Wendy James was a social anthropologist who produced both profound ethnographic studies and influential theoretical work. Formed at Oxford and making her career there, she championed and extended Oxford’s historically-oriented, humanities approach to anthropology. Her ethnographic fieldwork among the Uduk, a small group in southern Sudan, was sustained in successive visits over forty years, during which time Uduk communities were repeatedly displaced by war. From this experience she produced three major ethnographic monographs. In her key theoretical work, The Ceremonial Animal, she placed artistic impulses and the creation of form at the centre of human sociality. She also played a notable role in humanitarian activities in northeastern Africa.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 23