Kenelm O. L. Burridge (1922–2019)

Abstract

Kenelm Burridge, a pioneer in the study of cargo cults, millenarian movements, and religious change, passed away on May 21, 2019, in North Vancouver, BC. An original and wide-ranging thinker who drew attention to the moral dimensions of colonial encounters, he taught anthropology for two decades at the University of British Columbia. Born in Malta to a Maltese mother and British father, Burridge spent much of his early childhood in Lucknow, India, where his father was a medical officer, before being sent to boarding school in the United Kingdom. When World War II began, he joined the Royal Navy, and in 1943 a German destroyer sank his submarine off Naples. 1 He was wounded and interned in a POW camp near Milan, but escaped into the mountains and reached Allied lines with the help of farmers and shepherds who sheltered him along the way (Burridge n.d.a). This experience, which he later remembered as one of the happiest times of his life, led him to resign his lieutenant's commission after the war to pursue anthropology at Oxford.