In one of the many striking anecdotes in Freddy Foks's Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain, a history of the rise and fall of British social anthropology, Audrey Richards departs from Victoria Station in 1930 to begin her journey to what the British colonial state referred to as Northern Rhodesia. Her mentor, Bronislaw Malinowski, comes to see her off and to gift her a bewildering range of colored pencils so that she can organize her fieldwork notes: brown for economics, red for politics, blue for ritual. Once in the field, overwhelmed by the challenges of applying the lessons of Malinowski's writings and seminars to her new environment—and perhaps by her own skepticism—she asks, “how do you study a whole society, how do you do it?” (59).
One might ask the same question of Foks, who seeks to chart the shifting place of social anthropology in Britain's intellectual culture. This goal takes him to many different settings, both familiar and unexpected—from the South Pacific to Bermondsey. Throughout, Foks excels in revealing the paths not taken, the views that did not win out, the quirks and oddities of personality and thought that shaped large-scale disciplinary structures.
Foks traces the rise of anthropological knowledge through the 1920s and 1930s as a prop to colonial development. He follows this story through the apex of anthropological prestige in 1950s Britain and its decline in the policy sphere thereafter. But much like imperial power itself, Foks suggests, anthropological power was reconfigured and redeployed in the later decades of the twentieth century rather than simply lost. In the later chapters of the book, Foks explores the ways that anthropological knowledge was used in metropolitan British culture as a way to understand the social. Ultimately, he suggests, the discipline was most impactful in shaping debates about social change in Britain. These two narratives—the changing fortunes of anthropological knowledge about colonial development and the role of anthropology within Britain's intellectual culture—are both compelling, if not always as deeply connected as they might be.
Foks begins his narrative in the early twentieth century, adding texture and nuance to the story of anthropology's professionalization and setting the stage for its increasing centrality to the colonial state. He offers a fine-grained analysis of how and why Malinowski's perspective came to dominate the field. Parsing the differences between Malinowski and his competitors, such as Elliot Smith, Foks explicates how US funding played an important role in Malinowski's triumph—but also shifted Malinowski's own focus from the South Pacific to East Africa. Expertly tracing the “dense intra-imperial academic network that stretched across Britain's settler colonies” (27), Foks brings to life the world of debate and dissent that characterized this moment of “multipolarity with no single center of gravity” (28).
Foks brings a productive sense of friction to the world of British social anthropology, exploring how scholars offered competing views of indirect rule and trusteeship in response to the shifting demands of colonial politics. He is particularly effective in showing the range of political possibilities that emanated from social anthropology, helping readers to understand why this field was “for a time, an appealing body of knowledge for colonized peoples” (42) such as Jomo Kenyatta. Foks offers insights into anthropological method, presenting close readings of—for example, Lucy Mair's fieldwork experience (though a suggestive argument about gender is not fully developed)—and showing how the lessons of Malinowski were always contested.
From here, Foks turns his attention to the place of social anthropology in British culture more generally. He delves into the work of interwar anthropologists in British literary culture and radio broadcasting, concluding that the dream of conveying anthropological knowledge to a broader public was punctuated by frustration. Foks impressively charts the precise lines of influence between Malinowski's scholarship and interwar debates on the British family. He rightly notes that interwar British debates on the family were an often chaotic amalgam of conservative and progressive forces. To these debates, Malinowski (and Margaret Mead) offered a vision of Pacific Islanders ensconced in “boring, but stable and sexually well-adjusted marriages” (85). The precise scale of the uptake of Malinowski's ideas can be a bit murky: as Foks acknowledges, few received the precise lessons Malinowski wished to offer.
In the final three chapters, Foks explores what he sees as the debt of community studies researchers who conducted fieldwork in 1940s and 1950s Britain to social anthropology. Yet Foks also concedes the acrimony between anthropology and sociology during these same decades and the vitriolic disavowal of anthropology by these same scholars. We benefit throughout from Foks's careful readings of canonical texts, such as Peter Willmott and Michael Young's Family and Kinship in East London (1957). More zooming out from these texts, however, would have been welcome. Foks notes that the anti-statist views of Willmott and Young were taken up by Conservatives, too, but it would have been helpful to hear about these divergent political agendas. It is not always easy to discern the stakes of different scholars’ ties to social anthropology, though Foks's tracing of these ties is always painstakingly executed.
Foks ends by considering how anthropological expertise was eclipsed by economics. He offers intriguing, if not wholly convincing arguments that the last incarnation of anthropological expertise was in the domain of social history. Social anthropology, he proposes, “prompted historians to rethink modernization in the past, just as it began to be displaced as a way to think about development in the present” (173). Arguing that social anthropology “fertilized” debates in multiple domains, he suggests that the functionalist theory of social anthropology “allowed historians to connect changes in one domain of social life to another” (174). Here, the rubric of what counts as anthropological thinking occasionally becomes too capacious. Overall, though, this is a sophisticated and polished work, one that displays Foks’ own deeply impressive expertise on the inner workings of texts, scholars, and institutions.
