Henry Myers Lecturship Prior Recipients

Home Awards Honours Prior Recipients Henry Myers Lecturship Prior Recipients
2024Professor Chris Gosden‘Make Believe: a processual and material approach to the deep history of magic and religion’ 
2022Professor Harvey Whitehouse‘Rethinking Ritual: How rituals made our world…and how they could save it’ 
2020Professor David Gellner‘The Spaces of Religion: A View from South Asia’ 



 
2018Professor Simon Coleman‘Laterality: A Sideways Look at Ritual’ 
2016Dr Ken Dark‘Returning to the Caves of Mystery: archaeology and the origins of Christian pilgrimag 
2014Professor David Wengrow‘Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality’ 
2012Professor Ian Hacking‘The Anthropology (and Archaeology) of Numbers’ 
2010Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd‘Humanity between gods and beasts? Ontologies in question’ 



 
2008Professor Bruno Latour‘Nature and Creation: What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?’ 
2006Dr Piers Vitebsky‘Loving and Forgetting: A Farewell to Ancestors?’ 
2004Professor Wendy Doniger‘The Mythology of Self-Imitation in Passing: Race, Gender and Politics’ 
2002Professor Marcel Detienne‘The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities’ 
2000Professor Jan Assmann‘Funerary Rites in Ancient Egypt’ 



 
1998Professor Michael Gilsenan‘Signs of Power and Truth: Aspects of Authority, Violence and the Sacred in Arab Societies’ 
1996Professor Anne Salmond‘Maori and Modernity: The Wairua of the World’ 
1994Professor Bruce Kapferer‘Regenerative Rites: Anthropology and Ritual’ (Postponed – given in October 1995) 
1992Jonathan Parry`Hierarchical Complementarity’ 
1990 Cancelled 



 
1988Professor Gananath Obeyesekere`The Conscience of the Parricide: a Study of Buddhist History’ 
1986Professor Lu de Heusch`Kongo in Haiti – a new Approach to Religious Syncretism’ 
1984Professor Ernest Gellner`The Division of Labour and the Emergence of the Modern Mind’ 
1982Dr. Veena Das`The Language of Sacrifice’ 
1980Professor Rodney Needham`Reversals’ 



 
1978 Not given 
1976Dr. Jean La Fontaine`The Power of Rights: Initiation Ceremonies Reconsidered’ 
1974Professor C. Von Fürer Haimendorf`The Sense of Sin in Cross Cultural Perspective’ 
1972Professor Mary Douglas`Self Evidence’ 
1970Professor Louis Dumont`Religion, Politics and Society in the Individualistic Universe’ 



 
1968Dr. Audrey Richards`Keeping the King Divine’ 
1966Dr. Edmund Leach`Virgin Birth’ 
1964Professor Joseph Needham`Time and Eastern Man’ 
1962Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss`The Bear and the Barber’ 
1960Professor Meyer Fortes`Pietas in Ancestor Worship’ 



 
1956Professor Dorothy Emmett`Prophets and their Societies’ 
1954Professor E.E. Evans-Pritchard`The Meaning of Sacrifice among the Nuer’ 
1952Dr. Edwin W. Smith`African Symbolism’ 
1950Rev. Professor E.O. James`Religion and Reality’ 



 
1948Professor Raymond Firth`Religious Belief and Personal Adjustment’ 
1945Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown`Religion and Society’