John was on the anthropology staff of the University of Kent from 1966 to 1990, and Professor of Social Anthropology from 1982. In 1990 he moved to Oxford as head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, became Warden of All Souls College in 1995, where he remained until his retirement in 2008.
Between 1958 and 1961, John read history as an undergraduate at University College Oxford, after which he moved to the London School of Economics for postgraduate studies. It was here that he first met three individuals who were to shape his enduring preoccupations. The first was Paul Stirling, who was at the time undertaking pioneer work in Mediterranean ethnography; the second was Raymond Firth, who influenced his thought in the area of economic anthropology; and the third Lucy Mair, whose sharp mind and no-nonsense, concise writing style he much approved of and actively emulated. Under Stirling’s supervision he undertook fieldwork in southern Italy, completing his PhD in 1969, a study published as Land and Family in Pisticci, 1973. His debt to Mair was later to be reflected in his editing of a festschrift (Choice and Change, 1974) and by christening the first Kent Anthropology server with the name ‘Lucy’.
In 1966, John moved to Kent, part of a group of other LSE staff and students who were to form the nucleus of a board of studies later to become the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. John often said that he was ‘made at Kent’, and certainly this was where his best work was undertaken: his influential essays on exchange, his synthesis of Mediterranean ethnography (People of the Mediterranean, 1977), and his ground-breaking work on long-distance traders in Gaddafi’s Libya (Libyan politics: tribe and revolution, 1987).
In the early days at Kent, John both benefited from and contributed to the intellectual synergy between his own work and that of his colleagues in sociology, such as Ray Pahl (with whom he shared an interest in the informal economy) and Derek Allcorn (whose theoretical acumen and sense of humour he much admired). This synergy played an important role in integrating John’s Mediterranean interests into mainstream social theory, in developing a distinctive economic anthropology of complex industrial societies through ground-breaking analysis of gift-giving, sub-economies and exchange (Exchange, 1992), as well as in his pioneering ethnography of Libya, which explored the interconnections between a modern ‘hydrocarbon society’ and a pre-existing, segmentary lineage system.
It was also John Davis who founded the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing in 1985, which was to place Kent at the forefront of innovations in computing applications that have now become standard throughout academia.
John made an important contribution to the professional life of anthropology, being Chairman of the European Association of Social Anthropologists from 1993 to 1994 and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 1997 and 2001. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988.
The full biography of Professor John Davis, authored by Professor Roy Ellen and Dr Paul Dresch (University of Oxford), is available on the British Academy website here.