Peel, John (1941–2015)

Abstract

John Peel was a British social anthropologist whose lifelong ethnographic and archival work on the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria achieved seamless integration of anthropology and history, and proposed a form of comparatism that gave culture, and especially religion, a central place. His first degree was in classics and he held a series of academic posts in sociology departments, before taking up a chair in anthropology and sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. This trajectory gave him an unusual span of interests and expertise, from the broad social theory canon to close reading of original textual sources and exploration of narrative as the mainspring of humans' interpretation of experience. Central to his oeuvre is a trilogy of groundbreaking works on Yoruba Christianity and its encounters with Indigenous religion and Islam, and a rich ethnographic history of identity and politics in a former Yoruba kingdom as it became incorporated into the Nigerian state.