Mills, James Philip

Identity Statement

Reference code(s)	: GB 0102 PP MS 58
Held at	: School of Oriental and African Studies   Click here to find out how to view this collection at http://www.soas.ac.uk/Archives/home.html ›
Full title	: Mills, James Philip
Date(s)	: Created 1924-c1958
Level of description	: Collection (fonds)
Extent	: 1 box
Name of creator(s)	: Mills | James Philip | 1890-1960 | colonial administrator and anthropologist

Context

Administrative/Biographical history:

James Philip Mills was born in 1890 and educated at Winchester School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1913 he joined the Indian Civil Service and served in North-East India until 1947. He was Sub-divisional officer at Mokokchung in the Naga Hills of Assam from 1917-1924 and Deputy Commissioner, based at Kohima, during the 1930s. In 1930 he married Pamela Vesey-Fitzgerald.

In 1930 he was appointed the Honorary Director of Ethnography for Assam. His first monograph, The Lhota Nagas, was published by the Government of Assam in 1922, followed by The Ao Nagas in 1926 and The Rengma Nagas in 1937. In 1942 he was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute for anthropological fieldwork among the Nagas. In 1943 he was appointed as Advisor to the Governor for Tribal Areas and States, with overall responsibility for tribal matters in North-East India. This appointment enabled him to travel among and study for the first time tribal people living north of the Brahmaputra towards the Tibetan frontier, and to give permission to his good friend Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, and also Ursula Graham-Bower, to enter this closed area and carry out their pioneering studies.

Mills was elected to the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1948 and served as its President from 1951-1953. In 1948 he became Reader in Language and Culture with special reference to South-East Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Here he worked with Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf from the inception of the Department of Cultural Anthropology in 1950 until ill health forced his retirement in 1954.

Content

Scope and content/abstract:

Papers, 1924-c1958, of James Philip Mills, comprising correspondence, diaries, reports, lecture notes and articles, relating to his experiences in North East India, and his later teaching and research on the area.

Access & Use

Language/scripts of material:
English

System of arrangement:

The materials are arranged chronologically.

Conditions governing access:

Unrestricted.

Conditions governing reproduction:

No publication without written permission. Apply to archivist in the first instance.

Finding aids:

Unpublished handlist.

Archival Information

Archival history:

Immediate source of acquisition:

Donated in 1960 with a further accrual in 1990.

Allied Materials

Related material:

The School of Oriental and African Studies Library holds 24 albums of ethnographic photographs in its Art and Archaeology section (catalogue ref: FG.L.716915).

Further papers are held in the Pitt-Rivers Museum Archive, Oxford; Royal Anthropological Institute, London; and Cambridge University, Centre of South Asian Studies.

National Register of Archives: Click here to view NRA record

Publication note:

Description Notes

Archivist's note:

Rules or conventions:

Date(s) of descriptions:
16 May 2000