Many people from all over the world are affiliated to the RAI. We welcome anyone with an interest in the subject, whether working in an academic institution or not. Our affiliates include academic specialists, students, those working in fields where anthropology has practical applications, and those whose interest is captured by the subject matter of anthropology. The membership structure has been designed as far as possible to suit all interest groups. The RAI is constantly looking for ways of improving its structure and services, and welcomes all suggestions.

In this section:

• Membership Form

• Types of Affiliation

• Types of RAI Fellow

• Prices

The RAI administers a number of trust funds from the income of which it is able to award Fellowships at postdoctoral level in partnership with host universities, and limited financial support to postgraduate students of anthropology. The Institute also has honours, medals and prizes at its disposal, which are awarded in recognition of achievement of the highest order in anthropology. Details are listed on these pages. Enquiries should be addressed to the Assistant Director (Administration).

In this section:

• Research Grants

• Fellowships

• Prizes

• Honours

The Royal Anthropological Institute organises occasional one day conferences on specific topics.  In June 2012 we launched our major conference programme with Anthropology in the World. This was followed by Anthropology and Photography in May 2014, Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change in May 2016, Art, Materiality and Representation in June 2018, Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future in September 2020, Anthropology and Conservation in October 2021, Mobilising Methods in Medical Anthropoology in January 2022, Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society in June 2022 and Anthropology and Education coming up in June 2024.

Forensic anthropologists use their expertise in cases of both suspicious and non-suspicious deaths ensuring that all possible evidence is recovered, whilst also ensuring dignity and respect for the deceased.  This requires not only that they are skilled practitioners in forensic anthropology but that they also have an in-depth understanding of the legal framework of whichever country within which they work.   The certification process provided by the RAI ensures that those working in this field can demonstrate their skill level, that they are fully mentored where appropriate and that they are working to standards set by the RAI and endorsed by the Forensic Regulator.

In this section:

• What is Forensic Anthropology?

• Forensic Anthropologist I (FAI)

• Forensic Anthropologist II (FAII)

• Forensic Anthropologist III (FAIII)

• Chartered FAI

• Certified FAII

• Certified FAIII

• Course Certification

• Forensic Anthropology Event

• BAFA

Certification of forensic practitioners has gained momentum in recent years although it has proven to be more challenging to achieve for the independent practitioner. This is true for the discipline of forensic anthropology and to address this, the British Association for Forensic Anthropology was formed in 2011. This association has undergone an intensive period of standard setting and validation in partnership with the Royal Anthropological Institute as its professional body. The RAI has a Forensic Anthropology Committee whose main role is to provide oversight of the professional certification process.

The work to date has included the development of:

• Practitioner Levels
• Code of Practice for Forensic Anthropology
• Continuing Professional Development Framework
• Examination Procedures
• A robust curriculum and
• An extensive examination process approved by the RAI.

The certification process aims to provide two things; a transparent, fit-for-purpose guide to end users on the required skill set of the forensic anthropologist and a career pathway for forensic anthropology professionals of the future. The certification process and its development will be presented within the framework of appropriate scientific quality standards now being demanded by the Forensic Science Regulator and criminal justice systems.

Certification of forensic anthropologists are separated into 3 categories which permit police, judiciary or other clients to select a level of experience that is suitable for their needs and to identify geographically local capabilities.

• Chartered Forensic Anthropologist (FAI) - The highest level of certification and is chartered status. These are highly experienced practitioners who have court room experience.
• Forensic Anthropologist II - This level includes practitioners who have evidenced competence in both their practical and theoretical knowledge of forensic anthropology. They may not yet have given evidence in a courtroom but they will be mentored by an FAI to assist them in this regard.
• Forensic Anthropologist III - The practitioners at this level have evidenced that they have some experience and knowledge in the field of forensic anthropology. They may not have yet had real field experience but they will be mentored by either an FAI or an FAII practitioner.

A list of those already certified as Chartered Forensic Anthropologists (FAI) is available here

A list of those already certified as FAII is available here

A list of those already certified as FAIII is available here

Forensic Science Regulator legal guidance

BAFA small grant scheme

BAFA has recently launched a new small-grants scheme. The scheme comprises of a Research grant (£500), a CPD grant (£200) and an essay prize (£200). You can find out more about the application process by contacting BAFA via their website.

If you have any additional queries, please communicate these to the examination board via the email address fac@therai.org.uk.

These pages list vacancies in anthropology published in the RAI’s journal Anthropology Today; and opportunities for short-term attachment to the RAI as a Visiting Scholar. To post a vacancy announcement in Anthropology Today, contact atadverts@gmail.com.

The RAI is an entirely independent charity which has been in existence for nearly 150 years, thanks to the generosity of its benefactors. Donations and legacies allow us to sponsor cutting edge anthropological research, which is hard to finance by other means. Our benefactors also enable us to give much needed funds to help final year research students complete their PhDs, give out prizes for outstanding scholarship and conserve our invaluable archival, photo and film collections for future generations. We welcome any contributions, large or small, towards these endeavours. We also welcome contributions to our fundraising for our future flagship project, the creation of an RAI Research Centre. Anthropology is a discipline that tackles issues of universal concern such as ‘human nature’, gender and sexuality, health, nutrition, indigenous rights, globalisation, multiculturalism and development. It has a key role to play in the education of globally informed citizens, as well as practical applications in areas such as government, medicine, tourism, international aid and law. We believe its continued practice is of vital importance.

If you are interested in giving us a donation, or leaving us a gift in your will, we would love to hear from you. Enquiries can be made in confidence to the Director, Dr David Shankland on david.shankland@therai.org.uk, +44 (0)20 7387 0455, 50 Fitzroy Street, London, W1T 5BT.

More specific information about leaving us a gift in your will is available here.

Of course, one of the best ways to support us is to join as a Member or Fellow of the Institute and play an active part in our community. For more information about joining us visit our Joining pages. With donations over £2000 you have the option of a Life Fellowship of the RAI gratis, so that you can keep in touch with us and our work. Fellowship includes print and online subscription to our journals, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Anthropology Today, as well as reduced admission to RAI events and free access to the archives.

• Leaving a Legacy

• Our Benefactors

• Corporate Sponsorship

• To Donate to the RAI

What could your gift achieve?

Your donation or legacy could contribute to the charitable work of the Institute in various ways.

A gift of £50 could purchase a book for the Anthropology Library held at the British Museum. The Anthropology Library is free and open to members of the public for reference. RAI Fellows can borrow books. The library is one of the largest and broadest collections of anthropological reference materials in the world.

A gift of £200 could purchase a day of an archivist’s time to help assist the Royal Anthropological Institute with the important task of archiving and digitalising our extensive collections. This is an area where support is always appreciated and can make a significant difference. We have several important collections in need of archiving, as well as thousands of rare photographs in need of digitisation. These collections are not just of importance in terms of historical record, but can have direct contemporary relevance, for example we are currently revisiting the work of our blood group research committee from the 1950s (Mourant).

Donations allow us to expand the proportion of collections easily accessible to researchers. For example, an endowment trust is currently paying for an archivist to catalogue and make available to the public the collections of W.B. Fagg in the Fagg Library held on the premises.

A gift of £500 could enable us to offer a travel bursary for a filmmaker to attend our biennial RAI Film Festival.

A gift of £1000 could enable us to buy much needed equipment to assist the work of the archivist, for example specialist equipment to process larger scale items such as ethnographic drawings and maps.

A gift of £3000 could sponsor a dedicated seminar series, or themed film screening series.

A gift of £5000 could sponsor a small research grant, enabling a researcher to conduct a piece of contemporary and relevant fieldwork that they are unable to finance by other means. For example, a gift is currently allowing us to sponsor an exploratory research trip to the Caucasus, Armenia by an anthropologist working in collaboration with the World Land Trust, to explore the impact of conservation programmes on local communities. 

A gift of £25,000 could provide an Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, which focuses on research on disappearing indigenous cultures, languages, and ecologies. This unique scheme, privately funded by anthropologists (founding sponsor: Dr George Appell) has been running since 1995. For a list of past Urgent Anthropology Fellows and their work click here.

A gift of £200,000 would enable us to offer a new initiative of a fully costed post-doc Fellowship for three years, based at the Institute. With opportunities for full time paid academic positions increasingly restricted for PhD graduates, a contribution to this scheme could make a real difference. The RAI has an emphasis on facilitating publicly engaged anthropology and applications to the scheme would be required to demonstrate the contemporary relevance and importance of their project.

A gift of £2,000,000 could create an endowed fund for anthropological research. Endowed funds are when the capital of the gift is invested and produces an annual income for a specific activity. Endowed funds have been essential to the ongoing existence and work of the Institute. Notable endowments include the Radcliffe Brown Trust, Emslie Horniman Anthropological Trust, and the Esperanza Trust which support anthropological fieldwork and research at various levels. For more information about our research grants see here.

A gift of £10.000,000 would enable us to create a new RAI Research centre. This is part of a long-term vision of the Royal Anthropological Institute to create an independent space to allow for cutting-edge, publicly relevant and timely research.  

The RAI runs an active programme of academic publication in anthropology. It publishes the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropology Today, Anthropology and Photography, Anthropology and Art and Teaching Anthropology, and books and other publications from time to time. It also publishes the Anthropological Index Online.

In this section:

• Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

• JRAI Special Issue

• Anthropology Today

• Anthropology and Art

• Anthropology and Photography

• Occasional Papers

• RAI Book Series

• RAI Country Series

• Teaching Anthropology

The RAI photographic library is unique. Consisting of over 75,000 historic prints, negatives, lantern-slides, drawings, paintings and other images, the earliest of which date from the 1860s, it provides a scholarly service to a large number of academic researchers, students and responsible commercial users.

It contributes strongly to public awareness of the RAI, and provides a practical interface between the Institute and a wide range of audiences and disciplines. The anthropology of visual culture is becoming increasingly central to the discipline as a whole, and interest has correspondingly grown. The material contained in the photographic library is highly relevant to contemporary, as well as historical, concerns.

From time to time, the photographic library provides a focus for exhibitions, events and publications of interest to visual anthropologists and historians of anthropology. Enquiries should be addressed to the Archivist.

In this section:

• Selected Holdings

• Exhibitions

• Presidents

• Anthropology & Photography

• Photo Salon

• [Re:]Entanglements

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology (the study of humankind) in its broadest and most inclusive sense. The Institute is a non-profit-making registered charity and is entirely independent, with a Director and a small staff accountable to the Council, which in turn is elected annually from the Fellowship. It has a Royal Patron in the person of HRH The Duke of Gloucester KG, GCVO.

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The Anthropological Index Online (AIO) is a comprehensive, user-friendly online bibliography of anthropology-related journals held in the Anthropology Library and Research Centre at the British Museum, London. It provides an indispensable service for libraries and for individual researchers, teachers and students of anthropology and archaeology throughout the world. Supported for many years by grants from the W.B. Fagg Charitable Trust, the AIO now aims to be financially self-sustaining. For full information and to access the Index, click here.

The Anthropological Index Online (AIO) proudly announces a new service for its users. As of January 2012, anyone using AIO will be able to search for RAI films online via keywords, directors or area of coverage. Default searches will show simultaneously both articles and films. Users will have the choice of searching films only. Film titles will be marked with a distinctive icon that identifies them among articles appearing on the same page. This new service is the result of a collaborative project between AIO and the Film section of the RAI that aims at highlighting its resources among fellows, subscribers, and independent users. Film lists will be updated twice a year.

In this section:

• AIO Projects

• Subscription

In this section:

• Fagg library

• Archive contents

• Manuscript contents

• Search A&M

• Obituaries

The RAI is the custodian of a rich collection of unpublished archival and manuscript materials, most of which is available to bona-fide scholars for research purposes. Enquiries should be addressed to the Archives Officer.

The policies and guidelines for the Archives and Manuscripts department can be found here.

Visitors to the collection now have full access to the Wiley Digital Archive resource inhouse.

These pages list events run by the RAI, or to which the RAI contributes substantively. For information on events in anthropology run by other organisations worldwide, click here.

The Royal Anthropological Institute’s Education programme, Discover Anthropology, has been set up to develop actions and strategies to inform teachers and young people about anthropology as a university subject, and to bring the subject more generally into pre-university education. Anthropology, the study of what it means to be human across different societies, cultures and histories, is not currently taught in schools and colleges in the UK and compared to other social sciences, anthropology undergraduate degrees attract fewer students from widening participation target groups. Yet the discipline of anthropology has a distinctive, and vital, contribution to make to understanding the world today. Anthropology offers a deep understanding of how different societies work, how people live, their beliefs, customs, ideas, prejudices and aspirations.  In an era when global understanding and recognition of diverse ways of seeing the world are of critical social, political and economic importance, anthropology has a central role to play in education.

The Discover Anthropology education programme aims to 1) provide good quality accessible information for students considering studying anthropology at university 2) to create a series of regular events and activities for young people and teachers and 3) produce resources for teachers that draw upon the insights of anthropology. The programme will be represented by a dedicated website shortly. From 2005-2006 the programme was funded through the AimHigher National Activity programme.  From 2007-2010 the programme was funded by the Economics and Social Research Council.

For more information please contact our Education Officer.

The Anthropology Library and Research Centre, located within the British Museum, incorporates the original Library of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and the British Museum’s Ethnography Library, and is effectively Britain’s national anthropology library. The RAI contributes substantially to Library acquisitions and staffing. International exchange arrangements are also in place with scholarly institutions, under which the Library receives publications in exchange for RAI journals.

The Library is open to the public for reference and research. RAI Fellows have the special privilege of being able to borrow books from the library. Fellows are encouraged to make use of the Library’s wide ranging resources. The online catalogue can be searched here. 

Both the RAI and the Museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas host seminars and other events in the Library. The Department’s Collections Enquiries service is also located within the Library.

Library opening hours are 10.00-17.00 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and 12.00-17.00 on Thursday.

The Collection

The Library’s holdings comprise more than 120,000 books and pamphlets and 4,000 journal titles, of which around 1,500 are current. The journal collection, which is indexed by the Anthropological Index Online, is particularly strong for Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. The Library also contains maps, newsletters, reports and a significant pictorial collection.

Geographically the scope is worldwide, with particular emphasis on the Commonwealth, Eastern Europe and the Americas, notably Mesoamerica. All aspects of anthropology are covered: cultural (with an emphasis on material culture) and biological anthropology, archaeology and linguistics, together with related fields such as history, sociology, description and travel.

Fellows and Members are encouraged to make use of the Library’s wide ranging resources at the Anthropology Library and Research Centre at the British Museum.

Staff

Ted Goodliffe is the RAI's Library Officer and attends the Library on two days a week. Please contact him if you wish to discuss or comment on any aspect of the Library's services or policies or if you have any bibliographic or information enquiries. For urgent matters in his absence please contact the Senior Librarian, Jan Ayres.

RAI's Library Officer: Ted Goodliffe Telephone: +44 (0)20 7323 8067 Email Ted Goodliffe

Committees of the RAI

Finance Committee

Photo Committee

Film Committee

Urgent Anthropology Committee

Medical Anthropology Committee

Education Committee

Publications Committee

Manuscripts and Archives Committee

Library Committee

Anthropological Index Online Committee

Forensic Anthropology Committee

Travel and Tourism Committee

Research Committee

Anthropology of Art Committee

Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology Committee

Environment and Anthropology Committee

Anthropology and Language Committee

Anthropology of Policy and Practice Committee

Privacy Notice for Royal Anthropological Institute

This will be updated from time to time as appropriate.