Francis Huxley obituary

Anthropologist fascinated by shamanism, myths and religious rites who strove to protect indigenous peoples

In the early 1950s the anthropologist Francis Huxley, who has died aged 93, undertook pioneering fieldwork among the Urubu people of the Amazon basin. The resulting book, Affable Savages (1956), adopted a new, "reflexive" approach to the study of culture in which the author's encounters with the "other" are reflected as much in personal reactions as in objective descriptions.

Francis was a pioneer of this form of anthropological writing - a style that much suited his lifelong interest in shamanism and the altered states of consciousness often experienced by religious healers. While this novelesque way of writing was largely shunned by his contemporaries, eventually it became commonplace.

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