Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm – in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s? Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas. Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn't just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making
arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today. So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn't want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That's what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites. HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’? FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who…