A History of Oxford Anthropology

Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too have its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technical developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate on the interrelationship between anthropology and other academic fields but also on the challenge to anthropological methods of new intellectual and technological developments, and the role of anthropological thought in a general history of concepts.

`Oxford has arguably contributed more to our understanding of tribal societies than any other department of anthropology in the world...Albert Einstein once remarked that "unless an idea starts off as absurd, there is no hope for it."... Through creating a virtual community, by uniting their work and their lives, by their assurance, generations of Oxford scholars have been able to make the absurd leaps which take us into new and previously unsuspected worlds. They had the privileges, the shared zeal and the shock of similarity-with-difference which engenders true creativity and they made good use of it.' (from the Preface) Informative as well as entertaining, this volume offers many interesting facets of the first hundred years of anthropology at Oxford University.

Peter Riviere is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology of the University of Oxford and Fellow Emeritus of Linacre College, Oxford. He was an undergraduate at Magdalene, Cambridge (1954) and a graduate student at Magdalen, Oxford (1962). He has held posts at London, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and retired from the last, as Professor of Social Anthropology, in 2001. His main interests are in the native societies of Lowland South America and the history of the European exploration of Amazonia. His main publications are Marriage among the Trio (1969), The Forgotten Frontier: Ranchers of North Brazil (1972), Individual and Society in Guiana (1984), and Absented-minded Imperialism (1995). Most recently he has published, under the aegis of The Hakluyt Society, a two-volume edition of Sir Robert Schomburgk's reports on his Guiana travels. A subsidiary interest is the history of anthropology with special reference to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he has edited new editions of two early anthropological classics, by Lubbock and McLennan.