My central subject is Fernando Henriques (1916-1976), Jamaican anthropologist of mixed descent and the first Black Dean in British academia. Henriques completed a DPhil at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford, in 1948, for a thesis on ‘The social structure of Jamaica, with a special reference to racial distinctions’. A magisterial ethnographer of both colonialism in the Caribbean and coalmining in the UK, he was the most successful disseminator of anthropology in the postwar period, won notoriety as ‘Doctor Sex’ in the mid-1960s, and then became the first Black director of a Government-funded research centre in multi-racial studies at the University of Sussex, where he was professor of social anthropology. Yet today mention of his name draws blank faces. Time for a change?
The aims of this paper are to nuance the decolonisation debate, adjust historical biases in our discipline, and question, once again, the academic/public/popular divisions within social anthropology.
Departmental Seminar Series Hilary Term 2026
Theme: Hidden Histories of Oxford Anthropology
3pm, Fridays of Weeks 1-8, Lecture Room at 64 Banbury Road
Convened by Paul Basu, Clare Harris, David Pratten, Alpa Shah
