Difficult Folk?: A Political History of Social Anthropology(v. 19 Methodology & History in Anthropology)

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds. Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Chapter 1. Introduction: ideas, individuals, identities and institutions Chapter 2. Why disciplinary histories matter Chapter 3. A tale of two departments? Oxford and the LSE Chapter 4. The politics of disciplinary professionalisation Chapter 5. Anthropology at the end of empire Chapter 6. Tribes and territories Chapter 7. How not to apply anthropological knowledge: the RAI and its 'friends' Chapter 8. Anthropologists and 'race': social research in postcolonial Britain Chapter 9. Discipline on the defensive? Chapter 10. The uses of academic identity Appendix: Disciplining the archives Bibliography Index

About the Author :
David Mills is University Lecturer in Pedagogy and the Social Sciences at the University of Oxford. He previously held anthropology lectureships at Oxford, Manchester and Birmingham. His publications include Anthropology and Time (co-edited with Wendy James), Teaching Rites and Wrongs (co-edited with Mark Harris), and African Anthropologies: History, Practice and Critique (co-edited with Mwenda Ntarangwi and Mustafa Babiker).

Review :
Unlike previous historical accounts - [Mills]gives greater attention to structural factors than to intellectual emphases or individual personalities in his analysis of the emergence of different academic cultures in anthropology programs [in the UK and the US]. An illuminating account.A" * Choice