Alan Macfarlane is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China.
19 Facts About Alan Macfarlane
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Alan Macfarlane has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world.
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Alan Macfarlane is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
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Alan Macfarlane was born in Ganesh Das Hospital in the hill station of Shillong, at the time the capital of undivided Assam and now the capital of Meghalaya.
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Alan Macfarlane's father "Mac" Macfarlane was a reserve officer of the Assam Rifles, besides being a tea planter, and his mother was the author Iris Macfarlane.
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Alan Macfarlane was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford and Sedbergh School.
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Alan Macfarlane went on to be a research fellow in history at King's College, University of Cambridge.
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Alan Macfarlane became emeritus professor of anthropological science at the University of Cambridge and a life fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 2009.
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Alan Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.
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Alan Macfarlane's approach drew on the work of classic functionalist anthropologists Edward Evans-Pritchard and Lucy Mair.
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Also in 1970, Alan Macfarlane published The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a study of the diary of a famous seventeenth-century clergyman.
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Alan Macfarlane has undertaken several periods of ethnographic field research, the first of these a period in Nepal with the Gurung people.
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Alan Macfarlane used this period as the foundation of a 1976 study, Resources and Population a Malthusian analysis of Gurung responses to scarce resources and an expanding population.
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Alan Macfarlane has published extensively on English history, advancing the idea that many traits of so-called "modern society" appeared in England long before the period of modernity as defined by historians, such as Lawrence Stone.
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Alan Macfarlane's 1987 book The Culture of Capitalism is a non-deterministic study of the emergence of modernity and capitalism in Western Europe.
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Alan Macfarlane wrote an entire book dedicated to Japan published in 2007, Japan Through the Looking Glass.
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Alan Macfarlane's work has been widely read and cited by his contemporaries.
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Together with Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane established the Digital Himalaya Project in December 2000 and now serves as chairman of the executive board of the World Oral Literature Project.
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Alan Macfarlane is a co-editor of The Fortnightly Review's "new series" online.