Abstract. – Owing to the varying academic traditions in different countries, it is understandable that social or cultural anthropology, with those names or with others, has followed trajectories worthy of being studied. In Spain, academic compartmentalisation, scientific underdevelopment, opposition to acknowledging cultural diversity within the national state, and the lack of interest in exotic alterity after the loss of the colonial empire in the late 19th century are some of the reasons why social anthropology (also as ethnography or ethnology) was included, in a fragmentary state, in numerous pre-existing scientific fields until finally it became institutionalised academically in the 1960s, either associated with history as cultural anthropology or with sociology as social anthropology. [Spain, history of anthropology, history of ethnology, history of social sciences, institutionalisation of anthropology]