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Constructing the field in inter-war social anthropology: power, persona and paper technology

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Authors

Foks, Freddy 

Abstract

This article draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences - on ‘personae’ and ‘paper technology’ – to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology’s success lay in its practitioners’ ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This article shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski’s seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork: a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline’s development.

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Journal Title

Isis: international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences

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Journal ISSN

0021-1753

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Publisher

University of Chicago Press

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AHRC (1506671)