Dr Norman A. Townsend, assistant professor of anthropology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, died suddenly on 30 August 1979 at the age of 38. Born in Ashbourne, England, Townsend took his first degrees at the LSE (1962) and Makerere University (1963) before teaching four years at Kisumu Day Secondary School in Kenya. He then emigrated to Canada to study anthropology, receiving his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Toronto. Townsend taught at the University of Western Ontario before coming to Trent University in 1977. Townsend had done fieldwork with the Pokomo (Tana River District, Coast Province, Kenya) in 1971-3 and 1978. He published on Pokomo kinship, economy, and nomad-cultivator relations, and was currently working on relations of production in uncentralized societies.

This obituary first appeared as: RAIN NEWS. 1980. 'Obituary'. RAIN, No. 36, p. 12 Reproduced with permission.

 

To cite this article:

RAIN NEWS. 1980. 'Obituary'. RAIN, No. 36, p. 12 (available on-line: https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/norman-a-townsend).

 

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