Christian Clerk teaches social anthropology for the extramural services of London University and City University. His special interests lie in the anthropology and history of Polynesia. He carried out fi eld research in the Cook Islands for his doctoral thesis, The Animal World of the Mangaians (University of London, 1981), and has published articles on ethnozoology and on myth. He is Secretary of the Pacific Islands Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland, for which he has recently prepared the UK and Ireland Pacific Research Register.