Short Bibliography

Michael Allen graduated in philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin in 1950 and in 1965 was awarded a doctorate in social anthropology from the Australian National University. He was appointed to a lectureship in anthropology at Sydney University in 1965 and retired as Professor in 1993. His long and continuing interest in the culture of the Newar people of the Kathmandu valley, Nepal was first awakened when he had the good fortune to spend some four months there in 1953. He returned in 1967 and spent some 18 months studying the unique non-monastic variety of Tantric Buddhism practiced by the Newar people of Kathmandu valley. He spent a further nine months in 1973 and again in 1978 studying the cults of Kumari, Taleju and Matsyendranath, the use of food in ritual and various forms of popular pilgrimage. His main publications based on his research in Nepal include The Cult of Kumari: Virgin Worship in Nepal (1975 and revised in 1996), Ritual, Power and Gender: Explorations in the Ethnography of Vanuatu, Nepal and Ireland (2000) and his edited collections Women in India and Nepal (with Soumyen Mukherjee, 1982) and Anthropology of Nepal: Peoples, Problems and Processes (1994). He was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1981.

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