I centre this discussion on how an anthropology concerned with society and culture came to be built up and shaped within the wider \ufb01eld of relations that accompanied its birth and its subsequent transformations. I ask how we can understand the history of our endeavour, especially social anthropology, not only as an unfolding of ideas inside the discipline but also as it was shaped within a sociopolitical environment. We know that environment was generated by powerful forces of capitalism, colonial expansion, and national rivalry. It does not, however, serve us to see all modes of anthropological thought and practice as their direct, linear effects \u2013 as \u2018offspring\u2019 of capitalism or as \u2018handmaidens\u2019 of colonialism \u2013 as has become commonplace.

These forces are part of our history, and are implicated in anthropological theory and practice. Yet they were never unitary but were variable in time, space and intensity, and variable in their historical outcomes. They also, at all times, set off countervailing tendencies in both thought and action. Thus, to know how anthro- pology came to its present position, we need a more layered understanding of the forces \u2013 both external and internal \u2013 that formed it.

As we look at the various phases of our history, we must indeed begin with the larger sociopolitical \ufb01eld and the distribution of powers within it. Such \ufb01elds produce not only nations and states, political programmes and policies but also distinctive world views and dominant societal concerns, which in\ufb02uence anthropologists\u2019 think- ing and to which they may respond. Still, we need to remember that hegemonic ideas do not stand alone; they always contend with contrary interpretations offered from different positions in the society.

Then we need to pay attention to the institutional arrangements within which anthropology is practiced, the sources of support on which it relies and the disciplines that compete with it for academic terrain and for resources. Yet these external forces are not fully determinant of anthropological currents. We must relate them as well to developments internal to the discipline, the social circles and tradition-conveying clusters that form within it, and the ideas they propagate.

* I want to thank Professor Marilyn Strathern for inviting me, on behalf of EASA, to deliver this paper as the key address at the Fifth Biennial EASA Conference in Frankfurt, 4 September 1998. I acknowledge with thanks the discussions on the development of Soviet anthropology sustained during its preparation with Igor I. Krupnik, Anatoly M. Khazanov, and Peter Schweitzer. I owe a special gratitude to Sydel Silverman for help in focusing my ideas and organising their presentation. John Rashford and Jane Schneider improved the outcome with their editorial suggestions. Any omissions and commissions are of course mine.

Anthropology came of age in a time of European expansion and overseas conquest which was closely connected with the rise of capitalism and with the proliferation of competing nation-states. The\u2018great transformation\u2019 wrought by capitalism upset existing social and cultural arrangements, and created con\ufb02icts over how new groups and classes were to be\ufb01tted into the social order. Each of the states caught up in the transformation confronted these issues through politics at home and military engage- ments abroad.

universal values backed by Reason that were projected by the Enlightenment, but they were soon forced to contend with the currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that met the claims of universal Reason with appeals to parochial traditions (Berlin 1982: 1\u201324). These two modes recruited their followers under opposed political\ufb02ags, yet disputed each other within what Bruno Latour has called a common\u2018agonistic\ufb01eld\u2019. Anthropo- logical arguments were used on both sides.

Anthropology developed only very gradually from an avocation of amateurs into an academic specialisation. For much of the nineteenth century, many scholars who would now be recognised as anthropologists drew their incomes from law, theology, philology, medicine or medically inspired psychology. Many were gentlemen of independent means who worked out of their private studies, maintained their own collections of artefacts and observations, and furthered their scholarly interests through forming learned associations and publishing specialised journals.

At this time, a prevailing concern in Europe was nation-building, as states tried to rally populations segmented by gender, class, region and ethnic identity to the national cause, to convert\u2018peasants into Frenchmen\u2019, to win over the growing proletariat and to turn potential regional dissidents into patriotic citizens\u2013 in Massimo d\u2019Azeglio\u2019s words,\u2018Fatta l\u2019Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani\u2019. This required political missionary work: by writing national myth-histories and literature that exalted the nation\u2019s mission; by propagating\u2018folklore\u2019 glorifying the nation in schools and exhibitions; by performing patriotic and military displays; and by setting up monuments to the nation\u2019s accomplishments. Opponents of national integration, however, published alternative versions of history and lore, defended local custom against the invasion of national law, criticised supposedly national traditions, and refused to celebrate national glory and militarisation.

institutions in the course of the nineteenth century, sometimes illuminating the national past, in other instances exhibiting the success of the nation in the forward march towards civilisation. Some ethnographic collections were housed in separate museums of archaeology and ethnology, but many formed part of exhibits on natural history, in which anthropology was classi\ufb01ed as a natural science. Museums were also the\ufb01rst institutions to employ anthropologists as curators and research scholars. Yet for most of the nineteenth century, there was no market for anthropologists as teachers or public servants.

The Great Transformation also gave rise to major changes in the ways people were educated. The accustomed ways of preparing people for ascribed positions in society yielded to new modes of mass education to widen basic skills and also to teach them to

properly\u2018imagine\u2019 the nation. Yet that very entry of the masses challenged previous elite monopolies over education, turning it into a battleground between contending classes. A common response was to stratify the educational system, delegating the teaching of universal basic skills to the primary school, while reserving higher learning for the elite.

sequestering each in an institutional structure of its own. The middle ground vacated was apportioned among history, philosophy and classical letters, then seen as antidotes to science and its materialism. Thus the modern university did not, at least initially, respond to the requirements of capitalist science and industry. No particular new curricula were adopted in response to particular economic\u2018needs\u2019 (Ringer 1992: 29). The main goal of higher education in France, England, and in Germany was for a long time to fortify the existing order by inducting new claimants to quasi-aristocratic elite status into the accumulation of cultural capital. The main consumers of that educated talent were the civil service and the state.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the new research universities found space for\u2018the social sciences\u2019. These grew out of efforts by reformers in Western Europe and the United States to solve\u2018the social question\u2019 through a uni\ufb01ed\u2018social science\u2019 (Katznelson 1996: 28\u201335). However, as the Great Transformation dis- aggregated the societal ensemble into the distinct institutional domains of economy, society and polity, it also prompted the emergence of specialised disciplines, which entered the universities as economics, political science and psychology, as well as a sociology focused on problems of social order and disorder.

In contrast to these policy-oriented sciences, little immediately practical advice could then\ufb02ow from anthropological understandings, despite Edward Tylor\u2019s insis- tence (cited in Peckham 1970: 176) that anthropology could serve to expose harmful superstition and mark them out for destruction. The reinforcement of a humanistic orientation within the universities, however, did allow anthropology to gain a foothold there as an appendix to historical studies. It straddled\u2018natural\u2019 and\u2018cultural\u2019 history, and fed the Victorian appetite for comparative religion.

Anthropologists took part in the prevailing debates in society at large about human universals or differences and about the applicability of evolutionary theory to human society. Speaking on both sides of the debates, their seemingly abstract discussions often had political and ideological implications. While evolutionism does not necessarily entail evaluative judgments about the biological or psychological endowments of human populations, the evolutionary paradigm of the time readily provided intellectual rationales for industry and empire. It furnished seemingly rational grounds for inequalities of all kinds, and supported arguments for why savages and barbarians needed civilised guidance and missionary benevolence, or should be eliminated altogether.

Within anthropology, evolutionism gave way to diffusionism. The diffusionists emphasised cultural distributions on a grid of space, where evolutionists had placed them on a grid of time. The two perspectives came to be seen as polar opposites, although evolutionists like Tylor and Morgan certainly did not share this view. One may hazard some educated guesses on why this shift took place. The grand evolution-