Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The economic and organisational basis of British social anthropology in its formative period, 1930–1939: social reform in the colonies
- 2 Training for the field: the sorcerer's apprentices
- 3 Making it to the field as a Jew and a Red
- 4 Personal and intellectual friendships: Fortes and Evans-Pritchard
- 5 Personal and intellectual animosities: Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski and others
- 6 The Oxford Group
- 7 Some achievements of anthropology in Africa
- 8 Personal contributions
- 9 Concluding remarks
- Appendix 1 Changing research schemes
- Appendix 2 Towards the study of the history of social anthropology
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
Appendix 1 - Changing research schemes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The economic and organisational basis of British social anthropology in its formative period, 1930–1939: social reform in the colonies
- 2 Training for the field: the sorcerer's apprentices
- 3 Making it to the field as a Jew and a Red
- 4 Personal and intellectual friendships: Fortes and Evans-Pritchard
- 5 Personal and intellectual animosities: Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski and others
- 6 The Oxford Group
- 7 Some achievements of anthropology in Africa
- 8 Personal contributions
- 9 Concluding remarks
- Appendix 1 Changing research schemes
- Appendix 2 Towards the study of the history of social anthropology
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
Summary
The kind of research that anthropologists do sometimes seems to amount to parachuting themselves into another group of human beings and finding out as much as they can about their way of life. Undoubtedly, as with bird-watching, there is a lot of underrated ethnographic work of that kind, which has its uses in getting a general picture of a particular people. But needless to say, every observer goes to the field with some framework for his observations. In the case of Malinowski's students this was especially marked, partly because as experienced scholars they came in with their own foci of interest (Fortes, the family; Nadel, music; Hofstra, individuality). So I thought it would be of interest to present the research projects they submitted before going to the field, which increasingly bear the strong marks of Malinowski's influence on them. In Fortes' case he presented three versions of his project at different times and I have included all three in order to give some idea of the way he shaped his project under Malinowski's influence so that it moved from a general psychological enquiry to a more specific anthropological one. But it still retained a psychological component which when he later presented the results of his research under the influence of Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim had largely disappeared. Only in his account of Tallensi education did he retain an explicit orientation in that direction, although later in life he returned strongly to the theme of the interpretation of sociological and psychological (even psychoanalytic) frames.
There are three versions of Meyer Fortes' plans for research of a psychological nature in an anthropological setting.
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- Information
- The Expansive MomentThe rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970, pp. 159 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995