Kenelm Burridge

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Kenelm Oswald Lancelot Burridge (October 31, 1922 – May 21, 2019) was a Maltese-born Canadian anthropologist.

Biography

Kenelm Burridge was born in October 1922 in Malta.[1] After a childhood in Lucknow, India, he attended school in Great Britain. Burridge enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1939, serving throughout World War II. Although his ship, HMS Splendid, was sunk off Naples, Italy in 1943 and he was captured, Burridge escaped, returned to naval service, and retired as a lieutenant three years later.[2]

He entered Exeter College, Oxford University in 1946, receiving a B.A. in 1948 in social anthropology, followed by a B.Litt. in 1950 and an M.A. in 1952 in anthropology. In 1954 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Australian National University, Canberra; it was one of that university's first two doctorates, with the other going to astronomer Antoni Przybylski.[3]

Burridge conducted fieldwork in

chiliasms; social and symbolic organization; anthropological history and theory; myth; museology; and missionaries and missiology. Many of his studies have looked specifically at millenarianism and cargo cults, and religious aspects of cultural change.[4] As John Barker writes in the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania's 1991 Newsletter, Burridge's "most ambitious book, Someone, No One, (1979), combines anthropology, history, philosophy and theology in a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of being an individual."[5]

After teaching at

Baghdad University and Oxford University, he served as a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia from 1968 until retiring and assuming emeritus status in 1987. Burridge also served as visiting lecturer or professor at the University of Western Australia, Princeton University, and International Christian University in Tokyo. In 1977, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He died in May 2019 at the age of 96.[2]

Books

Submariners written under the name James Casing published 1951

References

  1. ^ Fraser, Hugh (1982). Who's who in Canada: An Illustrated Biographical Record of Men and Women of the Time. Canada: International Press Limited.
  2. ^ a b "Kenelm O. L. Burridge". Anthropology News. 12 July 2019. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  3. newspapers.com
  4. ^ Jorgensen, Dan (1994). Locating the divine in Melanesia: an appreciation of the work of Kenelm Burridge. Anthropology & Humanism 19(2):130-137.
  5. ^ "Kenelm Burridge". Archived from the original on 21 July 2011.

External links