John Mack

John Mack FBA FSA (born 10 July 1949 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a British social anthropologist and art historian specialising in African arts and cultures (particularly Equatorial African and the western Indian Ocean). He is an academic and former museum curator. His research focuses mostly on the Congo area, South Sudan, Kenya, Madagascar and Zanzibar, and addresses questions of memory and art, the process of miniaturisation, the cultural significance of the sea and more recently the relationship between art and death. Career John Mack attended Campbell College, Belfast before studying for BA (Hon) in Social Anthropology (1971) and MA in The History of Ideas (1972) both at the University of Sussex. He obtained his D.Phil at Merton College, University of Oxford (1975) for a thesis entitled “WHR Rivers and the contexts of anthropology”. Mack held a series of curatorial appointments at the British Museum (initially at the Museum of Mankind) from 1976 to 2004. In May 1976, he became a Research Assistant, before being appointed Assistant Keeper in November 1976 and Keeper of Ethnography (1991-2004). He also served as the British Museum's Senior Keeper from 1997 to 2003.