Adrian Curtius Mayer

Adrian Curtius Mayer (1922 – 2025) was born to Sir Robert Mayer, a philanthropist who set up Youth and Music and the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts, and his wife Dorothy Piper, a singer and a Quaker. He had an elder brother Philip and a younger sister, Pauline.

Adrian took his first degree at St John’s College Annapolis in Maryland. He later studied Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and took up a professorship at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1966.

In 1949 he married Kaia, a Danish artist, and they had two daughters, Claudia and Camilla; they lived in Highgate, North London.

He was a highly regarded anthropologist and an excellent linguist. His seminal work, ‘Caste & Kinship in Central India’, was written after fieldwork in the 1950s in the village of Jamgod in what is now Madhya Pradesh, where he made deep and lasting connections.