Obituary: Neil L. Whitehead

Professor Neil L. Whitehead

1956–2012

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Professor Neil L. Whitehead (19 March 1956–22 March 2012). Neil was a key participant of the workshop Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology: Continuities and Ruptures, held at Birkbeck, University of London in June 2010, at which earlier versions of these papers were discussed. He co-edited this issue.

Neil was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy and Psychology before gaining his MA and D.Phil. in Anthropology in 1984. In 1993, he left Oxford for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Neil published prolifically on Amazonian anthropology, shamanism and exploration. He pioneered the study of violence, post-human anthropology, the future of anthropology, and the archaeology of large-scale settlements in prehistoric Guyana.

Neil's major works include War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, NM, 1992 and 2000), Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, NC, 2002), and critical editions of Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (Manchester and Norman, OK, 1997) and, with Michael Harbsmeier, Hans Staden's True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham, NC, 2008). He is survived by his wife Theresa, and his children Luke, Florence, Rose and Natalie.