Royal Anthropological Institute

At last the Libraries of the British Museum are stepping gingerly into the 21st century. In Autumn 2010 the union catalogue of all the departmental libraries of the Museum will be accessible online.

RAI Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology
Call for applications

The Fellowship, supported by the Anthropologists’ Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research (Founding Sponsor Dr George N. Appell) is designed to facilitate ethnographic research on currently threatened indigenous peoples, cultures and languages. Such research should, as a primary aim, contribute to anthropological knowledge through detailed ethnography, and also if possible help such peoples in their particular circumstances.

The RAI is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr David Shankland as its new Director, in succession to Hilary Callan who has held the post since 2000.

David Shankland trained in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, then moved down to Cambridge for his doctoral studies, during the course of which he conducted fieldwork in Anatolia, looking in particular at questions of social change, politics and religion. After graduating, he became the Assistant, then Acting Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, during the course of which he became a member of the Catalhoyuk research team, beginning a study of the relationship between anthropology and archaeology which continues to this day.