My father, Colin Murray, who has died aged 65 of heart failure after suffering from the autoimmune disorder Churg-Strauss syndrome, was a distinguished anthropologist whose scholarship and lifelong friendships were characterised by a deep humanity.
Edinburgh-born, he undertook a stint of VSO teaching in a bush school in Uganda before going to university. This experience led him to change from studying classics to social anthropology at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and thence to several years of postgraduate fieldwork in a Lesotho village. Here the Pitse inhabitants became an extended family and these early trips to Africa laid the foundations of important friendships.
Over the following decades, Colin juggled regular fieldwork there with institutional posts, including at the London School of Economics and the universities of Liverpool, Cape Town and Manchester. His explorations of migrant labour and forced resettlements across South Africa were pursued beneath the radar of the security services at some personal risk.
After a radical shift in the political climate in the 1990s, he developed major studies of land reform and the now definitive work (with Peter Sanders in 2005) on the phenomenon of "medicine murders" in colonial Lesotho. This paper, Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis, examines high-profile instances of ritualised murders in which the victim's body parts are used for supposed medicinal purposes, and examines the "moral crisis" resulting from the clash of tribal and colonial practices.
Colin's earlier books, Families Divided (1981) and Black Mountain (1992), have become classic reading for students of anthropology, sociology, and history. For many years he was joint editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
He married Linda in 1979, and my sister Hannah and I were brought up in Liverpool and Manchester. My parents later divorced but always remained good friends. As we grew up, he balanced fieldwork with home life, growing vegetables and being committed to fatherhood. Our shared language was always inflected with African rhythms.
Colin tackled his ill-health with patience and after taking early retirement in 2002 he settled in the High Peak, Derbyshire. He had met Jane in 1998; their marriage in 2005 and the raising of their handsome collie, Mac, were complemented by a fulfilling engagement with their local community.
Colin's final project explored the role in the British empire of Scottish families that were connected with the small and barely inhabited island of Ardwall in Galloway. His life was strongly coloured by the love of this tiny place, to which we retreated each summer, where he found a spiritual kind of peace. It is in such peace that his family will remember him, with a Sesotho farewell: Tsamaea hantle, Ntate ("Go well").
He is survived by Jane, Hannah and me.