Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth Century

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Routledge, Sep 19, 2014 - Social Science - 170 pages

Anthropology and Anthropologists provides an entertaining and provocative account of British social anthropology from the foundations of the discipline, through the glory years of the mid-twentieth century and on to the transformation in recent decades. The book shocked the anthropological establishment on first publication in 1973 but soon established itself as one of the introductions for students of anthropology. Forty years later, this now classic work has been radically revised. Adam Kuper situates the leading actors in their historical and institutional context, probes their rivalries, revisits their debates, and reviews their key ethnographies. Drawing on recent scholarship he shows how the discipline was shaped by the colonial setting and by developments in the social sciences.

 

Contents

List of illustrations
1918
RadcliffeBrown
1932
The 1930s and 1940s From function to structure
Anthropology and colonialism
From charisma to routine The decade after World War II
Leach and the neostructuralists
Buddy can you spare a paradigm?
some contributions to the history of British social anthropology
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About the author (2014)

Adam Kuper is a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Visiting Professor at Boston University. His books include Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (1999), The Reinvention of Primitive Society (2005) and Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (2009).

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