Roger Martin Keesing (16 May 1935 – 7 May 1993) was an American linguist and anthropologist, most notable for his fieldwork on the Kwaio people of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, and his writings on a wide range of topics including kinship, religion, politics, history, cognitive anthropology and language.
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 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.
Keesing died suddenly of a heart attack at the Canadian Anthropology Society dance and reception in 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.