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Volume 39
Methodology & History in Anthropology
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After Society
Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford
Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman
232 pages, 1 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78920-768-2 $135.00/£99.00 Hb Published (July 2020)
eISBN 978-1-78920-769-9 eBook
Reviews
“[The book] tell us a lot about the development of anthropology and of a difficult period faced by universities in UK at the time resulting mainly from government policy.” • David Parkin, University of Oxford
“This volume provides a valuable mix of autobiographical reflections on what it was to be a student of anthropology at Oxford at a particular time in the Institute’s history. Such reflections are all the more insightful, written as they are, by former students who by now have had largely successful (indeed very successful) careers in the discipline.” • Elizabeth Ewart, University of Oxford
Description
In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.
João Pina-Cabral is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He was co-founder and president both of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology and of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Glenn Bowman is Professor Emeritus in Socio-Historical Anthropology at the University of Kent. He carried out his DPhil fieldwork on pilgrimage in Jerusalem's Old City (1983-85), before returning to the UK to teach at UCL and Kent. His recent publications include Sharing the Sacra (Berghahn, 2012).