Professor Roy Ellen FBA, President of the RAI, will have delivered his second Presidential Address when this issue of AT appears. Professor Ellen’s title is ‘On the concept of cultural transmission’, and his address will be given on 16 April at Queens University, Belfast, during the Annual Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists. We thank the ASA and the University for their hospitality.
The 2010 Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday 23 September in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum (time tba). It will be followed by the 2010 Henry Myers Lecture, to be given by Professor Geoffrey Lloyd of Cambridge University. Professor Lloyd’s title is ‘Humanity between gods and beasts? Ontologies in question’.
The Huxley Memorial Lecturer and Medallist for 2010 is Professor Johannes Fabian of the University of Amsterdam. The lecture will take place on Thursday 25 November in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum (time tba). Professor Fabian’s title is ‘Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge’.
New Honorary Editor for the JRAI. We are delighted to announce that the RAI Council has elected Dr Matthew Engelke (LSE) as Hon. Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute to succeed Professor Simon Coleman. He will serve for a three-year term from September 2010.
Wellcome Medal 2008. We are delighted to announce that the Wellcome Medal for medical anthropology has been awarded jointly to Professor Ron Barrett of Emory University and Professor Joao Biehl of Princeton University, for their respective books Aghora medicine: Pollution, death and healing in northern India (published by University of California Press) and The will to live: AIDS therapies and the politics of survival (published by Princeton University Press).
Education Outreach Programme. The dedicated education website http://www.discoveranthropology.org.uk went live at the end of January 2010. This site is managed by the RAI and intended for pre-university students, teachers, and members of the public interested in anthropology and wishing to learn more about the subject. The RAI’s contributions to the Economic and Social Research Council’s annual Festival of Social Science, comprising a one-day event ‘The meaning of water’ on board HMS President, moored on the Thames, and a series of public film screenings at the RAI, ‘Discovering the meaning of water through film’, will have taken place when this issue of AT goes to press. The new General Certificate of Education (GCE) A-level in anthropology, designed by the RAI and offered by the AQA examination board, will be taught from September 2010. The RAI’s Education Committee is working actively with AQA to provide teacher support and learning materials. The 2010 London Anthropology Day, an annual taster session for teachers and sixth-form students interested in studying anthropology at university, will take place at the British Museum on Thursday 8 July. We thank the ESRC for an extension of its funding support to the Education Programme.
Library news. The first series of events in the joint RAI/Centre for Anthropology seminar series ‘Reviewer Meets Reviewed’ came to a successful conclusion on 18 February, with a discussion between Dr Magdalena Midgly, author of The megaliths of northern Europe, and the book’s reviewer for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Professor Chris Scarre. These seminars are held at the Anthropology Library, British Museum, and bring together authors and reviewers for an informal discussion and audience Q&A session. Recent events in the series have featured Professor Georgina Born’s Uncertain vision: Birt, Dyke and the reinvention of the BBC, reviewed by Dr Michael Stewart, Dr Rebecca Cassidy’s Horse people, reviewed by Dr Margaret Taylor, and Professor Jean-Pierre Warnier’s The pot-king: The body and technologies of power, reviewed by Professor Richard Fardon.
Shaping the Field: Medical Anthropology in Europe: St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1-2 July 2010. Registration is now open for this conference, jointly organized by the RAI’s Medical Anthropology Committee and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University. Registration form and details available on the RAI website at http://www.therai.org.uk.
Vacancy for Director. Hilary Callan, Director of the RAI, will step down at the end of October 2010 after 10 years in post. See announcement elsewhere in this issue of AT. The post has been advertised and the application deadline is 20 April 2010. For further particulars and how to apply, visit the RAI website at http://www.therai.org.uk/about-the-rai/urgent-rai-announcements/.
