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

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Univ of California Press, Feb 14, 2023 - History - 280 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Development Decades
6
Decades of the Twentieth Century
9
Philanthropists and Imperialists
32
Pencils Schemes and Letters
58
Popularising the Field
80
From Kinship Studies to Community Studies
102
to Social Anthropology in the British Empire 19351955
130
From Development Economics to the Moral Economy
152
Epilogue
175
Bibliography
229
Index
257
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About the author (2023)

Freddy Foks is Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He is a historian of modern Britain and its empire.

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