Content area
Full text
Key Words sociocultural anthropology, history, British social science, seminars, British universities
* Abstract This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, concentrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, social anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries--between academic anthropology and practical policy-related research, between "social" and "cultural" anthropology--appear to have withered away. Yet British social anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.
DECLINE AND FALL?
Is British social anthropology still distinctively "British"? Or to rephrase the question, is it still distinctively "social"? This is a question about disciplines and their boundaries, and the answer I offer concentrates less on the substance of what is currently being written, taught, and debated in Britain and more on the institutions and practices through which a strong sense of discipline and boundedness is still, I believe, reproduced.
When he published the first edition of his history of modern British social anthropology, the young Adam Kuper (1973) had no doubt about the coherence of his subject matter: "'British social anthropology' is not merely a term for the work done by British or even British-trained social anthropologists. The phrase connotes a set of names, a limited range of ethnographic regional specialities, a list of central monographs, a characteristic mode of procedure, and a particular series of intellectual problems. In short, it connotes an intellectual tradition" (Kuper 1973:227). By the second edition in 1983, Kuper's confidence had begun to wane. Reviewing British social anthropology in the decade since the book's first publication he spoke of "institutional stagnation, intellectual torpor, and parochialism" while seeking solace in the continuing vitality of "its greatest strength, which is its fine ethnographic tradition" (Kuper 1983:192). By the early 1990s, in a French reference work, he lamented that it was now difficult to see what was "specifically British"...