Cambridge Alumni

The great invention of modern anthropology was long-term, hands-on fieldwork, and Cambridge was home to two of the pioneers of this method: Alfred Haddon, who organised the Torres Straits expedition in 1898, and W.H.R. Rivers, who joined him as the head of a distinguished team of psychologists.

Aside from Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, well-known anthropologists who followed them in Cambridge include:

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who developed the ‘comparative science of social structure’;

• Gregory Bateson, the iconoclastic innovator of psychological methods in Anthropology;

• the foundational Africanists Meyer Fortes, Audrey Richards and Jack Goody;

• the equally brilliant theorists of Asian anthropology, Edmund Leach and Stanley Tambiah.