ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century anthropology took shape as a reaction to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century social evolutionism, but it did not everywhere take the same form. In the USA the intellectual revolution was neither as rapid nor as thorough as in the UK. In part this was because of the far greater number of universities in the USA, leaving room for pockets of conservatism in which the nineteenth-century certitudes continued to circulate. The characteristic form of American cultural anthropology took shape in the course of this struggle, and it developed a broad range of interests. Consequently, British “social anthropology,” as described in the previous two chapters, is sometimes contrasted with American “cultural anthropology,” which is explored in subsequent chapters. There is, however, no inconsistency between the two. It is entirely possible to weave both approaches together seamlessly in discussing the same data. To avoid any implication of exclusiveness we are sometimes forced to use the clumsy expression “socio-cultural anthropology.”
