Firth lectures

The ASA is delighted to make the text of its annual Firth lectures available online.

2009
Prof Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Displaying cultures, simulating sites: on two exhibitionary complexes of colonial and post-colonial India
Lecture to take place during ASA09 in Bristol next year.

2008
Prof Janice Boddy, University of Toronto
Anthropology and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Sudan - download lecture as a PDF; accompanying PDF of map (2.5MB)

Abstract:
The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a crucible of anthropology. Not only the place where several notable figures did path-breaking research, it was also one of the contexts in which the contribution of ethnography to administration was assayed.  The lecture examines the assumptions behind ethnographic information-gathering and practice during Sudan's colonial period, from the first Wellcome expeditions at the turn of the 20th century, through the founding of Sudan Notes and Records in 1919, Dame Margery Perham's description of colonial officers as "unconscious anthropologists," and the different methods adopted by scholars to understand Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese.