Professor Richard Fardon is a social anthropologist specializing in West Africa, particularly Nigeria and Cameroon, where he began fieldwork in the second half of the 1970s. He is author or editor, often collaboratively, of over two dozen books and fifty plus essays and articles. He taught at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and SOAS University of London, where he is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and was at various times Chair of the Centre of African Studies, University of London, and founding Head of the SOAS Doctoral School. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.
Fardon has written on diverse interests: a series of monographs about the history, politics, religion and arts of the Chamba of Cameroon and Nigeria (Lela in Bali: history through ceremony in Cameroon, 2006); about other peoples of the Benue Valley, including Mumuye, Tiv and Verre, and a comparative account of the arts of that region (Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, 2011, with Marla C. Berns and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir); about language policy, modernity, radio, film, and other subjects in contemporary Africa (Learning from the Curse: Sembene’s Xala, 2017, drawn by Sènga la Rouge); and on social anthropology, including theoretical volumes, and book-length biographies of Mary Douglas and more recently Franz Steiner (Franz Steiner: a stranger in the world, 2022, with Jeremy Adler). A collection of his essays on Africa appeared in 2014 (Tiger in an African Palace and other thoughts about identification and transformation). His current project examines the historical interactions of colour in African arts and languages.
Interests: West Africa; African cultural studies; the historic arts of Africa; the history of ideas in social anthropology