Subject Guide: Anthropology: Archives and Special Collections

Anthropologists whose collections are held by ASC include David Brooks (1940-1994), who researched the 1960s/70s nomadic Bakhtiari people in Iran (and also has much on the Iranian Revolution of 1978/9). Furthermore, the internationally designated Sudan Archive contains a range of collections about the peoples of that part of Africa, including the papers of  Anthony Arkell (1898-1980), Ann Cloudsley (1916-2012), Paul Howell (1917-1994), Farnham Rehfisch (1922-1990), Ian Cunnison (1923-2013), Andrew Baring (1936-2003), Wendy James (1940-), and Paul Doornbos (1950-2018). Also in the Sudan Archive are the collections of a number of British administrators working in Sudan in the period 1898-1956, for example Dr John Christopherson (1868-1965), and others since independence like John Crowfoot (1873-1959), Molly Crowfoot (1879-1957), and Douglas Johnson (1949-), who collected ethnographic information about Sudanese peoples. The whole Sudan Archive is of course also a prime source for examining the lives and attitudes of the British themselves, at work and play. Available material includes papers, photographs, films, publications, and objects. 

Other collections with material of anthropological research interest are those of the historian Ann Lambton (1912-2008), working on and in Iran, and Sir Laurens Van der Post (1906-1996), active in various parts of Southern Africa.  

The institutional archive of Durham Diocese (16th century-date) features lots of details on individuals and their familial relationships in such as bishops’ transcripts, marriage licences, probate and court records. The archives of the Cremation Society of Great Britain (1822-), and the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities (1920-date) focus on how society has developed procedures for the disposal of the body. 

Collections with long series of personal correspondence and archives recording social interaction include the family papers of the Earls Grey, the Whartons, the Baker Bakers (18th-19th centuries), and the Headlams (19th-20th centuries). 

The archive of the university itself has material on the study of the subject and its administration, though records of the Anthropology Department (from 1967/8) are still held by the department itself. 

The collections also include the archives of a number of religious communities and how they have cohabited over the last thousand years, especially the medieval male Benedictine monks and then the male, until more recently male and female, Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral, and also various Catholic female communities such as the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in Bruges and then Essex, the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception also in Essex, the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus in Coventry, and the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron in Stockport. 

Then there are records of how societies have interacted in their professional groupings of such as the Durham Guilds, or the Catholic Social Workers’ Guild, or in their religious and gender groupings such as the National Board of Catholic Women, or in their more recreational groupings such as the Archaeological and Architectural Society of Durham and Northumberland.   

There are also some historic books on the subject in ASC’s collections, such as the Routh (19th century president of Magdalen College Oxford) and Howard (Catholic Cumberland landowner and antiquary around 1600) libraries, or the more general SC collection, and there is much on the more recent Christian, especially Catholic, interpretation of the subject in the extensive book collections at Ushaw College, especially in the Big Library and the Divines library.