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After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951. GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995; 570 pp.
After Tylor, George W. Stocking, Jr.'s magisterial sequel to his 1987 book Victorian anthropology, tells the story of the consolidation of "social anthropology" as a scholarly discipline in Britain. The narrative, brimming with significant detail and supported by massive primary documentation, is organized by several densely interwoven threads, such as the biographical trajectories of key figures, the institutional contexts of academic activity, the methodological practices of ethnographic fieldwork, and the lively debates over basic analytical concepts such as survivals, totemism, the genealogical method, lineage organization, and functionalism. In order to keep the already lengthy volume within reasonable size, Stocking purposively neglects several other possible threads, including the broader social and political environment of ethnographic theorizing and the relationship between social anthropology, strictly speaking, and related anthropological subdisciplines such as archaeology and linguistics. (Stocking does, however, provide extensive coverage of two contextual matters, the relationship between British colonial policy and...