Caroline Humphrey, Baroness Rees of Ludlow, (née Waddington; born 1 September 1943) is a British anthropologist and academic.
Biography Humphrey's father was the biologist Conrad H. Waddington.Robertson, Alan. 1977. Conrad Hal Waddington. 8 November 1905 — 26 September 1975. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23, 575-622; accessed 31 August 2014. Her mother was her father's second wife, architect Margaret Justin Blanco White (daughter of the writer Amber Reeves); she has a younger sister, the mathematician Dusa McDuff, and an elder half-brother, the physicist C. Jake Waddington, by her father's first marriage to Cecil Elizabeth Lascelles.
Humphrey received a BA degree in Social Anthropology from Girton College, Cambridge. Her PhD, completed in 1973, was entitled Magical Drawings in the Religion of the Buryat. She received the Rivers Memorial Medal in 1999,List of recipients of Rivers Memorial medal; accessed 31 August 2014. and, in 2003, an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Mongolia.Caroline Humphrey profile , cam.ac.uk; accessed 31 August 2014. Humphrey was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bolton in 2017 for her outstanding contribution to the field of anthropology.
Personal life In 1967, Caroline Waddington married Nicholas Humphrey; they had no children and divorced in 1977. In 1986, she married Martin Rees.
Research and positions Humphrey has conducted research in Siberia, Nepal, India, Mongolia, China (Inner Mongolia), Uzbekistan and Ukraine. In 1966, she was one of the first Anthropologist from a western country to be allowed to do fieldwork in the USSR. Her PhD (1973) focussed on Buryat religious iconography, and ensuing research topics have included Soviet collective farms, the farming economy in India and Tibet, Jainist culture in India, and environmental and cultural conservation in Inner Asia.Inner Asia Research: Caroline Humphrey , innerasiaresearch.org; accessed 31 August 2014.
Between 1971 and 1978, she undertook research, holding a fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge and at a post at the Scott Polar Research Institute. From 1978 to 1983 she lectured at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, before becoming a director of studies in archaeology and anthropology in 1984-89, and 1992-96. Humphrey has held the posts of university reader in Asian anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1995–98; university professor of Asian anthropology, 1998–2006; visiting professor at the University of Michigan, 2000; and Rausing Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology, 2006–10.
In 1986 she co-founded the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at Cambridge, together with Urgunge Onon. She retired from her post as Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at the University of Cambridge to become Voluntary Research Director of MIASU in October 2010.Inner Asia Research: Caroline Humphrey's curriculum vitae, innerasiaresearch.org; accessed 31 August 2014.
She has been a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge since 1978. In 2010, she completed the manuscript of a monograph, jointly written with Hurelbaatar Ujeed, entitled A Monastery in Time: the Making of Mongolian Buddhism. The book was the culmination of fieldwork and visits, from 1995, to Mergen Monastery in the Urad Mongols region of Inner Mongolia (China), where a distinctive form of Mongolian-language Buddhism has survived since the 18th century.
Honours In the 2011 New Year Honours, Humphrey was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) 'for services to scholarship'. Humphrey is an honorary fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge.Fellows of Robinson College In 2004, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Work Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm [Staley Prize, School of American Research] (1983) (ed. with Michael Carrithers) The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society (1991) (ed. with Stephen Hugh-Jones) Barter, Exchange and Value (1992) (ed. with Nicholas Thomas) Shamanism, History and the State (1994) (with James Laidlaw) The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, illustrated by the Jain rite of worship (1994) (with Urgunge Onon) Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols (1996) (ed. with David Sneath) Culture and Environment in Inner Asia (1996) (with Piers Vitebsky) Sacred Architecture (1997) [This is a popular work] Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind (1998) (with David Sneath) The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (1999) (ed. with A. Tulokhonov) Kul'tura i Priroda vo Vnutrenneyi Azii (Culture and Environment in Inner Asia, in Russian) (2001) (ed. with David Sneath) (2002) The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism [Heldt Prize] (2002) (ed. with Katherine Verdery) Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy (2004) (ed. with Catherine Alexander and Victor Buchli) Urban Life in Post-Soviet Central Asia (2007) (with Hurelbaatar Ujeed) A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism [Association for Asian Studies: E. Gene Smith Book Prize Honorable Mention] (2013)
References
External links Caroline Humphrey interview by Alan Macfarlane (August 5, 2010)