Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction: ideas, individuals, identities and institutions
Chapter 2. Why disciplinary histories matter
Chapter 3. A tale of two departments? Oxford and the LSE
Chapter 4. The politics of disciplinary professionalisation
Chapter 5. Anthropology at the end of empire
Chapter 6. Tribes and territories
Chapter 7. How not to apply anthropological knowledge: the RAI and its 'friends'
Chapter 8. Anthropologists and 'race': social research in postcolonial Britain
Chapter 9. Discipline on the defensive?
Chapter 10. The uses of academic identity

Appendix: Disciplining the archives

Bibliography
Index

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds.
Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

David Mills is Associate Professor (Pedagogy and the Social Sciences) at the University of Oxford's Department of Education and Fellow of Kellogg College. He directs the Grand Union ESRC-funded doctoral training partnership, an Oxford-led collaboration with Open University and Brunel University London. Trained in anthropology, he has published work on disciplinarity, higher education policy, doctoral education, and African universities. His current interests include the politics of higher education capacity building and the challenges of collaborative research. His books include Ethnography and Education (SAGE, 2013), Difficult Folk: A Political History of Social Anthropology (Berghahn, 2008), and the coedited African Anthropologies: History, Practice, Critique (Zed, 2006).