Judith Okely (1941–2025) 

Cultural Anthropologist, known for her academic and activist involvement in Roma Studies 

Sadly, after a long illness, Judith Okely, Cultural Anthropologist and Roma Studies expert, died on 30th March at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Her academic career included lectureships at Durham University (1976), Essex (1981), and Edinburgh (1990), culminating in a professorship at Hull (1996), where she retired in 2004. After moving to Oxford, she became a member and then Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre (IGS) at Queen Elizabeth House, which shortly thereafter became the Oxford Department of International Development. She was also a Research Associate at the School of Anthropology at Oxford. 

A large and diverse community of friends, colleagues, students, and readers is mourning the passing of Judith Okely. Our diversity will spark different memories and associations, reflecting the many identities Judith inhabited throughout her life. For this writer, among her many roles—teacher, writer, researcher, and mentor—it is the anthropologist who will be remembered most deeply. 

Judith was a dominant and widely respected figure in Roma Studies (The Traveller-Gypsies, 1983), but her influence extended beyond academia, raising awareness of the enduring injustices of stigmatization and discrimination. Acknowledging her intellectual debts to Malinowski’s work and Leach’s mentorship, she forged her own path toward an anthropology of relational intimacy. She championed an ‘at-home’ anthropology, advocating immersive ethnographic practice grounded in the ‘researcher’s whole being—hand, heart, movement, and the senses’ (Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, 2012). This holistic approach to producing alternative knowledge characterized her insistence on respecting the individuality of human experience and listening to life narratives that did not easily conform to conventional interview frameworks reliant on text and word. 

Judith’s commitment to this deeply embodied anthropological praxis was inseparable from her presence in every context—whether speaking, interacting, debating, or disputing. The interdisciplinary feminist academic community of the Oxford-based International Gender Studies Centre (which emerged from the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, founded in 1972, and remained active until its closure in 2019) will remember her as a fierce, articulate, passionate, and intellectually rigorous thinker. Feisty, receptive, at times contrary, but always engaged — Judith will be greatly missed. 

Maria Jaschok, former director of IGS, Oxford 

References (Selected publications by Judith Okely) 

1983 The Traveller-Gypsies, Cambridge University Press. 

1992 Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge, Routledge (edited with Helen Callaway). 

1996 Own or Other Culture, Routledge. 

2007 Identity and Networks: Fashioning Gender and Ethnicity across Cultures, Oxford, Berghahn (edited with Deborah Bryceson and Jonathan Webber). 

2008 Knowing How to Know (eds), Oxford, Berghahn (edited with Narmala Halstead and Eric Hirsch). 

2012 Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, Routledge.