Roland Littlewood

Roland Martin Littlewood FRAI (2 February 1947 – 22 November 2025) was a British anthropologist and psychiatrist, and Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College London.^[1] He was the co-author (with Maurice Lipsedge) of the book Aliens and Alienists, now in its third edition. During his career, he was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1994 to 1997.^[2]

Littlewood had interests in the (medical and social) anthropology of the Caribbean, Albania and Britain. He wrote extensively about the diagnosis of the black immigrant population in the UK.^[3]

Littlewood died on 22 November 2025, at the age of 78.^[4][5]

• With Edmund Leach, Meyer Fortes: Pathology and identity. The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 0-521-02615-6 (also reprinted in 2006).
• The Butterfly and the serpent. Essays in psychiatry, race and religion. Free Association Books, London 1998, ISBN 1-85343-399-3.
• Ed.: Cultural psychiatry & medical anthropology. An introduction and reader. Athlone Press, London 2000, ISBN 0-485-11527-1.
• Religion, agency, restitution. The Wilde lectures in natural religion 1999. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-19-924197-X.
• Pathologies of the West. An anthropology of mental illness in Europe and America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 2002, ISBN 0-8014-3934-5.
• With Maurice Lipsedge: Aliens and alienists. Ethnic minorities and psychiatry. Penguin, Harmondsworth 1982. (3rd Edition. Routledge, Hove 2004, ISBN 0-415-15724-2).
• On knowing and not knowing in the anthropology of medicine. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California 2007, ISBN 978-1-59874-275-6.

• Roland Littlewood In conversation with Rosalind Ramsay., in Psychiatric Bulletin, Band 23, 1999, S. 733–739