Difficult Folk?: A Political History of Social Anthropology

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 descri...