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.
She became fluent in Welsh, studying the language while conducting her PhD fieldwork in Bangor and Cardiff (1976-77). While living in Cardiff, Charlotte met Hywel Davies, a journalist and Plaid Cymru activist. They married in 1979 and adopted Elen Gwenllian in 1983 when she was eight weeks old.
In 1985, the family moved to the US and Charlotte was offered the position of lecturer in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. They moved back to Wales, to Caernarfon, in 1988, and the following year Charlotte became a researcher in the department of sociology and anthropology at Swansea University. In 1992, she was appointed lecturer in social research methods at Swansea, rising to be senior lecturer in sociology and anthropology in 2000. The university awarded her an honorary research fellowship when she retired in 2009. Her colleagues remember her kindness, collegiate spirit and commitment to social justice. Despite her formidable intellect, she remained approachable, and was popular among students.
Charlotte was a founder member of Anthropoleg Cymru/Anthropology Wales, set up to promote both the study of anthropology in Wales and the anthropological study of Wales. Together, she and I collected and edited several papers from the Anthropoleg Cymru conferences into Welsh Communities, New Ethnographic Perspectives, published in 2003.
She also worked on a restudy of Colin Rosser and Chris Harris’s famous 1960s research The Family and Social Change, which culminated in Families in Transition: Social Change, Family Formation and Kin Relationships, published in 2008, and co-written with Harris and Nickie Charles.
Her last book, Gender and Social Justice in Wales, which she co-edited, was published in 2010. She also wrote dozens of academic papers and chapters, and for the Welsh magazines Planet and Barn, and Y Papur Gwyrdd, a Welsh-language environmental periodical that she published with Hywel from 2007 to 2012.
From 2010 to 2020, Charlotte was a governor of Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Tan-y-Lan, Morriston, Swansea. She immersed herself in the local Welsh landscape and loved mountain walking, cycling and horse-riding.
Charlotte is survived by Hywel and Elen, and by her younger sister, Helen.
