Member of the Symposium

James A. Pritchett is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Director of Boston University's African Studies Center, and formerly Associate Provost for Intra-University Programs. 

He is currently a member of Board of Director of the African Studies Association and a member of the Board of Advisors of the International Consortium for Law and Development.  He has served as a Research Officer at the University of Zambia, and has conducted fieldwork there, and in Angola and Congo since 1982. 

He took his doctorate from Harvard University, doing a re-study of the Lunda-Ndembu people on the Central African Plateau, first studied by Victor Turner in the early 1950s.  His own work is concerned with the interaction between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa, particularly the ways in which social change is interpreted and validated according to local beliefs. 

He is the author of Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change and Social Transformation in South Central Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), and Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness Among the Lunda-Ndembu (University of Virginia Press, 2007). 

Professor Pritchett also has a strong interest in the African Diaspora, and has studied communities of African-descended people in the Caribbean, Brazil and elsewhere in Central and South America.  He teaches courses on African history and culture, anthropological theory, development, and symbols, rituals and myths.  In his role as Director of the African Studies Center he has established links between Boston University and institutions of higher learning across the USA and in Africa, and has been instrumental in bringing African material into the curriculum of the Boston public school system.

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