This book has dealt with the ‘content’ of anthropological theory. Yet anthropological theory is not a vessel to be emptied of old ideas and filled with new ones, or stuffed with more virulent paradigms to strangle the weak ones. Anthropological theory undoubtedly has ‘form’ as well as content, and in this final chapter we shall focus initially on the question of what form this might be, then return to the issue of the relation between form and content, first with some reflections on the future of anthropological ideas and then with a concluding summary.

National traditions and the future of anthropological theory

It is commonplace to think of anthropology in terms of national traditions, and often useful to do so. I think it is especially useful when trying to envisage the roots of and relations between the Boasian and Malinowskian/Radcliffe-Brownian traditions, and also the relation between anthropology and sociology (which at least had the potential to become part of our discipline, or ours part of theirs). Each new development is partly the product of individual thinking, of course, but also very much the product of the circumstances in which these thinkers found themselves. Some of these circumstances were, in fact, single events or clusters of events occurring at around the same time.