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
1 - The economic and organisational basis of British social anthropology in its formative period, 1930–1939: social reform in the colonies
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 role of foundations in the social sciences and parallel activities has been the subject of considerable debate. How far were they the tools of capitalism? Were the social policies of the Rockefeller Foundation ‘essential cogs in the production and reproduction of cultural hegemony’? The Gramscian argument, espoused by Fisher, places its emphasis on the ‘critical-conflict’ perspective in the process of knowledge change in which causes are sought in the economy, class, ideology and hegemony. This perspective succeeds in giving to an interesting and informative paper a top-heavy superstructure which does not do justice to the subtlety of the situation, nor yet to Fisher's own analysis. At that level the interpretation has come under attack from Bulmer (1984) and from Karl and Katz (1987). For the attempt to see the social policies as cogs in the reproduction of cultural hegemony overplays the extent of interlocking of family and foundation on the one hand and underestimates the degree of autonomy of structures and actors on the other. As this case history shows there was more conflict, contradiction, disagreement and independence than is often allowed. That conclusion seems even more true of the argument that British social anthropologists as a whole were ‘tools of colonialism’ since both their interests and those of the foundation that funded them (not to speak of a large part of the British population) rarely coincided with those of colonial governments.
Anthropology, ‘the study of man’, is a term that goes back to Aristotle and has usually meant the study of the other, the ‘primitive’ other at that.
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- The Expansive MomentThe rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970, pp. 7 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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