Book contents
- History in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- History in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Law and History, History and Law
- 2 History, Law and the Rediscovery of Social Theory
- 3 The Uses of History in the Study of International Politics
- 4 International Relations Theory and Modern International Order: The Case of Refugees
- 5 The Delphi Syndrome: Using History in the Social Sciences
- 6 Power in Narrative and Narratives of Power in Historical Sociology
- 7 History and Normativity in Political Theory: The Case of Rawls
- 8 Political Philosophy and the Uses of History
- 9 The Relationship between Philosophy and its History
- 10 When Reason Does Not See You: Feminism at the Intersection of History and Philosophy
- 11 On (Lost and Found) Analytical History in Political Science
- 12 Making History: Poetry and Prosopopoeia
- 13 Reloading the British Romantic Canon: The Historical Editing of Literary Texts
- 14 Economics and History: Analysing Serfdom
- 15 The Return of Depression Economics: Paul Krugman and the Twenty-First-Century Crisis of American Democracy
- 16 Anthropology and the Turn to History
- Index
- References
16 - Anthropology and the Turn to History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 December 2022
By
Book contents
- History in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- History in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Law and History, History and Law
- 2 History, Law and the Rediscovery of Social Theory
- 3 The Uses of History in the Study of International Politics
- 4 International Relations Theory and Modern International Order: The Case of Refugees
- 5 The Delphi Syndrome: Using History in the Social Sciences
- 6 Power in Narrative and Narratives of Power in Historical Sociology
- 7 History and Normativity in Political Theory: The Case of Rawls
- 8 Political Philosophy and the Uses of History
- 9 The Relationship between Philosophy and its History
- 10 When Reason Does Not See You: Feminism at the Intersection of History and Philosophy
- 11 On (Lost and Found) Analytical History in Political Science
- 12 Making History: Poetry and Prosopopoeia
- 13 Reloading the British Romantic Canon: The Historical Editing of Literary Texts
- 14 Economics and History: Analysing Serfdom
- 15 The Return of Depression Economics: Paul Krugman and the Twenty-First-Century Crisis of American Democracy
- 16 Anthropology and the Turn to History
- Index
- References
Summary
Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, I seek to explain why the methods of historical enquiry became so attractive to a generation of anthropologists. I make two major claims: first, that it was the problem of the origins and persistence of institutions that drew social and cultural anthropologists toward history; second, that this concern with institutional reproduction was part of anthropology’s long struggle to offer an alternative to a post-Hobbesian state-centred politics. In defending these claims, I examine in particular the writings of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clifford Geertz.
- Type
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- Information
- History in the Humanities and Social Sciences , pp. 379 - 407Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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