Geoffrey Gorer
British anthropologist
Geoffrey Edgar Solomon Gorer (26 March 1905 – 24 May 1985) was an English anthropologist and writer, noted for his application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology.
Biography
Born into a non-practising Jewish family, Gorer was educated at Charterhouse and at Jesus College, Cambridge.
During the 1930s, he wrote unpublished fiction and drama. His first book was The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (1934, revised in 1953 and again in 1964 as The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade). He then published an account of a journey he made following Féral Benga in Africa, entitled Africa Dances (1935, new editions 1945: Penguin, 1949, 1962; Eland 2003), which was a considerable success and proved to be a springboard for a career as a writer and anthropologist. After Africa Dances, his career was advanced by the publishers and anthropologists now taking a keen interest in his well-regarded work. Another cultural study followed: Bali and Angkor, or, Looking at Life and Death (1936). Hot Strip Tease appeared in 1937 and Himalayan Village in 1938.
His admiration for George Orwell's novel Burmese Days led him to contact Orwell in 1935. They remained good friends until Orwell's death in 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Geoffrey Gorer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.