Henry Myers Lecture

Prior Recipients

2008 Professor Bruno Latour 'Nature and Creation: What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?'

2006 Dr Piers Vitebsky 'Loving and Forgetting: A Farewell to Ancestors?'

2004 Professor Wendy Doniger ‘The Mythology of Self-Imitation in Passing: Race, Gender and Politics’

2002 Professor Marcel Detienne ‘The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities’

2000 Professor Jan Assmann ‘Funerary Rites in Ancient Egypt’

1998 Professor Michael Gilsenan ‘Signs of Power and Truth: Aspects of Authority, Violence and the Sacred in Arab Societies’

1996 Professor Anne Salmond ‘Maori and Modernity: The Wairua of the World’

1994 Professor Bruce Kapferer ‘Regenerative Rites: Anthropology and Ritual’ (Postponed – given in October 1995)

1992 Jonathan Parry `Hierarchical Complementarity'

1990 Cancelled

1988 Professor Gananath Obeyesekere `The Conscience of the Parricide: a Study of Buddhist History'

1986 Professor Lu de Heusch `Kongo in Haiti - a new Approach to Religious Syncretism'

1984 Professor Ernest Gellner `The Division of Labour and the Emergence of the Modern Mind'

1982 Dr. Veena Das `The Language of Sacrifice'

1980 Professor Rodney Needham `Reversals'

1978 Not given

1976 Dr. Jean La Fontaine `The Power of Rights: Initiation Ceremonies Reconsidered'

1974 Professor C. Von Fürer Haimendorf `The Sense of Sin in Cross Cultural Perspective'

1972 Professor Mary Douglas `Self Evidence'

1970 Professor Louis Dumont `Religion, Politics and Society in the Individualistic Universe'

1968 Dr. Audrey Richards `Keeping the King Divine'

1966 Dr. Edmund Leach `Virgin Birth'

1964 Professor Joseph Needham `Time and Eastern Man'

1962 Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss `The Bear and the Barber'

1960 Professor Meyer Fortes `Pietas in Ancestor Worship'

1956 Professor Dorothy Emmett `Prophets and their Societies'

1954 Professor E.E. Evans-Pritchard `The Meaning of Sacrifice among the Nuer'

1952 Dr. Edwin W. Smith `African Symbolism'

1950 Rev. Professor E.O. James `Religion and Reality'

1948 Professor Raymond Firth `Religious Belief and Personal Adjustment'

1945 Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown `Religion and Society'