Professor Roy Ellen FBA

Summary

Roy Ellen is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at the University of Kent. He gained his PhD at the London School of Economics, where he also held his first teaching position. He taught at Kent from 1973 to 2012, where he was professor from 1988 and founding director of the Centre for Biocultural Diversity. He has conducted long-term fieldwork amongst the Nuaulu people of Seram, eastern Indonesia (between 1969 and 2015), and has also undertaken research in other parts of the Moluccan islands, Indonesia and Brunei. His academic distinctions have included Visiting Fellowships or Professorships at the Australian National University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Leiden and at Vera Cruz University, Mexico. He has delivered the Royal Anthropological Institute's Curl Lecture, and was its President between 2007 and 2011 Principal Publications 1982 Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small-scale Social Formations. Cambridge University Press. 1993 The Cultural Relations of Classification: An Analysis of Nuaulu Animal Categories from Central Seram. Cambridge University Press. 2003 On the Edge of the Banda zone: Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network. University of Hawaii Press. 2005 The Categorical Impulse: Collected Essays in the Anthropology of Classifying Behaviour. Berghahn. 2012 Nuaulu Religious Practices: The Frequency and Reproduction of Rituals in a Moluccan Society. KITLV Press. 2018 Kinship, Population and Social Reproduction in the 'New Indonesia': A Study of Nuaulu Cultural Resilience. Routledge. 2020 The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia. Sean Kingston Publishing, for the Royal Anthropological Institute. 2021 Nature Wars: Essays Around a Contested Concept. Berghahn.