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Ruth Finnegan
FBA
Ruth Finnegan FBA
Born	31 December 1933 (age 90); Derry, Northern Ireland
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford
Occupation(s)	anthropologist and novelist
Employer	Open University

Ruth Finnegan,^[1] FBA, (born 1933), Emeritus Professor of the Open University www.open.ac.uk is an anthropologist and novelist with broad interdisciplinary interests, especially in classical studies, literature, sociolinguistics, modes of thought, cultural history and, recently, spiritual experience.

Life

Ruth Finnegan was born on the last day of 1933 in Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest child of Dr Thomas Finnegan, Professor of Classics and President of Magee College www.ulster.ac.uk, (later, under his leadership Magee University College) and Agnes Finnegan née Campbell, teacher and writer. Largely brought up in Derry, she and her parents spent most of the war years in Donegal, 13 months of it in a small cottage in a 'gentle' (faerie) wood, an experience vividly described in her mother’s entrancing 'Reaching for the Fruit' and her own semi-autobiographical novel, 'Black Inked Pearl'. This had a lasting influence on her life.

In order to avoid an upbringing tainted by Ulster religious divisions, on their return to Derry in 1945 her parents sent her to a Quaker school in York (the Mount) where the experience of memorising and repeating daily ‘texts’ from the Bible and other literature, seems to have shaped much of her future writing, most directly in her monograph ‘Why do we quote?’ and her novel ‘Black Inked Pearl’.

This was followed by four joyous years (1952-56) at Somerville College Oxford, again reflected in the novel 5, in the delightful study of classics (a degree that then combined literature, history and philosophy), ending, to her amazement, with one of the best classics firsts of her year. After two years teaching (and repaying her student debt) at the leading public school Malvern Girls College (now Malvern St James she decided to return to the intellectual life but this time, much though she would always love the Greek and Roman cultures, to follow her instinct, honed partly by her anti-colonialist and broadly left-wing stance, to widen her study to include learning about other cultures.

She therefore chose to focus on Africa, and completed first the postgraduate Oxford Diploma and B.Litt in Anthropology, then fieldwork (1960-61, 1963-4) on story telling among the Limba speakers of Northern Sierra Leone (her manuscript field notes are deposited in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; digitised versions of audio taped Limba story-telling and (minimally) music are available on http://www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html/. She completed her D.Phil in 1963, supported by Nuffield College, under the celebrated anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Immediately after her marriage in 1963 to David John Murray (grandson of Sir James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), she accompanied her husband to the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in the then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and then to the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (1965-69) where their three daughters were born. From there she and her husband were recruited as founding members of the academic staff of the Open University where, apart from three years at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, they, very productively, spent the rest of their careers; they are now both Emeritus Professors and still research active. They have five grandchildren (one in New Zealand) and live, write and walk with their two dogs in Old Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, round the corner from the famous Bletchley Park.

Main appointments

Academic positions 1963-64 Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 1965-69 Lecturer and (1967) Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. 1969-72 Lecturer in Sociology, Open University. 1972-75, 1978-99 Senior Lecturer, Reader (1982), Professor (1988) in Comparative Social Institutions,Open University. 1975-78 Reader in Sociology, and (1976) Head of Sociology Discipline, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji. 1989 Visiting Professor in Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin. 1999- Visiting Research Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University. 2002- Emeritus Professor, Open University.

Other

1978-1986 Member, Social Science Research Council (later Economic and Social Research Council) Standing Committees: Social Anthropology 1978-82 Social Affairs 1982-6 Joint Vice-Chairman Social Affairs 1985-6 1979-1993 Joint general editor (with Peter Burke) of monograph series 'Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture' 1987-9 Hon. Editor, Man (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) 1992 Member, Anthropology panel, UK Government (HEFCE) Research Assessment Exercise 1994-97 Series editor, ‘Studying family and community history: 19th and 20th centuries’, 4 volumes, Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University. 1996-2001 Joint editor of CD-ROM series Project reports in family and community history, The Open University. 1998-2002 Joint founding editor of interdisciplinary journal Family & Community History. 1998-2011 Trustee, Mass-Observation Archive (Royal Anthropological Institute appointee) 1999-2007 Member (Crown appointee), Governing Body, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; 2003-6 Vice-Chair 2012- Founder and Senior Editor, Callender Press www.callenderpress.co.uk. 2014- Member International Research Council on Humanities and Social Sciences Studies on Africa (IRCHSSA)

Scholarly and other contributions

Academic Ruth Finnegan’s contributions lie in three main areas each of which, initially controversial or disregarded, she developed and extended (she herself says many others had been there first, they had just not been so fully noticed):

In conjunction with others, especially the American and Finnish performance and linguistic anthropology scholars, she contributed much to the study, visibility and critical analysis of oral literature, multisensory performance and ‘orality’ (a handy if ultimately inadequate and misleading term) through fieldwork, conference presentations, and publications such as (among others) her ‘Limba stories and story-telling’, ‘Oral literature in Africa’ (read by July 2015 by over 80,000 readers - mainly, to her joy from Africa - on the publishers’ open access website and regularly among the top ten downloaded in specific categories in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) site, ‘Oral poetry’ and ‘The oral and beyond’. The term and study of ‘oral literature’, largely initiated by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, now has international recognition, reflected in, among others, such endeavours as the World Oral Literature Project and the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa with its regular conferences..

Building on the performance/practice approach of that earlier work, her ‘Hidden musicians’ (arguably her most original, or at any rate most influential, work) pioneered the non-ethnocentric non-elitist ethnography of local music across all genres. It built on a combination of social scientific and humanist approaches to conceptualise music primarily as practice and performance rather than as text. Many others have now taken up this approach and ‘The Hidden Musicians’ is widely regarded as seminal, manifested in conference and text treatments of music. 8

In the 3rd level Open University course ‘Studying family and community history: nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (first presented in 1994), Ruth Finnegan (as chair), together with well-informed and experienced colleagues, enabled students to build on their own interests and lay the foundations for their future research, whether within or outside academe, and for the important outcome of disseminating this in various forms to others. The subject itself was far from new but the approach in the course led participants to relate their individual interests to wider scholarship and take a critical as well as constructive approach to a wide range of sources, documentary and other. One of Ruth Finnegan’s delights has been the resultant foundation of the Family and Community History Research Society (FACHRS) principally but not exclusively by graduates of the course, whose members engage in collaborative first-hand research of a unique kind, reported in its associated journal and newsletter.

In her current research, besides completing a book on Fiji music and taxi-drivers’ lives, she is focusing on ‘enchantment’ and new scientific approaches to consciousness. She is thus engaged in exploring the amazing but in fact surprisingly well documented domain of human life referred to (not altogether satisfactorily) by such terms as ‘paranormal’, ‘vibes’, ‘spooky’ (Einstein’s term), ‘telepathy’, ‘remote nonlocal viewing’, ‘altered consciousness, the ‘noosphere’ and the like .

Other In her novel ‘Black Inked Pearl. A girl’s quest’ Ruth Finnegan opens up a new genre – or rather, as with many African novels, stretches the boundaries to include in the one work elements of such (accepted) genres as novel, short story, mystic poetry, fantasy, autobiography, theology, myth and Dante-esque epic. Reminiscent of James Joyce and Gerald Manley Hopkins, the novel, born like Coleridge’s Kublai Khan in dreams, also stretches the English language with its verbal, orthographic, and grammatical innovations, chosen to fit the rhythms of the dream-infused text. In its oral qualities – best appreciated therefore in the planned audio version - it builds on the author’s experience of Ireland, Africa and African story-telling. Although a novel – a love story, a parable – it also comes out of Ruth Finnegan’s anthropological, African and literary experience. Without that it could not have been written, and is thus more related to her academic work than it might seem at first sight.

Personal vision and outlook

Having been fortunate enough to have switched ‘disciplines’ as a graduate Ruth Finnegan has from the start sought the enlightenment of interdisciplinary perspectives on whatever she is currently studying (helped of course by the breadth both of her Oxford classics degree and her foundation in anthropology); she finds single-discipline approaches both constricting and unrevealing. It is this transdisciplinary perspective which has enabled her to work at the intersections of several disciplines, a great strength to her work.

Another of her concerns has been to bring home the importance of the scholars (often referred to as the ‘amateurs’) who work outside the universities and the recognised sphere of academe. In the past probably more fully recognised but now, owing to a number of university and government positions, allowed to slip from view, it is to these scholars, she argues, untrammelled by bureaucratic chains and thought, that we principally owe the emergence of new disciplines (such as ethnomusicology/ popular music, folklore. or astrophysics), original discoveries and unconventional but fruitful new perspectives. In keeping with this she has been at the forefront of recognising the revolutionary potentials of self-publication, print-on-demand, and open access.

Since 2014 she has aimed to devote the main proportion of her literary and lecturing income (such as it is) to a range of charities, believing that small amounts of money – in her case around £300 each – given to hands-on groups such as Combat Stress, WaterAid, and peace-and-reconciliation charities in Northern Ireland are the most effective. She hopes that her publications in the future will be successful enough to increase these amounts and reach out to other causes close to her heart.

Ruth has always been both inspired and challenged by her father’s peace-building activities (fully supported by her mother) in the then hostile climate of Northern Ireland , and her parents’ shared work to cross all divides whether based on religion, class, employment/unemployment, gender, or nationality. She is intensely proud to have inherited their vision and to have carried it on, not through politics but in her own way, in writing, publishing and research (examples being her reprint of her father’s impressive – and at the time very brave - ‘War at any price?’ - and her own edited ‘Peace writing’ collection).

Books

Academic works

Survey of the Limba people of northern Sierra Leone, Overseas Research Publication No.8, HMSO, 1965, 151pp

Limba stories and story-telling, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967, 352pp. Reprinted, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1981, 2nd (illustrated) edition, 2012.

Oral literature in Africa, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970, 558pp. Reprinted (paperback) OUP, Nairobi, 1976. Japanese translation (chapter 1) 1971; 2nd (illustrated) edition, Open Book Publications Cambridge (World Oral Literature monograph series), 2011 Modes of thought.

Essays on thinking in Western and non-Western societies (ed. with Robin Horton), Faber and Faber, London, 1973, 399pp.

Oral poetry: its nature, significance and social context, Cambridge University Press, 1977, illustrated, 299pp. Paperback, CUP, 1980. 2nd edition, Indiana University Press 1992. 3rd edition 2012.

The Penguin book of oral poetry (ed.), Allen Lane, 1978, 548pp, also published as A World treasury of oral poetry, Indiana University Press, 1978. Penguin paperback, 1982, ., new edition in press, 2013.

Essays on Pacific literature (ed. with Raymond Pillai). Oral Tradition Series, 2, Fiji Museum, Suva, 1978, 122pp, 2nd edition 2012.

Conceptions of inquiry (ed. with Stuart Brown and John Fauvel), Methuen, 1981, 334pp.

New approaches to economic life (ed. with Bryan Roberts and Duncan Gallie), Manchester University Press, 1985, 566pp., new edition in press, 2013

Information technology: social issues (ed. with G.Salaman and K.Thompson), Hodder and Stoughton, 1987, 314pp.

Literacy and orality: studies in the technology of communication, Blackwell, 1988, 201pp (also published by Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Australia). Italian translation: La Fine di Gutenberg: Studi sulla tecnologia della comunicazione, Sansoni, Firenze, 1990; 2nd edition, 2012, ., new edition in press, 2013.

The hidden musicians: music-making in an English town, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 378pp. 2nd edition, Wesleyan University Press (Music/Culture series), 2007; Japanese translation, Hosei University Press, 2011, kindle edition ., in press, 2013.

Oral traditions and the verbal arts: a guide to research practices, Association of Social Anthropologists 'Research methods in social anthropology' series, Routledge 1992, 284pp.

From family tree to family history (ed. with Michael Drake), Cambridge University Press/Open University, 1994, 196pp.

Sources and methods for family and community historians: a handbook (ed. with Michael Drake), Cambridge University Press/Open University, 1994, 2nd ed. 1997, 322pp.

South Pacific oral traditions (ed. with Margaret Orbell), Indiana University Press, 1995, 259pp., ., new edition in press, 2013

Tales of the city: a study of narrative and urban life, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 212pp.

Communicating: the multiple modes of human interconnection, Routledge, 2002, 336pp., 44 b & w illustrations (short listed British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize 2003, long listed British Academy book prize 2003). Italian translation Comunicare: le molteplici modalità dell’interconnessione umana, Novara: De Agostini, 2009, 2nd enlarged edition in press, Routledge 2013.

(ed.) Participating in the knowledge society: researchers beyond the university walls, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005, 292pp. ISBN 978- 1-4039-3946-3

The oral and beyond: doing things with words in Africa, James Currey, Oxford / University of Chicago Press / University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Scottsville South Africa, 2007, 358pp (honourable mention, African Studies Association Herskovits award 2008).
Why do we quote? The culture and history of quotation, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2011, 327pp, ISBN 978-1-906924-33-1 (paperback ed), 978-1-906924-34-8 (hardback), 978-1-906924-35-5 (digital ed. – pdf)

Carried by a mystic wind: B W Andrzejewski on the Somali passion for poetry and language, joint ed. with Martin Orwin and Graham Furniss, special issue, Journal of African Cultural Studies 23, 1 (June) 2011, and, as book, Callender Press, 2013.
‘Oral Literature in Africa, 2nd (illustrated and expanded) edition, World Oral literature series, Open Book, 2012.

Studying oral texts, a handbook for researchers, Callender Press, 2013.

Music and creation, Milton Keynes: Callender Press, 2012.

(ed.) Peace writing: a selection of texts, Callender Press, 2013.

Where is Language? Bloomsbury, 2015.

Callender Press editions of classical texts in English translation

Cato’s distichs, the oldest Latin primer (ed. with introductory essays), 2012.

Catullus carmina, 2012.

Xenophon on horsemanship, 2012.
Alexander the Great, 2012.

Varro on Roman farming, 2012.

Greek lexicon for the New Testament, 2013.

Creative Writing

 *As Catherine Farrar

The Little Angel and the Three Wisdoms, 2012, SBPRA

The Wild Thorn Rose, 2012, Callender Press

Three Ways of Loving, 2012, Callender Press

Lil the Rocker, the angel’s little sister, 2012, Callender Press

The Dragon’s Tale, 2012, Callender Press

 *As Ruth Finnegan

   *Black Inked Pearl. A Girl's Quest - a  novel,  2015, Garn Press.

Honours

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