Arthur Bernard Deacon (1903-1927) was a social anthropologist who carried out fieldwork on the islands of Malakula and Ambrym in what is now Vanuatu.
Deacon was born in Nikolayev, then in south Russia, where his English father worked for a shipping firm, and at the age of thirteen was sent back to finish his education in England.
Deacon graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded a grant for anthropological fieldwork in Malakula.
The book was drawn on by both later ethnographers[3] and present-day inhabitants of the islands, although later fieldwork by Margaret Patterson radically reinterpreted his evidence on the Ambrym marriage system.
[4] Although they exchanged many letters, and arranged to meet in Australia to live as a couple, they never met again.