| Value | $20,000 |
| Number Offered | 2 |
| Closing Date | 20 November |
Established in 2025 by the University of Otago through a generous bequest from the estate of Ngaere Adele Geddes (1928-2020), given in honour of her late husband, Professor W R Geddes (1916-1989).
A distinguished alumnus of the University of Otago (BA 1938, MA 1939), Professor Geddes received a PhD from the University of London in 1948. As well as studying there, Geddes also lectured briefly in psychology at the University of London, before returning to New Zealand and teaching at Auckland University College for several years during the 1950s. Geddes subsequently moved to Australia, taking up a chair in social anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1959, and in 1963 he married Ngaere Adele Te Punga. Geddes enjoyed an active academic career until his retirement in 1981, including several stints of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, and post-retirement he continued to travel and work tirelessly for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He died in 1989 at Wahroonga, NSW. Geddes viewed anthropology as a significant force for cross-cultural understanding, tolerance and action, and strongly believed anthropologists should play a practical role in affairs in their particular areas of expertise.
In tribute to Professor W R Geddes, these awards seek to support postgraduate students of merit to pursue courses in Social Anthropology at the University of Otago. The awards will be available via two pathways: one for meritorious postgraduate Social Anthropology students of Māori, Pacific or other Indigenous ancestry, and one for meritorious postgraduate Social Anthropology students of non-Indigenous ancestry.
Applicants must be:
- enrolled or planning to enrol in 400-level study towards a postgraduate programme (i.e. Honours, Postgraduate Diploma, or Master’s degree with a coursework/paper component) taught within the Social Anthropology Programme
- able to provide ancestry verification from the University if of Māori or indigenous Pacific descent.
The following factors shall be considered in selecting the scholarship recipient:
- the applicant’s academic performance throughout their undergraduate study
- evidence of the applicant’s engagement with and/or leadership within their community
- where the applicant will be undertaking a dissertation, the viability of the research proposal for their dissertation as a social anthropological project