Jeff Sissons retires

The Cultural Anthropology Programme celebrates the retirement and career of our outstanding colleague, Associate Professor Jeff Sissons.

Jeff has been an intellectual force in this programme for nearly 20 years and a key contributor to anthropologies in and of Aotearoa New Zealand, te ao Māori, and the Pacific for even longer. As an intellectual, Jeff is an iconoclast. His research has taken up a range of varied themes related to global Indigenous politics, settler-colonial states, architecture, changing Indigenous lifeways, and more broadly, socio-political transformation in Aotearoa and the Pacific. His thinking combines careful attention to the historical record with sharp, theoretically rich insight. It is not an understatement to say that Jeff’s insights have helped rewrite the history of the Pacific in important ways. However, beyond merely remaking the historical record, Jeff’s work is profoundly generative, opening lines of flight and setting out bold new trajectories of thought for future scholars. His body of work will be reckoned with for a long time.

Just as Jeff's research is marked by a profound sense of open possibility, so too are his classrooms. As colleagues we have had the joy of watching students try to keep up with Jeff mid-flight. His lectures transform their ways of thinking and being in the world. They are rich intellectual performances of thought in action. Jeff's restless intellect seems to make and remake itself anew each term, calling upon us as fellow intellectual travellers to do the same. He encourages our post-graduate students to see their work as part of a larger tradition of living an intellectually driven, curious life. In this, he has continually worked to realize the very best of what a university education can offer and created a lasting important imprint on our programme’s intellectual culture.

Jeff not only inspires his students to think more carefully and to read more deeply, but also his colleagues. He has been a key figure in the remaking of Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in the last decade and a wonderful collaborator as we continue that project into a new era. His departure from the programme is an incredible loss of intellectual mana and also human fellowship; Jeff is just a lovely person to work with.

Despite this, we are eagerly looking forward to seeing what Jeff gets up to during his retirement. He will no doubt continue to reinvent himself, playing music, reading, gardening, making wine, drinking whisky, and writing. Of course, we anticipate that he will continue to revolutionize his own thinking, continuing always to plough his own furrow.  Congratulations, Jeff!