spencer british anthropology

British Social Anthropology: A RetrospectiveAuthor(s): Jonathan SpencerSource: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 1-24Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223412Accessed: 03/12/2009 00:40

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:1-24 Copyright ( 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

A Retrospective

Jonathan Spencer Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, Scotland; e-mail: [email protected]

Key Words sociocultural anthropology, history, British social science, seminars, British universities

* Abstract This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, con-

centrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, social anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries-between academic anthropology and practical policy-related research, between "social" and "cultural" anthropology-appear to have withered away. Yet British social anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.

DECLINE AND FALL?

Is British social anthropology still distinctively "British"? Or to rephrase the question, is it still distinctively "social"? This is a question about disciplines and their boundaries, and the answer I offer concentrates less on the substance of what is currently being written, taught, and debated in Britain and more on the institutions and practices through which a strong sense of discipline and boundedness is still, I believe, reproduced.

When he published the first edition of his history of moder British social anthropology, the young Adam Kuper (1973) had no doubt about the coherence of his subject matter: "'British social anthropology' is not merely a term for the work done by British or even British-trained social anthropologists. The phrase connotes a set of names, a limited range of ethnographic regional specialities, a list of central monographs, a characteristic mode of procedure, and a particular series of intellectual problems. In short, it connotes an intellectual tradition" (Kuper 1973:227). By the second edition in 1983, Kuper's confidence had begun to wane.

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Reviewing British social anthropology in the decade since the book's first publication he spoke of "institutional stagnation, intellectual torpor, and parochialism" while seeking solace in the continuing vitality of "its greatest strength, which is its fine ethnographic tradition" (Kuper 1983:192). By the early 1990s, in a French reference work, he lamented that it was now difficult to see what was "specifically British" about social anthropology in Britain (Kuper 1991:307), and in a later edition of his book (Kuper 1996:176), he declared that "as a distinctive intellectual movement," British social anthropology lasted only for the half-century from the publication of Malinowski's Argonauts (1922) in the early 1920s to-oddly enough-the moment in the early 1970s when he published his own book (Kuper 1973). The future of social anthropology, for Kuper, lies not in national traditions, but in an increasingly cosmopolitan European exchange (Kuper 1996:193).

Any writer on moder British anthropology works in the long shadow cast by previous historians. Apart from Kuper, though, most historical work has concentrated on the period between the turn of the century and the late 1940s or early 1950s, the period when social anthropology consolidated its position within British academic life (Goody 1995; Kuklick 1991; Langham 1981; Stocking 1984, 1992, 1995; Urry 1993). Although Kuper took the story forward to the late 1960s and has extended it to the 1990s in a series of epilogues to his original work, his emphasis is overwhelmingly on the intellectual history of the discipline, with relatively little attention to the changing political, social, and institutional context within which that history was worked out (cf Leach 1984:2-3). In what follows then, I want as far as possible to discuss themes and issues that have been left relatively unex- plored in recent historiography; to work, as it were, "after Stocking"-starting at that point in the early 1950s when Stocking's magisterial work (Stocking 1995) leaves off-and following a significantly different line of enquiry from Kuper's (1983). Since the publication of the first edition of Kuper's (1973) book, British social anthropology has been heavily dependent on the material support of the British state and has been forced, like all other academic disciplines in British universities, to adapt its practices of teaching and research to an ever more activist educational bureaucracy. So the question that dominates an institutional history of recent British social anthropology is this: Has anthropology triumphantly survived the increasingly directive attentions of its main source of material support, or has it been irretrievably compromised and corrupted by this relationship?

The central section of this chapter addresses that question through a review of the demography of the discipline, seen through the lens of changing funding regimes. The closing section attempts to assess the intellectual consequences of institutional change and returns to the sense of decline so forcefully articulated by Kuper in his recent versions of disciplinary history. But in partial disagreement with Kuper, I suggest that "British social anthropology" retains its distinctiveness as a relatively small and coherent group of intellectual practitioners, even though the particular markers of distinction-the things that make it "British," or "social," or "anthropological"-have changed, and continue to change. This means that we have-in true British spirit-to replace the cultural question of what particular

BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

intellectual (or "cultural") content makes British social anthropology "British" for the more sociological question of what particular institutions, practices, and rituals continue to ensure its distinction from its neighbors while allowing it to change its empirical focus and its theoretical emphases.

STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

In the closing chapter of his book, Stocking (1995) gives a gripping account of Meyer Fortes' appointment to the William Wyse Chair in Cambridge in 1949. In so doing, he reminds us of two things: how small the discipline was in Britain in the late 1940s, and how tenuously placed social anthropology was within British anthropology of the time. Fortes' main rival for the Cambridge chair was Christophe von Ftirer-Haimendorf, a German-trained ethnographer of limited theoretical ambition but with distinct "culturalist" inclinations. If Fiirer-Haimendorf, then at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London, had been appointed to the Cambridge chair, social anthropology would have been reduced to two university departments, at Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE), with fragments in Manchester and Edinburgh. Instead, Fortes' appointment sealed a period of postwar consolidation in which the social anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown became the dominant strand of British anthropology (Stocking 1995:427-32). Yet in all that follows, it must be recognized that we are dealing with a remarkably small group of people.

A good sense of the demographics of the discipline at this moment can be gleaned from Forde's contribution to a compendium of world anthropology (Forde 1953). Altogether there were just over 30 social anthropologists in British universities. At Oxford, Evans-Pritchard held the chair, with an extraordinary team of lecturing staff, including JG Peristiany, Paul Bohannon, Godfrey Lienhardt, Louis Dumont, and Fritz Steiner. At the LSE, Raymond Firth held the chair, with Isaac Schapera, Edmund Leach, Maurice Freedman, and Paul Stirling in support, whereas Lucy Mair held a separate position as Reader in Colonial Administration. In Manchester, Max Gluckman was supported by Elizabeth Colson, John Barnes, Ian Cunnison, and AL Epstein. At Cambridge, Meyer Fortes presided over a relatively small department; Daryll Forde, Mary Douglas, and Phyllis Kaberry were at University College London (UCL); and von Furer-Haimendorf was at SOAS.

1All the population figures that follow require mild qualification, as they are gleaned from published lists of the names of people employed in university departments, with a certain amount of informed guesswork necessary to separate social from physical anthropologists, or in later lists, social anthropologists from sociologists in joint departments. The main sources are Forde (1953), the Commonwealth Universities Yearbook (1963, 1973, 1983, 1993), and the Annals of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA 1999). For useful demographic accounts of the discipline at crucial moments in its recent history, see Ardener & Ardener (1965) and Riviere (1985).

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The story of British social anthropology in the years that followed is heavily shaped by the story of British universities and their relationship with the British state. Although the number of anthropologists working in universities had increased to more than 50 by 1963, these were all to be found in the same few departments as in the early 1950s (with the exception of a few odd figures working on their own in large institutions without departments of anthropology around them). In the early 1960s, the British government launched a major expansion of what until then had been a small and elitist university sector: New universities were opened, and a whole additional class of institutions-polytechnics-was created to supplement the more conventional universities. In the next decade, anthropology was established, sometimes in joint departments with sociology, at the new Universities of Sussex, Kent, and East Anglia, while new departments struggled into life at older universities like Belfast, Hull, and Swansea. By 1973 there were about 90 anthropologists in post, and by 1983 the figure had risen to 120, with two more new departments, at Goldsmiths and St Andrews. By 1993 there were more than 160 anthropologists working in British universities. A check of the ASA Annals (1999) suggests that the latest figure is around 220 (this figure includes anthropologists working on short-term contracts, for example as replacements for staff on leave).

This is not, however, the straightforward tale of growth and expansion it might seem to be. After the rapid expansion of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, universities were badly hit by government austerity measures, and with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979, the social sciences were singled out for especially harsh treatment. With cutbacks in state support for universities, by the early 1980s the discipline was felt to be in real crisis as the supply of academic jobs almost completely dried up. The situation only started to change at the end of that decade, when the government changed tack and launched a further huge expansion of university teaching. This time, however, most of the increase was accounted for by much larger student numbers within existing departments and degree courses, rather than by creating new institutions, as had happened in the 1960s. The new boom in student recruitment coincided with a moment of higher public visibility for social anthropology, and demand for places on anthropology courses has soared since the late 1980s.

Is this, then, a straightforward tale of expansion (apart from the Thatcherite hiccup in the 1980s), as it appears from the figures? Or is it a case of tightly limited expansion (in the context of the growth of universities in general, and social sciences in particular) since the early 1950s? A comparison with sociology is instructive here, not least because the two disciplines have been closely linked throughout this period. Before the 1960s boom in universities, sociology as an academic presence in Britain was arguably smaller and more dispersed than social anthropology. But by 1981 (the gloomiest year of Thatcher's rule for the social sciences), the discipline had expanded to more than 1000 government-funded university positions, growing at almost 10 times the rate of social anthropology. What is most significant in the comparison with sociology's expansion is the places where anthropology was not found. With a handful of exceptions, it was not taught


in the polytechnics, or in the innovative Open University set up by the Labour Government of the 1960s.2 Nor was it established as part of the school curriculum. By the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 18-year-olds had studied sociology as an A-level examination subject; in 1999, the figure for anthropology remained stuck on zero (Abrams 1981).

There are three possible explanations for the limits to anthropological expansion. One is a simple problem of demand: The new welfare bureaucracies of postwar Britain required sociologists (or thought they did) and not anthropologists, and the universities and the government accommodated themselves to this brute fact.

The second is demographic: There were only just enough anthropologists to build the departments that were built in the 1960s, and not enough to sustain a huge expansion. Yet a number of leading anthropologists-Peter Worsley, Max Marwick, and Ronald Frankenberg, among others-took up positions in the new sociology departments in the 1960s, while others, most notably Victor Turner, and later FG Bailey and Stanley Tambiah, left Britain for the United States. This reveals an important difference in the mode of expansion of the two disciplines at the time: Social anthropology departments were concerned with staffing themselves only with social anthropologists; sociology departments were staffed with whomever was available, and the issue of professional or disciplinary coherence was raised after-rather than during-the period of expansion. This difference was explicit in the development of the relevant professional organizations for the two disciplines. The Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) was founded in 1946 with a strong model of professionalization in mind: Membership required a higher degree in social anthropology and/or evidence of publications and a teaching position in anthropology. Up until the 1990s, the annual meetings of the Association were marked by careful (and for some distasteful) scrutiny and discussion of the qualifications of would-be members (cf Tapper 1980). The British Sociological Association, in contrast, remained a far more open organization-a broad church much more like the AAA in the United States-despite occasional attempts to create a more elite professional standing for sociologists (Barnes 1981).

The third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for the limits to anthropological expansion is internal to the discipline. Anthropology did not expand into other educational settings because anthropologists themselves did not want to expand. It was seen as, above all, a subject for graduate researchers, not for

2Ruth Finnegan has been almost the only anthropologist employed by the Open University- a pioneering distance-learning initiative set up by the Labour government of the late 1960s- whereas Oxford Brookes (formerly Oxford Polytechnic) was, for a long time, the only one of the former polytechnics to teach anthropology as a degree subject. 3British anthropologists were heavily involved in establishing a social anthropology com- ponent in the International Baccalaureate examination for high-school students, but for all its merits, this program reaches a tiny proportion of students in the relevant age group, compared with the A-level examinations, which are taken by virtually all 18-year-olds in the school system in England and Wales.

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undergraduates, let alone school students. In 1973, for example, Leach argued forcefully against any attempt to introduce anthropology to school-age students: "It could be very confusing to learn about other people's moral values before you have confident understanding of your own" (Leach 1973:4). In Oxford in the 1970s, social anthropology was not taught-and not thought to be teachable-to undergraduates as a degree subject. Twenty years later, in the conclusion to his brief memoir of British social anthropology, Jack Goody reiterated the point that the lack of attention to undergraduate teaching was one of the great strengths of British social anthropology in what was, for him, its golden age (Goody 1995:157-58).

Whatever the reason, the limits to expansion had some obvious consequences for the discipline. The places not visited by the insights of anthropological science- the polytechnics and the Open University in particular-became the academic home of a great deal of interdisciplinary and pedagogic innovation, as well as a refuge for the post-1968 intellectual Left. These were the ingredients that coalesced into the heady brew now known as "British Cultural Studies," but the work of leading figures in this area (from EP Thompson and Raymond Williams to Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Paul Willis) barely touched British social anthropology until it was reimported in the 1980s via the work of American anthropologists (cfNugent & Shore 1997). Anthropology, unlike cultural studies or even sociology, was almost entirely confined to the older, research-based, elite universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, and the more prestigious London colleges, such as the LSE and UCL. On the other hand, and in contrast to the United States in the early 1990s (cf Turner 1993), in Britain cultural studies never looked a threat to anthropology because it rarely occupied the same niche in the academic ecosystem.

In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropology's place at the heart of the academic es- tablishment did not go entirely unremarked on. The young Perry Anderson, in his sweeping polemic against the pervasive empiricism and liberalism of 1960s British academia, specifically excepted anthropology from his strictures. Anthro- pology, however, was allowed to be theoretical and totalizing (a "good thing" for the 1960s Left) because it displaced its attentions to the colonies, and he quoted a prominent sociologist of the time on the social correlates of British anthropology: "British social anthropology has drawn on the same intellectual capital as sociology proper, and its success, useful to colonial administration and dangerous to no domestic prejudice, shows at what a high rate of interest that capital can be made to pay.... The subject ... unlike sociology, has prestige. It is associated with colonial administration-traditionally a career for a gentleman, and entrance into the profession and acceptance by it confers high status in Britain" (see Anderson 1969:265, original emphasis).

This view of the social centrality of British social anthropology is partly cor- roborated by Leach, himself a formidable academic politician, in the context of a panegyric to the diplomatic skills of his mentor, Raymond Firth: "From the 1940s to the 1960s he had a wide variety of personal, but quite informal, ties with senior civil servants in key positions. He used these contacts with outstand- ing skill.... Firth went behind the scenes and talked with the people who really mattered. Considering the tiny scale of the whole enterprise in Britain of the


1950s, the central funding of social anthropological research was quite disproportionately generous. It was a phase which only endured while Firth was at the helm at the LSE" (Leach 1984:13-14).

All this, it could be argued, changed when a new breed of professional academic-survivors from the 1960s expansion of the universities and, with their allu- sions to "wealth creation" and "market forces," fluent in the new lingua franca of the times-took control of the central institutions of British social science in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in the 1990s (the decade of the performance indicator), the institutional distribution of academic anthropologists had its advantages. In official assessments and peer-based quantifications of teaching quality and research performance-which now dominate British academic life-anthropology departments have consistently performed better than other social science disciplines. Although outsiders might grumble about the clannishness of a discipline that so overtly protects its own, anthropologists merely point to the kinds of institutions they are found in and suggest that their high ratings are no more nor less than would be found elsewhere in those institutions.4

PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

The impression of a tightly bounded discipline confined to a small number of high- status institutions is heightened if we shift our attention to the social production of social anthropologists. There are two ways to assess this: Either examine where the PhDs in social anthropology are being awarded, or look to see where successive cohorts of university teachers were trained. Whichever way we look, the picture is the same, but a new element is also introduced: the increased vulnerability of the discipline (like its sisters in the social sciences) to government intervention via state funding organizations.

Let's start with the first question: Where do the successful PhDs come from?5 In the quarter century from 1970 to 1994, just under 1000 PhDs were awarded in social anthropology in Britain, of which just under half came from just three departments: Oxford, Cambridge, and the LSE (Table 1). Between them they accounted for 460 of 964 PhDs granted in that period.

If we break these figures down into 5-year periods (Table 2), a slightly more nuanced account of the distribution emerges. In particular, we get a better sense

4Again, a comparison with sociology is instructive. Even now, sociology is a marginal discipline in Oxford and Cambridge whereas some of the strongest departments are found in relatively unfashionable universities such as Lancaster and Essex (Heath & Edmondson 1981). For a valuable guide to anthropology's passage through the stormy bureaucratic waters of the 1990s, see Gledhill (in press). 5Data on anthropology PhDs in Britain since the early 1970s are available through the Index to Theses accepted for higher degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland (searchable online at www.theses.com); some of this material is also summarized in Webber (1983), which contains a thorough discussion of the limitations of the classifications used in organizing the information.

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TABLE 1 PhDs in social anthropology by department, 1970-1994

Department

Oxford

Cambridge London School of Economics

School of Oriental and African Studies

Manchester

Sussex

University College London

Edinburgh Belfast

All other departments

Total

No. PhDs

187

137

136

82

59

51

46

37

31

198

964

of the lag between changes in funding and the completion, years later, of PhDs

affected by those changes. So in the early 1970s, although the new departments from the 1960s were beginning to build up their own pools of researchers, few

of these had yet completed degrees: Much as might be expected, the three key

departments-Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE-provided 60% of the PhDs. By the second half of the decade, however, although the total number rose from 132

(about 26 a year) to 214 (45 a year), the Oxford-Cambridge-LSE share dropped to less than 40%, as students in newer departments-notably Sussex-started to

complete their doctoral studies. The total numbers for all departments briefly rose

in the first half of the 1980s, before settling at, or just below, 40 a year. And as the

TABLE 2 intervals)

PhDs in social anthropology by department, 1970-1994 (5-year

Total Oxford, Cambridge, Years Oxford Cambridge LSEa (all UK) LSE (%of all PhDs)

1970-1974 33 20 26 132 60

1975-1979 40 27 17 214 39

1980-1984 42 40 19 232 44

1985-1989 41 23 41 204 51

1990-1994 31 27 33 182 50

Total 187 137 136 964 48

aLSE, London School of Economics.


TABLE 3 Postgraduate training of academic anthropologists employed in British departments, 1999a

Department Pre-1989 staff Post-1989 staff Total %age of total

Cambridge 23 24 47 24

LSE 16 23 39 17

Oxford 16 22 38 16

SOAS 11 8 19 8

UCL 10 6 16 7

Manchester 4 7 11 5

Sussex 6 3 9 4

Edinburgh 3 2 5 2

Durham 1 4 5 2

Kent 2 1 3 1

Belfast 2 0 2 1

Hull 1 0 1 < 1

Other (UK) 2 10 12 5

Other (non-UK) 8 19 27 12

Total 105 129 234 100

aLSE, London School of Economics; SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies; UCL, University College London.

figures settled, so the share held by the "big three" departments stabilized at about 50%.

These figures tell another story, of the rise and decline of state support for graduate research in social anthropology, which I return to shortly. What, though, of academic jobs? Table 3 shows collated information on the graduate training of anthropologists currently working in British departments. They are divided into two cohorts: those first employed before the crisis years of the 1980s, and those who took up their first permanent appointment afterward. For local historical reasons, 1989 is taken as the watershed year.6

The division by cohorts is instructive. Over half the staff (55%) working in British departments in 1999 had been first appointed in the preceding 10 years whereas just under half (45%) were survivors from the pre-Thatcher expansion of the discipline. But the dominance of the big three departments is remarkably stable across the generations: 55 of the pre-1989 generation were trained at

6In some years in the 1980s, there were virtually no permanent academic jobs offered in British anthropology departments. In 1989, an unprecedented number of new posts became available at LSE, UCL, Brunel, SOAS, and Manchester.

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Oxford, Cambridge, or the LSE, as were 68 of the post-1989 generation (52% and 53% of their respective cohorts). Within the three departments, Cambridge is disproportionately important: Although it awarded only 14% of the doctorates in social anthropology between 1970 and 1994, in 1999 its graduates held 24% of the jobs in British universities (Oxford had 19% of the doctorates and 16% of the jobs, and the LSE had 14% of the doctorates and 17% of the jobs). In other words, although three departments continue to dominate the discipline, the department at Cambridge has been especially successful in providing new generations of academic anthropologists.

There are other patterns that are not clear from the aggregated figures alone. Some departments display high levels of endogeny, recruiting heavily from their own graduates. This has been especially true of Oxford and Cambridge over the years, but also of SOAS and UCL until recently. Oxford students have been underrepresented in recruitment at the LSE and vice versa. And there are signs of more diverse recruitment in recent years, especially from North America: only five of the pre-1989 generation hold North American PhDs compared with 15 of the post-1989 cohort (including four from Chicago and two from Princeton). Unfortunately, data are not easily available on other aspects of anthropologists' educational background, such as their class or ethnic origins. We can, however, see significant shifts in the gender balance. In the mid-1980s, Riviere (1985) re- ported to the ASA on the demographic shape of the discipline, using a sample of nine departments. His analysis showed that the ratio of men to women had barely changed since the early 1970s: In 1973 there were 12 women to 67 men; in 1983, there were 15 to 69, a tiny rise from 15% to 18% (Riviere 1985:11). In 1999, in the discipline as a whole, there were 97 women in teaching positions, or 41% of the total, and a breakdown by cohort shows how much has changed: In the

pre-1989 generation there are 23 women (22%) to 82 men (78%), a figure in line with Riviere's report from the 1980s; in the post-1989 cohort, the figures are 55 men (43%) and 74 women (57%).

If we step back from the details and try to look at the larger picture, a number of patterns are clear. Although British social anthropology has remained a

relatively small and tightly knit community, taught in a few universities only, graduate research-and the production of new generations of anthropologists- has been extraordinarily concentrated in the same three departments: Oxford, Cambridge, and the LSE. Viewed in the long run, diversity has tended to be peripheral and short-lived. The distinctive strand of work pioneered by Gluckman and his followers in Manchester did not long survive Gluckman's own retirement in the early 1970s: The rebirth of that department in the 1980s owed everything to the imaginative appointment of Marilyn Strather to the chair in 1984 and

signaled the beginning of the second wave of diversification in British anthro-

pology. In the 1970s, Sussex emerged as the main producer of new graduate researchers (other than the big three)-often working in new fields such as Europe and Latin America-but with the cutbacks of the 1980s, it, like the other new


departments of the 1960s, lost access to the funds that would keep its graduate program alive.

As this might suggest, a great deal of what happened can be explained by the distribution of support from one central agency. Until the mid-1960s, British social anthropology had relied on a combination of sources for its relatively modest research needs: the Colonial Social Science Research Council and other British government sources, certain American foundations (such as the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation), and a few British foundations [a more detailed account of pre-1968 funding can be found in a report to the Social Science Research Council (1968:92-99)]. In 1965, the British government established its own Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which provided grants for new research projects and supported graduate students at masters and doctoral levels. In its first decade, the new SSRC presided over a boom in graduate research in the social sciences. Such was its impact that by 1971, the chair of its social anthropology committee, Edmund Leach, could report that it provided "virtually the only source of financial support for field research in social anthropology" (Leach 1971:11). At the peak of its munificence, in 1973, the SSRC was able to offer 84 new awards to graduate researchers in social anthropology, spread around 11 departments, but with just over half directed to the triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and the LSE.7

The SSRC was a 1960s initiative, initially ill-suited to the straitened circum- stances of the 1980s. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979, one of her government's first actions was to slash its budget. An enquiry into the activities of the SSRC failed to produce the recommendation for abolition favored by some Conservative politicians, but it was the catalyst for a number of changes. The organization was renamed the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-the Minister responsible apparently had a deep suspicion of any claim to social science-and its internal structure was changed so that social anthropology (along with other disciplines) lost its own cozy subject committee. From the peak support of the mid-1970s, studentships fell to between 20 and 30 a year, where they have remained ever since. After these reforms, the ESRC aggres- sively reinvented itself as the vanguard organization for the Tories' new cultural command economy. New ESRC priorities in research funding at first explicitly em- phasized "wealth creation" and implicitly focused almost entirely on UK-focused work, apparently discouraging the kind of classic anthropological field projects that had been supported in the past. Tough controls on PhD submission rates meant that by the late 1980s, most British departments (including at one point Cambridge, UCL, and SOAS) had been blacklisted for ESRC students. They also meant that theses had to be written more quickly, fieldwork and writing-up time

7The figures for graduate student support from the late 1960s to the early 1980s can be tracked through the issues of the SSRC Newsletter, which also contains annual reports of the Social Anthropology Committee.

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were squeezed, and compulsory generic social science research training ate into prefieldwork preparation.8

REPRESENTATIONS, INITIATIVES, AND BOUNDARIES

In a broad overview, the difficult trick is to move back from this kind of institutional history to see what intellectual resonance it has. One way to do this is to look at the discipline's own self-representations. These might include everything from the content of undergraduate reading lists, to textbooks and introductions to the subject, through the presence (and nonpresence) of anthropologists as public intellectuals in the mass media. In the interests of space, I concentrate on four defining occasions, the Decennial conferences of the Association of Social An- thropologists, alternating between Cambridge and Oxford, in 1963, 1973, 1983, and 1993, the occasions when British social anthropology put on its best party dress and displayed itself to the world.

The 1963 conference-coorganized by M Gluckman and F Eggan-brought together leading British and American "social anthropologists" from the "younger generation" (Gluckman & Eggan 1965:xii).9 The papers were published in four distinctive volumes [on religion, political systems, complex societies, and the use of models (Banton 1965a-d)], with a common introduction from the two coor- ganizers. This set out an explicit agenda for the meeting: not so much the celebration of the distinctiveness of British social anthropology as an exploration of a set of sensitive boundaries. The most obvious of these was between British and American anthropology, and the opening shot came with Gluckman and Eggan implicitly coopting the likes of Schneider and Geertz as "social" (rather than "cultural") anthropologists. Equally important, however, were the boundaries between anthropology and the other social sciences-economics, political science, sociology, psychology-each of which was weighed up as a potential partner in the introduction. In the different volumes, the British contributors-on the whole- concentrated on typologies and formal model building. [Turner (1965), as ever, provided a magnificent exception in his classic paper on Ndembu color symbolism.] This was anthropology as generic social science, ready for the brave new world of the 1960s expansion, and many of the British participants moved into chairs and readerships, often in new joint anthropology and sociology departments, in the subsequent decade.

8It must be remembered, of course, that the SSRC/ESRC was far more important to anthropology than anthropology-which never claimed more than a tiny fraction of the organization's resources-was to its main funder. Anthropology's relatively low profile also had its uses, as in the early 1980s, when sociology became the focus of attack from ideologues of the New Right. 9The occasion has attracted a fair amount of reminiscence from the participants (see e.g. Frankenberg 1988; Geertz 1991, 1995; Goody 1995; Schneider 1995). Of course it only became recognized as the "first" Decennial much later in the day.


The 1973 conference came at the peak of a decade of growth, and the publications that emerged reflected the kind of intellectual optimism that academ- ics usually only manage in a period of apparently unlimited expansion. The generic editorial introduction was this time provided by Edwin Ardener, who in his Malinowski Memorial lecture a few years earlier had detected a spirit of novelty running through the discipline: "[F]or practical purposes text-books which looked useful, no longer are; monographs which used to appear exhaustive now seem se- lective; interpretations which once looked full of insight now seem mechanical and lifeless" (Ardener 1971:449). In keeping with Ardener's passion for the new, the conference theme was "New Directions." In his introduction, however, Ardener seemed keen to stress the "deep roots" of some of the topics covered, pointing out that the offerings of the 1963 conference had not become the stuff of controversy in the intervening years, not least because "new" theory in the 1960s had usually come from France rather than the United States (Ardener 1975). Of the topics covered by panels in the conference itself, six eventually found their way into print: on Marxism (Bloch 1975), symbolism (Willis 1975), "biosocial" anthropology (Fox 1975), texts (Jain 1976), transactionalism (Kapferer 1976), and mathemati- cal techniques (Mitchell 1980). But whereas the founding monographs from the 1963 meeting had served as canonical texts in the new undergraduate syllabuses of the 1960s, only two or three of the 1973 volumes endured to fill that niche.

If the year of the "isms" (as 1973 is now recalled) provided a conference for its time, this was even more true of 1983.10 Only one volume emerged from the proceedings, although more were originally planned. The theme was "social anthropology in the 1980s," and despite all the panels on gender (unrepresented in 1973 but now a major theme), on family and economy, and on anthropology and policy, and despite the keynote addresses (from Beteille and Tambiah, Goody, Godelier, and Mary Douglas), the question for many participants was whether, in Thatcherite Britain, there even would be a social anthropology after the 1980s. The only volume to emerge from the conference was on the interface between anthropology and development policy (Grillo & Rew 1985), reflecting widespread heart-searching about the future of the discipline, and the prospects for employment of the growing reserve army of underemployed PhDs in the subject. One participant was quoted in a contemporary report on the events: "This isn't a conference, it's a psychodrama" (Grillo 1983:10).

For once, the most significant developments occurred not in the set-piece presentations by luminaries. (The "younger generation" this time might have been too much of an embarrassment to act as an intellectual focus.) The most important- and heated-exchanges seem to have taken place in the business meeting, as the members of the Association argued about the best solution to the current employment crisis in the discipline. Edmund Leach in particular objected strongly

10"[In 1973 a] women's session met amicably outside the official programme. Some radical leaflets were circulated. The third world now figured as a political as well as an academic subject. The historical period at least (it may well be thought in 1983) was unmistakable" (Ardener 1975:ix).

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to attempts to train anthropology graduates for nonacademic employment. He followed this with a heartfelt letter to the committee set up by the ASA to report on employment in applied anthropology: "The ASA was started as a 'professional trade union' in the sense that it sought to ensure that when social anthropology was taught in universities and elsewhere the people who were employed to do the teaching were properly qualified in the subject.... As a professional body we need to tell Heads of Departments that they should discourage students from embarking on a course of studies leading to a PhD in social anthropology. It must be emphasised to such potential students that the prospects of ever being employed as a professional social anthropologists [sic] are extremely small.... I would personally be horrified if it became apparent that the 'syllabus design' of what is taught in a University Department of Social Anthropology was slanted towards 'applied anthropology.' This would indeed be ironical! ... the original role of the ASA was to prevent the Universities from employing unqualified refugees from the disappearing Colonial service to teach 'applied anthropology' !" (see Grillo 1994:309-10).

Leach's anger at the threatened dilution of "pure" anthropology in British universities has deep disciplinary roots. In the late colonial period, academic control of the relevant committees of the Colonial Social Science Research Council meant that British anthropologists enjoyed enough scientific autonomy to ignore demands for more relevant research, and Kuklick, for example, documents the disdain ex- pressed by many leading anthropologists in the 1940s (not least Edmund Leach himself) for practical, policy-oriented work in the colonies (Kuklick 1991:190-93).

Yet-despite considerable resistance from some quarters-what happened in the early 1980s may well have transformed the discipline. From the first cuts in the then SSRC budget in the summer of 1979, some anthropologists started to organize for the bleak times ahead. A succession of workshops and working-groups on employment for anthropology graduates gave birth to a cluster of organizations with ever-changing acronyms (GAPP, BASAPP, SASCW) and culminated in a report to the ASA (Grillo 1984). Much of this activity emanated from the new departments of the 1960s, which by now had fallen on hard times-Kent, for example, but especially Sussex. With hindsight, the activists' efforts have proven remarkably successful. Throughout the 1980s the only significant growth area in academic anthropology was in more-or-less vocational taught masters degrees. This was paralleled by a growth in demand for anthropologists to work in nonacademic settings, especially-but not exclusively-in the field of social development. In the 1990s, the better resourced, but often more conservative, departments in London, Oxford, and Cambridge hurried to establish similar programs in such areas as development anthropology-a clear case of innovation at the disciplinary periphery being appropriated and reincorporated at the core.

Symptomatically, however, this particular transformation in disciplinary trajec- tory was not especially apparent in the most recent celebration of British social anthropology, the 1993 Decennial. In contrast to the 1983 event, the mood was upbeat and expansionist. The universities had started to grow again-in student numbers at least-and enough new posts had been advertised in recent years to


absorb almost all the underemployed leftovers from the 1980s. Social anthropology was in especially good shape because it was experiencing its own boom within the bigger boom; it found itself in unexpected demand from a generation of new students. It was still a very small discipline with a relatively low public profile, but it was beginning to show signs of imminent transition to being a mass subject taught in an under-funded mass university system (Gledhill, in press).

The overall theme for the conference promised to address some of the changes that had overtaken the discipline in the previous decade-"The Uses of Knowledge: Global and Local Relations." Yet neither pedagogy nor the dilemmas of practi- cally engaged anthropology were much discussed in the main sessions.11 These instead focused on a mixture of classic themes (religious certainties) and areas of recent intellectual excitement (consumption and modernity). Outside observers noted the upbeat mood (Stolcke 1993), and the "continuing rapprochement with American cultural anthropology," evinced by the number of presentations from anthropologists institutionally based in North America (Stocking 1995:438). Some of the most exciting discussion at the conference itself took place in fringe sessions on art, on new reproductive technologies, and on ethnic violence, and these sessions were also more representative of the new, post-1989 generation of anthropologists (underrepresented on the platform in the main conference sessions). The conference organizer's "traditional" foreword to the eventual publications- expansive and commanding for the 1963 volumes, reduced but still reasonably full in 1973-was effectively shrunk to a short but challenging paragraph in 1993, as if the kind of expansive overview offered with such confidence by Gluckman and Eggan 30 years earlier were simply no longer feasible (Strathern 1995a).

We can look at the conferences of 1963, 1973, 1983, and 1993 as moments of collective self-presentation. And we can look back at what has and has not survived intellectually from the earlier ones. But we can also look at these as occasions to take stock, in particular, as occasions to renegotiate the discipline's boundaries: in 1963 with the other social sciences; in 1973 with sources of new ideas from outside Britain and/or outside the discipline; in 1983 with the economic chill of the so-called "real world"; and in 1993 with the forces of the global (in anthropology, as well as in the world).

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCE

At this point let's look at two important themes from recent work in the social history of science. Reviewing the exteralism/intemalism debate in science studies, and the linked issue of boundaries around cultural practices like science, Shapin (1992) points out that for historians of science, "boundary talk" helps us see the nonnecessity of actors' accounts of scientific practice, especially when we have

1The most notable exception was the session on the uses of social knowledge convened by Henrietta Moore (cf Moore 1996).

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the cultural distance of the historian looking at past practice. In his book, We Have Never Been Modem, Bruno Latour (1993) goes further and stresses the fic- tive nature of all attempts to bound off "science" from "society" or "politics," or "nature" as a discrete realm from "culture," the place of those who study it. In practice, networks of actors transgress these boundaries, and our world is full of hybrids-part nature, part culture. To deal with this a great effort is put into what Latour calls the "work of purification." In a close, but slightly different, neck of the historiographic woods, attention has been drawn to the ways in which scientific "facts" are made (in laboratories and other highly structured settings), not given (in nature). And if "facts" are made, so are the specialists who observe them, the community of scientists-to invoke the language of Shapin & Schaffer's (1985) study of Hobbes and Boyle, a bounded group with special powers of "witness."

These historical arguments offer a new perspective on the shifting concerns revealed in the four ASA Decennial conferences. Each, in different ways, might be thought of as a return to the questions I opened with: Is it still British? Is it still social? Is it still anthropology? There is a long history here. In the early 1950s, in a carefully staged and still celebrated exchange in the pages of American Anthropologist, George Murdock and Raymond Firth debated these very issues. Concentrating on the then recently published African Systems of Kinship and

Marriage, Murdock leveled a number of accusations at his British colleagues. Sure they're good at what they do, but their geographical and theoretical interests, their reading, their ideas are so narrow. Crucially, they shy away from all talk of "culture," a fact which reveals them in their true colors-they're not anthropologists at all, they're actually sociologists (Murdock 1951:471).12

Here we face an apparent paradox, for virtually all of Murdock's marks of British distinction in the 1950s appear to have melted into air in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1960s, the early concentration on Africa, which taxed Murdock, was already giving way to work in Asia and Europe (SSRC 1968, Kappers 1983). The

apparent obsession with kinship at the expense of all other areas of life (Murdock 1951:467) seems also to have declined: the topic was barely mentioned in the main sessions of the 1993 Decennial, and its recent revival in Britain owes more to the influence of that arch culturalist, David Schneider, than to the ghost of Radcliffe-Brown (cf Carsten 2000, Franklin 1997, Strathern 1992). "Culture" has probably been as much discussed in Britain as in the United States in the 1990s, whereas a whole host of topics-until recently rigorously policed by the anthropological boundary patrol, for example psychological (Bloch 1998) and psychoanalytic (Heald & Deluz 1994) work-have been quietly admitted to the mainstream. These days more attention is probably paid to the work of American anthropologists in Britain than to the work of British (or French or Norwegian or German) anthropologists in the United States. Even applied, or practical, anthropology-anathema to professional anthropologists of Leach's

12Firth's (1951) response to Murdock is characteristically fair and diplomatic, and in the following decade he was especially active in building bridges with such American colleagues as David Schneider.


generation-has, for many British anthropologists, become the discipline's bread- and-butter since the 1980s.

Yet as anyone who has spent time around British anthropology departments would admit, boundary talk remains a vigorous idiom in everyday practice. In an unjustly neglected paper from the early 1980s, Watson (1984) provided a rich vein of examples of the social/cultural boundary patrol, from both sides of the Atlantic. It is probably true that explicit boundary talk is slightly less likely to be found in print than in the past, but the question "Is this anthropology?" is still the stuff of some PhD examinations in Britain and "She didn't seem to really know that much anthropology" is not unknown as an explanation of the failure to appoint some brilliant outsider to a new position.13 How are these judgments formed when, as we have just seen, the formal criteria seem so shifting and evanescent? From whence do new British anthropologists gain their truly anthropological dis- positions?

One clue can be found in a recent essay by Kuper (1992). In the context of a complaint about the corrosive effects of alien American "culturalism," he provides a brilliantly vivid evocation of Cambridge in the mid-1960s: "A university like Cambridge is an efficient engine of acculturation. The department itself impressed a very specific academic identity on the new recruit. Within a couple of terms it would turn out a fledgling Fortesian Africanist or structuralist South Asianist, armed with some ideas but above all with strong loyalties. It is interesting that these ideas were inculcated with a minimum of direct instruction. One had to pick up a great deal on one's own. That also made one less likely, perhaps, to rebel. There was little explicit control, though it is significant that when we tried to establish a small seminar of our own, Fortes did his best to nip it in the bud" (Kuper 1992:60).

This, remember, was the department that produced a disproportionate number of today's academic anthropologists in Britain. It did so, apparently, with a "minimum of direct instruction." (The oral archive suggests that Kuper's account is at least as true of Oxford, where the ability to leave students to "pick up a great deal on one's own" was elevated to an art form.) We are in the realm, I suggest, of "tacit knowledge," whose importance in scientific practice has been well documented since Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1958). How is this kind of knowledge imparted, if not through "direct instruction"? The conventional answer is through what Lave & Wenger (1991) call "legitimate peripheral participation," the acquisition of membership in a "community of practice."

And where is it imparted? Kuper's last sentence gives one clue: in the seminar. Seminars loom large in British anthropological reminiscence. Gell starts his posthumously published, autobiographical account of his own anthropological formation with several pages of reflection on "seminar culture" in British anthropology: "[A]n anthropology department without a weekly seminar series is like a

13Unfortunately, the most imaginative recent work on anthropology's boundary talk (Gupta & Ferguson 1997) chooses to ignore the Atlantic division and instead talks of a unitary "Anglo-American anthropology."

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body without a heart," and "seminar culture is what really defines my academic metier, rather than membership of a rather nebulous 'profession"' (Gell 1999:2,3). Gell provides an account of his own anthropological self-making in terms of successive seminars he presented to, and participated in: as an undergraduate with Meyer Fortes in Cambridge; as a fledgling researcher to the postgraduate seminar at the LSE; and then, to his amazement, to the full departmental seminar presided over by Raymond Firth. Gell concentrates on the pleasures of performance but also remarks on the skills of the listener, as acquired in the audience of Firth's seminar at the LSE: "[A]ll those in attendance were assumed to be able to com- ment intelligently, and would be asked to do so if the chairman saw fit. Since I never knew when Raymond might ask 'Well, what do you think, Mr Gell?' it was absolutely necessary to pay attention both to the paper and to the subsequent discussion, on pain of possible public humiliation. I still retain the ability to listen to an hour's paper and 50 minutes of discussion, without lapses of concentration, as a result of this early, invaluable, training" (Gell 1999:5).

In his own memoir, David Schneider describes the impact of Raymond Firth's seminar at the LSE in very similar terms [and contrasts it to the ghastly experi- ence of trying to tell Gluckman's seminar about Zulus in Manchester (Schneider 1995:125-29)]. Goody, reminiscing of the ASA in the 1950s, draws some further links: "Attendance ... was virtually obligatory in the fifties. However the general atmosphere was one of camaraderie, of solidarity, of communitas, rather than au- thority; the seminars and the drinking were done together.... Life was in some ways like an on-going seminar, with continuing discussions of this or that theme, what X thought, what new empirical work had to say on the subject. The closeness of the fraternity was one way in which the highly amorphous subject of anthropology (which can be all things to all men) was given some manageable bounds, and some continuing focus was providedfor current investigations" (Goody 1995:83, my emphasis). And Leach, like many others, describes the ultimate source for the whole tradition: Malinowski's seminar at the LSE in the 1920s and 1930s (Leach 1986:376; cf Firth 1975:2-3, Stocking 1995:294-5).14

Here the importance of the continuing domination of the discipline by a handful of core departments becomes obvious. With over half of the members of the discipline coming out of three, relatively small, departments-even now, the com- bined membership of the departments concerned is no more than 30 or 40-and others passing through to give papers on a reasonably regular basis, just a few

14Historians of science have traced the importance of the seminar as the locus of scientific bildung, or self-creation, to the scientific seminars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany (Clark 1989, Olesko 1991). This would seem to provide a strong link to the world of Malinowski (and of course Boas). Schaffer's wonderful essay, "From Physics to Anthropology-and Back Again" (1994), contains the most imaginative treatment of the place of scientific self-making in the early history of British anthropology, but it concentrates more on the laboratory and its practices and has relatively little to say about seminars and seminar culture. Here is a topic for future historians.


weekly seminars can continue to act as a testing ground for what is or is not an- thropologically correct or theoretically interesting. They can, moreover, do so in a flexible way: The seminar does not necessarily care if the boundaries shift over the years. It may appear to have some sort of collective memory, but it is not a court, susceptible to formal appeals to precedent. It is rather the setting for certain

stylized kinds of performance, and for the passing of, often tacit, judgments. Inso- far as the performance becomes second nature, the judgments themselves may be allowed to differ. Cambridge in the 1960s was, after all, a department in which the dominant figures-Leach and Fortes, Tambiah and Goody-were, intellectually at least, perceived to be at war with each other (Gell 1999:4, Kuper 1992:60). And British anthropology, in what may have been its real golden era-the 1950s and 1960s rather than the 1930s-was the scene of endless set-piece public contro- versies. Besides those of Fortes and Leach, there were battles between Leach and Gluckman, Needham and Gellner, Needham and Beattie. My point is that these were the products of a close-knit seminar culture that, rather than inculcating a simple and narrow orthodoxy, set the terms for what was deemed worthy of argument. The decline of such bitter academic argument since the 1980s may be a symptom of many things-the changing politics of academic employment, the shifting gender balance of the discipline-but it may above all herald the decline of the kinds of multiplex social relations celebrated by Goody in his description of the 1950s.

In itself, the demographic growth of the discipline has threatened the kinds of tacit structure I have just been describing-the annual ASA conferences, for example, have for years been too big to reproduce the intellectual communitas invoked by Goody, yet too small to act as all-purpose occasions of professional efferves- cence like the AAA meetings (cf Ardener 1983). And it is debatable whether the kind of tight disciplinarity Goody celebrates can survive beyond a certain point of demographic expansion, whatever the institutional environment. But the institutional environment in British education is now especially hostile to the endurance of the implicit and the unstated. In her Cambridge inaugural in 1994, Marilyn Strather concluded with a meditation on the recent mania in higher education for rendering explicit what often works best by being left implicit: To put it more crudely than she ever would, the translation of Kuper's "education without instruction" into a set of aims and objectives at the head of a reading list, with appropriate cross references to the institutional mission statement (Strathern 1995b). A classic example would be fieldwork itself, which, in Evans-Pritchard's Oxford, simply could not be taught, it could only be learned by doing-"methods and methodology were American terms" (Gilsenan 1990:225). Now, however, the ESRC demands explicit methods training from all departments that would receive its funding, and anthropology has yielded to this demand like the other social sciences.

Yet it is worth ending with one characteristic anthropological response to the demands of the new educational command economy in Britain. If we look at the disciplinary guidelines for research training in different subjects drawn up for the ESRC, anthropology's entry looks odd (ESRC 1996). Where sociologists, for

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example, are given a crisp one-page list of things every new sociologist should know ("the principles of descriptive and inferential statistics and bi- and multi- variable analysis; the systematic analysis of textual and other qualitative data ... "), social anthropology's entry is long and highly discursive, yet somehow it manages to omit any list of required techniques, except for broad gestures toward fieldwork and language learning. What is described in the social anthropology guidelines is a set of desired relationships (primarily with the supervisor), a long process (fieldwork) of an otherwise open-ended kind, and a certain kind of central social event: the research seminar. Described with care, this crucible of anthropological training could be one of the Cambridge seminars of the 1960s, or it could be at the Institute in Oxford, or in Gluckman's Manchester, or at the LSE with Bloch, Parry, and Gell taking on some puzzled foreign star in the 1980s. Although it misses out on a certain amount of telling local detail-there is no requirement that the seminar be chaired by an apparent megalomaniac and no allusion to the high levels of dysfunctional behavior exhibited in the classic seminars of British social anthropology-it links the anthropology of the 1990s back to the primal scene that still haunted the anthropologists who consolidated British social anthropology in the 1950s, Malinowski's seminar at the LSE. It seems to me at the very least arguable that here-rather than the rite of fieldwork, which is after all, hard to control from a distance-is one key site of continuity, a place where we do "the work involved in making interdisciplinary boundaries appear sui generis" (Watson 1984:352).

Finally, a note of caution. The kind of demographic picture I presented earlier should rule out anything as final as a conclusion. British social anthropology has just passed through a decade of growth and expansion, in which its teaching and research interests have been transformed. Although I suspect its institutional oddities will ensure its survival as a distinctive strand of an increasingly global discipline, it is nevertheless possible that future historians will instead see the 1990s as the end of British social anthropology as we have known it. In the end I have told the story as it makes most sense to me, concentrating on institutional facts rather than more conventional intellectual history. Even within my picture of center- periphery dynamics, I can see how some of my interpretive choices have shaped the story I have told. For reasons of space I have not, for example, attempted to develop an argument about British anthropology's presence (or absence) in the public sphere-from Leach's Reith lectures in the 1960s, through his role in rejuvenating the RAI in the 1970s, and taking on board the important role of British public service broadcasting as a sponsor for the discipline in the years that followed (Leach 1968, 1974). One of the most vital products of that story is the RAI's "popular" publications, RAIN and later Anthropology Today, which between the two provide as good a sense of the changing concerns of the discipline in Britain as any source (Benthall 1996). I have concentrated, I now see, most heavily on the years since I sat in my first anthropology lecture in the early 1970s. Had I sat in the lecture 10 years earlier, I suspect I would have had more to say about the earlier alternative strands opened up by Gluckman and his proteges at


Manchester. Writing from one particular perspective, especially one so close to the object being described, has its limitations. But, if I have one point to make, it is one anticipated by Leach (1984:3) in his memoir from the 1980s: "The sociology of the environment of social anthropologists has a bearing on the history of social

anthropology." That, it seems to me, is a very social anthropological way of

approaching one's own history.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been especially fortunate in the advice and help I have received from many colleagues. Pat Caplan and Ralph Grillo generously shared their memories of the difficult decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Both helped me locate important documents from the 1980s, as did Alan Barnard and Nigel Rapport. Seminar audiences in Saint Andrews and in the Department of Sociology at Edinburgh raised

important questions and supplied further insights. In this respect I must especially thank Jonathan Hearn, John Holmwood, Steve Sturdy, and Neil Thin. Jonathan

Parry directed my attention to Gell's crucial commentary on seminar culture after I had completed a first draft of the argument. Given his own mercurial brilliance as a seminar performer, it is only fitting that the paper itself be dedicated to the most original and sorely missed anthropologist of his generation, Alfred Gell.

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