THE HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURE

will be given by

Professor Alan MacFarlane FBA, Professor Emeritus of King’s College, Cambridge

Anthropology, Empire and Modernity

Friday 14 December 2012 at 5.30pm, in the BP Lecture Theatre, Clore Education Centre, the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG.

The event is free, but places must be booked. Please email Amanda Vinson on admin@therai.org.uk to book your place.

Enquiries to: RAI, 50 Fitzroy St, London W1T 5 BT; tel 020 7387 0455; email

Abstract

Anthropology has developed within three theoretical frameworks over the last three hundred years. The Enlightenment world view dominated from the early eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century; Evolutionary models triumphed from Darwin and Marx through to the late 1980’s; a Global vision is the one we now inhabit. Investigating the reasons for these paradigm changes, the lecture will consider the relative power of nations (imperialism and industrialism) as one factor. Another has been the growth of ‘modernity’, defined as the separation of institutional spheres (Wealth, Power, Society, Ideology). Recent shifts in world power and the re-shaping of ‘modernity’ through technological change are redefining the task of anthropology in the twenty-first century.