British Social Anthropology: A Retrospective Author(s): Jonathan Spencer Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 29 (2000), pp.

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2000. 29:1-24 Copyright( 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rightsreserved

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

A Retrospective
EH8 9LL, Edinburgh Departmentof Social Anthropology,Universityof Edinburgh, Scotland; e-mail: jonathan.spencer@ed.ac.uk

Jonathan Spencer

Key Words sociocultural anthropology, history, British social science, seminars, British universities This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, con* Abstract centrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particularemphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particularthe Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularlydifficult 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 anthropologystill distinctively "British"? Or to rephrasethe question, is it still distinctively"social"?This is a questionaboutdisciplines and theirboundaries,andthe answerI offerconcentrates on the substanceof whatis less currentlybeing written,taught,anddebatedin Britainandmore on the institutions and practicesthroughwhich a strongsense of discipline and boundednessis still, I believe, reproduced. When he publishedthe firstedition of his history of moder 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 limitedrangeof ethnographic regionalspecialities,a list of centralmonographs,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'sconfidencehad begunto wane.
0084-6570/00/1015-0001$14.00

SPENCER Reviewing British social anthropologyin the decade since the book's firstpublication he spoke of "institutional stagnation,intellectualtorpor,andparochialism" while seeking solace in the continuingvitality of "its greateststrength,which is its fine ethnographic tradition" (Kuper1983:192). By the early 1990s, in a French referencework,he lamentedthatit was now difficultto see whatwas "specifically British" about social anthropologyin Britain (Kuper 1991:307), and in a later edition of his book (Kuper 1996:176), he declaredthat "as a distinctiveintellectual movement," British social anthropologylasted only for the half-centuryfrom the publicationof Malinowski'sArgonauts(1922) in the early 1920s to-oddly enough-the momentin the early 1970s when he publishedhis own book (Kuper for 1973). The futureof social anthropology, Kuper,lies not in nationaltraditions, but in an increasinglycosmopolitanEuropeanexchange (Kuper1996:193). Any writeron moder British anthropologyworks in the long shadowcast by previoushistorians. Apartfrom Kuper,though, most historicalwork has concentratedon the period between the turn of the century and the late 1940s or early consolidatedits positionwithinBritish 1950s, the periodwhen social anthropology academiclife (Goody 1995; Kuklick 1991; Langham1981; Stocking 1984, 1992, to 1995; Urry 1993). AlthoughKupertook the storyforward the late 1960s andhas extendedit to the 1990s in a series of epilogues to his originalwork, his emphasis is overwhelminglyon the intellectualhistoryof the discipline,with relativelylittle attentionto the changing political, social, and institutionalcontext within which that history was worked out (cf Leach 1984:2-3). In what follows then, I want as far as possible to discuss themes and issues thathave been left relativelyunexto plored in recent historiography; work, as it were, "afterStocking"-starting at that point in the early 1950s when Stocking's magisterialwork (Stocking 1995) leaves off-and following a significantlydifferentline of enquiryfrom Kuper's (1983). Since the publicationof the first edition of Kuper's(1973) book, British social anthropologyhas been heavily dependent on the material supportof the British state and has been forced, like all other academic disciplines in British universities,to adaptits practicesof teachingandresearchto an ever more activist educationalbureaucracy. the questionthatdominatesan institutional So historyof recentBritishsocial anthropology this: Has anthropology is survived triumphantly the increasinglydirectiveattentionsof its main source of materialsupport,or has it been irretrievably compromisedand corrupted this relationship? by The central section of this chapteraddresses that question througha review of the demographyof the discipline, seen throughthe lens of changing funding regimes. The closing section attemptsto assess the intellectualconsequences of institutionalchange andreturnsto the sense of decline so forcefully articulated by Kuperin his recent versions of disciplinaryhistory. But in partialdisagreement with Kuper,I suggest that "Britishsocial anthropology" retainsits distinctiveness as a relatively small and coherentgroupof intellectualpractitioners, even though or markers distinction-the thingsthatmakeit "British," "social," the particular of or "anthropological"-have changed, and continue to change. This means that we have-in trueBritishspirit-to replacethe culturalquestionof whatparticular

ANTHROPOLOGY BRITISH SOCIAL

contentmakesBritishsocial anthropology"British" intellectual(or "cultural") for the more sociological questionof whatparticular institutions,practices,andrituals continueto ensureits distinctionfrom its neighborswhile allowing it to change its empiricalfocus and its theoreticalemphases.

STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

In the closing chapterof his book, Stocking (1995) gives a gripping account of to Meyer Fortes' appointment the William Wyse Chairin Cambridgein 1949. In so doing, he reminds us of two things: how small the discipline was in Britain in the late 1940s, and how tenuously placed social anthropology was within British anthropologyof the time. Fortes' main rival for the Cambridgechair was of a Christophevon Ftirer-Haimendorf, German-trained ethnographer limited theoreticalambitionbut with distinct"culturalist" inclinations. If Fiirer-Haimendorf, then at the School of Orientaland African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London, had been appointedto the Cambridgechair, social anthropologywould havebeen reducedto two universitydepartments, Oxfordandthe LondonSchool at of Economics (LSE), with fragments in Manchester and Edinburgh.Instead, Fortes' appointmentsealed a period of postwarconsolidationin which the social anthropologyof Malinowskiand Radcliffe-Brownbecame the dominantstrandof British anthropology(Stocking 1995:427-32). Yet in all that follows, it must be small groupof people. recognized that we are dealing with a remarkably A good sense of the demographicsof the discipline at this moment can be to (Forde gleanedfrom Forde'scontribution a compendiumof worldanthropology 1953). Altogether there were just over 30 social anthropologists in British universities. At Oxford, Evans-Pritchard held the chair, with an extraordinary teamof lecturingstaff,includingJGPeristiany, PaulBohannon,GodfreyLienhardt, Louis Dumont, and Fritz Steiner. At the LSE, RaymondFirthheld the chair,with Isaac Schapera,EdmundLeach, MauriceFreedman,and Paul Stirlingin support, whereasLucy Mairheld a separateposition as Readerin ColonialAdministration. In Manchester,Max Gluckmanwas supportedby ElizabethColson, JohnBarnes, Ian Cunnison,and AL Epstein. At Cambridge,Meyer Fortespresidedover a relatively small department; Daryll Forde,MaryDouglas, and Phyllis Kaberrywere at UniversityCollege London (UCL); and von Furer-Haimendorf at SOAS. was
1All the populationfiguresthatfollow requiremild qualification,as they are gleaned from with a certain published lists of the names of people employed in universitydepartments, amount of informed guesswork necessary to separate social from physical anthropologists, or in later lists, social anthropologistsfrom sociologists in joint departments. The main sources are Forde (1953), the CommonwealthUniversities Yearbook(1963, 1973, 1983, 1993), and the Annals of the Association of Social Anthropologists(ASA 1999). For useful demographicaccounts of the discipline at crucial moments in its recent history,see Ardener& Ardener(1965) and Riviere (1985).

SPENCER The story of British social anthropologyin the years that followed is heavily shapedby the story of British universitiesand their relationshipwith the British state. Although the number of anthropologistsworking in universities had increased to more than 50 by 1963, these were all to be found in the same few as departments in the early 1950s (with the exception of a few odd figuresworkof ing on theirown in large institutionswithoutdepartments anthropologyaround them). In the early 1960s, the British governmentlauncheda majorexpansionof whatuntilthenhadbeen a smallandelitist universitysector:New universitieswere opened, and a whole additionalclass of institutions-polytechnics-was created to supplementthe more conventionaluniversities. In the next decade, anthropolwith sociology, at the new ogy was established, sometimes in joint departments Universities of Sussex, Kent, and East Anglia, while new departmentsstruggled into life at older universitieslike Belfast, Hull, and Swansea. By 1973 therewere about 90 anthropologistsin post, and by 1983 the figure had risen to 120, with two more new departments, Goldsmithsand St Andrews. By 1993 there were at morethan 160 anthropologists workingin Britishuniversities.A check of the ASA Annals (1999) suggests that the latest figure is around220 (this figure includes contracts,for exampleas replacementsfor anthropologists workingon short-term staff on leave). This is not, however,the straightforward of growthand expansionit might tale seem to be. After the rapidexpansionof the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, universities werebadlyhit by government austeritymeasures,andwith the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979, the social sciences were singled out for especially harsh treatment.With cutbacks in state supportfor universities, by the early 1980s the discipline was felt to be in real crisis as the supplyof academic jobs almost completely dried up. The situationonly startedto change at the end of that decade, when the governmentchanged tack and launched a furtherhuge expansion of universityteaching. This time, however, most of the increase was accounted for by much larger studentnumberswithin existing departmentsand degree courses, ratherthan by creatingnew institutions,as had happenedin the 1960s. The new boom in studentrecruitment coincided with a momentof higher public visibility for social anthropology,and demandfor places on anthropology courses has soaredsince the late 1980s. Is this, then, a straightforward of expansion (apartfrom the Thatcherite tale in the 1980s), as it appearsfrom the figures? Or is it a case of tightly hiccup limited expansion (in the context of the growth of universities in general, and social sciences in particular) since the early 1950s? A comparisonwith sociology is instructivehere, not least because the two disciplines have been closely linked throughoutthis period. Before the 1960s boom in universities, sociology as an academicpresencein Britainwas arguablysmallerand moredispersedthansocial anthropology. But by 1981 (the gloomiest year of Thatcher'srule for the social sciences), the discipline had expanded to more than 1000 government-funded universitypositions, growing at almost 10 times the rate of social anthropology. Whatis most significantin the comparisonwith sociology's expansionis the places whereanthropology was not found. Witha handfulof exceptions,it was not taught

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

in the polytechnics, or in the innovative Open University set up by the Labour of Government the 1960s.2 Nor was it establishedas partof the school curriculum. the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 18-year-oldshad studied sociology as an By A-level examinationsubject;in 1999, the figurefor anthropologyremainedstuck on zero (Abrams 1981). There are three possible explanationsfor the limits to anthropologicalexpansion. One is a simple problem of demand: The new welfare bureaucraciesof postwar Britain requiredsociologists (or thought they did) and not anthropologists, and the universitiesand the governmentaccommodatedthemselves to this brutefact. The second is demographic: There were only just enough anthropologiststo build the departmentsthat were built in the 1960s, and not enough to sustain a huge expansion. Yet a numberof leading anthropologists-Peter Worsley,Max Marwick,and Ronald Frankenberg, among others-took up positions in the new in the 1960s, while others,most notablyVictorTurner, and sociology departments laterFG Bailey andStanleyTambiah, Britainforthe UnitedStates. Thisreveals left an important differencein the mode of expansionof the two disciplinesat the time: Social anthropologydepartmentswere concerned with staffing themselves only with social anthropologists;sociology departments were staffed with whomever was available,and the issue of professionalor disciplinarycoherence was raised after-rather than during-the period of expansion. This difference was explicit in the developmentof the relevantprofessional organizationsfor the two disciplines. The Association of Social Anthropologists(ASA) was founded in 1946 with a strongmodel of professionalization mind: Membership in requireda higher degree in social anthropologyand/orevidence of publicationsand a teachingposition in anthropology. until the 1990s, the annualmeetings of the Association Up were markedby careful (and for some distasteful)scrutinyand discussion of the qualificationsof would-be members (cf Tapper1980). The British Sociological Association, in contrast,remaineda far more open organization-a broadchurch much more like the AAA in the United States-despite occasional attemptsto create a more elite professionalstandingfor sociologists (Barnes 1981). The third, and perhapsmost compelling, explanationfor the limits to anthropological expansion is internal to the discipline. Anthropology did not expand into other educationalsettings because anthropologiststhemselves did not want to expand. It was seen as, above all, a subject for graduateresearchers,not for 2Ruth has the Finnegan beenalmost onlyanthropologist employed theOpen by Universityapioneering initiative upbytheLabour set of distance-learning government thelate1960sof theformer to as polytechnics teachanthropology a degree subject. 3British were in a comanthropologists heavilyinvolved establishing socialanthropology in Baccalaureate examination high-school for but ponent theInternational students, forall
its merits, this programreaches a tiny proportionof students in the relevant age group, comparedwith the A-level examinations,which are taken by virtually all 18-year-oldsin whereasOxfordBrookes (formerlyOxfordPolytechnic)was, for a long time, the only one

the schoolsystemin England Wales. and

SPENCER let undergraduates, alone school students. In 1973, for example, Leach argued forcefully against any attemptto introduceanthropologyto school-age students: "Itcould be very confusing to learnaboutotherpeople's moralvalues before you have confident understandingof your own" (Leach 1973:4). In Oxford in the 1970s, social anthropologywas not taught-and not thoughtto be teachable-to as undergraduates a degreesubject. Twentyyearslater,in the conclusionto his brief memoir of British social anthropology,Jack Goody reiteratedthe point that the lack of attentionto undergraduate teachingwas one of the greatstrengthsof British social anthropologyin what was, for him, its golden age (Goody 1995:157-58). Whatever reason,the limitsto expansionhadsome obviousconsequencesfor the the discipline. The places not visited by the insights of anthropological sciencethe polytechnics and the Open University in particular-became the academic home of a great deal of interdisciplinary pedagogic innovation,as well as a and that refugeforthepost-1968intellectualLeft. Theseweretheingredients coalesced into the heady brew now known as "BritishCulturalStudies,"but the work of leading figures in this area (from EP Thompsonand RaymondWilliams to Paul Gilroy, StuartHall, and Paul Willis) barely touched British social anthropology until it was reimportedin the 1980s via the work of American anthropologists unlikeculturalstudiesoreven sociology, (cfNugent & Shore 1997). Anthropology, was almostentirelyconfinedto the older,research-based, elite universities,such as OxfordandCambridge, the moreprestigiousLondoncolleges, suchas the LSE and andUCL. On the otherhand,andin contrastto the United Statesin the early 1990s (cf Turner1993), in Britainculturalstudies neverlooked a threatto anthropology because it rarelyoccupied the same niche in the academicecosystem. In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropology'splace at the heartof the academic establishmentdid not go entirely unremarked on. The young Perry Anderson, in his sweeping polemic against the pervasiveempiricism and liberalism of 1960s British academia,specifically excepted anthropologyfrom his strictures.Anthropology, however,was allowed to be theoreticaland totalizing (a "good thing"for the 1960s Left) because it displaced its attentionsto the colonies, and he quoted a prominentsociologist of the time on the social correlatesof British anthropology: "Britishsocial anthropologyhas drawnon the same intellectualcapital as and sociology proper,andits success, useful to colonial administration dangerous to no domesticprejudice, shows at what a high rate of interestthat capitalcan be made to pay.... The subject... unlike sociology, has prestige. It is associatedwith colonial administration-traditionallya careerfor a gentleman,and entranceinto the profession and acceptanceby it confers high statusin Britain"(see Anderson 1969:265, originalemphasis). This view of the social centralityof British social anthropologyis partlycorroboratedby Leach, himself a formidableacademic politician, in the context of a panegyric to the diplomatic skills of his mentor, Raymond Firth: "Fromthe 1940s to the 1960s he had a wide variety of personal, but quite informal, ties with senior civil servantsin key positions. He used these contactswith outstanding skill.... Firth went behind the scenes and talked with the people who really mattered. Consideringthe tiny scale of the whole enterprisein Britain of the

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

researchwas quite dispropor1950s, the centralfundingof social anthropological It was a phase which only enduredwhile Firthwas at the helm tionatelygenerous. at the LSE" (Leach 1984:13-14). All this, it could be argued,changed when a new breed of professional academic-survivors from the 1960s expansionof the universitiesand, with theirallusions to "wealthcreation"and "market forces,"fluentin the new lingua francaof the times-took control of the centralinstitutionsof British social science in the 1980s. Nevertheless,in the 1990s (the decade of the performanceindicator),the institutionaldistributionof academic anthropologists had its advantages. In official assessments and peer-basedquantifications teaching quality and research of performance-which now dominateBritish academiclife-anthropology departments have consistently performedbetter than other social science disciplines. Although outsidersmight grumbleabout the clannishnessof a discipline that so overtly protectsits own, anthropologistsmerely point to the kinds of institutions they are found in and suggest that their high ratings are no more nor less than would be found elsewhere in those institutions.4

PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

The impressionof a tightlyboundeddisciplineconfinedto a small numberof highstatusinstitutionsis heightenedif we shift our attentionto the social productionof social anthropologists.There are two ways to assess this: Eitherexamine where the PhDs in social anthropology being awarded,or look to see wheresuccessive are cohorts of universityteacherswere trained. Whicheverway we look, the picture is the same, but a new element is also introduced:the increasedvulnerabilityof the discipline (like its sistersin the social sciences) to governmentintervention via state funding organizations. Let's startwith the firstquestion: Wheredo the successful PhDs come from?5 In the quartercentury from 1970 to 1994, just under 1000 PhDs were awarded in social anthropologyin Britain, of which just under half came from just three departments: Oxford, Cambridge,and the LSE (Table 1). Between them they accountedfor 460 of 964 PhDs grantedin thatperiod. If we break these figures down into 5-year periods (Table 2), a slightly more nuancedaccount of the distributionemerges. In particular, get a better sense we
4Again, a comparison with sociology is instructive.Even now, sociology is a marginal discipline in Oxfordand Cambridgewhereas some of the strongestdepartments found are in relativelyunfashionableuniversitiessuch as Lancasterand Essex (Heath& Edmondson 1981). For a valuable guide to anthropology'spassage throughthe stormy bureaucratic waters of the 1990s, see Gledhill (in press). 5Data on anthropologyPhDs in Britain since the early 1970s are available through the Indexto Theses acceptedfor higherdegreesby the Universitiesof GreatBritainandIreland (searchableonline at www.theses.com);some of this materialis also summarized Webber in (1983), which contains a thoroughdiscussion of the limitationsof the classificationsused in organizingthe information.

SPENCER TABLE 1 PhDs in social anthropologyby department,1970-1994 Department Oxford Cambridge London School of Economics School of Orientaland African Studies Manchester Sussex UniversityCollege London Edinburgh Belfast All otherdepartments Total No. PhDs 187 137 136 82 59
51

46 37 31 198 964

of the lag between changes in funding and the completion, years later, of PhDs affected by those changes. So in the early 1970s, although the new departments from the 1960s were beginning to build up their own pools of researchers, few of these had yet completed degrees: Much as might be expected, the three key departments-Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE-provided 60% of the PhDs. By the second half of the decade, however, although the total number rose from 132 (about 26 a year) to 214 (45 a year), the Oxford-Cambridge-LSE share dropped to less than 40%, as students in newer departments-notably Sussex-started to complete their doctoral studies. The total numbers for all departments briefly rose in the first half of the 1980s, before settling at, or just below, 40 a year. And as the TABLE 2 PhDs in social anthropologyby department,1970-1994 (5-year intervals) Years 1970-1974 1975-1979 1980-1984 1985-1989 1990-1994 Total Oxford 33 40 42 41 31 187 Cambridge 20 27 40 23 27 137 LSEa 26 17 19 41 33 136 Total (all UK) 132 214 232 204 182 964 Oxford, Cambridge, LSE (%of all PhDs) 60 39 44 51 50 48

aLSE,London School of Economics.

BRITISHSOCIALANTHROPOLOGY TABLE 3 Postgraduate trainingof academicanthropologistsemployed in British departments, 1999a Department Cambridge LSE Oxford SOAS UCL Manchester Sussex Edinburgh Durham Kent Belfast Hull Other(UK) Other(non-UK) Total Pre-1989 staff 23 16 16 11 10 4 6 3 1 2 2 1 2 8 105 Post-1989 staff 24 23 22 8 6 7 3 2 4 1 0 0 10 19 129 Total 47 39 38 19 16 11 9 5 5 3 2 1 12 27 234 %age of total 24 17 16 8 7 5 4 2 2 1 1 <1 5 12 100

aLSE,London School of Economics; SOAS, School of Orientaland African Studies; UCL, University College London.

figures settled, so the share held by the "big three"departmentsstabilized at about 50%. These figures tell another story, of the rise and decline of state supportfor which I returnto shortly. What,though, graduateresearchin social anthropology, of academicjobs? Table 3 shows collated informationon the graduatetraining of anthropologistscurrentlyworking in British departments. They are divided into two cohorts: those first employed before the crisis years of the 1980s, and those who took up theirfirstpermanent afterward. local historical For appointment reasons, 1989 is taken as the watershedyear.6 The division by cohorts is instructive. Over half the staff (55%) working in British departmentsin 1999 had been first appointedin the preceding 10 years whereas just under half (45%) were survivorsfrom the pre-Thatcherexpansion of the discipline. But the dominance of the big three departmentsis remarkably stable across the generations: 55 of the pre-1989 generationwere trainedat
6In some years in the 1980s, there were virtuallyno permanentacademicjobs offered in Britishanthropologydepartments.In 1989, an unprecedented numberof new posts became availableat LSE, UCL, Brunel, SOAS, and Manchester.

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SPENCER Oxford, Cambridge,or the LSE, as were 68 of the post-1989 generation(52% and 53% of their respective cohorts). Within the three departments, Cambridge is disproportionately important:Although it awardedonly 14%of the doctorates in social anthropologybetween 1970 and 1994, in 1999 its graduatesheld 24% of the jobs in British universities(Oxfordhad 19%of the doctoratesand 16%of the jobs, and the LSE had 14% of the doctoratesand 17%of the jobs). In other continueto dominatethe discipline, the departwords, althoughthreedepartments ment at Cambridgehas been especially successful in providingnew generations of academicanthropologists. There are other patternsthat are not clear from the aggregatedfigures alone. Some departments display high levels of endogeny,recruitingheavily from their own graduates.This has been especially true of Oxford and Cambridgeover the years, but also of SOAS and UCL until recently.Oxford studentshave been unin derrepresented recruitmentat the LSE and vice versa. And there are signs of more diverse recruitmentin recent years, especially from North America: only five of the pre-1989 generationhold North American PhDs compared with 15 of the post-1989 cohort (including four from Chicago and two from Princeton). Unfortunately,data are not easily available on other aspects of anthropologists' educationalbackground,such as their class or ethnic origins. We can, however, see significantshifts in the gender balance. In the mid-1980s, Riviere (1985) reportedto the ASA on the demographicshape of the discipline, using a sample of nine departments. analysis showed thatthe ratio of men to women had barely His changedsince the early 1970s: In 1973 therewere 12 women to 67 men; in 1983, there were 15 to 69, a tiny rise from 15% to 18% (Riviere 1985:11). In 1999, in the discipline as a whole, there were 97 women in teaching positions, or 41% of the total, and a breakdownby cohort shows how much has changed: In the pre-1989 generationthere are 23 women (22%) to 82 men (78%), a figurein line with Riviere's reportfrom the 1980s; in the post-1989 cohort, the figures are 55 men (43%) and 74 women (57%). If we step back from the details and try to look at the largerpicture, a number of patternsare clear. Although British social anthropologyhas remained a relatively small and tightly knit community, taught in a few universities only, graduateresearch-and the productionof new generationsof anthropologistsconcentratedin the same three departments: Oxford, has been extraordinarily and the LSE. Viewed in the long run, diversityhas tended to be peCambridge, ripheraland short-lived. The distinctive strandof work pioneeredby Gluckman and his followers in Manchesterdid not long surviveGluckman'sown retirement in in the early 1970s: The rebirthof that department the 1980s owed everything to the imaginative appointmentof Marilyn Strather to the chair in 1984 and signaled the beginning of the second wave of diversificationin British anthropology. In the 1970s, Sussex emerged as the main producerof new graduate researchers (otherthanthe big three)-often workingin new fields such as Europe and Latin America-but with the cutbacks of the 1980s, it, like the other new

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY BRITISH

11

departmentsof the 1960s, lost access to the funds that would keep its graduate programalive. As this might suggest, a great deal of what happened can be explained by the distributionof supportfrom one centralagency. Until the mid-1960s, British had social anthropology reliedon a combinationof sourcesfor its relativelymodest researchneeds: the Colonial Social Science ResearchCouncil and other British governmentsources, certainAmericanfoundations(such as the FordFoundation and the National Science Foundation), and a few British foundations [a more detailedaccountof pre-1968fundingcan be foundin a reportto the Social Science ResearchCouncil (1968:92-99)]. In 1965, the British governmentestablishedits own Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which provided grants for new researchprojectsand supportedgraduatestudentsat mastersand doctorallevels. In its first decade, the new SSRC presided over a boom in graduateresearch in the social sciences. Such was its impact that by 1971, the chair of its social anthropologycommittee, EdmundLeach, could reportthat it provided"virtually the only source of financial supportfor field research in social anthropology" (Leach 1971:11). At the peak of its munificence, in 1973, the SSRC was able to offer 84 new awards to graduateresearchersin social anthropology,spread around11 departments, with just over half directedto the triangleof Oxford, but Cambridge,and the LSE.7 The SSRC was a 1960s initiative, initially ill-suited to the straitenedcircumstances of the 1980s. When MargaretThatcherwas elected Prime Minister in 1979, one of her government'sfirst actions was to slash its budget. An enquiry into the activitiesof the SSRC failed to producethe recommendation abolition for favored by some Conservativepoliticians, but it was the catalyst for a number of changes. The organizationwas renamedthe Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-the Minister responsible apparentlyhad a deep suspicion of was changed so that social any claim to social science-and its internalstructure anthropology(along with other disciplines) lost its own cozy subjectcommittee. Fromthe peak supportof the mid-1970s, studentshipsfell to between 20 and 30 a year,where they have remainedever since. Afterthese reforms,the ESRC aggressively reinventeditself as the vanguardorganizationfor the Tories' new cultural commandeconomy.New ESRCprioritiesin researchfundingat firstexplicitlyemphasized "wealthcreation"and implicitly focused almost entirelyon UK-focused work, apparentlydiscouragingthe kind of classic anthropologicalfield projects that had been supportedin the past. Tough controls on PhD submission rates meant that by the late 1980s, most British departments(including at one point Cambridge,UCL, and SOAS) had been blacklistedfor ESRC students. They also meant that theses had to be writtenmore quickly, fieldworkand writing-uptime 7Thefiguresfor graduate student fromthe late 1960sto the early1980scanbe support tracked the whichalso contains annual of Newsletter, through issuesof the SSRC reports the SocialAnthropology Committee.

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SPENCER were squeezed, and compulsorygeneric social science researchtrainingate into prefieldwork preparation.8

REPRESENTATIONS,INITIATIVES, AND BOUNDARIES

In a broadoverview, the difficult trick is to move back from this kind of institutional history to see what intellectualresonance it has. One way to do this is to look at the discipline's own self-representations. These might include everything from the contentof undergraduate lists, to textbooksand introductionsto reading the subject,throughthe presence (and nonpresence)of anthropologistsas public intellectuals in the mass media. In the interests of space, I concentrateon four defining occasions, the Decennial conferences of the Association of Social Anthropologists,alternatingbetween Cambridgeand Oxford, in 1963, 1973, 1983, and 1993, the occasions when British social anthropologyput on its best party dress and displayeditself to the world. The 1963 conference-coorganized by M Gluckmanand F Eggan-brought fromthe "younger togetherleadingBritishandAmerican"socialanthropologists" generation"(Gluckman& Eggan 1965:xii).9 The paperswere published in four distinctivevolumes [on religion, political systems, complex societies, and the use of models (Banton 1965a-d)], with a common introductionfrom the two coorganizers. This set out an explicit agenda for the meeting: not so much the celebrationof the distinctivenessof British social anthropologyas an explorationof a set of sensitive boundaries. The most obvious of these was between British and American anthropology,and the opening shot came with Gluckmanand Eggan implicitly cooptingthe likes of Schneiderand Geertzas "social"(ratherthan"culhowever,were the boundariesbetween tural")anthropologists. Equallyimportant, anthropologyand the other social sciences-economics, political science, sociology, psychology-each of which was weighed up as a potentialpartnerin the introduction.In the differentvolumes, the British contributors-on the wholeconcentratedon typologies and formal model building. [Turner(1965), as ever, provideda magnificentexception in his classic paperon Ndembu color symbolism.] This was anthropologyas generic social science, ready for the brave new world of the 1960s expansion, and many of the British participantsmoved into and chairsandreaderships, oftenin newjoint anthropology sociology departments, in the subsequentdecade. to was of that 8Itmustbe remembered, course, theSSRC/ESRC farmoreimportant anthroof morethana tinyfraction theorganizanever claimed pologythananthropology-which also low tion'sresources-wasto its mainfunder. Anthropology's relatively profile hadits of fromideologues the became focusof attack uses,as in theearly1980s,whensociology theNewRight. from a of 9Theoccasion attracted fairamount reminiscence the participants e.g. has (see 1988;Geertz1991, 1995;Goody1995;Schneider 1995). Of courseit only Frankenberg muchlaterin theday. as Decennial became recognized the"first"

ANTHROPOLOGY BRITISH SOCIAL

13

The 1973 conference came at the peak of a decade of growth, and the publications that emerged reflected the kind of intellectual optimism that academics usually only manage in a period of apparentlyunlimited expansion. The was genericeditorialintroduction this time providedby EdwinArdener,who in his MalinowskiMemoriallecture a few years earlierhad detected a spiritof novelty runningthroughthe discipline: "[F]orpracticalpurposestext-bookswhich looked useful, no longer are;monographswhich used to appearexhaustivenow seem sewhich once looked full of insightnow seem mechanicaland lective; interpretations lifeless" (Ardener1971:449). In keeping with Ardener'spassion for the new, the conference theme was "New Directions." In his introduction,however,Ardener seemed keen to stressthe "deeproots"of some of the topics covered,pointingout that the offerings of the 1963 conferencehad not become the stuff of controversy in the interveningyears, not least because "new"theory in the 1960s had usually come fromFrancerather thanthe UnitedStates(Ardener1975). Of the topics covered by panels in the conference itself, six eventuallyfound their way into print: on Marxism (Bloch 1975), symbolism (Willis 1975), "biosocial"anthropology (Fox 1975), texts (Jain 1976), transactionalism (Kapferer1976), and mathematical techniques(Mitchell 1980). But whereas the founding monographsfrom the 1963 meeting had served as canonical texts in the new undergraduate syllabuses of the 1960s, only two or three of the 1973 volumes enduredto fill thatniche. If the year of the "isms"(as 1973 is now recalled) provided a conference for its time, this was even more true of 1983.10 Only one volume emerged from the proceedings, althoughmore were originally planned. The theme was "social anthropologyin the 1980s," and despite all the panels on gender (unrepresented in 1973 but now a major theme), on family and economy, and on anthropology and policy, and despite the keynote addresses(fromBeteille andTambiah,Goody, was whether,in Godelier,and MaryDouglas), the questionfor many participants ThatcheriteBritain, there even would be a social anthropologyafter the 1980s. The only volume to emerge from the conference was on the interface between anthropologyanddevelopmentpolicy (Grillo& Rew 1985), reflectingwidespread aboutthe futureof thediscipline,andtheprospectsfor employment heart-searching of the growingreservearmyof underemployed PhDsin the subject. Oneparticipant was quoted in a contemporary on the events: "Thisisn't a conference, it's report a psychodrama" (Grillo 1983:10). For once, the most significantdevelopmentsoccurrednot in the set-piece presentationsby luminaries.(The "youngergeneration" time mighthavebeen too this much of an embarrassment act as an intellectualfocus.) The most importantto and heated-exchanges seem to have taken place in the business meeting, as the members of the Association argued about the best solution to the current employmentcrisis in the discipline. EdmundLeach in particular objectedstrongly 1973 sessionmetamicably outside official the 10"[In a]women's Someradical programme. leafletswerecirculated. third The worldnowfigured a political well as anacademic as as The at in subject. historical period least(it maywell be thought 1983)wasunmistakable" (Ardener 1975:ix).

14

SPENCER to attemptsto train anthropologygraduatesfor nonacademicemployment. He followed this with a heartfeltletterto the committee set up by the ASA to report on employmentin appliedanthropology:"TheASA was startedas a 'professional tradeunion' in the sense thatit soughtto ensurethatwhen social anthropology was taughtin universitiesandelsewherethe people who were employedto do the teaching were properlyqualifiedin the subject....As a professionalbody we need to tell Heads of Departments thatthey should discouragestudentsfrom embarkingon a courseof studiesleadingto a PhD in social anthropology.It mustbe emphasisedto such potentialstudentsthatthe prospectsof everbeing employedas a professional social anthropologists[sic] are extremelysmall.... I would personallybe horrified if it became apparentthat the 'syllabus design' of what is taughtin a University Departmentof Social Anthropologywas slantedtowards 'appliedanthropology.' This would indeed be ironical!... the originalrole of the ASA was to preventthe Universitiesfrom employingunqualifiedrefugees from the disappearing Colonial service to teach 'appliedanthropology' (see Grillo 1994:309-10). !" Leach's angerat the threatened dilutionof "pure" anthropologyin Britishuniversities has deep disciplinaryroots. In the late colonial period,academiccontrol of the relevantcommitteesof the Colonial Social Science ResearchCouncil meant thatBritishanthropologists enjoyedenoughscientificautonomyto ignoredemands for more relevantresearch,and Kuklick,for example, documentsthe disdain expressed by many leading anthropologistsin the 1940s (not least EdmundLeach workin thecolonies (Kuklick1991:190-93). himself) forpractical,policy-oriented considerableresistance from some quarters-what happenedin Yet-despite the early 1980s may well have transformed discipline. Fromthe firstcuts in the the then SSRCbudgetin the summerof 1979, some anthropologists startedto organize for the bleak times ahead. A succession of workshopsandworking-groups emon for anthropologygraduatesgave birthto a clusterof organizationswith ployment ever-changing acronyms(GAPP,BASAPP,SASCW) andculminatedin a reportto the ASA (Grillo 1984). Much of this activityemanatedfrom the new departments of the 1960s, which by now had fallen on hard times-Kent, for example, but especially Sussex. With hindsight,the activists' efforts have proven remarkably successful. Throughoutthe 1980s the only significantgrowth area in academic anthropologywas in more-or-less vocational taught masters degrees. This was to paralleledby a growthin demandfor anthropologists work in nonacademicsettings, especially-but not exclusively-in the field of social development. In the in 1990s, the betterresourced,but often more conservative,departments London, Oxford,and Cambridgehurriedto establish similarprogramsin such areasas developmentanthropology-a clear case of innovationat the disciplinaryperiphery at and being appropriated reincorporated the core. in transformation disciplinarytrajechowever,this particular Symptomatically, tory was not especially apparentin the most recent celebrationof British social anthropology,the 1993 Decennial. In contrastto the 1983 event, the mood was upbeatand expansionist. The universitieshad startedto grow again-in student numbersat least-and enough new posts had been advertisedin recent years to

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absorbalmost all the underemployedleftovers from the 1980s. Social anthropology was in especially good shapebecauseit was experiencingits own boom within the bigger boom; it found itself in unexpecteddemandfrom a generationof new students. It was still a very small discipline with a relatively low public profile, but it was beginning to show signs of imminenttransitionto being a mass subject mass universitysystem (Gledhill, in press). taughtin an under-funded The overalltheme for the conferencepromisedto addresssome of the changes thathadovertaken disciplinein thepreviousdecade-"The Uses of Knowledge: the Global and Local Relations." Yet neitherpedagogy nor the dilemmas of practically engaged anthropologywere much discussed in the main sessions.11 These insteadfocused on a mixtureof classic themes (religious certainties)and areasof recent intellectual excitement (consumptionand modernity). Outside observers noted the upbeatmood (Stolcke 1993), and the "continuingrapprochement with Americanculturalanthropology," evincedby the numberof presentations fromanthropologistsinstitutionallybased in North America (Stocking 1995:438). Some of the most exciting discussion at the conference itself took place in fringe sessions on art, on new reproductive technologies, and on ethnic violence, and these sessions were also more representativeof the new, post-1989 generationof anon thropologists(underrepresented the platformin the main conferencesessions). The conference organizer's"traditional" forewordto the eventualpublicationsandcommandingfor the 1963 volumes, reducedbut still reasonablyfull expansive in 1973-was effectively shrunkto a shortbut challengingparagraph 1993, as in if the kind of expansiveoverview offered with such confidenceby Gluckmanand Eggan 30 years earlierwere simply no longer feasible (Strathern1995a). We can look at the conferences of 1963, 1973, 1983, and 1993 as moments of collective self-presentation. And we can look back at whathas andhas not survived from the earlierones. But we can also look at these as occasions to intellectually take stock, in particular,as occasions to renegotiatethe discipline's boundaries: in 1963 with the other social sciences; in 1973 with sources of new ideas from outsideBritainand/oroutsidethe discipline;in 1983 with the economic chill of the so-called "realworld";and in 1993 with the forces of the global (in anthropology, as well as in the world).

SOCIALSTRUCTURE AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

At this point let's look at two important themes from recentwork in the social history of science. Reviewing the exteralism/intemalism debatein science studies, and the linked issue of boundariesaroundculturalpractices like science, Shapin talk"helps us see the (1992) points out that for historiansof science, "boundary nonnecessity of actors' accounts of scientific practice, especially when we have 1The mostnotable was convened exception the sessionon the uses of socialknowledge Moore(cf Moore1996). by Henrietta

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SPENCER the cultural distance of the historian looking at past practice. In his book, We Have Never Been Modem, BrunoLatour(1993) goes furtherand stresses the fictive natureof all attemptsto bound off "science"from "society"or "politics,"or "nature" a discrete realm from "culture," place of those who study it. In as the networksof actors transgressthese boundaries,and our world is full of practice, hybrids-part nature,partculture. To deal with this a greateffort is put into what Latourcalls the "workof purification."In a close, but slightly different,neck of the historiographic woods, attentionhas been drawnto the ways in which scientific "facts"are made (in laboratoriesand other highly structured settings), not given (in nature). And if "facts"are made, so are the specialists who observe them, the communityof scientists-to invoke the language of Shapin & Schaffer's (1985) study of Hobbes and Boyle, a boundedgroupwith special powers of "witness." These historical argumentsoffer a new perspectiveon the shifting concerns revealedin the four ASA Decennial conferences. Each, in differentways, might be thought of as a returnto the questions I opened with: Is it still British? Is it still social? Is it still anthropology? There is a long history here. In the early 1950s, in a carefullystagedand still celebratedexchangein the pages of American Anthropologist,George Murdockand RaymondFirthdebatedthese very issues. Concentratingon the then recently published African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, Murdock leveled a number of accusations at his British colleagues. Sure they'regood at what they do, but theirgeographicalandtheoreticalinterests, their reading, their ideas are so narrow. Crucially,they shy away from all talk a of "culture," fact which reveals them in theirtruecolors-they're not anthropologists at all, they'reactually sociologists (Murdock1951:471).12 Here we face an apparentparadox, for virtually all of Murdock's marks of British distinction in the 1950s appearto have melted into air in the 1970s and on 1980s. By the 1960s, the earlyconcentration Africa,whichtaxedMurdock,was alreadygiving way to workin Asia and Europe(SSRC 1968, Kappers1983). The obsession with kinshipat the expense of all otherareasof life (Murdock apparent 1951:467) seems also to have declined: the topic was barely mentioned in the main sessions of the 1993 Decennial, and its recent revival in Britainowes more to the influence of that arch culturalist,David Schneider, than to the ghost of Radcliffe-Brown (cf Carsten 2000, Franklin 1997, Strathern1992). "Culture" has probablybeen as much discussed in Britain as in the United States in the 1990s, whereas a whole host of topics-until recently rigorously policed by the anthropologicalboundarypatrol, for example psychological (Bloch 1998) and psychoanalytic (Heald & Deluz 1994) work-have been quietly admitted to the mainstream. These days more attention is probably paid to the work of American anthropologistsin Britain than to the work of British (or French or Norwegian or German) anthropologistsin the United States. Even applied, of or practical,anthropology-anathema to professionalanthropologists Leach's and fair is to 12Firth's (1951)response Murdock characteristically anddiplomatic, in the with in active building he decade wasespecially colleagues bridges suchAmerican following as DavidSchneider.

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become the discipline'sbreadgeneration-has, for manyBritishanthropologists, and-butter since the 1980s. Yet as anyone who has spent time aroundBritish anthropologydepartments would admit, boundarytalk remains a vigorous idiom in everyday practice. In an unjustlyneglected paperfrom the early 1980s, Watson(1984) provideda rich vein of examples of the social/culturalboundarypatrol, from both sides of the Atlantic.It is probablytrue thatexplicit boundarytalk is slightly less likely to be found in printthanin the past, but the question "Is this anthropology?" still the is stuffof some PhD examinationsin Britainand"Shedidn'tseem to reallyknowthat much anthropology"is not unknown as an explanationof the failure to appoint some brilliant outsider to a new position.13 How are these judgments formed when, as we have just seen, the formal criteriaseem so shifting and evanescent? From whence do new Britishanthropologists disgain theirtrulyanthropological positions? One clue can be found in a recent essay by Kuper(1992). In the context of a he complaintaboutthe corrosiveeffects of alien American"culturalism," provides a brilliantlyvivid evocation of Cambridgein the mid-1960s: "A universitylike is itself impressed Cambridge an efficientengine of acculturation.The department a very specific academic identity on the new recruit. Within a couple of terms it would turn out a fledgling Fortesian Africanist or structuralistSouth Asianist, armed with some ideas but above all with strong loyalties. It is interestingthat these ideas were inculcated with a minimum of direct instruction.One had to pick up a great deal on one's own. That also made one less likely, perhaps,to rebel. There was little explicit control,though it is significantthat when we tried to establish a small seminarof our own, Fortes did his best to nip it in the bud" (Kuper1992:60). numThis, remember,was the departmentthat produced a disproportionate ber of today's academic anthropologistsin Britain. It did so, apparently, with a "minimumof directinstruction."(The oral archivesuggests that Kuper'saccount is at least as true of Oxford, where the ability to leave students to "pick up a great deal on one's own" was elevated to an art form.) We are in the realm, I suggest, of "tacitknowledge,"whose importancein scientific practicehas been well documentedsince Polanyi'sPersonalKnowledge(1958). How is this kind of The conventionalanswer knowledgeimparted,if not through"directinstruction"? is throughwhat Lave & Wenger(1991) call "legitimateperipheralparticipation," the acquisitionof membershipin a "communityof practice." And where is it imparted? Kuper'slast sentence gives one clue: in the seminar. Seminarsloom large in British anthropologicalreminiscence.Gell startshis posthumously published, autobiographicalaccount of his own anthropological formationwith severalpages of reflectionon "seminarculture"in British anthrowithouta weekly seminarseries is like a pology: "[A]n anthropologydepartment the recent work anthropology's on talk 13Unfortunately, mostimaginative boundary (Gupta & Ferguson divisionandinsteadtalksof a unitary 1997)choosesto ignorethe Atlantic "Anglo-American anthropology."

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SPENCER body without a heart,"and "seminarcultureis what really defines my academic thanmembership a rathernebulous'profession"'(Gell 1999:2,3). of metier,rather Gell providesan accountof his own anthropological self-makingin termsof successive seminarshe presentedto, and participatedin: as an undergraduate with to seminar Meyer Fortesin Cambridge;as a fledgling researcher the postgraduate at the LSE; and then, to his amazement,to the full departmental seminarpresided over by Raymond Firth. Gell concentrateson the pleasures of performancebut also remarkson the skills of the listener, as acquiredin the audience of Firth's seminarat the LSE: "[A]ll those in attendancewere assumed to be able to comment intelligently, and would be asked to do so if the chairmansaw fit. Since I never knew when Raymondmight ask 'Well, what do you think, Mr Gell?' it was absolutelynecessaryto pay attentionboth to the paperand to the subsequent discussion, on pain of possible public humiliation.I still retainthe abilityto listen to an hour'spaperand 50 minutes of discussion, withoutlapses of concentration, as a resultof this early,invaluable,training"(Gell 1999:5). In his own memoir,David Schneiderdescribesthe impactof RaymondFirth's seminarat the LSE in very similar terms [and contrastsit to the ghastly experience of trying to tell Gluckman'sseminaraboutZulus in Manchester(Schneider 1995:125-29)]. Goody, reminiscingof the ASA in the 1950s, drawssome further ... links: "Attendance was virtuallyobligatoryin the fifties. However the general of atmospherewas one of camaraderie, solidarity,of communitas,ratherthan authority; the seminars and the drinking were done together....Life was in some ways like an on-going seminar,with continuingdiscussions of this or thattheme, whatX thought,whatnew empiricalworkhadto say on the subject. The closeness of the fraternity one way in which the highly amorphoussubjectof anthropolwas ogy (which can be all things to all men) was given some manageablebounds,and some continuing focus was providedfor currentinvestigations" (Goody 1995:83, my emphasis). And Leach, like many others,describesthe ultimatesource for the whole tradition:Malinowski'sseminarat the LSE in the 1920s and 1930s (Leach 1986:376; cf Firth 1975:2-3, Stocking 1995:294-5).14 Here the importanceof the continuingdominationof the discipline by a handful of core departments becomes obvious. With over half of the membersof the out of three,relativelysmall, departments-even now, the comdisciplinecoming bined membershipof the departments concernedis no more than 30 or 40-and others passing throughto give papers on a reasonablyregularbasis, just a few of as the 14Historians sciencehavetraced importance theseminar thelocusof scientific of and seminars eighteenth- nineteenth-century of to or bildung, self-creation, the scientific 1989, Olesko1991). This wouldseemto providea stronglink to the (Clark Germany wonderful worldof Malinowski (andof courseBoas). Schaffer's Physics essay,"From treatment to Anthropology-and Back Again"(1994), containsthe most imaginative but in of the placeof scientific self-making the earlyhistoryof Britishanthropology, it little and and more concentrates on thelaboratory its practices hasrelatively to say about historians. Hereis a topicforfuture seminars seminar and culture.

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weekly seminarscan continue to act as a testing groundfor what is or is not anthropologicallycorrector theoreticallyinteresting. They can, moreover,do so in a flexible way: The seminardoes not necessarilycare if the boundariesshift over the years. It may appearto have some sort of collective memory,but it is not a court,susceptibleto formalappealsto precedent.It is ratherthe settingfor certain and stylized kinds of performance, for the passing of, often tacit,judgments. Insofar as the performancebecomes second nature,the judgmentsthemselves may be in in allowed to differ. Cambridge the 1960s was, afterall, a department which the dominantfigures-Leach and Fortes, Tambiahand Goody-were, intellectually at least, perceivedto be at warwith each other(Gell 1999:4, Kuper1992:60). And British anthropology,in what may have been its real golden era-the 1950s and 1960s ratherthan the 1930s-was the scene of endless set-piece public controversies. Besides those of Fortesand Leach, therewere battlesbetween Leach and Gluckman,Needham and Gellner,Needham and Beattie. My point is that these were the productsof a close-knit seminarculturethat, ratherthan inculcatinga simple and narroworthodoxy,set the terms for what was deemed worthy of argument. The decline of such bitter academic argumentsince the 1980s may be a symptomof many things-the changingpolitics of academic employment,the shifting genderbalance of the discipline-but it may above all heraldthe decline of the kinds of multiplex social relationscelebratedby Goody in his description of the 1950s. In itself, the demographicgrowthof the discipline has threatened kinds of the I tacit structure havejust been describing-the annualASA conferences,for example, have for years been too big to reproducethe intellectualcommunitasinvoked by Goody, yet too small to act as all-purposeoccasions of professionaleffervescence like the AAA meetings (cf Ardener1983). And it is debatablewhetherthe kind of tight disciplinarityGoody celebratescan survivebeyond a certainpoint of demographicexpansion, whateverthe institutionalenvironment.But the institutional environment Britisheducationis now especially hostile to the endurance in of the implicit and the unstated. In her Cambridgeinauguralin 1994, Marilyn Strather concluded with a meditationon the recent mania in higher education for renderingexplicit what often works best by being left implicit: To put it more of withoutinstruccrudelythanshe ever would, the translation Kuper's"education tion"into a set of aims and objectivesat the head of a readinglist, with appropriate cross referencesto the institutionalmission statement(Strathern1995b). A classic examplewould be fieldworkitself, which, in Evans-Pritchard's Oxford,simply could not be taught,it could only be learnedby doing-"methods andmethodology were Americanterms"(Gilsenan 1990:225). Now, however,the ESRC demands that explicit methodstrainingfrom all departments would receive its funding,and anthropologyhas yielded to this demandlike the other social sciences. Yet it is worth ending with one characteristicanthropologicalresponse to the demandsof the new educationalcommandeconomy in Britain.If we look at the disciplinary guidelines for research training in different subjects drawn up for the ESRC, anthropology'sentrylooks odd (ESRC 1996). Where sociologists, for

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SPENCER example, are given a crisp one-page list of things every new sociologist should know ("the principlesof descriptiveand inferentialstatistics and bi- and multivariableanalysis;the systematicanalysisof textualandotherqualitativedata... "), social anthropology's entryis long andhighly discursive,yet somehowit manages to omit any list of requiredtechniques,except for broadgesturestowardfieldwork and language learning. What is describedin the social anthropologyguidelines is a set of desired relationships(primarilywith the supervisor),a long process (fieldwork)of an otherwise open-endedkind, and a certainkind of central social event: the researchseminar.Describedwith care, this crucibleof anthropological trainingcould be one of the Cambridgeseminarsof the 1960s, or it could be at the Institutein Oxford, or in Gluckman'sManchester,or at the LSE with Bloch, Parry,and Gell taking on some puzzled foreign star in the 1980s. Although it misses out on a certainamountof telling local detail-there is no requirement that the seminarbe chairedby an apparent megalomaniacand no allusion to the high levels of dysfunctionalbehaviorexhibitedin the classic seminarsof British social of anthropology-it links the anthropology the 1990s back to the primalscene that still hauntedthe anthropologists who consolidatedBritish social anthropologyin the 1950s, Malinowski's seminar at the LSE. It seems to me at the very least arguablethat here-rather than the rite of fieldwork, which is after all, hard to control from a distance-is one key site of continuity,a place where we do "the workinvolvedin makinginterdisciplinary boundariesappearsui generis"(Watson 1984:352). Finally, a note of caution. The kind of demographicpictureI presentedearlier should rule out anything as final as a conclusion. British social anthropology has just passed througha decade of growthand expansion,in which its teaching and researchinterestshave been transformed. AlthoughI suspect its institutional oddities will ensure its survivalas a distinctive strandof an increasingly global discipline,it is nevertheless possible thatfuturehistorianswill insteadsee the 1990s as as the end of Britishsocial anthropology we haveknownit. In the end I havetold the story as it makes most sense to me, concentratingon institutionalfacts rather than more conventionalintellectual history. Even within my picture of centerchoices have shaped peripherydynamics, I can see how some of my interpretive the story I have told. For reasons of space I have not, for example, attempted to develop an argumentabout British anthropology'spresence (or absence) in the public sphere-from Leach's Reith lectures in the 1960s, throughhis role in rejuvenatingthe RAI in the 1970s, and taking on board the importantrole of British public service broadcastingas a sponsor for the discipline in the years that followed (Leach 1968, 1974). One of the most vital productsof that story is the RAI's "popular" publications,RAINand laterAnthropologyToday,which betweenthe two provideas good a sense of the changingconcernsof the discipline in Britain as any source (Benthall 1996). I have concentrated,I now see, most lecturein the early 1970s. heavily on the years since I sat in my firstanthropology Had I sat in the lecture 10 years earlier,I suspect I would have had more to say about the earlieralternativestrandsopened up by Gluckmanand his proteges at

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Manchester. Writing from one particular perspective, especially one so close to the object being described, has its limitations. But, if I have one point to make, it is one anticipated by Leach (1984:3) in his memoir from the 1980s: "The sociology of the environment of social anthropologists has a bearing on the history of social anthropology." That, it seems to me, is a very social anthropological way of approaching one's own history. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been especially fortunate in the advice and help I have received from many colleagues. Pat Caplan and Ralph Grillo generously shared their memories of the difficult decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Both helped me locate important documents from the 1980s, as did Alan Barnard and Nigel Rapport. Seminar audiences in Saint Andrews and in the Department of Sociology at Edinburgh raised important questions and supplied further insights. In this respect I must especially thank Jonathan Hearn, John Holmwood, Steve Sturdy, and Neil Thin. Jonathan Parry directed my attention to Gell's crucial commentary on seminar culture after I had completed a first draft of the argument. Given his own mercurial brilliance as a seminar performer, it is only fitting that the paper itself be dedicated to the most original and sorely missed anthropologist of his generation, Alfred Gell. Visit the Annual Reviews home page at www.AnnualReviews.org LITERATURE CITED AbramsP. 1981. The collapse of Britishsociology? See Abramset al 1981, pp. 53-70 AbramsP, Deem R, Finch J, Rock P, eds. 1981. Practice and Progress: British Sociology 1950-1980. London: Allen & Unwin Anderson P. 1969. Components of a national culture. In Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action. ed. A Cockbum, R Blackbur, pp. 214-84. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin ArdenerE. 1971. The new anthropologyandits critics. Man 6(3):449-67 Ardener E. 1975. General editor's note. See Bloch 1975, pp. vii-x ArdenerE. 1983. The ASA andits critics.RAIN 56:11-12 Ardener E, Ardener S. 1965. A directory Br. study of social anthropologists. J. Sociol. 16:295-314 Assoc. Soc. Anthropol. 1999. Annals of the Association of Social Anthropologistsof the Commonwealth and Directory of Members. London: Assoc. Soc. Anthropol. Banton M, ed. 1965a. The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. ASAMonogr.1. London: Tavistock BantonM, ed. 1965b.Political Systemsand the Distributionof Power.ASAMonogr 2. London: Tavistock Banton M, ed. 1965c. Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. ASA Monogr.3. London: Tavistock BantonM, ed. 1965d. TheSocial Anthropology of ComplexSocieties. ASA Monogr.4. London: Tavistock BarnesJA. 1981. Professionalismin Britishsociology. See Abramset al. 1981, pp. 13-24 Benthall J. 1996. Enlargingthe context of anthropology.The case of Anthropology Today. In PopularizingAnthropology, ed. J MacClancy,C McDonaugh,pp. 135-41. London: Routledge

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