As Allan Hanson sorts through photographs that he took nearly 40 years ago, he stops to look at a picture of a boy standing with a goat on top of a ridge on Rapa, a remote island about 750 miles south of Tahiti in the South Pacific.

“From the standpoint of scenery, it’s beautiful,” said Hanson, a professor of anthropology at Kansas University. “In order to form that picture I had to tie that goat down, so I like that one very much.”

Next month, Hanson and his wife, Louise, will take that picture and about 70 more back to Rapa to include it in an exhibit to show what the island looked like 40 years ago.

The eight-day trip will be the first time that the Lawrence couple have returned to the island since they lived there for about a year in 1964. Allan Hanson, who also is the coordinator for the Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice, did research for his dissertation in cultural anthropology there.

The 64-year-old says he is excited to go back because he wants to see what the island is like now.

“So many of our friends are dead or dying,” he said. “We just want to renew our acquaintances.”

Back then, the island was so untouched by the outside world that nothing was published about Rapa, which is why he picked the island, Allan Hanson said. There were no showers, no toilets and no running hot water. Now, Rapans have electricity, television and even e-mail, he said.

Some things remain the same.

“Once you’re there you have to stay so long,” Allan Hanson said. “Ships still call now, as they did when we were there, only about once a month. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity because it’s so remote.”

Allan and Louise Hanson pose with a picture of a friend, Tafara, who now is an elder on the Polynesian island of Rapa. The Hansons will soon return to Rapa, where they lived nearly 40 years ago.

Living overseas is nothing new for the Hansons. Besides Rapa, they have lived in Denmark, England, France, New Zealand and Tahiti. But the couple said Rapa would always have a special place in their hearts.

For Allan Hanson, his field experience there started his career as an anthropologist. After the trip, he wrote several articles about the island including a book called “Rapan Lifeways: Society and History on a Polynesian Island.”

“It was challenging for us to live and to understand,” he said. “You live in a very different society, they speak a language that you don’t know and you don’t know anybody there. Everything depends so much on how you make contact with the people around you.”