Writing about the recent history of social anthropology in Britain has made me think more tightly about the writing of history, especially when I compare my own approach with that of individuals who were neither anthropologists nor participants. Participants do not make the best historians, nor do practitioners make the best historians of science. But historians too are at a disadvantage. In the first place they are dependent on the written record or, with contemporary or oral historians, on recollections about the past. As we have seen in the case of the letters of Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski, the written record is very partial in a number of ways. Not simply because much is left out, much destroyed, but because the presentation of the self in writing is often a caricature of what occurs in the intercourse of everyday life. Obviously the written record of an incident covers a greater span than the understanding of any one of the participants, perhaps of all of them. But in so far as it does so it may well override subjective meaning, meaning to the actors. Of course, the presentation of such a meaning can rarely constitute the be-all and end-all of scholarship. Equally it can never be disregarded.

Of nowhere is this more apparent than in intellectual history. Historians of this domain are intent on placing people in schools, to which various characteristics are allotted. This is done partly for their own understanding of a complex situation, partly to make comprehension easier for the reader, who likes to have his phenomena tied together in neat packages.