| 2024 | Professor Chris Gosden | ‘Make Believe: a processual and material approach to the deep history of magic and religion’ | |
| 2022 | Professor Harvey Whitehouse | ‘Rethinking Ritual: How rituals made our world…and how they could save it’ | |
| 2020 | Professor David Gellner | ‘The Spaces of Religion: A View from South Asia’ | |
| 2018 | Professor Simon Coleman | ‘Laterality: A Sideways Look at Ritual’ | |
| 2016 | Dr Ken Dark | ‘Returning to the Caves of Mystery: archaeology and the origins of Christian pilgrimag | |
| 2014 | Professor David Wengrow | ‘Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality’ | |
| 2012 | Professor Ian Hacking | ‘The Anthropology (and Archaeology) of Numbers’ | |
| 2010 | Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd | ‘Humanity between gods and beasts? Ontologies in question’ | |
| 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’ |
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