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Abstract
This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, concentrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, social anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries—between academic anthropology and practical policy-related research, between “social” and “cultural” anthropology—appear to have withered away. Yet British social anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.