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"By the 1950s, social anthropologists were at the forefront of debates about culture, society, and the limits to economic development in Britain and the British Empire. This book explains how anthropology rose to such prominence and how its influence dispersed across the humanities and social sciences. Part institutional history of social anthropology's imperial formation, part cultural history of the discipline's impact, this is the first account of social anthropology's pivotal role in Britain's midcentury intellectual culture"--