Participant Observers : Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain

Social anthropology was at the forefront of debates about culture, society, and economic development in the British Empire. This book explores the discipline's rise in the interwar period, crisis amid decolonization, and ironic reemergence in the postwar metropole. Across the humanities and social sciences, activists and scholars used anthropological concepts forged in empire to rethink British society at midcentury. Participant Observers shows how colonial anthropology helped define the social imagination of postimperial Britain. Part institutional history of the discipline's formation, part cultural history of its impact, this is the first account of social anthropology's pivotal role in Britain's intellectual culture. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Map Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Islands and Institutions, Anthropology in Britain and the British Empire in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century 2. Philanthropists and Imperialists, Indirect Rule, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of LSE Anthropology 3. Pencils, Schemes and Letters, Fieldwork and Pedagogy in 1930s Social Anthropology 4. Popularising the Field, Interwar Anthropologists on the Radio and in Literary Culture 5. From Kinship Studies to Community Studies, ‘Race Relations’, the ‘Traditional Working-Class Neighbourhood’ and the ‘Social Network’ in Post-war British Sociology 6. The Development Decades, The African Survey, the CSSRC and Three Approaches to Social Anthropology in the British Empire, 1935–1955 7. From Development Economics to the ‘Moral Economy’, At the Margins of Anthropology, Economics and Social History in the 1950s and 1960s Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index "By the 1950s, social anthropologists were at the forefront of debates about culture, society, and the limits to economic development in Britain and the British Empire. This book explains how anthropology rose to such prominence and how its influence dispersed across the humanities and social sciences. Part institutional history of social anthropology's imperial formation, part cultural history of the discipline's impact, this is the first account of social anthropology's pivotal role in Britain's midcentury intellectual culture"-- Provided by publisher