Transcript Anthropology Introduction

ANTHROPOLOGY
an introduction
for historians
[email protected]
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Historicizing the
HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS
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EP Thompson
Natalie Zemon Davis
Peter Burke
Carlo Ginzburg
Keith Thomas
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On the Left?
Outsider status?
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‘Always historicize’
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A generation?
‘always historicize’
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History and Anthropology
THE CLASSICAL INHERITANCE
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Herodotus described both as
the first anthropologist and the
‘father of history’
Tacitus ‘Germania’
Classical education as a
lesson in cultural difference
Missionaries and Explorers:
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE NEW WORLD
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St Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649) and
the Huron dictionary
Joseph-François Lafitau (16811746) Mœurs des sauvages
américains comparées aux mœurs
des premiers temps
Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan
(1666-c.1716) Dialogues de M. le
Baron de la Hontan et d’un sauvage
dans l’Amérique (1703)
Jean-Frédéric Bernard (1683-1744)
& Bernard Picart (1673-1733) Traité
des cérémonies religieuses de toutes
les nations (11 vols, 1723-43)
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From STADIAL THEORY
to the Rankean counter-revolution
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Scottish Enlightenment ‘speculative
historians’
Adam SMITH, John MILLAR,
Henry HOME, Adam FERGUSON
Stadial Theory and Progress
From Savage to Barbarian to
Civilized
From stone age to bronze age to
iron age (C.J. Thomsen)
From poetry to drama to prose
From family to tribe to monarchy
to… ?
From animism to polytheism to
monotheism to…?
The REACTION
THE EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGISTS
Edward
Tylor (Keeper of the
Pitt-Rivers, 1883, 1st chair in
Anthropology at Oxford, 1896)
and Primitive Culture
‘Survivals in Culture’
 James Frazer (First chair in
Social Anthropology at
Liverpool in 1908) and The
Golden Bough
‘The Savage Within’
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THE FUNCTIONAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS
THE BRITISH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
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Bronislaw Malinowski
Fieldwork in the Trobiand Islands
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Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Fieldwork in the Adaman Islands
Gives rise to:
 Functionalism
 Structural Functionalism
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLIGISTS
Clifford Geertz
THICK DESCRIPTION
Pierre Bourdieu
AND SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
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WHAT’S THE APPEAL?
obvious problems for historians
with the anthropological approach
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PARTICIPANT
OBSERVATION
SCALE
FUNCTIONALISM AND THE
DENIAL OF CONFLICT
STRUCTURAL
FUNCTIONALISM AND THE
DENIAL OF CHANGE
Eg Pitt-Rivers, The People of the
Sierra, and ‘Honour and
Shame’.
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Explaining HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Treat the past like ‘a foreign country’ – witchcraft for example
 Robert Darnton ‘‘other people are other. They do not
think the way we do.”
For example
•EP Thompson on cross dressing
•Davis on ritual violence
•Ginzburg on shape-shifting
Symbols as sources for ‘history from below’
Thompson and Davis on crowd violence
CLUES
Humanist history
Rejection of top-down social engineering
projects of the postwar era
Failure of the established Left in 1968
AGENCY
Bottom up history
The local, the micro, the street-fighter’s view
AGENCY
View from the Margins
History of the excluded (Women’s liberation,
Gay liberation, Civil Rights)
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The democratisation of the university
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Biersack, Aletta, ‘Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History (London ,1989), pp. 72-96.
Burke, Peter, History and Social Theory (Cambridge, 1992), esp. chs.1 & 4.
—Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987).
Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge, 1988), Chap. 4. A critical reading of Darnton.
Cohn, B.S., 'History and Anthropology: The State of Play', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22 (1980), 198-221.
Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), Chaps 1 and 2. [See the criticism of this book in Chartier].
Davis, Natalie Zemon, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford 1975), Chapters 4-6.
Dezan, Suzanne, ‘Crowds, community and ritual in the work of E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History (London ,1989).
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Anthropology and History (Manchester, 1961).
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), Chaps 1 and 15.
—'History and Anthropology', New Literary Theory 21 (1990), 321-35 + Rosaldo’s response, 337-41.
Gentilcore, David, ‘Anthropological Approaches’, in G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (London, 2005), pp. 49-70
Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘Ritual Pillages: A Preface to Research in Progress’, in Edward Muir & Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991), + the introduction.
Goody, Jack, The development of the family and marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
Green, A., & Troup, K. (eds), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century History and Theory (Manchester, 1999), pp. 172-81 (‘Anthropology and Ethnohistory’). Very useful
book for disciplines in general.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Carnival in Romans: A People’s Uprising, 1579-1580 (London, 1980).
Muir, Edward. Rituals in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 1997.
Sabean, David. Power in the Blood. Village Discourse and Popular Culture in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, 1984. Esp. Chap. 6.
Sahlins, Peter, ‘Deep Play in the Forest: Peasant Culture and Protest in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Barbara Dieffendorf and Carla Hesse (eds.), Culture and Identity in Early Modern France,
1500-1800 (Ann Arbor, 1993). Note that Peter Sahlins is the son of a leading anthropologist – Marshall Sahlins.
Schulte, Regina. The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848-1910. Cambridge, 1994.
Scribner, Bob. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London, 1987.
Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1980).
—'History and Anthropology', Past & Present 24 (1963), 3–24.
Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common (London, 1991).
—'Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Midland History 1 (1972).
Walters, R. G., ‘Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and the Historians’, Social Research 47 (1980), 537-56.