a Canoe Voyage from Samoa to Tahiti".American Anthropologist, Volume 90, Number 2: pages 401–405.
• 1991: "Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging."^[29]American Anthropologist, Volume 93, Number 2, June 1991, pages 383–404.
• 1994: "The Other One-Third of the Globe".^[30]Journal of World History, Volume 5, Number 2.
• 1994: "Polynesian Voyagers to the New World".Man and Culture in Oceania, Volume 10: pages 1–13.
• 1995: "A role for Magnetoreception in Human Navigation".^[31]Current Anthropology, Volume 36, Number 3: pages 500–506.
• 2001: "Voyage to Polynesia's Land's End".Antiquity, Volume 75: pages 172–181.
• 2007: "Tracking Polynesian Seafarers".Science, Volume 317: pages 1873–1874.

• 1985: "Lunar Base: Learning to live in space" (pages 731–756) in Wendell Mendell, ed.,Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century.Houston:Lunar and Planetary Institute.ISBN 0-89464-011-9.
• 1988: "Will space change humanity?" (pages 155–172) in J. Schneider and M. Leger-Orine, eds.,Frontiers and Space Conquest: The Philosopher's Touchstone. Bingham:Kluwer Academic Press.ISBN 90-277-2741-4.
• 1996: "Colonizing an Island World" (pages 71–116) in Ward H. Goodenough, ed.,Prehistoric Settlement of the Pacific. Philadelphia: Diane Publishing Co.ISBN 0-87169-865-X
• 2007: Three chapters inVaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific.^[32] Kerry Howe (Massey University School of Social and Cultural Studies), ed. Honolulu:University of Hawaiʻi Press.ISBN 978-0-8248-3213-1.
• 2007: "Polynesia, Micronesia and Eastern Melanesia: the Exploration and Settlement of Remote Oceania". InThe Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History,^[33] Volume 3, pages 154–162.Oxford:Oxford University Press.

A character inLaunch Out, a Philip Robert Harrisscience fiction novel that is set in the year 2010, is based on Finney, a University of Hawaiʻi professor of anthropology who is also the president of the fictional Unispace Academy.^[34]

• Malcolm Gault-Williams.Legendary Surfers: Surfing from an Historical and Cultural Viewpoint, 2500 B.C. to the Present (Volumes 1 through 8).
• Colin Jack-Hinton."A compass can go wrong, the stars never."Oceania, anacademic journal published by theUniversity of Sydney, December 1995.
• Tom Harris."The real reason we're in space: Space travel is a social activity."The Globe and Mail, 31 May 1999.
• Ellen Barry."Settling the Galaxy."The Boston Globe, 19 March 2002.
• P. J. Capelotti."Space: The Final Archaeological Frontier."Archived 2012-11-04 at theWayback MachineArchaeology, Volume 57, Number 6, November/December 2004.
• David Tenenbaum.https://web.archive.org/web/20071011114048/http://whyfiles.org/shorties/243polynesian_voy/ An Island Too Far?]The Why Files: Science Behind the News. 27 September 2007.

• Ben Finney, Professor Emeritus. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa faculty page.

• 1933 births
• 2017 deaths
• People from Hawaii
• People from San Diego
• UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumni
• Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
• University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa faculty
• American cultural anthropologists
• American maritime historians
• Hōkūleʻa
• Historians of Hawaii
• Polynesian navigation
• Historians from California

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