Nationality British Discipline Social anthropologist Died 17 May 1986 | Thesis year 1957 Sub discipline Arab societies | |
Born 12 March 1928 ( 1928-03-12 ) Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, United Kingdom Thesis title The Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia Books Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, Disorientations: A Society in Flux : Kuwait in the 1950s | ||
Life
Lienhardt was born in Bradford on 12 March 1928. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and, like his brother Godfrey Lienhardt, at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied Arabic and Persian. After military service in the Royal Air Force he undertook post-graduate studies in social anthropology at Lincoln College, Oxford, earning a doctorate in 1957 with a thesis on "The Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia".
In the mid 1950s he carried out fieldwork in the Gulf States for his doctorate, and as a senior research fellow at the East African Institute for Social Research at Makerere College, Uganda, he carried out fieldwork in Zanzibar in the late 1950s. He carried out further fieldwork in Iran in the mid 1960s.
Lienhardt was appointed to a faculty lectureship in Middle Eastern sociology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford. He died on 17 March 1986.
In 1987 the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies published a volume in his honour, The Diversity of the Muslim Community: Anthropological Essays in Memory of Peter Lienhardt, edited by Ahmed Al-Shahi.