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Before social anthropology

by James Urry

This volume explains aspects of British anthropology's past by placing people, events and institutions in their wider historical context. The essays follow a century of immense change from the foundation of British anthropology in the 1840s by examining a number of themes--innovations in ethnographic research and writing, institutional change and the professionalization of practice, and the redefinition of the content and boundaries that constituted anthropology. From these changes emerged new approaches during the 1920s and 1930s resulting in the triumph of social anthropology as an intellectual, academic and professional discipline after World War II.