My husband, Roland Littlewood, who has died aged 78, was professor of psychiatry and anthropology at University College London from 1994 until 2012, and for more than 20 years the joint director of UCL’s Centre for Medical Anthropology, which explores how health, medicine and healing are influenced by cultural values and practices across different societies.

In the course of his research, Roland travelled to Trinidad to study the healing practices of Mother Earth (Jeanette Baptist) and the Earth People (a spiritual community), to Haiti to research voodoo and healing, and to the Lebanon to observe the Druze sect.

Born in Leicester, he was the younger son of Robert Littlewood, a lecturer in Spanish, and his Swiss wife, Trudi (nee Lehner), a lecturer in French and German. He spent formative years at Wyggeston grammar school in Leicester, then trained as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London. I met Roland in 1969 at a party at Barts, where I was training as a nurse – we married there in 1975, with our wedding reception held in the Great Hall.

Photo: Roland Littlewood helped lead the Centre for Medical Anthropology at University College London.

My husband, Roland Littlewood, who has died aged 78, was professor of psychiatry and anthropology at University College London from 1994 until 2012, and for more than 20 years the joint director of UCL’s Centre for Medical Anthropology, which explores how health, medicine and healing are influenced by cultural values and practices across different societies.

In the course of his research, Roland travelled to Trinidad to study the healing practices of Mother Earth (Jeanette Baptist) and the Earth People (a spiritual community), to Haiti to research voodoo and healing, and to the Lebanon to observe the Druze sect.

Born in Leicester, he was the younger son of Robert Littlewood, a lecturer in Spanish, and his Swiss wife, Trudi (nee Lehner), a lecturer in French and German. He spent formative years at Wyggeston grammar school in Leicester, then trained as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London. I met Roland in 1969 at a party at Barts, where I was training as a nurse – we married there in 1975, with our wedding reception held in the Great Hall.

Roland then trained in psychiatry at Homerton hospital in Hackney. He would spend many hours with patients, wishing to understand people’s delusional ideas, how healing occurred within their understanding of their illness, how science and personal experiences might inform one another. With a fellow psychiatrist at Homerton, Maurice Lipsedge, he wrote Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry (1982), an examination of how prejudice and disadvantage can influence mental health, which is now a standard text.

Roland was awarded a scholarship to study anthropology at Oxford, and, unusually, our daughter Leti (born in 1979) and I accompanied him on his field work to Trinidad, where I worked as a volunteer in a home for elderly people (L’Hospice) while Roland was in the north of the island in the remote settlement of Matelot. There he came across a group of people whose healer and master of nature was Mother Earth. Her followers scandalised some Trinidadians by walking around naked (though they wore jute sacks if they came into town).

Our family were lucky enough to stay with her and the Earth People, as she and I formed a bond through our young children. She was a charismatic figure, interested in ideas about healing, mental illness and respect for the Earth. She and Roland would talk long into the night. He drew on this experience for his 1987 thesis, published in 1993 as Pathology and Identity.

Roland enjoyed his time as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1994 to 1997, as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2007, and at UCL, where he continued as professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology until 2024.

He experienced several periods of illness, succumbing to metastatic pancreatic cancer, but with the help of UCL doctors was able to complete his book Between Anthropology and Psychiatry (with Simon Dein), which is due for publication in 2026.

He is survived by Leti and me, and his grandchildren, Mac, Etta and Daniel, and by his older brother, Antony.

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My friend and former work colleague Adrian Mayer, who has died aged 102, was a social anthropologist renowned for a 1950s study of an Indian village that showed how the caste system, while based on ancient religious beliefs and linked to the system of kinship, was quite separate from divisions based on wealth or class.

Adrian carried out his research in the village of Jamgod, Madhya Pradesh, in 1954 and 1955, while he was a research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). His fieldwork there allowed him to participate in the daily life of villagers over an extended period and so to form fine-grained observations about how the caste system was integrated into people’s daily lives.

He set out his conclusions in a book, Caste and Kinship in Central India (1960), which shone a light on areas that had hitherto been hidden to most western eyes.

Later he studied Indian populations overseas, and in particular how the caste system fared when taken abroad. He spent most of his career in the anthropology department at Soas University of London, where he taught me and where we eventually became colleagues when I joined Soas as a lecturer.

Adrian was born in London to Dorothy Piper, a writer and soloist with the Carl Rosa Opera Company of Liverpool, and Sir Robert Mayer, a musician who sponsored the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Educated at Bryanston school in Dorset, he did a liberal arts degree in the US at St John’s College in Annapolis and on his return to the UK joined the Friends Ambulance Unit during the second world war, spending 1944 to 1946 in India distributing food and milk across the country. During this time, on separate occasions, he met and spoke to Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and years later could remember the exact details of those conversations.

Having developed a fascination with India, Adrian studied Hindi at Soas in 1947 and afterwards earned a postgraduate diploma in anthropology at the LSE, followed by a PhD at the same institution.

Photo: Adrian Mayer in India in the mid-1950s, when he was carrying our fieldwork on the caste system.

He then spent nearly six years as a research fellow at the ANU, which funded his fieldwork in Jamgod, before returning to Soas to become a lecturer in 1956. Over the next 29 years he was to enjoy a distinguished career there, and for the last eight years of his employment he was head of department, retiring in 1985 as professor of Asian anthropology.

Adrian also served the wider community of British anthropologists as editor of its premier journal, Man (1964-69), president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1983-85) and chair of the social anthropology committee of the Social Science Research Council (1973-79). Aside from his 1960 study on caste, he wrote four other books, plus many journal articles – the last in 2012, when he was 90.

His wife, Kaia (nee Suhr), an artist, whom he married in 1949, died in 2006. He is survived by their daughters, Claudia and Camilla, and grandchildren, Zoe and Georgina.

Photo: Adrian Mayer, far left, in Jamgod village in Madhya Pradesh, central India, in 1955.

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Emeritus Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution and a Fellow of the Turing Institute

Robert is an evolutionary and biological anthropologist, with a focus on the hominin lineage and the development of novel methods and models for analysing patterns and processes in human evolution.

His research integrates fossils, genetics and archaeology and encompasses the application of evolutionary models to human evolution, the origins of modern humans, speciation and extinction in hominins, as well as social evolution and hunter-gatherer ecology. Rob Foley has published multiple scientific papers and two influential books – Another Unique Species (1987), and Humans Before Humanity (1997).

Robert co-founded the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies with Marta Mirazón Lahr. Alongside monographs and edited volumes, Rob Foley has published widely in major scientific journals including Nature, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (H index 54).

He has supervised more than 30 PhD students many of whom are now established in academic roles around the world.

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Benno Glauser has spent more than fifty years devoted to protecting and helping the indigenous peoples of Latin America, particularly those of Paraguay, and the few remaining ‘first-contact’ peoples.

During the course of this he has defied regimes, police, businesses and state-sanctioned oppression at considerable personal risk. Benno graduated in Philosophy in Fribourg (CH) and in History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge, from where he moved to Latin America in 1974.

After working in several countries on behalf of political prisoners and other victims in the context of dictatorial governments and repression, from 1977 on he settled in Paraguay and since has directed his work to social minorities and marginalized, voiceless and ‘invisible’ social groups, including street children and youth, campesinos and urban poor, and very particularly, indigenous peoples, combining grass root level work with social research. From 1993 onwards, he explored the situation of indigenous groups in voluntary isolation in Paraguay.

In 2002 he was a co-founder of Iniciativa Amotocodie, an NGO concerned with monitoring and protecting isolated indigenous groups in the Northern Paraguayan Chaco whose work he directed until 2012.

Presently, Benno Glauser writes on social research and on topics related to his work, and gives workshops.

Under the title Anthropological perspectives, interculturality and the processes of development he gave yearly classes from 2012 to 2017 at IUSS/ University of Pavia (Italy), in the frame of its Master Program in Cooperation and Development. More about his highly thoughtful and important work can be seen here: Benno Glauser – Textos, escritos, reflexiones…Truly, he has spent his life devoted to the pursuit of human dignity on behalf of those who are most in need.

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Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies, Australian National University

Laurajane Smith is Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies at ANU, and a fellow of the Society for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has had a career long interest in the politics of heritage making. She is founder of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and has been editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies since 2009. Prior to arriving at the ANU in 2010, she held the position of Reader in heritage studies at the University of York, UK, where she directed the MA in Cultural Heritage Management for nine years. Originally from Sydney, she taught Indigenous Studies at the University of New South Wales (1995-2000), and heritage and archaeology at Charles Sturt University (1990-1995). She also worked as a heritage consultant in south-eastern Australia during the 1980s.

Her key books include Uses of Heritage (2006) and Emotional Heritage (2021) and the edited volumes Intangible Heritage (2009) and Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (2019) both with Natsuko Akagawa, Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present (2018) with Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Class (2011) with Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, and Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous engagements (2011) with Geoff Cubitt, Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki and the forthcomming (2024) The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics with Gönül Bozoglu, Gary Campbell and Christopher Whitehead.

The case for the award of the Public anthropology award rests on her current project on Heritage and Reconciliation. This project re-conceptualises heritage from a standpoint of reconciliation. In doing so, it generates new understandings about how heritage and its management can contribute to reconciliation processes. The project combines Aboriginal, Maori and Western intellectual traditions in order to advance theoretical understandings of heritage and to examine its reconstructive power. It will produce models for practical implementation, including new conservation and management protocols. The project’s investigation of a new approach to heritage has the potential for profound social benefit.

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Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Vilaça has carried out ethnographic research among the Wari’ people in Southwestern Amazonia for over three decades and has published extensively in multiple languages on Indigenous agency, embodiment, kinship, cannibalism, conversion to Christianity, and ecologies of knowledges.

She is the author of multiple books, including Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia, and Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia, has co-authored Science in the Forest, Science in the Past. Paletó and Me: Memories of My Indigenous Father, which won the Casa de las Americas nonfiction award, the most important Latin American book prize.

Her powerful essay, Mourning Kin After the End of Cannibalism, examines mortuary cannibalism and other rituals of grieving and has appeared in Sapiens.

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Professor Emeritus, University of Reading

Winner of the 2025 President’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Richard John Bradley is a British archaeologist and academic. He specialises in the study of European prehistory, and in particular Prehistoric Britain. From 1987 to 2013, he was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading; he is now emeritus professor. He is also the author of numerous books on the subject of archaeology and prehistory.  British Archaeology magazine commented that Bradley was one of the best respected archaeologists in the field. On 13 January 1977, Bradley was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.  In 2006, Bradley was awarded the Grahame Clark Medal by the British Academy.

His fieldwork has centred on prehistoric settlements, landscapes and monuments in England, Scotland, Spain and Scandinavia. These include studies of Cranborne Chase, the Neolithic axe quarries of Great Langdale (Cumbria), the stone circles of north-east Scotland, the Clava Cairns of northern Scotland, the megalithic art of Orkney, the prehistoric land boundaries of Salisbury Plain, and the Copper Age cave sanctuary of El Pedroso (northern Spain). He has conducted other field investigations of megalithic tombs in the west of Sweden, and a study of the siting of Bronze Age metalwork hoards in southern England, and has also investigated prehistoric rock art in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway.

Recent projects include a book on approaches to studying prehistoric art, another on ritual and domestic life in prehistoric Europe, and accounts of both the prehistory of Britain and Ireland and the role of circular architecture in the ancient world. Field projects published in the last three years include an investigation of henge monuments in Aberdeenshire and Caithness, excavation around prehistoric rock carvings on the National Trust of Scotland’s Ben Lawers estate, and a study of the Bronze Age ship settings on the Baltic island of Gotland. Together with three colleagues he is writing a new account of the Continental background to British and Irish Prehistory. The latter project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and conducted jointly with Leicester University.

His books include The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain (1984), Passage of Arms: An Archaeological Analysis of Prehistoric Hoards and Votive Deposits (1990), Interpreting the Axe Trade: Production and Exchange in Neolithic Britain (1993), The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe (1998), An Archaeology of Natural Places (2000), The Past in Prehistoric Societies (2002), Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (2005), The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland(2007) and The Idea of Order: The Circular Archetype in Prehistoric Europe (2012)

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Ralph John Regenvanu is a leading public figure in Vanuatu. He has been a Member of Parliament since September 2008, was a member of Cabinet for most of the period from December 2010 to January 2012 and then from March 2013 to June 2015, and was the Director of the Vanuatu National Cultural Council from 1995 until December 2010.

At present, he is Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change, and is making a leading international contribution in assuring attention and seeking legal redress for the indigenous Pacific peoples who are most impacted by climate change.

Ralph studied anthropology, archaeology and development studies at the Australian National University, obtaining an Honour’s degree in development studies in 1991, before becoming curator of the National Museum of Vanuatu.

Les Nouvelles calédoniennes describes him as “Vanuatu’s first anthropologist”. In 1994, he was a founding member of the Pacific Islands Museums Association, and was a member of its inaugural executive board from 1997 to 2009.

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Professor of Political Anthropology, Durham University

Ethnographic exploration of public memories of violent pasts and aesthetic practices of reparative futures – the state, violence, memory, aesthetics, memorialisation, visual practices, ethics, irreconciliation, adoption and South Asia.

Ethnographic research engages with (i) public memories of wartime sexual violence; (ii) the role of graphic ethnography in translating difficult stories; (iii) war crimes tribunals and irreconciliation; (iv) memorialisation of past violence and the history of the enslaved; (v) digital surveillance (vi) transnational adoption and genetic citizenship and (vii) ethics. Published extensively on anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics.

Recent publications:

1. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Historicising the Birangona: Interrogating the politics of commemorating the wartime rape of 1971 in the context of the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh.” In Recounting the Memories of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. Routledge (2024), pp. 125-134.
2. Corso, Alessandro, and Nayanika Mookherjee. “The presence of abandonment: Left to live at the borderland of Lampedusa.” American Anthropologist 126.4 (2024): 622-634.
3. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “‘Occupying’ the womb: Disrupted kinship futures and sovereign logics in sexual violence during wars.” Critique of Anthropology 43.4 (2023): 422-443.
4. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Introduction: on irreconciliation.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28.S1 (2022): 11-33.
5. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Irreconcilable times.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28.S1 (2022): 153-178.
6. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Aurality of images in graphic ethnographies: Sexual violence during wars and memories of the feelings of fear.” The Sociological Review 70.4 (2022): 686-699.
7. Islam, Sadaf Noor E., Nayanika Mookherjee, and Naveeda Khan. “‘Medicine in name only’: Mistrust and COVID-19 among the crowded Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 9.2 (2022): 1-32.
8. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Imaging ‘traitors’: The raped woman and sexual violence in the Bangladesh war of 1971.” In Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath, ed. Sarah Federman and Ronald Niezen. Cambridge University Press (2022), pp. 222-246.
9. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “Birangona: Toward ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict.” In Profiles of Anthropological Praxis: An International Casebook, ed. Terry M. Redding and Charles C. Cheney. Berghahn Books (2022). pp. 224-236.
10. Lacy, Mark, and Nayanika Mookherjee. “Democracy in scare quotes: The granularity of control in the hybrid state of Bangladesh.” In Masks of Authoritarianism: Hegemony, Power and Public Life in Bangladesh, ed. Arild Engelsen Ruud and Mubashar Hasan. Palgrave Macmillan (2022), pp. 237-246.
11. Mookherjee, Nayanika. “The Birangonas (war heroines) in Bangladesh: Generative resilience of sexual violence in conflict through graphic ethnography.” In Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice, ed. Janine N. Clark and Michael Ungar. Cambridge University Press (2021), pp. 143-163.

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