This thesis explores attempts within the emerging social sciences to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. It reveals a lively, participatory tradition spanning the nascent disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, and human geography, in which British people, social scientists and otherwise, sought to know themselves as having a ‘culture’. In doing so, it challenges a conventional narration of this period: that in a high-Victorian, high-imperial era, ‘metropolitan perception’ prevailed; that this perception was marked by an inability to see Britain as a ‘social totality’, except as the evolutionary apex of a globally-exportable Civilisation; and that this situation was only rescued by the retrieval of an insular, national culture from the winds of imperial contraction in the 1930s.

Instead, the thesis shows that we can detect autoethnographic thinking within the human sciences themselves, even during an era when those sciences were supposedly more prone to self-universalising than self-relativising. It proceeds via five case studies, beginning with late-nineteenth century folkloristics, the first endeavour within the human sciences to devote itself to homeland ethnography, before moving onto an examination of the fin-de-siècle photographic survey movement. It shows how contributors to both projects saw themselves as both participants and observers in the cultures they sought to make visible. A third case continues this theme, examining participatory, bio-sociological ‘regional surveys’ in the era of mass democracy. The fourth case examines the use of ethnographic fieldwork in geographical teaching; while a fifth turns to the practice of interwar sociological survey. This last chapter shows that the 1930s did witness a national ‘anthropological turn’, but it came at the expense of an older, perhaps more genuinely popular one. By reconstructing this earlier tradition, this thesis provides a more textured account of a culture in transition from global empire to island nation.