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Social anthropology

Social anthropology was founded in Britain following World War I through a methodological revolution pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski’s meticulous process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and through Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim’s sociology. Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemprorary Volkerpsychologie of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolph Bastian, and Sir E. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a positivistic science following Auguste Comte. Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. There was never a settled theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society but always a tension between several views that were seriously opposed.

Following WW II, sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school of cultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas from Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralism and from Max Gluckman’s Manchester school, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks.

A European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteen European countries, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennual conferences and by editing its academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.

Other universities outside Britain do have departments of Social Anthropology, including in the United States (e.g., Stanford, Harvard, Chicago) and many non-European anthropologists identify themselves as social anthropologists, and often in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for example in the subfield of structure and dynamics.

Bibliography

Anthropologists associated with British Social Anthropology

Anthropologists associated with the Manchester School

The Macfarlane Interviews in Social Anthropology

Categories


British anthropologists | Anthropology

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