In 1928, he first visited Tikopia, the southernmost of the Solomon Islands, to study the untouched Polynesian society there, resistant to outside influences and still with its pagan religion and undeveloped economy.

The first of these, We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia was published in 1936 and seventy years on is still used as a basis for many university courses about Oceania.

[6] We the Tikopia has been through dozens of editions, and its title was adapted by the British-born New Zealand doctor David Lewis: We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific.

[2] From 1948 to 1952, he was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the then-fledgling Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, along with Howard Florey (co-developer of medicinal penicillin), Mark Oliphant (a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project), and Keith Hancock (Chichele Professor of Economic History at Oxford).

[9] He returned to Tikopia on research visits several times, although as travel and fieldwork requirements became more burdensome he focused on family and kinship relationships in working- and middle-class London.

There followed visiting professorships at British Columbia (1969), Cornell (1970), Chicago (1970–71), the Graduate School of the City University of New York (1971) and UC Davis (1974).

[16] Composed on behalf of the Polynesian Society by its then-President, Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu (English translation)[2] Firth's papers are held at the London School of Economics – including his photographic collection