Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology

In this paper I discuss changes in the use of ethnographic field data in social anthropological analyses in Britain. I begin with two caveats. First, I do not in any way imply that the developments I discuss represent the only fruitful new methods of analysis in the subject: social anthropologyj like all sciences, has to proceed by exploiting many theories and lines of analysis. Secondly, because of limitation of space, I cannot touch on many of the influences vihich have produced this particular development, or on the stimulating work of scholars in countries of Europe other than Britain, in America, and elsewhere. My purpose is to deal with Britain alone. Modem British anthropology was dominated for many years by Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown supplied the more fruitful theoretical approach, though British anthropologists have proceeded far beyond the point he reached. Yet I regard Malinowski as the real father of modem British anthropology. Theory is but one side of a science: the other equally important side is the type of data which are subjected to theoretical analysis. Here Malinowski produced a revolutionary change in the subjea, though scholars in other countries were working on the same lines as he. Malinowski's long residence in the Trobriands and the faa that he worked through the Trobriand language enabled him to make observations on social life which were quite different in quality from the observations made by the casual travellers who had passed through colonial countries, and even from those made by missionaries and administrators working among particular colonial peoples. The change in the nature of his data had a profound effect on his own thinking, and hence on the subjea. I can illustrate this briefly by comparing two of his books with a work which is still a great classic of ethnography, Henri A. Junod's The Life of a South African Tribe, about the Tsonga of Mozambique. In this book, in his description of the life-cycle of a man, Junod devotes 151 pages