Paper short abstract:

My paper introduces a new piece of research tracing the career of Eric J. Miller to recover a post-war 'expansive moment' when anthropologists were applying their skills to understanding industrial working conditions and urban life, with the express purpose of making improvements.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will introduce a new piece of research which traces the career of Eric J. Miller, to recover a post-war 'expansive moment' when anthropologists were applying their skills to understanding industrial working conditions and urban life, with the express purpose of making improvements. By drawing on fresh archival material of the Tavistock Institute at Wellcome Library, combined with free-flow narrative interviews with family and colleagues, and background research using private collections in the UK and in India, the research will trace the evolution of Miller's career from academic anthropologist at Cambridge University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, where Miller worked on the changing place of occupational caste in imperial and post-imperial India, through his work as an internal consultant anthropologist to a large family-owned textile business in India, through to his organisational consultancy career at the Tavistock Institute, to delineate the influence of an anthropological training on Miller's approach. The project will generate a monograph that reframes Miller's deployment of anthropology as a model by which we might not only practice social science, but teach social anthropology so as to practice. By exploring and publishing on Miller's anthropologically-informed methods, it is hoped more social anthropologists will take up his approach and be better equipped to work across academic and applied social sciences and organisational consultancy, so as to re-engage anthropology in industry.