Ian George Cunnison (13 February 1923 – 16 June 2013) was a Scottish social anthropologist and academic who specialised in the ethnography of Central and East Africa. Regarded as an influential figure in Sudanese anthropology, Cunnison served as the first Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Khartoum in 1959.
Cunnison later served as the founding professor of social anthropology at the University of Hull in 1966 until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his anthropological work on the Humr tribe of Sudan, and on the people of the Luapula Valley in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Cunnison also taught at the University of Manchester. Some of his major publications include The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (1959), and Baggara Arabs (1966). Cunnison also translated Marcel Mauss's seminal sociological work, The Gift (1954), into English for the first time.
Career
Born in Milngavie, Scotland, Cunnison graduated from the University of Cambridge and later completed a DPhil in anthropology at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research was on the peoples of the Luapula Valley in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and was supported by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Publications
References