Contributors

David Best is a reader in the Department of Philosophy, University of Wales, Swansea; visiting professor, School of Theatre, Manchester Metropolitan University; senior academic fellow and honorary professor, DeMontfort University; visiting professor, International Centre for the Study of Drama in Education; and consultant to Bretton Hall College of the Arts. He holds various honorary appointments. Recently, he was professor of Philosophy at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. He acted as consultant for the National Department of Education and Science for England and Wales. He has written numerous articles, and his books include Expression in the Arts (1974), Philosophy and Human Movement (1978), Feeling and Reason in the Arts (1985), and The Rationality of Feeling (1993). He frequently speaks at conferences and lectures in several countries. His philosophical interests are wide, but he is best known for his work in philosophy of the arts and the arts in education.

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–73) was a leading figure in British social anthropology. As a student of history at Exeter College in Oxford, he studied under, and was influenced by, Robert Marrett, an ethnologist, and he later chose to study social anthropology at London University. His later works such as The Nuer (1940), Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951), and Nuer Religion (1956) bear the influences of Bronislaw Malinowski, Charles Seligman, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Soon after his doctorate and appointment as a professor at Oxford, he began to rethink the notion of anthropology as a science and looked toward the humanities and history for alternative approaches. Other important works by Evans-Pritchard include The Sanussi of Cyrenaia (1951), The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology (1963), Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), The Position of Women in Primitive Religion (1965), The Azande (1971), and Man and Women among the Azande (1974). He died in Oxford on September 11, 1973, two years after his knighthood in 1971.

Drid Williams has conducted fieldwork in England, the U.S., Australia, and Kenya. She has taught anthropology of the dance and human movement studies in all four countries. She holds a D. Phil in social anthropology from St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. In addition to numerous book chapters and articles, her publications include Anthropology and Human Movement, 1: The Study of Dances (1997), Anthropology and Human Movement, 2: Searching for Origins (2000), and a revised version of her first book, Ten Lectures on Theories of the Dance (1991), now retitled Sociocultural Anthropology and the Dance: Ten Lectures (2004). Forthcoming works are Ideokinesis: Imagery and the Teaching of Dancing (2010) and Signifying Bodies, Signifying Acts: New Ways of Thinking about Human Movement. She is the founder and senior editor of JASHM.