My friend and mentor Charlotte Aull Davies, the social anthropologist, who has died aged 80, was the author of Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, first published in 1998. It is still cited in academic journals and continues to be a key text for students, combining both practical guidance for, and the philosophical contexts of, ethnography.
Charlotte was born in the US, in Lexington, Kentucky, one of three children of Llewellyn (nee Holmes), a homemaker, and Charles Aull, who worked for the South Carolina Highways Department. After leaving Waggener high school in Louisville, Charlotte gained a degree in mathematics at Florence State College (1963), then a master’s in mathematics at the University of Mississippi (1965), before pursuing a PhD in social anthropology with Richard Fox at Duke University in North Carolina. Charlotte acted on Fox’s suggestion that she to go to Wales to study ethnicities and social change; her resulting research was published in 1989 as Welsh Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: The Ethnic Option and the Modern State.
