Spencer 2000

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August 26, 2000 9:26 Annual Reviews AR111-01
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:1–24

Copyright
c 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

A Retrospective
Jonathan Spencer
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LL,
Scotland; e-mail: jonathan.spencer@ed.ac.uk
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000.29:1-24. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Access provided by Howard University on 01/27/15. For personal use only.
Key Words sociocultural anthropology, history, British social science, seminars,

British universities
■ Abstract This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, con-
centrating 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 an-
thropology 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 an-
thropology, 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.
0084-6570/00/1015-0001$14.00 1
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2 SPENCER
Reviewing British social anthropology in the decade since the book’s first publi-
cation 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” about social anthropology in Britain (Kuper 1991:307), and in a later
edition of his book (Kuper 1996:176), he declared that “as a distinctive intellec-
tual movement,” British social anthropology lasted only for the half-century from
the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts (1922) in the early 1920s to—oddly
enough—the moment in the early 1970s when he published his own book (Kuper
1973). The future of social anthropology, for Kuper, lies not in national traditions,
but in an increasingly cosmopolitan European exchange (Kuper 1996:193).

Any writer on modern British anthropology works in the long shadow cast by
previous historians. Apart from Kuper, though, most historical work has concen-
trated on the period between the turn of the century and the late 1940s or early
1950s, the period when social anthropology consolidated its position within British
academic life (Goody 1995; Kuklick 1991; Langham 1981; Stocking 1984, 1992,
1995; Urry 1993). Although Kuper took the story forward to the late 1960s and has
extended it to the 1990s in a series of epilogues to his original work, his emphasis
is overwhelmingly on the intellectual history of the discipline, with relatively little
attention to the changing political, social, and institutional context 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 that have been left relatively unex-
plored in recent historiography; to work, as it were, “after Stocking”—starting at
that point in the early 1950s when Stocking’s magisterial work (Stocking 1995)
leaves off—and following a significantly different line of enquiry from Kuper’s
(1983). Since the publication of the first edition of Kuper’s (1973) book, British
social anthropology has been heavily dependent on the material support of the
British state and has been forced, like all other academic disciplines in British
universities, to adapt its practices of teaching and research to an ever more activist
educational bureaucracy. So the question that dominates an institutional history of
recent British social anthropology is this: Has anthropology triumphantly survived
the increasingly directive attentions of its main source of material support, or has
it been irretrievably compromised and corrupted by this relationship?
The central section of this chapter addresses that question through a review
of the demography of the discipline, seen through the lens of changing funding
regimes. The closing section attempts to assess the intellectual consequences of
institutional change and returns to the sense of decline so forcefully articulated by
Kuper in his recent versions of disciplinary history. But in partial disagreement
with Kuper, I suggest that “British social anthropology” retains its distinctiveness
as a relatively small and coherent group of intellectual practitioners, even though
the particular markers of distinction—the things that make it “British,” or “social,”
or “anthropological”—have changed, and continue to change. This means that
we have—in true British spirit—to replace the cultural question of what particular
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3
intellectual (or “cultural”) content makes British social anthropology “British” for
the more sociological question of what particular institutions, practices, and rituals
continue to ensure its distinction from its neighbors while allowing it to change its
empirical focus and its theoretical emphases.
STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

In the closing chapter of his book, Stocking (1995) gives a gripping account of
Meyer Fortes’ appointment to the William Wyse Chair in Cambridge in 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 anthropology of the time. Fortes’ main rival for the Cambridge chair was
Christophe von Fürer-Haimendorf, a German-trained ethnographer of limited the-
oretical ambition but with distinct “culturalist” inclinations. If Fürer-Haimendorf,
then at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of
London, had been appointed to the Cambridge chair, social anthropology would
have been reduced to two university departments, at Oxford and the London School
of Economics (LSE), with fragments in Manchester and Edinburgh. Instead,
Fortes’ appointment sealed a period of postwar consolidation in which the social
anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown became the dominant strand of
British anthropology (Stocking 1995:427–32). Yet in all that follows, it must be
recognized that we are dealing with a remarkably small group of people.
A good sense of the demographics of the discipline at this moment can be
gleaned from Forde’s contribution to a compendium of world anthropology (Forde
1953). Altogether there were just over 30 social anthropologists in British
universities.1 At Oxford, Evans-Pritchard held the chair, with an extraordinary
team of lecturing staff, including JG Peristiany, Paul Bohannon, Godfrey Lienhardt,
Louis Dumont, and Fritz Steiner. At the LSE, Raymond Firth held the chair, with
Isaac Schapera, Edmund Leach, Maurice Freedman, and Paul Stirling in support,
whereas Lucy Mair held a separate position as Reader in Colonial Administration.
In Manchester, Max Gluckman was supported by Elizabeth Colson, John Barnes,
Ian Cunnison, and AL Epstein. At Cambridge, Meyer Fortes presided over a rel-
atively small department; Daryll Forde, Mary Douglas, and Phyllis Kaberry were
at University College London (UCL); and von Fürer-Haimendorf was at SOAS.
1 All the population figures that follow require mild qualification, as they are gleaned from
published lists of the names of people employed in university departments, with a certain
amount of informed guesswork necessary to separate social from physical anthropolo-
gists, or in later lists, social anthropologists from sociologists in joint departments. The
main sources are Forde (1953), the Commonwealth Universities Yearbook (1963, 1973,
1983, 1993), and the Annals of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA 1999). For
useful demographic accounts of the discipline at crucial moments in its recent history, see
Ardener & Ardener (1965) and Rivière (1985).
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4 SPENCER
The story of British social anthropology in the years that followed is heavily
shaped by the story of British universities and their relationship with the British
state. Although the number of anthropologists working in universities had in-
creased to more than 50 by 1963, these were all to be found in the same few
departments as in the early 1950s (with the exception of a few odd figures work-
ing on their own in large institutions without departments of anthropology around
them). In the early 1960s, the British government launched a major expansion of
what until then had been a small and elitist university sector: New universities were
opened, and a whole additional class of institutions—polytechnics—was created
to supplement the more conventional universities. In the next decade, anthropol-
ogy was established, sometimes in joint departments with sociology, at the new
Universities of Sussex, Kent, and East Anglia, while new departments struggled
into life at older universities like Belfast, Hull, and Swansea. By 1973 there were
about 90 anthropologists in post, and by 1983 the figure had risen to 120, with
two more new departments, at Goldsmiths and St Andrews. By 1993 there were
more than 160 anthropologists working in British universities. A check of the ASA
Annals (1999) suggests that the latest figure is around 220 (this figure includes
anthropologists working on short-term contracts, for example as replacements for
staff on leave).
This is not, however, the straightforward tale of growth and expansion it might
seem to be. After the rapid expansion of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, universities
were badly hit by government austerity measures, and with the election of Margaret
Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979, the social sciences were singled out for
especially harsh treatment. With cutbacks in state support for universities, by
the early 1980s the discipline was felt to be in real crisis as the supply of academic
jobs almost completely dried up. The situation only started to change at the end
of that decade, when the government changed tack and launched a further huge
expansion of university teaching. This time, however, most of the increase was
accounted for by much larger student numbers within existing departments and
degree courses, rather than by creating new institutions, as had happened in the
1960s. The new boom in student recruitment coincided with a moment of higher
public visibility for social anthropology, and demand for places on anthropology
courses has soared since the late 1980s.
Is this, then, a straightforward tale of expansion (apart from the Thatcherite
hiccup in the 1980s), as it appears from the figures? Or is it a case of tightly
limited expansion (in the context of the growth of universities in general, and
social sciences in particular) since the early 1950s? A comparison with sociology
is instructive here, not least because the two disciplines have been closely linked
throughout this period. Before the 1960s boom in universities, sociology as an
academic presence in Britain was arguably smaller and more dispersed than social
anthropology. But by 1981 (the gloomiest year of Thatcher’s rule for the social
sciences), the discipline had expanded to more than 1000 government-funded
university positions, growing at almost 10 times the rate of social anthropology.
What is most significant in the comparison with sociology’s expansion is the places
where anthropology was not found. With a handful of exceptions, it was not taught
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in the polytechnics, or in the innovative Open University set up by the Labour

Government of the 1960s.2 Nor was it established as part of the school curriculum.
By the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 18-year-olds had studied sociology as an
A-level examination subject; in 1999, the figure for anthropology remained stuck
on zero (Abrams 1981).3
There are three possible explanations for the limits to anthropological expan-
sion. One is a simple problem of demand: The new welfare bureaucracies of
postwar Britain required sociologists (or thought they did) and not anthropolo-
gists, and the universities and the government accommodated themselves to this
brute fact.
The second is demographic: There were only just enough anthropologists to
build the departments that were built in the 1960s, and not enough to sustain a
huge expansion. Yet a number of leading anthropologists—Peter Worsley, Max

Marwick, and Ronald Frankenberg, among others—took up positions in the new
sociology departments in the 1960s, while others, most notably Victor Turner, and
later FG Bailey and Stanley Tambiah, left Britain for the United States. This reveals
an important difference in the mode of expansion of the two disciplines at the time:
Social anthropology departments were concerned with staffing themselves only
with social anthropologists; sociology departments were staffed with whomever
was available, and the issue of professional or disciplinary coherence was raised
after—rather than during—the period of expansion. This difference was explicit
in the development of the relevant professional organizations for the two disci-
plines. The Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) was founded in 1946
with a strong model of professionalization in mind: Membership required a higher
degree in social anthropology and/or evidence of publications and a teaching po-
sition in anthropology. Up until the 1990s, the annual meetings of the Association
were marked by careful (and for some distasteful) scrutiny and discussion of the
qualifications of would-be members (cf Tapper 1980). The British Sociological
Association, in contrast, remained a far more open organization—a broad church
much more like the AAA in the United States—despite occasional attempts to
create a more elite professional standing for sociologists (Barnes 1981).
The third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for the limits to anthro-
pological expansion is internal to the discipline. Anthropology did not expand
into other educational settings because anthropologists themselves did not want
to expand. It was seen as, above all, a subject for graduate researchers, not for
2 Ruth Finnegan has been almost the only anthropologist employed by the Open University—
a pioneering distance-learning initiative set up by the Labour government of the late 1960s—
whereas Oxford Brookes (formerly Oxford Polytechnic) was, for a long time, the only one
of the former polytechnics to teach anthropology as a degree subject.
3 British anthropologists were heavily involved in establishing a social anthropology com-
ponent in the International Baccalaureate examination for high-school students, but for all
its merits, this program reaches a tiny proportion of students in the relevant age group,
compared with the A-level examinations, which are taken by virtually all 18-year-olds in
the school system in England and Wales.
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6 SPENCER
undergraduates, let alone school students. In 1973, for example, Leach argued
forcefully against any attempt to introduce anthropology to school-age students:
“It could be very confusing to learn about other people’s moral values before you
have confident understanding of your own” (Leach 1973:4). In Oxford in the
1970s, social anthropology was not taught—and not thought to be teachable—to
undergraduates as a degree subject. Twenty years later, in the conclusion to his brief
memoir of British social anthropology, Jack Goody reiterated the point that the
lack of attention to undergraduate teaching was one of the great strengths of British
social anthropology in what was, for him, its golden age (Goody 1995:157–58).
Whatever the reason, the limits to expansion had some obvious consequences for
the discipline. The places not visited by the insights of anthropological science—
the polytechnics and the Open University in particular—became the academic

home of a great deal of interdisciplinary and pedagogic innovation, as well as a

refuge for the post-1968 intellectual Left. These were the ingredients that coalesced
into the heady brew now known as “British Cultural Studies,” but the work of
leading figures in this area (from EP Thompson and Raymond Williams to Paul
Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Paul Willis) barely touched British social anthropology
until it was reimported in the 1980s via the work of American anthropologists
(cf Nugent & Shore 1997). Anthropology, unlike cultural studies or even sociology,
was almost entirely confined to the older, research-based, elite universities, such as
Oxford and Cambridge, and the more prestigious London colleges, such as the LSE
and UCL. On the other hand, and in contrast to the United States in the early 1990s
(cf Turner 1993), in Britain cultural studies never looked a threat to anthropology
because it rarely occupied the same niche in the academic ecosystem.
In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropology’s place at the heart of the academic es-
tablishment did not go entirely unremarked on. The young Perry Anderson, in
his sweeping polemic against the pervasive empiricism and liberalism of 1960s
British academia, specifically excepted anthropology from his strictures. Anthro-
pology, however, was allowed to be theoretical and totalizing (a “good thing” for
the 1960s Left) because it displaced its attentions to the colonies, and he quoted
a prominent sociologist of the time on the social correlates of British anthropol-
ogy: “British social anthropology has drawn on the same intellectual capital as
sociology proper, and its success, useful to colonial administration and dangerous
to no domestic prejudice, shows at what a high rate of interest that capital can be
made to pay.... The subject ... unlike sociology, has prestige. It is associated with
colonial administration—traditionally a career for a gentleman, and entrance into
the profession and acceptance by it confers high status in Britain” (see Anderson
1969:265, original emphasis).
This view of the social centrality of British social anthropology is partly cor-
roborated by Leach, himself a formidable academic politician, in the context of
a panegyric to the diplomatic skills of his mentor, Raymond Firth: “From the
1940s to the 1960s he had a wide variety of personal, but quite informal, ties
with senior civil servants in key positions. He used these contacts with outstand-
ing skill.... Firth went behind the scenes and talked with the people who really
mattered. Considering the tiny scale of the whole enterprise in Britain of the
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1950s, the central funding of social anthropological research was quite dispropor-
tionately generous. It was a phase which only endured while Firth was at the helm
at the LSE” (Leach 1984:13–14).
All this, it could be argued, changed when a new breed of professional acad-
emic—survivors from the 1960s expansion of the universities and, with their allu-
sions to “wealth creation” and “market forces,” fluent in the new lingua franca of
the times—took control of the central institutions of British social science in the
1980s. Nevertheless, in the 1990s (the decade of the performance indicator), the
institutional distribution of academic anthropologists had its advantages. In offi-
cial assessments and peer-based quantifications of teaching quality and research
performance—which now dominate British academic life—anthropology depart-
ments have consistently performed better than other social science disciplines.
Although outsiders might grumble about the clannishness of a discipline that so

overtly protects its own, anthropologists merely 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 impression of a tightly bounded discipline confined to a small number of high-

status institutions is heightened if we shift our attention to the social production of
social anthropologists. There are two ways to assess this: Either examine where
the PhDs in social anthropology are being awarded, or look to see where successive
cohorts of university teachers were trained. Whichever way we look, the picture
is the same, but a new element is also introduced: the increased vulnerability of
the discipline (like its sisters in the social sciences) to government intervention via
state funding organizations.
Let’s start with the first question: Where do the successful PhDs come from?5
In the quarter century from 1970 to 1994, just under 1000 PhDs were awarded
in social anthropology in Britain, of which just under half came from just three
departments: Oxford, Cambridge, and the LSE (Table 1). Between them they
accounted for 460 of 964 PhDs granted in that period.
If we break these figures down into 5-year periods (Table 2), a slightly more
nuanced account of the distribution emerges. In particular, we get a better sense
4 Again, a comparison with sociology is instructive. Even now, sociology is a marginal

discipline in Oxford and Cambridge whereas some of the strongest departments are found
in relatively unfashionable universities such as Lancaster and Essex (Heath & Edmondson
1981). For a valuable guide to anthropology’s passage through the stormy bureaucratic
waters of the 1990s, see Gledhill (in press).
5 Data on anthropology PhDs in Britain since the early 1970s are available through the
Index to Theses accepted for higher degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland
(searchable online at www.theses.com); some of this material is also summarized in Webber
(1983), which contains a thorough discussion of the limitations of the classifications used
in organizing the information.
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8 SPENCER
TABLE 1 PhDs in social anthropology by

department, 1970–1994
Department No. PhDs
Oxford 187
Cambridge 137
London School of Economics 136
School of Oriental and African Studies 82
Manchester 59
Sussex 51
University College London 46

Edinburgh 37
Belfast 31
All other departments 198
Total 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 anthropology by department, 1970–1994 (5-year

intervals)
Total Oxford, Cambridge,
Years Oxford Cambridge LSEa (all UK) LSE (%of all PhDs)
1970–1974 33 20 26 132 60
1975–1979 40 27 17 214 39
1980–1984 42 40 19 232 44
1985–1989 41 23 41 204 51
1990–1994 31 27 33 182 50
Total 187 137 136 964 48
a
LSE, London School of Economics.
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TABLE 3 Postgraduate training of academic anthropologists employed in

British departments, 1999a
Department Pre-1989 staff Post-1989 staff Total %age of total
Cambridge 23 24 47 24
LSE 16 23 39 17
Oxford 16 22 38 16
SOAS 11 8 19 8
UCL 10 6 16 7
Manchester 4 7 11 5
Sussex 6 3 9 4
Edinburgh 3 2 5 2
Durham 1 4 5 2
Kent 2 1 3 1
Belfast 2 0 2 1
Hull 1 0 1 <1
Other (UK) 2 10 12 5
Other (non-UK) 8 19 27 12
Total 105 129 234 100
a
LSE, London School of Economics; SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies; UCL, University
College London.
figures settled, so the share held by the “big three” departments stabilized at ab-
out 50%.
These figures tell another story, of the rise and decline of state support for
graduate research in social anthropology, which I return to shortly. What, though,
of academic jobs? Table 3 shows collated information on the graduate training
of anthropologists currently working in British departments. They are divided
into two cohorts: those first employed before the crisis years of the 1980s, and
those who took up their first permanent appointment afterward. For local historical
reasons, 1989 is taken as the watershed year.6
The division by cohorts is instructive. Over half the staff (55%) working in
British departments in 1999 had been first appointed in the preceding 10 years
whereas just under half (45%) were survivors from the pre-Thatcher expansion
of the discipline. But the dominance of the big three departments is remark-
ably stable across the generations: 55 of the pre-1989 generation were trained at
6 Insome years in the 1980s, there were virtually no permanent academic jobs offered in
British anthropology departments. In 1989, an unprecedented number of new posts became
available at LSE, UCL, Brunel, SOAS, and Manchester.
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10 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 awarded only 14% of the doctorates
in social anthropology between 1970 and 1994, in 1999 its graduates held 24%
of the jobs in British universities (Oxford had 19% of the doctorates and 16% of
the jobs, and the LSE had 14% of the doctorates and 17% of the jobs). In other
words, although three departments continue to dominate the discipline, the depart-
ment at Cambridge has been especially successful in providing new generations
of academic anthropologists.
There are other patterns that are not clear from the aggregated figures alone.
Some departments display high levels of endogeny, recruiting heavily from their
own graduates. This has been especially true of Oxford and Cambridge over the
years, but also of SOAS and UCL until recently. Oxford students have been un-
derrepresented in recruitment at the LSE and vice versa. And there are signs of
more diverse recruitment in recent years, especially from North America: only
five of the pre-1989 generation hold 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’
educational background, such as their class or ethnic origins. We can, however,
see significant shifts in the gender balance. In the mid-1980s, Rivière (1985) re-
ported to the ASA on the demographic shape of the discipline, using a sample of
nine departments. His analysis showed that the ratio of men to women had barely
changed since the early 1970s: In 1973 there were 12 women to 67 men; in 1983,
there were 15 to 69, a tiny rise from 15% to 18% (Rivière 1985:11). In 1999,
in the discipline as a whole, there were 97 women in teaching positions, or 41%
of the total, and a breakdown by cohort shows how much has changed: In the
pre-1989 generation there are 23 women (22%) to 82 men (78%), a figure in line
with Rivière’s report from 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 larger picture, a num-
ber of patterns are clear. Although British social anthropology has remained a
relatively small and tightly knit community, taught in a few universities only,
graduate research—and the production of new generations of anthropologists—
has been extraordinarily concentrated in the same three departments: Oxford,
Cambridge, and the LSE. Viewed in the long run, diversity has tended to be pe-
ripheral and short-lived. The distinctive strand of work pioneered by Gluckman
and his followers in Manchester did not long survive Gluckman’s own retirement
in the early 1970s: The rebirth of that department in the 1980s owed everything
to the imaginative appointment of Marilyn Strathern to the chair in 1984 and
signaled the beginning of the second wave of diversification in British anthro-
pology. In the 1970s, Sussex emerged as the main producer of new graduate
researchers (other than the big three)—often working in new fields such as Europe
and Latin America—but with the cutbacks of the 1980s, it, like the other new
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departments of the 1960s, lost access to the funds that would keep its graduate
program alive.
As this might suggest, a great deal of what happened can be explained by
the distribution of support from one central agency. Until the mid-1960s, British
social anthropology had relied on a combination of sources for its relatively modest
research needs: the Colonial Social Science Research Council and other British
government sources, certain American foundations (such as the Ford Foundation
and the National Science Foundation), and a few British foundations [a more
detailed account of pre-1968 funding can be found in a report to the Social Science
Research Council (1968:92–99)]. In 1965, the British government established its
own Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which provided grants for new
research projects and supported graduate students at masters and doctoral levels.
In its first decade, the new SSRC presided over a boom in graduate research
in the social sciences. Such was its impact that by 1971, the chair of its social
anthropology committee, Edmund Leach, could report that it provided “virtually
the only source of financial support for 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 graduate researchers in social anthropology, spread
around 11 departments, but with just over half directed to the triangle of Oxford,
Cambridge, and the LSE.7
The SSRC was a 1960s initiative, initially ill-suited to the straitened circum-
stances of the 1980s. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in
1979, one of her government’s first actions was to slash its budget. An enquiry
into the activities of the SSRC failed to produce the recommendation for abolition
favored by some Conservative politicians, but it was the catalyst for a number
of changes. The organization was renamed the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC)—the Minister responsible apparently had a deep suspicion of
any claim to social science—and its internal structure was changed so that social
anthropology (along with other disciplines) lost its own cozy subject committee.
From the peak support of the mid-1970s, studentships fell to between 20 and 30 a
year, where they have remained ever since. After these reforms, the ESRC aggres-
sively reinvented itself as the vanguard organization for the Tories’ new cultural
command economy. New ESRC priorities in research funding at first explicitly em-
phasized “wealth creation” and implicitly focused almost entirely on UK-focused
work, apparently discouraging the kind of classic anthropological field projects
that had been supported in 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 blacklisted for ESRC students. They also
meant that theses had to be written more quickly, fieldwork and writing-up time
7 The figures for graduate student support from the late 1960s to the early 1980s can be
tracked through the issues of the SSRC Newsletter, which also contains annual reports of
the Social Anthropology Committee.
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12 SPENCER
were squeezed, and compulsory generic social science research training ate into
prefieldwork preparation.8
REPRESENTATIONS, INITIATIVES, AND BOUNDARIES
In a broad overview, the difficult trick is to move back from this kind of institu-
tional history to see what intellectual resonance it has. One way to do this is to
look at the discipline’s own self-representations. These might include everything
from the content of undergraduate reading lists, to textbooks and introductions to
the subject, through the presence (and nonpresence) of anthropologists as public
intellectuals in the mass media. In the interests of space, I concentrate on four

defining occasions, the Decennial conferences of the Association of Social An-

thropologists, alternating between Cambridge and Oxford, in 1963, 1973, 1983,
and 1993, the occasions when British social anthropology put on its best party
dress and displayed itself to the world.
The 1963 conference—coorganized by M Gluckman and F Eggan—brought
together leading British and American “social anthropologists” from the “younger
generation” (Gluckman & Eggan 1965:xii).9 The papers were published in four
distinctive volumes [on religion, political systems, complex societies, and the use
of models (Banton 1965a–d)], with a common introduction from the two coor-
ganizers. This set out an explicit agenda for the meeting: not so much the cele-
bration of the distinctiveness of British social anthropology as an exploration of a
set of sensitive boundaries. The most obvious of these was between British and
American anthropology, and the opening shot came with Gluckman and Eggan
implicitly coopting the likes of Schneider and Geertz as “social” (rather than “cul-
tural”) anthropologists. Equally important, however, were the boundaries between
anthropology and the other social sciences—economics, political science, soci-
ology, psychology—each of which was weighed up as a potential partner in the
introduction. In the different volumes, the British contributors—on the whole—
concentrated on typologies and formal model building. [Turner (1965), as ever,
provided a magnificent exception in his classic paper on Ndembu color symbol-
ism.] This was anthropology as generic social science, ready for the brave new
world of the 1960s expansion, and many of the British participants moved into
chairs and readerships, often in new joint anthropology and sociology departments,
in the subsequent decade.
8 It must be remembered, of course, that the SSRC/ESRC was far more important to anthro-
pology than anthropology—which never claimed more than a tiny fraction of the organiza-
tion’s resources—was to its main funder. Anthropology’s relatively low profile also had its
uses, as in the early 1980s, when sociology became the focus of attack from ideologues of
the New Right.
9 The occasion has attracted a fair amount of reminiscence from the participants (see e.g.
Frankenberg 1988; Geertz 1991, 1995; Goody 1995; Schneider 1995). Of course it only
became recognized as the “first” Decennial much later in the day.
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The 1973 conference came at the peak of a decade of growth, and the pub-
lications that emerged reflected the kind of intellectual optimism that academ-
ics usually only manage in a period of apparently unlimited expansion. The
generic editorial introduction was this time provided by Edwin Ardener, who in his
Malinowski Memorial lecture a few years earlier had detected a spirit of novelty
running through the discipline: “[F]or practical purposes text-books which looked
useful, no longer are; monographs which used to appear exhaustive now seem se-
lective; interpretations which once looked full of insight now seem mechanical and
lifeless” (Ardener 1971:449). In keeping with Ardener’s passion for the new, the
conference theme was “New Directions.” In his introduction, however, Ardener
seemed keen to stress the “deep roots” of some of the topics covered, pointing out
that the offerings of the 1963 conference had not become the stuff of controversy
in the intervening years, not least because “new” theory in the 1960s had usually
come from France rather than the United States (Ardener 1975). Of the topics cov-
ered by panels in the conference itself, six eventually found their way into print:
on Marxism (Bloch 1975), symbolism (Willis 1975), “biosocial” anthropology
(Fox 1975), texts (Jain 1976), transactionalism (Kapferer 1976), and mathemati-
cal techniques (Mitchell 1980). But whereas the founding monographs from the
1963 meeting had served as canonical texts in the new undergraduate syllabuses
of the 1960s, only two or three of the 1973 volumes endured to fill that niche.
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, although more were originally planned. The theme was “social
anthropology in 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 (from Béteille and Tambiah, Goody,
Godelier, and Mary Douglas), the question for many participants was whether, in
Thatcherite Britain, there even would be a social anthropology after the 1980s.
The only volume to emerge from the conference was on the interface between
anthropology and development policy (Grillo & Rew 1985), reflecting widespread
heart-searching about the future of the discipline, and the prospects for employment
of the growing reserve army of underemployed PhDs in the subject. One participant
was quoted in a contemporary report on the events: “This isn’t a conference, it’s
a psychodrama” (Grillo 1983:10).
For once, the most significant developments occurred not in the set-piece pre-
sentations by luminaries. (The “younger generation” this time might have been too
much of an embarrassment to act as an intellectual focus.) The most important—
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
employment crisis in the discipline. Edmund Leach in particular objected strongly
10 “[In 1973 a] women’s session met amicably outside the official programme. Some radical
leaflets were circulated. The third world now figured as a political as well as an academic
subject. The historical period at least (it may well be thought in 1983) was unmistakable”
(Ardener 1975:ix).
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14 SPENCER
to attempts to train anthropology graduates for nonacademic employment. He

followed this with a heartfelt letter to the committee set up by the ASA to report
on employment in applied anthropology: “The ASA was started as a ‘professional
trade union’ in the sense that it sought to ensure that when social anthropology was
taught in universities and elsewhere the people who were employed to do the teach-
ing were properly qualified in the subject.... As a professional body we need to tell
Heads of Departments that they should discourage students from embarking on a
course of studies leading to a PhD in social anthropology. It must be emphasised to
such potential students that the prospects of ever being employed as a professional
social anthropologists [sic] are extremely small.... I would personally be horrified
if it became apparent that the ‘syllabus design’ of what is taught in a University
Department of Social Anthropology was slanted towards ‘applied anthropology.’

This would indeed be ironical! ... the original role of the ASA was to prevent the
Universities from employing unqualified refugees from the disappearing Colonial
service to teach ‘applied anthropology’!” (see Grillo 1994:309–10).
Leach’s anger at the threatened dilution of “pure” anthropology in British uni-
versities has deep disciplinary roots. In the late colonial period, academic control
of the relevant committees of the Colonial Social Science Research Council meant
that British anthropologists enjoyed enough scientific autonomy to ignore demands
for more relevant research, and Kuklick, for example, documents the disdain ex-
pressed by many leading anthropologists in the 1940s (not least Edmund Leach
himself) for practical, policy-oriented work in the colonies (Kuklick 1991:190–93).
Yet—despite considerable resistance from some quarters—what happened in
the early 1980s may well have transformed the discipline. From the first cuts in the
then SSRC budget in the summer of 1979, some anthropologists started to organize
for the bleak times ahead. A succession of workshops and working-groups on em-
ployment for anthropology graduates gave birth to a cluster of organizations with
ever-changing acronyms (GAPP, BASAPP, SASCW) and culminated in a report to
the ASA (Grillo 1984). Much of this activity emanated from 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. Throughout the 1980s the only significant growth area in academic
anthropology was in more-or-less vocational taught masters degrees. This was
paralleled by a growth in demand for anthropologists to work in nonacademic set-
tings, especially—but not exclusively—in the field of social development. In the
1990s, the better resourced, but often more conservative, departments in London,
Oxford, and Cambridge hurried to establish similar programs in such areas as de-
velopment anthropology—a clear case of innovation at the disciplinary periphery
being appropriated and reincorporated at the core.
Symptomatically, however, this particular transformation in disciplinary trajec-
tory was not especially apparent in the most recent celebration of British social
anthropology, the 1993 Decennial. In contrast to the 1983 event, the mood was
upbeat and expansionist. The universities had started to grow again—in student
numbers at least—and enough new posts had been advertised in recent years to
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absorb almost all the underemployed leftovers from the 1980s. Social anthropol-
ogy was in especially good shape because it was experiencing its own boom within
the bigger boom; it found itself in unexpected demand from a generation of new
students. It was still a very small discipline with a relatively low public profile,
but it was beginning to show signs of imminent transition to being a mass subject
taught in an under-funded mass university system (Gledhill, in press).
The overall theme for the conference promised to address some of the changes
that had overtaken the discipline in the previous decade—“The Uses of Knowledge:
Global and Local Relations.” Yet neither pedagogy nor the dilemmas of practi-
cally engaged anthropology were much discussed in the main sessions.11 These
instead focused on a mixture of classic themes (religious certainties) and areas of
recent intellectual excitement (consumption and modernity). Outside observers

noted the upbeat mood (Stolcke 1993), and the “continuing rapprochement with
American cultural anthropology,” evinced by the number of presentations from an-
thropologists institutionally based in North America (Stocking 1995:438). Some
of the most exciting discussion at the conference itself took place in fringe ses-
sions on art, on new reproductive technologies, and on ethnic violence, and these
sessions were also more representative of the new, post-1989 generation of an-
thropologists (underrepresented on the platform in the main conference sessions).
The conference organizer’s “traditional” foreword to the eventual publications—
expansive and commanding for the 1963 volumes, reduced but still reasonably full
in 1973—was effectively shrunk to a short but challenging paragraph in 1993, as
if the kind of expansive overview offered with such confidence by Gluckman and
Eggan 30 years earlier were simply no longer feasible (Strathern 1995a).
We can look at the conferences of 1963, 1973, 1983, and 1993 as moments of
collective self-presentation. And we can look back at what has and has not survived
intellectually from the earlier ones. But we can also look at these as occasions to
take stock, in particular, as occasions to renegotiate the discipline’s boundaries:
in 1963 with the other social sciences; in 1973 with sources of new ideas from
outside Britain and/or outside the discipline; in 1983 with the economic chill of the
so-called “real world”; and in 1993 with the forces of the global (in anthropology,
as well as in the world).
SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

At this point let’s look at two important themes from recent work in the social his-
tory of science. Reviewing the externalism/internalism debate in science studies,
and the linked issue of boundaries around cultural practices like science, Shapin
(1992) points out that for historians of science, “boundary talk” helps us see the
nonnecessity of actors’ accounts of scientific practice, especially when we have
11 Themost notable exception was the session on the uses of social knowledge convened
by Henrietta Moore (cf Moore 1996).
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16 SPENCER
the cultural distance of the historian looking at past practice. In his book, We
Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1993) goes further and stresses the fic-
tive nature of all attempts to bound off “science” from “society” or “politics,” or
“nature” as a discrete realm from “culture,” the place of those who study it. In
practice, networks of actors transgress these boundaries, and our world is full of
hybrids—part nature, part culture. To deal with this a great effort is put into what
Latour calls the “work of purification.” In a close, but slightly different, neck of
the historiographic woods, attention has been drawn to the ways in which scientific
“facts” are made (in laboratories and other highly structured settings), not given
(in nature). And if “facts” are made, so are the specialists who observe them, the
community of scientists—to invoke the language of Shapin & Schaffer’s (1985)
study of Hobbes and Boyle, a bounded group with special powers of “witness.”
These historical arguments offer a new perspective on the shifting concerns

revealed in the four ASA Decennial conferences. Each, in different ways, might
be thought of as a return to 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 carefully staged and still celebrated exchange in the pages of American
Anthropologist, George Murdock and Raymond Firth debated these very issues.
Concentrating on the then recently published African Systems of Kinship and
Marriage, Murdock leveled a number of accusations at his British colleagues.
Sure they’re good at what they do, but their geographical and theoretical interests,
their reading, their ideas are so narrow. Crucially, they shy away from all talk
of “culture,” a fact which reveals them in their true colors—they’re not anthropo-
logists at all, they’re actually sociologists (Murdock 1951:471).12
Here we face an apparent paradox, for virtually all of Murdock’s marks of
British distinction in the 1950s appear to have melted into air in the 1970s and
1980s. By the 1960s, the early concentration on Africa, which taxed Murdock, was
already giving way to work in Asia and Europe (SSRC 1968, Kappers 1983). The
apparent obsession with kinship at the expense of all other areas of life (Murdock
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 Britain owes more
to the influence of that arch culturalist, David Schneider, than to the ghost of
Radcliffe-Brown (cf Carsten 2000, Franklin 1997, Strathern 1992). “Culture”
has probably been 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 anthropological boundary patrol, 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 anthropologists in Britain than to the work of British (or French
or Norwegian or German) anthropologists in the United States. Even applied,
or practical, anthropology—anathema to professional anthropologists of Leach’s
12 Firth’s
(1951) response to Murdock is characteristically fair and diplomatic, and in the
following decade he was especially active in building bridges with such American colleagues
as David Schneider.
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generation—has, for many British anthropologists, become the discipline’s bread-

and-butter since the 1980s.
Yet as anyone who has spent time around British anthropology departments
would admit, boundary talk remains a vigorous idiom in everyday practice. In
an unjustly neglected paper from the early 1980s, Watson (1984) provided a rich
vein of examples of the social/cultural boundary patrol, from both sides of the
Atlantic. It is probably true that explicit boundary talk is slightly less likely to be
found in print than in the past, but the question “Is this anthropology?” is still the
stuff of some PhD examinations in Britain and “She didn’t seem to really know that
much anthropology” is not unknown as an explanation of 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 criteria seem so shifting and evanescent?
From whence do new British anthropologists gain their truly anthropological dis-
positions?
One clue can be found in a recent essay by Kuper (1992). In the context of a
complaint about the corrosive effects of alien American “culturalism,” he provides
a brilliantly vivid evocation of Cambridge in the mid-1960s: “A university like
Cambridge is an efficient engine of acculturation. The department itself impressed
a very specific academic identity on the new recruit. Within a couple of terms it
would turn out a fledgling Fortesian Africanist or structuralist South Asianist,
armed with some ideas but above all with strong loyalties. It is interesting that
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 significant that when we tried
to establish a small seminar of our own, Fortes did his best to nip it in the bud”
(Kuper 1992:60).
This, remember, was the department that produced a disproportionate num-
ber of today’s academic anthropologists in Britain. It did so, apparently, with a
“minimum of direct instruction.” (The oral archive suggests that Kuper’s account
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 “tacit knowledge,” whose importance in scientific practice has been
well documented since Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958). How is this kind of
knowledge imparted, if not through “direct instruction”? The conventional answer
is through what Lave & Wenger (1991) call “legitimate peripheral participation,”
the acquisition of membership in a “community of practice.”
And where is it imparted? Kuper’s last sentence gives one clue: in the semi-
nar. Seminars loom large in British anthropological reminiscence. Gell starts his
posthumously published, autobiographical account of his own anthropological
formation with several pages of reflection on “seminar culture” in British anthro-
pology: “[A]n anthropology department without a weekly seminar series is like a
13 Unfortunately, the most imaginative recent work on anthropology’s boundary talk (Gupta
& Ferguson 1997) chooses to ignore the Atlantic division and instead talks of a unitary
“Anglo-American anthropology.”
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18 SPENCER
body without a heart,” and “seminar culture is what really defines my academic
métier, rather than membership of a rather nebulous ‘profession”’ (Gell 1999:2,3).
Gell provides an account of his own anthropological self-making in terms of suc-
cessive seminars he presented to, and participated in: as an undergraduate with
Meyer Fortes in Cambridge; as a fledgling researcher to the postgraduate seminar
at the LSE; and then, to his amazement, to the full departmental seminar presided
over by Raymond Firth. Gell concentrates on the pleasures of performance but
also remarks on the skills of the listener, as acquired in the audience of Firth’s
seminar at the LSE: “[A]ll those in attendance were assumed to be able to com-
ment intelligently, and would be asked to do so if the chairman saw fit. Since
I never knew when Raymond might ask ‘Well, what do you think, Mr Gell?’ it
was absolutely necessary to pay attention both to the paper and to the subsequent
discussion, on pain of possible public humiliation. I still retain the ability to listen
to an hour’s paper and 50 minutes of discussion, without lapses of concentration,
as a result of this early, invaluable, training” (Gell 1999:5).
In his own memoir, David Schneider describes the impact of Raymond Firth’s
seminar at the LSE in very similar terms [and contrasts it to the ghastly experi-
ence of trying to tell Gluckman’s seminar about Zulus in Manchester (Schneider
1995:125–29)]. Goody, reminiscing of the ASA in the 1950s, draws some further
links: “Attendance ... was virtually obligatory in the fifties. However the general
atmosphere was one of camaraderie, of solidarity, of communitas, rather than au-
thority; the seminars and the drinking were done together.... Life was in some
ways like an on-going seminar, with continuing discussions of this or that theme,
what X thought, what new empirical work had to say on the subject. The closeness
of the fraternity was one way in which the highly amorphous subject of anthropol-
ogy (which can be all things to all men) was given some manageable bounds, and
some continuing focus was provided for current investigations” (Goody 1995:83,
my emphasis). And Leach, like many others, describes the ultimate source for the
whole tradition: Malinowski’s seminar at the LSE in the 1920s and 1930s (Leach
1986:376; cf Firth 1975:2–3, Stocking 1995:294–5).14
Here the importance of the continuing domination of the discipline by a hand-
ful of core departments becomes obvious. With over half of the members of the
discipline coming out of three, relatively small, departments—even now, the com-
bined membership of the departments concerned is no more than 30 or 40—and
others passing through to give papers on a reasonably regular basis, just a few
14 Historiansof science have traced the importance of the seminar as the locus of scientific
bildung, or self-creation, to the scientific seminars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Germany (Clark 1989, Olesko 1991). This would seem to provide a strong link to the
world of Malinowski (and of course Boas). Schaffer’s wonderful essay, “From Physics
to Anthropology—and Back Again” (1994), contains the most imaginative treatment
of the place of scientific self-making in the early history of British anthropology, but it
concentrates more on the laboratory and its practices and has relatively little to say about
seminars and seminar culture. Here is a topic for future historians.
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weekly seminars can continue to act as a testing ground for what is or is not an-
thropologically correct or theoretically interesting. They can, moreover, do so in
a flexible way: The seminar does not necessarily care if the boundaries shift over
the years. It may appear to have some sort of collective memory, but it is not a
court, susceptible to formal appeals to precedent. It is rather the setting for certain
stylized kinds of performance, and for the passing of, often tacit, judgments. Inso-
far as the performance becomes second nature, the judgments themselves may be
allowed to differ. Cambridge in the 1960s was, after all, a department in which the
dominant figures—Leach and Fortes, Tambiah and Goody—were, intellectually
at least, perceived to be at war with each other (Gell 1999:4, Kuper 1992:60). And
British anthropology, in what may have been its real golden era—the 1950s and
1960s rather than the 1930s—was the scene of endless set-piece public contro-
versies. Besides those of Fortes and Leach, there were battles between Leach and
Gluckman, Needham and Gellner, Needham and Beattie. My point is that these
were the products of a close-knit seminar culture that, rather than inculcating a
simple and narrow orthodoxy, set the terms for what was deemed worthy of ar-
gument. The decline of such bitter academic argument since the 1980s may be
a symptom of many things—the changing politics of academic employment, the
shifting gender balance of the discipline—but it may above all herald the decline
of the kinds of multiplex social relations celebrated by Goody in his description
of the 1950s.
In itself, the demographic growth of the discipline has threatened the kinds of
tacit structure I have just been describing—the annual ASA conferences, for exam-
ple, have for years been too big to reproduce the intellectual communitas invoked
by Goody, yet too small to act as all-purpose occasions of professional efferves-
cence like the AAA meetings (cf Ardener 1983). And it is debatable whether the
kind of tight disciplinarity Goody celebrates can survive beyond a certain point of
demographic expansion, whatever the institutional environment. But the institu-
tional environment in British education is now especially hostile to the endurance
of the implicit and the unstated. In her Cambridge inaugural in 1994, Marilyn
Strathern concluded with a meditation on the recent mania in higher education
for rendering explicit what often works best by being left implicit: To put it more
crudely than she ever would, the translation of Kuper’s “education without instruc-
tion” into a set of aims and objectives at the head of a reading list, with appropriate
cross references to the institutional mission statement (Strathern 1995b). A clas-
sic example would be fieldwork itself, which, in Evans-Pritchard’s Oxford, simply
could not be taught, it could only be learned by doing—“methods and methodology
were American terms” (Gilsenan 1990:225). Now, however, the ESRC demands
explicit methods training from all departments that would receive its funding, and
anthropology has yielded to this demand like the other social sciences.
Yet it is worth ending with one characteristic anthropological response to the
demands of the new educational command economy in Britain. If we look at the
disciplinary guidelines for research training in different subjects drawn up for
the ESRC, anthropology’s entry looks odd (ESRC 1996). Where sociologists, for
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20 SPENCER
example, are given a crisp one-page list of things every new sociologist should
know (“the principles of descriptive and inferential statistics and bi- and multi-
variable analysis; the systematic analysis of textual and other qualitative data ... ”),
social anthropology’s entry is long and highly discursive, yet somehow it manages
to omit any list of required techniques, except for broad gestures toward fieldwork
and language learning. What is described in the social anthropology guidelines
is a set of desired relationships (primarily with the supervisor), a long process
(fieldwork) of an otherwise open-ended kind, and a certain kind of central social
event: the research seminar. Described with care, this crucible of anthropological
training could be one of the Cambridge seminars of the 1960s, or it could be at
the Institute in Oxford, or in Gluckman’s Manchester, or at the LSE with Bloch,
Parry, and Gell taking on some puzzled foreign star in the 1980s. Although it
misses out on a certain amount of telling local detail—there is no requirement that

the seminar be chaired by an apparent megalomaniac and no allusion to the high
levels of dysfunctional behavior exhibited in the classic seminars of British social
anthropology—it links the anthropology of the 1990s back to the primal scene that
still haunted the anthropologists who consolidated British social anthropology in
the 1950s, Malinowski’s seminar at the LSE. It seems to me at the very least
arguable that 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
work involved in making interdisciplinary boundaries appear sui generis” (Watson
1984:352).
Finally, a note of caution. The kind of demographic picture I presented earlier
should rule out anything as final as a conclusion. British social anthropology
has just passed through a decade of growth and expansion, in which its teaching
and research interests have been transformed. Although I suspect its institutional
oddities will ensure its survival as a distinctive strand of an increasingly global
discipline, it is nevertheless possible that future historians will instead see the 1990s
as the end of British social anthropology as we have known it. In the end I have told
the story as it makes most sense to me, concentrating on institutional facts rather
than more conventional intellectual history. Even within my picture of center-
periphery dynamics, I can see how some of my interpretive choices have shaped
the story I have told. For reasons of space I have not, for example, attempted
to develop an argument about British anthropology’s presence (or absence) in
the public sphere—from Leach’s Reith lectures in the 1960s, through his role
in rejuvenating the RAI in the 1970s, and taking on board the important role of
British public service broadcasting as a sponsor for the discipline in the years
that followed (Leach 1968, 1974). One of the most vital products of that story
is the RAI’s “popular” publications, RAIN and later Anthropology Today, which
between the two provide as good a sense of the changing concerns of the discipline
in Britain as any source (Benthall 1996). I have concentrated, I now see, most
heavily on the years since I sat in my first anthropology lecture in the early 1970s.
Had I sat in the lecture 10 years earlier, I suspect I would have had more to say
about the earlier alternative strands opened up by Gluckman and his protégés 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
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24 SPENCER
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August 26, 2000 9:26 Annual Reviews AR111-01

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:1–24

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

Key Words sociocultural anthropology, history, British social science, seminars,

DECLINE AND FALL?

Is British social anthropology still distinctively “British”? Or to rephrase the

but in an increasingly cosmopolitan European exchange (Kuper 1996:193).

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3

STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 5

in the polytechnics, or in the innovative Open University set up by the Labour

huge expansion. Yet a number of leading anthropologists—Peter Worsley, Max

the polytechnics and the Open University in particular—became the academic

home of a great deal of interdisciplinary and pedagogic innovation, as well as a

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 7

Although outsiders might grumble about the clannishness of a discipline that so

PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

The impression of a tightly bounded discipline confined to a small number of high-

4 Again, a comparison with sociology is instructive. Even now, sociology is a marginal

TABLE 1 PhDs in social anthropology by

University College London 46

TABLE 2 PhDs in social anthropology by department, 1970–1994 (5-year

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 9

TABLE 3 Postgraduate training of academic anthropologists employed in

Oxford, Cambridge, or the LSE, as were 68 of the post-1989 generation (52%

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 11

REPRESENTATIONS, INITIATIVES, AND BOUNDARIES

intellectuals in the mass media. In the interests of space, I concentrate on four

defining occasions, the Decennial conferences of the Association of Social An-

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 13

to attempts to train anthropology graduates for nonacademic employment. He

Department of Social Anthropology was slanted towards ‘applied anthropology.’

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 15

recent intellectual excitement (consumption and modernity). Outside observers

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

These historical arguments offer a new perspective on the shifting concerns

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 17

generation—has, for many British anthropologists, become the discipline’s bread-

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 19

misses out on a certain amount of telling local detail—there is no requirement that

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 21

Manchester. Writing from one particular perspective, especially one so close to

Visit the Annual Reviews home page at www.AnnualReviews.org

London: Assoc. Univ. Br. Commonw. Banton 1965a, pp. xi–xlii

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23

global? An outsider’s view. Anthropol. To- Turner V. 1965. Colour classification in

tion? RAIN 36:6–7 Social Anthropology Accepted for Higher

Turner T. 1993. Anthropology and multicultur- Degrees at British Universities. London:

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