The “natural preserve of anthropologists”: social anthropology, scientific planning and development

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between practical and cognitive interests in the production of anthropological knowledge. It analyses the links between the projects of directed social transformation in “backward” societies that characterize the program of “development” since the 1920s, and the emergence of a discipline aiming at a scientific understanding of these societies. A reconstruction of the process of autonomization of British social anthropology in Africa during the interwar period thus offers at the same time a genealogy of the uses of anthropology in development. It is argued that, instead of viewing the relationship between anthropology and the colonial administration as an alternative between instrumentalization or independence, it is more fruitful to analyse it as structured by both common interests in producing knowledge about colonized societies and a competition between academic specialists and “practical men”. The “professionalization” of social anthropology and its institutionalization as an academic discipline then appears as a process of construction of a monopoly of competence on non-western social phenomena.