After Society

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.

Autorentext

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).

Inhalt

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