Homer G. Barnett was born to Henry Barnett and Daisy Tipton Barnett in 1906. He attended the University of California, receiving his Ph.D. in 1938. His primary specializations were culture change and applied anthropology. While he was still a student, Homer did a lot of fieldwork with the American Indians of Oregon, Washington, and Northwestern California. In particular, he studied the Yurok, Hupa, and Yakima People, along with some other smaller groups of the Oregon coast. Some of his research focused on ethnological issues but most of it was focused on the Indian Shaker religion and the potlatch. The potlatch was also the subject of his doctoral dissertation later on.
In 1939, Barnett went to the University of Mexico and became the Field Director of the Jemez Archeological Field School and directed a project in the Santa Fe National Forest. Later in the same year Barnett moved to the University of Oregon. Within a few years he grew restless and in the summer of 1943, Barnett helped with the World War II Far Eastern Language and Area Training Program of the University of California at Berkeley. While there he helped to train service men in the art of extracting cultural information from native informants.
The next year, Barnett joined the Bureau of American Ethnology staff and became a researcher with the Ethnogeographic Board, which was the World War II agency that provided scientific information on human and natural resources around the world. Barnett took the position of Executive Secretary of the Board's abortive Pacific Survey Project and, later, also took a War Document Survey concerning the Pacific to give his advice on the disposition of documents, which had been amassed by the government (collections of anthropological archives).
After the war, Barnett returned to the University of Oregon and continued pursuing his interest in Pacific cultures. Under the sponsorship of the National Research Council he worked on Palau, and served as Staff Anthropologist for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Barnett was also a Consultant for the government of the Netherlands New Guinea. In the 1960s, he directed a program of research among Pacific communities displaced because of natural disasters or atomic bomb tests (collections of anthropological archives).
During 1956-57, Barnett served on the National Science Foundation as a senior fellow. He served on the Society for Applied Anthropology as president in 1961. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto in 1965. Barnett was a much loved and a very respected teacher. He traveled to other universities as a visiting lecturer and during 1960-61, he worked for the American Anthropological Association as a traveling lecturer. The Oregon Academy of Science presented him with a citation upon his retirement for his services as a teacher. His colleagues honored him in 1980 by establishing a graduate teaching fellowship in his name. They hoped "to encourage continuance of the high standard of teaching and scholarship" that Homer Barnett had exemplified.
Dr. Homer Garner Barnett died of cancer on May 9, 1985. In Barnett's obituary, Theodore Stern said, " his passing has ended a career-long devotion to a quest for the orderly principles that underlie cultural change". Stern said that as a teacher, Barnett has few equals.
References
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~rita/stanifer/d0005/g0000045.html, (2002)
Barnett, Homer Garner, http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/guide/_b1.htm, (2002)
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Sep., 1987), pp. 701-703.
Written By: Ted Katzung, 2002
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008