Kenneth Little

Kenneth Lindsay Little (19 September 1908 – 28 February 1991) was an English academic who started out as a physical anthropologist. He attended the London School of Economics where he studied under Raymond Firth. He subsequently headed the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Biography Kenneth Little was born in West Derby, Liverpool, where his father, Harold Muir Little, was a ship broker. His mother was Annie, née Livesey. He attended Liverpool College, and then went on to Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Little studied for his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, and his thesis, which was published in 1948 as Negroes in Britain, was a study of the Black and minority ethnic communities of Cardiff. The African-American sociologist St. Clair Drake worked with the Black community of Cardiff drafting a response, in which the local community said they "distrust people who survey us and study us, who write about us and publicize us, and who try to reform and lead us." Appointed as Reader in Social Anthropology, Little was the head of the Department of Social Anthropology, and was appointed a professor in 1965.

Publications Negroes in Britain: A Study of Race Relations in English Society (1948) The Mende of Sierra Leone (1951) West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change (1965) Urbanization as a Social Process: An essay on movement and change in contemporary Africa (1974) African Women in Towns: An Aspect of Africa's Social Revolution (1974) Urbanization, Migration, and the African Family with Anne Price (1974) The Sociology of Urban Women’s Image in African Literature (1980)