He was born 16 May 1935, to antropplogists
Felix M. Keesing and
Marie Margaret Martin Keesing, also an anthropologist of the Pacific. Keesing studied at
Stanford and
Harvard and began work in 1965 at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1974 he became a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the
Australian National University in
Canberra, heading the Department of Anthropology from 1976. In 1990, he moved to
McGill University in
Montreal. In 1974. he wrote a famous article, one of around a hundred published over the course of his career, defining and specifying a view of
culture inspired by linguistics and
Marxian thinking. He also wrote several books, and is perhaps best known among students of anthropology as the author of
Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective, regarded as one of the most authoritative general introductory works on the subject. This was based on a book originally authored by his father, and was extensively revised by Keesing over the course of many years, beginning with an updated edition of the original in 1971, and continuing with a full rewrite in 1976, revised further in 1981. Since Keesing's death this task was taken up by
Andrew Strathern, and the book remains popular. In 1989, Keesing worked closely with the author to translate
Jonathan Fifi'i's autobiography,
From Pig-Theft to Parliament: My Life between Two Worlds, which chronicled his life from his poor Kwaio origins through to the
Maasina Ruru movement and onto his career as a politician. Keesing died suddenly of a heart attack at the Canadian Anthropology Society dance and reception on 7 May 1993, and his ashes were transferred to the Solomon Islands, where the families of his Kwaio associates accord him the status of an
andalo or
ancestral spirit. ==Partial bibliography==