In 2013, the Social Anthropology Seminar Series held throughout each semester within the School of Anthropology and Conservation organised a series of conferences dedicated to examining what, in the long term, is behind an anthropological vocation. The School invited a number of colleagues that had undertaken their PhDs in Oxford in the early 1980s – at a time when anthropology was under attack by the newly elected Thatcher government – and, despite this, led creative and successful anthropological careers across the globe.
Each of the papers presented turned out to address the major theoretical challenges that were being announced at the time and can be broadly categorised under the term ‘After Society’: that is, they embody a critique of the atomistic and sociocentric background assumptions that were dominant in the social sciences throughout the twentieth century.
These have now been compiled together and published in the book After Society: Anthropological Trajectories Out of Oxford by Berghahn Books in July. The volume is edited by Professor of Social Anthropology, João Pina-Cabral, alongside Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations, Glenn Bowman, who both organised the Seminar Series that provided the inspiration.