Brian Morris

Brian Morris (born 18 October 1936) is emeritus professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He is a specialist on folk taxonomy, ethnobotany and ethnozoology, and on religion and symbolism. He has carried out fieldwork among South Asian hunter-gatherers and in Malawi. Groups that he has studied include the Ojibwa. He has also written widely on the history of ideas and in particular on anarchism.

Biography Brian Morris was born in the Black Country. He left school at fifteen.

He worked as a tea planter in Malawi. He became an anarchist in the mid-1960s, and remained active in several protests and political movements. He later received a doctorate in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, doing his PhD ethnographic fieldwork with Malaipantaram hunter-gatherers in Southern India.

Books Forest Traders: a Socio-economic Study of the Hill Pandaram (1982), Humanities Press Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987), Cambridge University Press, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (1993), Black Rose Books, Anthropology Of The Self: The Individual In Cultural Perspective (1994) The Power Of Animals (1998), Berg Western Conceptions of the Individual (1991) Berg, Animals and Ancestors: An Ethnography (2000), Berg Insects and Human Life (2004), Berg, Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (2004), The History and Conservation of Mammals in Malawi (2004), Kachere Series (Zomba), Common Mushrooms of Malawi (1987) Fungiflora A/S, Religion And Anthropology: A Critical Introduction (2006), Cambridge University Press Ernest Thompson Seton, Founder of the Woodcraft Movement 1860-1946: Apostle of Indian Wisdom and Pioneer Ecologist (2007), Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston), The Anarchist Geographer: An Introduction to the Life of Peter Kropotkin (2012), Genge Press (Minehead) Pioneers of Ecological Humanism (2012), Book Guild Publishing (Brighton), Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism: A Brian Morris Reader (2014), PM Press, Pioneers of Ecological Humanism: Mumford, Dubos, and Bookchin (2017), Black Rose Books, Visions of Freedom: Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism (2018), Black Rose Books, Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (2018), PM Press, Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism: A Philosophical Manifesto (2020), Black Rose Books, An Ecological Vision of Earth: the Life and Thought of W.H. Hudson (2026), Reuben Books,