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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.
“[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
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.
Introduction: After Society
João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman
Part I: The Oxford Experience and Beyond
Chapter 1. Plodding Towards Prosopography: Oxford Anthropology from 1976 on
Jeremy MacClancy
Chapter 2. Amor Fati and the Institute of Social Anthropology
Glenn Bowman
Chapter 3. The Lucky Anthropologist? Becoming an Anthropologist of Japan in Oxford
Dolores P. Martinez
Chapter 4. Lost and Found in Oxford
Roger Just
Chapter 5. Is Necessity the Mother of Invention?
A. David Napier
Part II: Ethnography as a Vocation
Chapter 6. Changing Questions? Reflections on Anthropology in and out of Oxford since the 1980s
David N. Gellner
Chapter 7. The Fieldwork Tradition and the Quest for Essential Perplexities
Signe Howell
Chapter 8. Journeys of an Ethnographer: From Oxford to the Field and on to the Archives
Sandra Ott
Part III: Why Anthropology? Concluding Remarks
Chapter 9. Why Anthropology? Structuralism and Since
Timothy Jenkins
Chapter 10. From Oxford to Cambridge: Chasing the ‘Aka’
Maryon McDonald
Chapter 11. Mediterranean Equivoques at Oxford
João Pina-Cabral
Index