“This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle decades of the 20th century. What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in. Yet as anthropologists these particular natives knew very well that their academic work was shaped, among other things, by personal background, friendships and rivalries, career structures and institutions, and the politics of the times.”