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German Club Life as a Local Cultural System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

John R. Eidson
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park

Extract

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

Type
The Culture of Social Organizations
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1990

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