WENDY ROSALIND JAMES (1940-2024)
Wendy James passed away peacefully at her home in North Oxford on 27 April 2024, some two months after her 84th birthday. She was a pivotal figure in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she studied, taught and conducted research for over six decades.
Born in Timperley, Cheshire, Wendy grew up as a fourth-generation vegetarian in a guesthouse her mother ran in Westmorland. She had Welsh and rationalist origins on her father’s side and a Quaker pacifist background on her mother’s side (her maternal grandfather was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War). As two of her cousins pointed out at the memorial service, Wendy knew from an early age what it means to be an outsider. Wendy attended the local Kelsick Grammar School in Ambleside and in 1959 won an exhibition to read geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Inspired by her father, she spent the summer of 1961 in Kilimanjaro, in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), teaching English and gathering material for her undergraduate dissertation. She attributed the optimism and enthusiasm she experienced there in the run-up to independence as the catalyst for her switch to social anthropology.
After completing a Diploma and BLitt in Anthropology, Wendy took up a five-year lectureship in the Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Khartoum in 1964. Supported by the Ford Foundation, she spent holidays and periods of leave conducting field research among the Uduk-speaking people of the upper Blue Nile Valley, wedged between the north and south, near the Ethiopian border. The research resulted in a DPhil thesis written under Evans-Pritchard’s supervision while Wendy was a Leverhulme research fellow. This later turned into her first monograph ‘Kwanim Pa: The making of the Uduk people: An ethnographic study of survival in the SudanEthiopian borderlands (1979). Augmented by comparative material Wendy gathered in western Ethiopia in the mid-1970s, the book details how these minority subsistence farmers cobbled together a moral community under long-standing conditions of insecurity, where raiding, conflict and cooperation formed part of wider interchanges across boundaries of various kinds. Her account anticipated disciplinary interests in memory, multiplicity, history, violence, the state and the constitutive role of language.
In spring 1971, Wendy filled in for Evans-Pritchard as a visiting professor at Aarhus University. At the University of Khartoum, which had established collaborations with the University of Bergen in 1963, she befriended Fredrik Barth and others working in Sudan. She then spent the following academic year as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. In 1972, Wendy returned to Oxford, where she was appointed lecturer in social anthropology and fellow of St Cross College. She was subsequently promoted to professor in 1996.
In the late 1990s, I studied under Wendy and experienced her as a generous teacher, tutor and supervisor who approached students as intellectual interlocutors rather than subjects of instruction. She conveyed a strong conviction that Oxford anthropology was a distinct undertaking, where historically informed, rigorous ethnography involved a vernacular conceptual analysis that could raise issues and insights of significance also to other disciplines. This conviction was shared among the teaching staff at that time, who, like Wendy, had largely trained at and returned to Oxford.
From L’Année sociologique, Wendy emphasized Marcel Mauss’s ethnographic sensibility, while drawing on the British fieldwork tradition through Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt. She also co-edited volumes honouring these mentors (Cunnison & James 1972; James & Johnson 1988) and Mauss’s legacy (Hart & James 2014; James & Allen1998). Following Evans-Pritchard’s 1950 Marett Lecture, she positioned anthropology firmly within the humanities.
Her second monograph, The listening ebony: Moral knowledge, religion, and power among the Uduk of Sudan (1988) followed naturally from Nuer religion (Evans-Pritchard 1956) and Divinity and experience (Lienhardt 1961) and was inflected by a Maussian regard for personhood and bodily techniques. It also considered the influence of Christian and Muslim discourses, which later broadened into a concern for the paradoxical certainties that identities and categories may yield.
Influenced by Evans-Pritchard’s Marett Lecture, Wendy explored connections with fellow Lake District native R.G. Collingwood’s work on philosophy, art, history and archaeology, co-editing his unpublished ‘fairy tales’ manuscript (Collingwood 2005).
Adapting Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion, The ceremonial animal: A new portrait of anthropology (James 2003) synthesized the field and chartered its relationship with neighbouring disciplines. The book reflected Wendy’s teaching across multiple degree programmes and launched the concept of choreography to carve a space for anthropology as the study of patterned relationality. It initiated a dialogue with evolutionary biology and rational choice, which deepened through her involvement in the British Academy Centenary Research Project ‘From Lucy to language’ and the RAI workshop on early human kinship. Crucially, Wendy’s critique of reductive arguments did not involve condemnation, but an invitation for others to engage with anthropology as a robust field of study.
Her research became multi-sited when the Sudanese civil war of the 1980s displaced the Uduk-speaking population. Wendy encountered these people again in refugee camps, where she examined fear and feeling, and documented the resilience of aesthetic forms. This work reconnected her with Ethiopia, where she remained active – despite earlier interruption by revolution – co-editing volumes with Donald Donham (Donham & James 1986) and Donham, Kurimoto & Triulzi (James et al. 2002).
Her third monograph, War and survival in Sudan’s frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (2007) details how the end of the Cold War and consequent fall of Ethiopia’s Mengistu regime impacted and scattered the Uduk speakers as far afield as Australia, Canada and the US. Building on Wendy’s involvement with Granada Television’s Disappearing world series, the book included a website containing films, photos and audio recordings demonstrating the persistent plasticity and imbrications of material and creative practices of the ‘Kwanim pa from four decades. As ever open to the wider world, ‘we home people’ inevitably registered the effects of global events, while their ethnographer became a linchpin for their continued connections and community.
During the civil war, Wendy consulted for various United Nations agencies, refugee nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Together with her husband – historian of South Sudan, Douglas H. Johnson – she worked to support the negotiations that resulted in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Their work fed on and into the long-running North East Africa Seminar in Oxford, where scholars, students, exiled Sudanese and former colonial officers maintained a conversation on the region, to which they all remained deeply attached.
Wendy received numerous awards and honours. She was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1999, served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2001-2004) and vice-president of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (2001-2011). She was awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology in 1988, an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 2005, the Rivers Memorial Medal in 2009 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2011 for services to scholarship. A Wendy James Associate Professorship in Evolutionary Anthropology was endowed at St Hugh’s College in 2023.
After retiring in 2007, Wendy remained active until she suffered a serious accident in 2019. She is survived by her husband, Douglas, their two children, Fiona and Roger, and one grandchild.
Obituary by Knut Christian Myhre Norwegian University of Science and Technology knut.myhre@ntnu.no.
Collingwood, R.G. 2005. The philosophy of enchantment: Studies in folktale, cultural criticism, and anthropology (eds D. Boucher et al.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cunnison, I. & W. James (eds) 1972. Essays in Sudan ethnography: Presented to Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. London: C. Hurst.
Donham, D. & W. James (eds) 1986. The southern marches of imperial Ethiopia: Essays in history and social anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1956. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hart, K. & W. James (eds) 2014. Marcel Mauss: A living inspiration. Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1).
James, W. 1979. ‘Kwanim pa: The making of the Uduk people: An ethnographic study of survival in the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
— 1988. The listening ebony: Moral knowledge, religion, and power among the Uduk of Sudan. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
— 2003. The ceremonial animal: A new portrait of anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— 2007. War and survival in Sudan’s frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— & N. Allen (eds) 1998. Marcel Mauss: A centenary tribute. Oxford: Berghahn.
— & D.H. Johnson (eds) 1988. Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the social anthropology of religion presented to Godfrey Lienhardt. Oxford: JASO.
— et al. (eds) 2002. Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and after. Oxford: James Currey.
Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and experience: The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
