著者

名和 克郎 Katsuo Nawa

出版者

国立民族学博物館

雑誌

国立民族学博物館研究報告 = Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology (ISSN:0385180X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.31, no.1, pp.87-115, 2006-09-29

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This article provides an informal and tentative status report on British‘social’ anthropology today, largely based on my very casual ‘participantobservation’ of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University ofCambridge from 2002 to 2003 as a visiting scholar. After brief introductoryremarks on the history of British social anthropology (as against Americancultural anthropology) and the department, I point out two conspicuous traitsof the department I observed. First, it is polycentric in that each of the threeprofessors seems to indicate a different direction concerning the future of thedepartment and social anthropology in general: recording, documentation andancestor worship; transdisciplinary theoretical sophistication based on the British‘social’ anthropological tradition; and a regionally oriented advanced studyunit composed of anthropologists and scholars of related disciplines. Second,the recent systematisation of the curriculum (possibly due to the ‘audit culture’)and the internationalisation of the department seem to have lessened itsparticularity as a centre of ‘British’ ‘social’ anthropology. Even the long-establishedtradition of ‘Senior Seminars’ seems to have been almost imperceptiblyeroding. If the British tradition of social anthropology is destined to melt intothe larger field of anthropology (the World, European, Anglophone, or otherwise),it might be ancestor worship on the world wide web which serves mostto uphold the venerable tradition of Cambridge social anthropology qua ‘social’anthropology.