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Participant Observers

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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 a...
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  • 14 February 2023
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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.
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Price: $34.95
Pages: 280
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Berkeley Series in British Studies
Publication Date: 14 February 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520390331
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

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