Professor Michael Rowlands: 1944–2025

It is with considerable sadness that I write this brief obituary of my close and long-term friend and colleague Professor Michael Rowlands (November 2, 1944-July 19, 2025) whose paper coauthored with Walter van Beek was published in a recent issue of African Arts: “The Art of Singing at Night: The Dogon Baja Ni performance,” (2025). Although this may well have been Mike's first and only appearance in these pages, and his name may well be unfamiliar to many of our readers, Mike nevertheless stands behind much of what has been published in Britain and elsewhere to the east of the Atlantic in the fields of material culture, museum and heritage studies, and the anthropology and history of art.Mike was trained, and subsequently employed, within the broad-based anthropology program established at University College London in 1945 by Professor Daryll Forde. This embraced biological studies of the human species (once called physical anthropology), alongside social anthropology, material culture, and archaeology. In the UCL obituary (UCL 2025) we can see how this broad-based approach was put to effective use when we read thatOne of his more recent publications, coauthored with Stephan Feuchtwang, is Civilisation Recast: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (2019); see also Reframing the Ethnographical Museum: Histories, politics and futures (Rowlands, Stanley, and Ware 2025). Other publications will be found listed in Wikipedia, and his various obituaries (see Nyamnjoh 2025).Mike is survived by his wife, Sue, their two sons, and four grandchildren; as Max Rowlands' photo suggests, Mike enjoyed being a grandfather.