Professor David Parkin

Professor David Parkin

BA, PhD, FBA
Linguistics, Social Anthropology
Emeritus Fellow since 2008

I am an anthropologist whose background is undergraduate and postgraduate training in social anthropology and in social interaction through multiple language use  (1959 1965  School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London). My research career developed on the basis of these subject areas at both SOAS (1959-1976) and University of Oxford (1976-present) with intensive and lengthy fieldwork in East Africa over the period 1962-2008. Topics have ranged from agricultural development, ethnicity, political developments and the role of Islam with reference to changing modes of interpersonal communication in Eastern Africa. I became professor of social anthropology first in London and then at Oxford.

Links
School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography Profile
Research Areas
Social Anthropology
Evolution
Healing and Sensory Systems
Semantics and language use
Islam/Religion
Swahili and Bantu-and Nilotic-speaking peoples
East Africa, the Indian Ocean littoral and China

Selected Publications

Power, Mobility and Voice

(2026 - an edited festschrift for the sociolinguist, Jan Blommaert) 

The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making

(2021)
 

Holistic Anthropology

(2007 - a jointly edited theoretical critique of essentialism in anthropology);

Sacred Void (Indigenous religion and collective identity among the Giriama of Kenya)

(1991)

The Anthropology of Evil (cultural translation of a metaphysical concept)

(1985)

Semantic Anthropology

(1982)

Background
  • Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College (from 2008)
  • Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford and Fellow, All Souls College (from 1996 to 2008)
  • Lecturer (to 1976), Reader (to 1981), finally Professor (from 1981), School of Oriental and African Studies, London (from 1965 to 1996)
  • Undergraduate and Postgraduate, School of Oriental and African Studies, London (from 1959 to 1965)