Royal Anthropological Institute

This distinction was instituted in 1900 in memory of Thomas Henry Huxley and is the highest honour at the disposal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. It is awarded annually, by ballot of the Council, to a scientist, British or foreign, distinguished in any field of anthropological research in the widest sense.

The Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology is awarded annually by the Royal Anthropological Institute. First awarded in 1998, the Medal is intended to honour excellence in the application of anthropology to the relief of poverty and distress, and to the active recognition of human dignity.

Oxford University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and UCL Anthropology have established a fund to support an annual lecture in memory of Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007). Mary was trained at Oxford and spent most of her working life at UCL, so it is proposed that the lecture should alternate between Oxford and UCL. The topic of the lecture will be related to a field in which she was active (e.g., African ethnography, environment and technological risk, Old Testament scholarship) and outward facing from the discipline of Anthropology in keeping with her role as a public intellectual. It is anticipated that the lectures will be published in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute. The first lecture will be held in 2014.