Obituary: Carmen Blacker (1924 - 2009)

Dr Carmen Blacker, the eminent British folklorist, died in Cambridge, England, on 13 July, 2009, having been born in that country, in the county of Surrey. She had served from 1982-1984 as the President of the Folklore Society in London, as well as receiving many scholarly and formally academic honours from around the world, e.g., the Order of the Precious Crown from the Government of Japan, a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1989, and an Honorary Fellowship of (the long time intellectual women's college), Somerville College, Oxford, in 1991; and the Minakata Prize in 2007, for her rare and vastly extensive knowledge of Japanese culture and literature. She is also well known in Australia for her many fine appraisals of the enduring/ accessible aspects of (traditional) Japanese culture, and for her generous friendship to Oxbridge graduates working in Australia, even as here she was even more respected for her remarkable ability to take comparative/folklore scholars into the surprisingly accessible - and meaningful - world of the greater motifs in that same culture.