Seminar Culture(s), Rites of Passage and the Unmentionable in Contemporary British Social Anthropology

‘... I am saying that the history of British social anthropology as viewed by participant observers is quite different from the same history as viewed by non-participant observers, and further, that even among participant observers there are several dif-ferent categories. The ‘‘insiders’ ’ and the ‘‘out-siders’ ’ participate in quite different ways. ’ (Leach 1984: 7) ‘As a transitional phenomenon, casualisation has also been facilitated by the willingness of more privileged members of the academic community to be complicit in its extension and hostile (for reasons of perceived self-interest) to efforts by the victims of this development to defend themselves... One of the most powerful effects of neo-liberalism has bee