Wolfson alumnus wins prestigious Royal Anthropological Institute award 

Wolfson College alumnus, Professor Jeremy MacClancy (matric. 1978) has been awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute J.B. Donne Essay Prize in the anthropology of art for his essay ‘Morris Maoriesque: Western appreciation of non-Western aesthetics, in New Zealand’.  

The J.B. Donne Essay Prize is awarded biennially in memory of the late J.B. Donne. Essays should address some aspect of the anthropology of art, including the visual and performing arts.  

Jeremy is a Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. He researches and publishes on a variety of topics including: critical decolonisation across anthropology, British residents in Southeast Spain, neo-rurals in West Ireland and northern Spain, emptiness and depopulation, critical museum studies, histories of anthropology public and academic, Basque studies, anthropologies of food, art, and sports. 

Speaking on his essay, Professor MacClancy said: 

“For institutional reasons, the Arts and Crafts Movement was more successful, more widespread, and longer-lasting in New Zealand than anywhere else in the English Speaking world. My essay argues its proselytisers promoted the aesthetic dimensions of indigenous art there years before Picasso and other modernists in Paris ‘discovered’ indigenous aesthetics for the Western world.” 

Wolfson would like to congratulate Professor MacClancy on this award.