The term social anthropology emerged in Britain in the early years of the 20th century and was used to describe a distinctive style of anthropology—comparative, fieldwork-based, and with strong intellectual links to the sociological ideas of Émile Durkheim and the group of French scholars associated with the journal L’Année sociologique. Although it was at first defined in opposition to then-fashionable evolutionary and diffusionist schools of anthropology, by the mid-20th century social anthropology was increasingly contrasted with the more humanistic tradition of American cultural anthropology. At this point, the discipline spread to various parts of what was then the British Empire and also was established as a distinctive strand of teaching and research in a handful of American universities. The years after World War II, though, brought a partial breakdown of the British opposition to American cultural anthropology, as younger scholars abandoned the tenets of comparative sociology set out by one of the discipline’s founders, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. During the same period, however, the term was increasingly used in Continental Europe: the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss accepted a chair in social anthropology in the Collège de France in 1959, and, when European anthropologists established a joint professional association in the late 1980s, it took the title European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and called its journal Social Anthropology.

The conventional story of social anthropology begins with James George Frazer’s appointment to a chair with that title in Liverpool in 1908, but the appointment was a short-lived disaster, and Frazer himself later preferred the description mental anthropology to cover his vast comparative project. But distinctive teaching in social anthropology was established in both Oxford and Cambridge in the years immediately before World War I. After the war, two figures emerged as the dominant intellectual forces in the new discipline. The Pole Bronisław Malinowski was appointed to a readership in social anthropology at the London School of Economics (and a professorship a few years later); there he swiftly established an enormously influential research seminar at which students were initiated into the ideas and methods of the new school of anthropology. At the same time, Radcliffe-Brown took up a series of chairs—in Cape Town; Sydney, Australia; and Chicago—before returning to a chair at Oxford in 1937. The personalities and intellectual styles of the two men are often contrasted: Malinowski was charismatic and romantic and was remembered for his vast fieldwork-based publications on the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea; Radcliffe-Brown was drier and more austere and left as an intellectual legacy a series of short, systematizing essays on comparison, function, and, above all, kinship.

In the early 1950s the publication of an edited collection on kinship in Africa occasioned a celebrated critique in the pages of the journal American Anthropologist. A leading American anthropologist, George P. Murdock, faintly praised the emerging school of British social anthropology for its command of deep ethnographic knowledge and its strong sense of inner theoretical coherence, but he criticized it for its narrow ambitions: it was too tightly focused on Africa, on kinship, and on a set of intellectual issues that were, in the end, sociological rather than anthropological. One of the central points of Murdock’s critique was the indifference of social anthropology to any discussion of culture. In the strong version of social anthropology, exemplified by Radcliffe-Brown, culture was thought to be a “vague abstraction” of little scientific value; rather than talking about culture, social anthropologists should concentrate instead on the supposedly harder, more factual comparison of different social structures.

Murdock’s attack was met by a more measured response from Raymond Firth, who had been Malinowski’s first student at the London School of Economics, and Firth was especially active in the 1950s and ’60s in bringing together British and American, social and cultural, anthropologists. At the same time, the younger anthropologists who had been appointed to the emerging departments of social anthropology in Britain quickly turned on the ancestors. Malinowski’s ethnography retained its intellectual authority, but his theoretical ideas were swiftly abandoned by his former students. Radcliffe-Brown’s successor in Oxford, Edward Evans-Pritchard, broke with his former teacher’s positing of a “natural science of society,” preferring instead a more humanistic vision of social anthropology. As Lévi-Strauss’s work started to become known outside France in the 1950s, it offered a powerful alternative: more theoretically sophisticated and intellectually ambitious than Radcliffe-Brown but less obviously attached to Malinowski’s romantic vocation of the lone field-worker immersed in the minutiae of a single society. But Lévi-Strauss had grown to intellectual maturity as a wartime exile in New York, where he had steeped himself in Americanist ethnography in the Boasian, cultural tradition. His first major publication was on kinship theory, but he moved on to work on myth and the interpretation of ritual and symbols, themes that were of growing importance in American cultural anthropology in the 1960s.

While one strand of British social anthropology was moving closer to the concerns of American anthropology, a similar shift was occurring in the United States. Many anthropologists trained in British social anthropology took positions in American departments in the 1950s and ’60s, while younger American anthropologists such as David Schneider and Marshall Sahlins, in different ways, engaged with intellectual issues from the mainstream of European social anthropology. As a mark of this rapprochement, by the early 1980s some anthropologists in the United States were using the neologism sociocultural anthropology to describe their intellectual stance, while in Britain the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology renamed itself the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 1991.

Yet important differences remained. European anthropologists were, on the whole, less overwhelmed by the “postmodern” shift in social and cultural theory than their American counterparts, while the canonical text of American postmodern anthropology, the anthology Writing Culture (1986), edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, can be read as an attempt to make a final intellectual break from the hegemony of Malinowskian ethnographic authority. The colonial legacy of British social anthropology, although far more politically and morally complex than some critics have claimed, was especially troubling for younger radicals in the United States. In Britain, on the other hand, some of the most stimulating, and apparently postmodern, work of the 1980s and ’90s—that of Marilyn Strathern, for example—focused on classic social anthropological themes such as kinship, property, the utility of notions of society and culture, and the possibilities and limitations of comparison.