ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the symbolic work early anthropologists invested in their disciplinary persona as it began to gain recognition in British and American universities in the early part of the twentieth century. It discusses the fields of classics, history, archaeology, and cultural geography. These disciplinary “family portraits” need to be placed in national frames, as they reflect local struggles for status, funding, and academic capital within different systems of higher education. If sociology is anthropology’s troublesome twin, cultural studies has been one of those mysterious, uninvited house-guests who ends up moving in. As part of its ambition to be an “anti-discipline,” the field claims to have abandoned a narrow institutional professionalism in favor of a broader academic cosmopolitanism, politically and theoretically sophisticated. The chapter concludes by exploring whether the policy and funders’ fascination with interdisciplinarity threatens the future of the discipline and its relationships.
