Peter Lienhardt

Peter Lienhardt (1928–1986) was a British social anthropologist.

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.

• Hasani Bin Ismail, The Medicine Man: Swifa Ya Nguvumali, edited and translated by Peter Lienhardt (Oxford Library of African Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968).
• Peter Lienhardt, Disorientations – A Society in Flux: Kuwait in the 1950s, edited by Ahmed AI-Shahi (Middle East Cultures Series 19; Reading, Ithaca Press, 1993).
• Peter Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, edited by Ahmed AI-Shahi (Palgrave, 2001).