"Nothing is simple". An ethnographic theory and its history

This lecture was given on April 16th, 2026, at St Andrews University, as the 2nd Peter Gow Memorial Lecture. Its aim is not only to pay tribute to a great anthropologist who died prematurely, but also to explore a fundamental aspect of his work. Namely, the fact that Peter Gow developed what we might call an “ethnographic theory of mixture”. This theory is elaborated here through a comparison between Peter Gow’s work and my own, with a particular focus on what I have termed the Afro-indigenous relationship, counter-miscegenation, and counter-syncretism.