Difficult folk?: a political history of social anthropology

Abstract

Over the last three decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have energetically reflected on their intellectual role, their relationship to the world and their disciplines' potential contribution to it.This has taken the form of some hard and productive selfquestioning.Despite the best efforts of sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, academics have paid rather less attention to the role that universities play in legitimating and sustaining disciplinary knowledges.Many academics now depend upon the intricate and unique intellectual ecosystems that higher education institutions nurture and protect.Yet we still know relatively little about the institutional role universities and funders play in shaping how academic disciplines effloresce, evolve and mature.This book is a political history of the emergence of social anthropology as an intellectual 'school' and disciplinary identity, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom between the 1930s and the 1960s.My substantive theme is the role that the institutions and resources of the British and imperial state played in fostering the autonomy of this new social science.Difficult Folk? tells the story of a tightly knit community of scholars using state funds and patronage to advance a new theoretical and methodological paradigm, steadily isolating themselves from a broader disciplinary community of colonial administrators, amateur scholars and museum curators.In 1930 social anthropologists emphasised their field's practical relevance to potential funders, particularly the British colonial authorities.By 1960 the discipline was sufficiently established for its This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched.Not for resale.leaders to be able to distance themselves from those who sought to 'apply' anthropological knowledge, whether in the fields of race relations, industrial relations or social development.As they staked out a new disciplinary territory, the discipline's protagonists progressively isolated their field from these different publics.Social anthropology's history is a reminder of the protean and always provisional nature of disciplinary knowledge and methods.This is a book for students of anthropology, their teachers, and all those interested in the political history of the social sciences.This is by no means the first such history of social anthropology.Difficult Folk? seeks to complement existing historiographic milestones -most especially work by Stocking (1984Stocking ( , 1991Stocking ( , 1996)), Kuklick (1991) and Kuper (1996aKuper ( [1973]]), but also the important contributions of Feuchtwang (1973), Goody (1995), Pels and Salemink (1999a), Barth (2005) andYoung (2004).Many senior anthropologists have also offered shorter accounts, whether in detailed obituaries (e.g.Firth (1956) on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Firth (1975) on Max Gluckman) or in perceptive autobiographical pieces -such as Fortes's memories of the LSE seminar (1978) or Leach's barbed observations about the 'unmentionable' role of class prejudice in the discipline (Leach 1984).My own contribution is to draw on recently deposited personal and institutional archives that offer detailed new insights into this period.I use them to show how, during the final years of empire and the domestic higher education, this school acquired the bureaucratic foundations to defend its intellectual territory and sustain its future expansion.For its practitioners the history of anthropology can be a kitchentable affair, a recounting that everyone can join in.We are all involved in telling and retelling our disciplinary pasts, through anecdote, gossip and oral memory as much as through teaching and writing.We learn about disciplinary genealogies through our supervisors, we re-shape history through our bibliographies and citations and literature reviews, and we pass on a sense of disciplinary traditions in our teaching.By this definition, most scholars are involved in the production of 'insider histories' for students and colleagues.How does this book differ from such 'insider histories'?During the thirty-year period I explore, the skein of individual ambitions and rivalries created a dense and tangled social tapestry.It would be easy to focus on charismatic personalities and their academic intrigues, for institutional histories can tend to be worthy, dull affairs.Fortunately, the archives are also full of the messy, complex details of everyday university life.These minutiae serve to bring formal bureaucracies alive.Staying close to the archive also limits any anthropological inclination towards theoretical abstraction.In so doing, I seek to Difficult Folk?This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched.Not for resale.systematically chart the links between the private and public faces of this new intellectual identity, between the scholarly record and the less visible aspects of institutional politics.Throughout this book I show how the success of this emergent disciplinary paradigm depended on the interplay of what I call the four 'i's -ideas, individuals, identities and institutions.For obvious reasons, intellectual history tends to dwell on the first of these factors -ideas.In social anthropology this now means the key methodological and theoretical advances of Bronislaw Malinowski or A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, their disputes and debates, their progenitors and disciples.There are numerous accounts of Malinowski's archetypical fieldwork practice and his influential 'functionalist' theories (e.g.Stocking 1983, Kuper 1996, Young 2004).The historians go on to show how Malinowski's ideas and scholarly influence were gradually superseded by Radcliffe-Brown's more formalist 'hyphenated functionalism' (Stocking 1996, 361), based on his re-readings of Durkheim and Mauss.Whilst intellectual historians try to carefully historicise their accounts, those written for teaching purposes tend to be read with an eye to current concerns.Histories that focus primarily on ideas also risk reifying disciplinary identities and imaginaries.At worst, these histories become Whiggish origin myths, rhetorical pasts written to justify the discipline's subsequently development -what some call 'presentist' historiography (Stocking 1965).Perhaps none of this matters for the new undergraduate, who starts by trying to understand the dominant theoretical schools and their relationships.But it can make it harder to understand the political and social contexts in which theoretical ideas emerge and acquire legitimacy and influence.My focus is on the inter-relationship of the remaining three 'i'sindividuals, identities and institutions.I show how the reputations of individual thinkers depended on their ability to create, promote and manage a new definition of anthropology within the institutions (be they universities, funding councils, philanthropic organisations or professional associations) in which they worked.Success often came to those best able to manipulate the financial and administrative cogs of these institutions.The discipline's epistemological fortunes can also be closely linked to political developments at the end of the colonial era.Changing domestic and international attitudes to the British Empire, the post-war colonial settlement, and a huge expansion in domestic higher education funding in the 1950s and 1960s all had profound resource implications for the new social sciences.Much of the action in this history revolves around a few highly ambitious and determined scholars, their relationships and their Book outlineI begin with the challenge of delimiting academic disciplines through writing their histories.Why not leave this task to the professional historians who are best equipped to call discipline-based scholars to account?Many social scientists feel that, by virtue of their knowledge and training, they are entitled to tell the story of 'their' identity.I This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched.Not for resale.Difficult Folk?This open access library

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