British functional anthropology began to emerge as a distinctive discipline shortly after World War I through the efforts of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, but it was not until after World War II that it gained an assured academic status in the universities. Compared with the two decades before World War II an enormous quantity of anthropological writing was published in the two decades after it. Within this brief period its claim to academic respectability was virtually unchallenged. By 1961 a prominent sociologist could write that" social anthropology is, among other things, a small but I think flourishing profession. The subject, like social work and unlike sociology, has prestige"(MacRae 1961: 36). A few years later a pohtical scientist contrasted social anthropology favorably with sociology, declaring that unlike the latter, but like the other bona fide social sciences, social anthropology" had built up a body of knowledge which cannot readily be described as anything else"(Runciman 1965: 47).

Functional anthropology had barely secured its enviable academic reputation when some serious misgivings began to make themselves felt from within the established profession. In 1961 Leach claimed that" functionalist doctrine [has] ceased to carry conviction"(1961: 1). Five years later Worsley wrote his trenchant critique under the significant title" The end of anthropology?" By 1970 Needham was arguing that social anthropology" has no unitary and continuous past so far as ideas are concerned.... Nor is there any such thing as a rigorous and coherent body of theory proper to social anthropology"(1970: 36-37). A year later Ardener observed that