Article
ID: CBB371835573

Constructing the Field in Interwar Social Anthropology: Power, Personae, and Paper Technology (2020)

unapi
Personality; character Power (social sciences) Science education and teaching Social anthropology Natural science Technology 20th century, early Malinowski, Bronislaw London School of Economics and Political Science

This essay 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 essay 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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Authors & Contributors
John Wallace
Hlade, Josef
Josephine Musil-Gutsch
Lydia E. Carol-Ann Burke
Foks, Freddy
Entradas, Marta
Journals
History of the Human Sciences
British Journal for the History of Science
Technology and Culture
Science and Education
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Public Understanding of Science
Publishers
Yale University Press
Berghahn Books
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Concepts
Social anthropology
Natural science
Science education and teaching
Cultural anthropology
Anthropology
Colonialism
People
Malinowski, Bronislaw
Spiro, Melford
Julius Wiesner
Gillen, Francis James
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan
Spencer, Baldwin
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
Modern
21st century
Places
Great Britain
Portugal
Africa
Bahamas
Melanesia
Kenya
Institutions
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
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