Adam Kuper

Adam Kuper (born 1941) is a British anthropologist most closely linked to the school of social anthropology. In his works, he often treats the notion of "culture" skeptically, focusing as much on how it is used as on what it means.

Born and raised in South Africa, he took his first degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His doctorate, from the University of Cambridge, was based on field research in the Kalahari desert in what is now Botswana. After graduation he returned to Africa, doing further fieldwork in Botswana and Uganda and teaching for three years at Makerere University in Kampala. From 1970 to 1976 he taught at University College London. From 1976 to 1985 he was professor of African anthropology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Since 1985 he has been a lecturer at Brunel University, where he was the first head of the Department of Human Sciences, and is now head of the Anthropology Department.

In the early 1970s he did fieldwork in Jamaica, on attachment to the National Planning Agency in the Office of the Prime Minister, but his main ethnographic focus continued to be the societies of Southern Africa, on which he has published three books. In 1973 he published a history of British social anthropology, and since then he has continued to study and publish on the intellectual history of anthropology, most recently a book on the idea of culture in the anthropological tradition. He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Grant for two years (2003-5) which was to allow him to spend more time on research. The topic is cousin marriage and incest in nineteenth century England.

Supervision of students working on Southern African ethnography, history of anthropology, family business, kinship.

He currently is a lecturer of Social Anthropology at Brunel University.

The football writer Simon Kuper is his son.

elected Publications

"Wives for Cattle: Bridewealth and Marriage in Southern Africa", (Routledge, 1982)

"The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion", (Routledge, 1988)

"The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity", (Harvard University Press, 1994) "Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School", (Routledge, 3rd edn, 1996) "Culture: The Anthropologists' Account", (Harvard University Press, 1999)