ABSTRACT
Looking back, it is apparent that as a distinctive intellectual movement, British social anthropology lasted for just fifty years, from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. The ethnographies of the neo-Malinowskians then began to be taught as classics, not as exemplars, and the theoretical preoccupations of the functionalists came to seem increasingly remote. The tradition did not suddenly come to an end but it petered out, and by the 1980s it no longer defined the projects of the new generation.
