Charles William Merton Hart (1905–1976) was a social anthropologist and sociologist best known for his study of the Tiwi people of the Bathurst and Melville Islands (or Tiwi Islands) in north Australia during the 1920s.
In 1969 he retired to North America, taking a visiting position at Wichita State University in 1971 which he held until his death.
[2] Together with Arnold R. Pilling, Hart authored The Tiwi of North Australia (New York, 1960), a classic work of ethnography based in part on his fieldwork among the Tiwi in 1928–1929.
[3] This was one of the first participant-observation studies of a population of Australian Aborigines still functioning as a hunter-gatherer society.
[4] Hart is now sometimes noted for his failure to take proper account of the role of grandmothers in hunter-gatherer society, dismissing elderly women as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting".