I would like to thank Doris Bachmann-Medick, Lina Brock, David William Cohen. Rhys Isaac, Alf Lüdtke, Joachim Matthes, Sidney W. Mintz, David Sabean, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, and Gerald Sider for their discussion. They contributed generously to the arguments made here, but not to the reductions to be found.

In my choice of title I am indebted to Bernard S. Cohn. In an essay that first appeared in the pages of this journal Cohn created the ironic ideal type of the “missionary in the row boat.” In doing this he clearly and critically has set into our discourse on method and theory one model of anthropology as an ahistorical practice, which works, however, with certain basic assumptions about the agents and origins of change. “In this model, the missionary, the trader, the labor recruiter or the government official arrives with the bible, the mumu, tobacco, steel axes or other items of Western domination on an island whose society and culture are rocking along in the never never land of structural-functionalism, and with the onslaught of the new, the social structure, values and lifeways of the “happy” natives crumble. The anthropologist follows in the wake of the impacts caused by the Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been. The anthropologist searches for the elders with the richest memories of days gone by, assiduously records their ethnographic texts, and then puts together between the covers of their monographs a picture of the lives of the natives of Anthropologyland. The peoples of Anthropology land, like all God's children got shoes, got structure. In an older mode of anthropological praxis, this structure was social: roles, rights and duties, positions in systems which persons moved through or, better yet, rotated through. These structures the anthropologist finds have always been there, unbeknownst to their passive carriers, functioning to keep the natives in their timeless spaceless paradise.” Cohn, B. S., “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22:2 (04 1980), 198–221, at 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cohn perhaps too modestly pointed only to ethnographers’ ahistorical ways of seeing. In the following essay I shall try to show amongst other things that the fictions and assumptions that Cohn finds in Anthropologyland are prevalent in certain regions of Historyland as well.

¹ On the international development and distribution of “historical social science,” see Stone, L., “History and the Social Sciences in the Twentieth Century,” in his The Past and the Present (London, 1981), 3–44Google ScholarPubMed, at 16ff; on the self-understanding of its German apostles, see Wehler, H. U., “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” in Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit,” Habermas, J., ed. (Frankfurt, 1979), II, 709–53Google Scholar, at 742ff; Kocka, J., Sozialgeschichte, Begriff- Entwicklung-Probleme (Göttingen, 1977), 73ff, 82ffGoogle Scholar; for a new statement, which shows modifications in some respects, but not in the hard core of the orientation towards the “systematic social sciences,” with their “offerings” of “methods, concepts, models and theories” see idem, “Theorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in idemet at., Theoriedebatte und Geschichtsunterricht (Paderborn, 1982), 7–27Google Scholar, at lOff; the most interesting critique to date of this approach in the Federal Republic of Germany has come from France: Roche, G., “Un mouvement des nouvelles Annales en RFA?” Revue d'Allemagne, 11:3 (07–09 1979), 405–20Google Scholar.

² Stone, L., “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present, no. 85 (11 1979), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in his Past and Present, 74–96.

³ On this, see Hobsbawm, E. J., “The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments,” Past and Present, no. 86 (02 1980), 3–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and esp. Abrams, Ph., “History, Sociology, Historical Sociology,” Past and Present, no. 87 (05 1980), 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. also idem. Sociological History (London, 1983)Google ScholarPubMed; the best critique to date is Philipp, June, “Traditional Historical Narrative and Action-oriented (or Ethnographic) History,” Historical Studies, 20:80 (04 1983), 339–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ On this, see Kocka, , “Theorien,” 18, 22Google Scholar; Wehler, , Geschichtswissenschaft, 737–38Google Scholar.

⁵ Abrams, , “History, Sociology, Historical Sociology,” 5.Google Scholar

⁶ For this view, see Wehler, , Geschichtswissenschaft, 743Google Scholar; Kocka, , Sozialgeschichte, 109ffGoogle Scholar.

⁷ See Roche, , “Un mouvement,” 407, 414ffGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Abrams, , “History, Sociology, Historical Sociology,” 3ffGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Stone, , “History and Social Sciences,” 31–32Google Scholar.

¹⁰ A useful though somewhat incomplete survey through 1980 is Gaunt, D., Memoir on History and Anthropology (Brytpunkt—Writings from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences) (Stockholm, 1982)Google Scholar; Cohn, B. S., “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22:2 (04 1980), 198–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Anthropology and History in the 1980s. Towards a Rapprochement,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12:2 (Autumn 1981), 227–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, N. Z., “Anthropology and History in the 1980s. The Possibilities of the Past,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12:2 (Autumn 1981) 267–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; from reciprocal exchanges among an international working group of historians and social anthropologists, which has existed since 1978 and whose cooperation originated in an initiative from Robert Berdahl, Alf Lüdtke, David Sabean, Gerald Sider, and me, the following have appeared: Berdahl, R. et al. , Klassen und Kultur. Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt, 1982)Google Scholar; Medick, H. and Sabean, David, eds., Interest and Emotion. Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; on the first meeting of the group in 1978, see the conference report: Berdahl, R.et al., “Il ‘processo lavorativo’ nella storia: note su un debittito,” Quaderni Storici, 14 (03–04 1979), 190–204Google Scholar. The last meeting took place in October 1983 on the theme “Domination as Social Practice.” The proceedings, edited by Alf Lüdtke, are being prepared for publication. A future meeting concerned with “The Production of History” is planned for 1986–87.

¹¹ On this, see text below at section VI.

¹² Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Anthropology and History (Manchester, 1961), 20Google Scholar.

¹³ Sahlins, M., “Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History,” American Anthropologist, 85:3 (09 1983), 517–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 534, reprinted in idem, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985), 32–72Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁴ Köhler, O., “Versuch einer ‘Historischen Anthropologie,’” Saeculum, 25 (1974), 129–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar, gives a summary of the discussions and considerations of a circle which coalesced at the beginning of the 1970s around the journal Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte. On the continuation of this circle, out of which in the meantime the Freiburg Institute for Historical Anthropology developed, see Martin, J., “Das Institut fur Historische Anthropologie,” Saeculum 33 (1982), 375–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lepenies, W., “Probleme einer historischen Anthropologie,” in Historische Sozialwissenschaft, Rurup, W., ed. (Göttingen, 1977), 126–59Google Scholar; a noteworthy and interesting approach, which was not continued, is to be found in Nipperdey, Th., “Die anthropologische Dimension der Geschichtswissenschaft (1967),” in his Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Neueren Geschichle (Göttingen, 1976), 33–57, 418–19nn.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; characteristic incidentally for the predominant underestimation at that time (1967) of the productivity of ethnographic perspectives is Nipperdey's reference in his note 1 to Evans-Pritchard's Anthropology and History, with the commentary, “The lecture of E. E. Evans-Pritchard…. from the position of an ethnologist, provides nothing new for our topic” (p. 418).

¹⁵ This shows itself most clearly in the report of Köhler, “Versuch einer ‘Historischen Anthropologie.’ ” Even Lepenies does not seem to be free of this, when he designates, in the tradition of the anthropology of the eighteenth century, the “historicizing of biological givens” and the investigation of “elementary modes of behaviour” as the central themes of an historical anthropology. See especially his “Probleme einer historischen Anthropologie,” 138ff. Whether the Freiburg Institute for Historical Anthropology, now directed by J. Martin and Th. Nipperdey, will open itself in full measure to a critique of the epistemological traps inherent in the “historical anthropology” that developed in Germany from the tradition of philosophical anthropology remains to be seen. On the more recent developments, see Sössmuth, H., ed., Historische Anthropologie. Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1984)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ The following works may be taken as exemplary: Davis, N. Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London, 1975)Google Scholar; on Davis's motives for turning to ethnology, see the interesting interview, “Politics, Progeny, and French History. An Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis,” Radical History Review, 24 (1980), 115–39Google Scholar, at 129ff; and also her essay, “Anthropology and History in the 1980s”; Ginzburg, C., The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth- Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar; Schmitt, J. C., Le Saint Levrier. Guinefort, guérisseur d'enfants depuis le XIII^e siècle (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See esp. Pomata, G., “La storia delle donne: una questione di confine,” in Gli strumenti delta richercha. Pt. 2: Questioni di metodo. Vol. XX of Il Mondo Contamporaneo (Florence, 1983), 1434–69Google Scholar; cf. also Davis, N. Z., “ ‘Women's History’ in Transition: The European Case,” Feminist Studies, 3:3/4 (1976), 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 90; the interesting if controversial attempt by Illich, I., Gender (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, makes an impression through its ethnohistorical wealth of information and the questioning of an “epistemological sexist central perspective” that it makes possible. This has validity despite the reductions, which are found in Illich's presentation of the authority and power relationships between the sexes (principally in his thesis), which will not stand up to historical testing, of a “fragmented gender” in the early modern transition period, or indeed of a contradictionless “ uni-sex” of the industrial-capitalist, commodity-producing societies.

¹⁸ See Medick, H. and Sabean, D., “Interest and Emotion in Family and Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology,” in Interest and Emotion, Medick, and Sabean, , eds., 9–27Google Scholar.

¹⁹ On this, see the controversy between Detlev Peukert and Alf Lüdtke: Peukert, D., “Arbeiteralltag—Mode und Methode,” in Arbeiteralltag in Stadt und Land. Neue Wege der Geschichtsschreibung, Haumann, H., ed. (Argument Sonderband 94) (Berlin 1982), 8–39Google Scholar; Lüdtke, A., “ ‘Kolonisierung der Lebens-Welten’—oder: Geschichte als Einbahnstrasse?” Das Argument, 140 (1983), 536–41Google Scholar; and the reply of Peukert, D., “Glanz und Elend der ‘Bartwichserei’”, Das Argument, 140 (1983), 542–49Google Scholar. Peukert seems to be holding to a concept of “Völkerkunde" (ethnology) which is wrong, or at least no longer tenable today, when he invokes its colonialist heritage (p. 34) (which it has itself called into question) in order to talk about a necessary “social scientific” limiting and regimenting of the history of everyday life. This becomes especially obvious when he talks about the “incompatibility of scientific knowledge and everyday experience” (p. 24) He refers to a “paradox” (?) that cannot be made good between the “methods of analysis and presentation” of historical social science (which are supposedly to follow the “requirements of reason”) and the “symbolic self interpretations” of “life worlds which are decaying.” Indeed he does not consider that these can be represented in the history of everyday life. Lüdtke's reply deals only indirectly with the translation problems of an history of everyday life, which intends to articulate and present the otherness of everyday experiences and modes of behaviour. He treats this expressly in “Organizational Order or ‘Eigensinn’? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics in Imperial Germany,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, Wilentz, S., ed., 303–33 (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar; and in the complementary essay, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horse-Play: ‘Eigensinn’ and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany around 1900,” in Class, Confrontation and the Labor Process: Studies in Class Formation, Hanagan, M. and Stephenson, Ch., eds. (Westport, Conn., and London, 1986)Google Scholar.

²⁰ An exemplary work, comparable in some respects for the USA to Thompson, Edward P.'s Making of the English Working Class (1968) if not for the white industrial proletariat, is the late Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar.

²¹ Interesting on this is Pomata, G., “La storia delle donne,” 1437ffGoogle Scholar.

²² Needham, R., “Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequence,” Man, 10:3 (09 1975), 349–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Davis, , “Anthropology and History in the 1980s,” 274–75Google Scholar.

²⁴ Kocka, J., “Klassen oder Kultur? Durchbruche oder Sackgassen in der Arbeitergeschichte,” Merkur, 36:70 (10 1982), 955–65, at 962–63Google Scholar.

²⁵ Thompson, E.P., “The Poverty of Theory,” in his The Poverty ofTheory and Other Essavs (London, 1978), 193–406, at 280Google Scholar.

²⁶ Schindler, N., “Spuren in die Geschichte der ‘anderen’ Zivilisation. Probleme und Perspektiven einer historischen Volkskulturforschung,” in Volkskultur. Zur Wiederbelebung des vergessenen Alltags (16.–20. Jahrhundert), Schindler, N. and van Dulmen, R., eds. (Frankfurt, 1984), 13–77Google Scholar.

²⁷ Gadamer, H. G., Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzuge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen 1960), 284ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Ginzburg, C., “Geschichte und Geschichten. Über Archive, Marlene Dietrich und die Lust an derGeschichte,” in his Spurensicherungen. Über verborgene Geschichte, Kunst und soziales Gedächtnis (Berlin, 1983), 7–24, at 22–23Google Scholar.

²⁹ Boon, J. A., Other Tribes, Other Scribes. Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cambridge, 1983), 234Google Scholar.

³⁰ Especially relevant for the problems discussed below are Geertz, Cl., “Thick Discription: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 3–30Google Scholar, and “ ‘From the Native's Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in his Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York, 1983), 55–70Google Scholar.

³¹ Dwyer, K., Moroccan Dialogues. Anthropology in Question (Baltimore, 1982), esp. Part 2, “On the Dialogic of Anthropology,” 253–88Google Scholar.

³² Geertz, , “Thick Description,” 13Google Scholar.

³³ Geertz, , “ ‘From the Native's Point of View,’ ” 56Google Scholar.

³⁴ Ibid., 58.

³⁵ With this criticism of concepts of interpretation and understanding that are centred on the interpreter, I follow considerations of Clifford Geertz, but I am at the same time modifying and radicalising them. Further insights are to be found in Boon, Other Tribes, and Dwyer, Moroccan Dialogues; the most interesting critique to date of Geertz's too rigid restriction of his interpretative analysis of culture to an interpretation of texts is to be found—as a critical reading of one of Geertz's seminal essays—in Roseberry, W., “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology,” Social Research, 49 (1982), 1013–28Google Scholar.

³⁶ I owe this awareness for the dialectical constitution of “Verstehen” and “interpretation” as elementary forms of social practice and parts of a “geteilte Wirklichkeit” to an exchange with Joachim Matthes. See his “Die Soziologen und ihre Wirklichkeit. Anmerkungen zum Wirklic hkeitsverhältnis der Soziologie,” Soziale Welt, Sonderband no. 3 “Entzauberte Wissenschaft,” Bonß, W. and Hartmann, H., eds., 49–64 (Göttingen, 1985)Google Scholar. The term “nostrificationof the other and unknown” appears therein (p. 51).

³⁷ Geertz, , “ ‘Deep Play.’ Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in his Interpretation of Cultures, 412–53, at 452Google Scholar.

³⁸ Dwyer, , Moroccan Dialogues, 285Google Scholar.

³⁹ Turk, H., “Die Wirklichkeit der Gleichnisse. Überlegungen zum Problem der objektivenInterpretation am Beispiel Kafkas,” Poetica, 8:3 (1976), 208–25Google Scholar; an ethnological turning on this literary critical concept of an “objective interpretation” is to be found in Bachmann-Medick, D., “Die ‘dritte Welt’ der Literatur. Eine ethnologische Methodenkritik literaturwissenschaftlichen Interpretierens, am Beispiel von Raabes Roman ‘Abu Telfan oder die Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge’,” in Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1979), 27–71Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Kocka, J., “Gegenstandsbezogene Theorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Theorien in der Praxis des Hislorikers (Geschkhte and Gesellschaft) (Sonderheft 3), Kocka, J., ed. (Göttingen, 1977), 178–88Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Geertz, , “Thick Description,” 24–25Google Scholar.

⁴² Ibid., 17.

⁴³ Sewell, W. H., Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Isaac, R., The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Ibid, esp. ch. 11, 243–69.

⁴⁷ Ibid., esp. the final chapter, “A Discourse on Method: Action, Structure, and Meaning,” 323–57.

⁴⁸ See Cohn, , “History and Anthropology,” 217ffGoogle Scholar; also his “Anthropology and History in the 1980s,” with extensive bibliography.

⁴⁹ Cf. Cohn, , “History and Anthropology,” 199Google Scholar; cf. my introductory footnote.

⁵⁰ See text above, at note 13.

⁵¹ Sahlins, M., Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Island Kingdoms (Ann Arbor, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sahlins has elaborated on the themes dealt with in this study, both theoretically and in historical subject matter, in his interesting volume of essay Islands of History (Chicago, 1985)Google ScholarPubMed.

⁵² Sahlins, , Historical Metaphors, 9ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Ibid., 28ff.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 68.

⁵⁵ These culturalist elements are criticized rightly by Groh, D., “Ethnologie als Universalwissenschaft,” Merkur, 36:12 (12 1982), 1217–25Google Scholar, in a discussion of one of Sahlin's systematic essays (Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar), although without taking into account his larger cultural-anthropological interpretation of history.

⁵⁶ Mintz, S., Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History xxix; (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, on Mintz's historically oriented understanding of culture, which owes its dialectical thrust precisely to the contradictoriness and incongruence of cultural ways of life and experience on the one hand and of social relations and material conditions of life on the other, see his “Culture. An Anthropological View,” Yale Review (1982), 499–512, esp. 5O5ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Cf. note 56.

⁵⁸ I am relying with gratitude upon exchanges with Sidney Mintz during the winter of 1981–82.

⁵⁹ Mintz, S., “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness,” Marxist Perspectives, 2:4 (Winter 1979–1980), 56–73, at 60Google ScholarPubMed.

⁶⁰ On the meaning of “coffee breaks” and “sweet bread spreads,” see the interesting article by Wiegelmann, G., “Volkskundliche Studien zum Wandel der Speisen und Mahlzeiten.” in Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dent Einfluß der Industrialisierung, Teuteberg, H. J. and Wiegelmann, G., eds. (Göttingen, 1972), 247ff, 299ffGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Some studies are in preparation. For some of the interpretive possibilities, see Medick, H., “Überleben, Weben und Widerstand im alten Laichingen,” Schwäbische Heimat, 36:1 (01 1986)Google Scholar; and Bischoff-Luithlen, A., Der Schwabe und sein Häs (Stuttgart 1982)Google Scholar.

⁶² See the brilliant little essay by Ginzburg, C. and Poni, C., “La micro-histoire,” Le Debat, 17 (1981), 133–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Manfred Thaller has provided important theoretical and practical prerequisites for this with his ClioSystem of source-based data processing. Parallel to the insights which follow from the thick description of the ethnologists, his method proceeds from the multivalence and ambiguity of historical sources (which are closed off in certain essential respects to any previous “grasp,” methodologically and conceptually, of the systematic social sciences, which are a priori oriented towards a fixed meaning), and attempts to come to terms with this decisive assumption of historical work and interpretation: Thaller, M., “Ungefähre Exaktheit. Theoretische Grundlagen und praktische Möglichkeiten einer Formulierung historischer Quellen als Produkte ‘unscharfer’ Systeme,” in Neue Ansätze in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Conceptus Studien, vol. IGoogle Scholar), Nagl-Docekal, H. and Wimmer, Fr., eds. (Vienna, 1984), 77–100Google Scholar. idem, “Automation on Parnassus. Clio—A Databank Oriented System for Historians,” Historical Social Research!Historische Sozialforschung, 15 (July 1980), 40–65.

⁶⁴ Kocka, , “Gegenstandsbezogene Theorien,” 178ffGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Mauss, M., “Die Gabe. Form und Funktion des Austausch in archaischen Gesellschaften,” in his Soziologie und Anthropologie (München 1975), II, 139Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Some notable examples are Rosaldo, R., Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974. A Study in Society and History (Stanford, 1980Google Scholar); Price, R., First Time. The Historical Vision of an Afro- American People (Baltimore, 1983Google Scholar); all of the research and writings of Gerald Sider give outstanding examples of the complexities and contradictions, of the constancies and changes in action, custom, and culture that are at work in situations of historical change; see, amongst others, his “Christmas Mumming and the New Year in Outport Newfoundland,” Past and Present, no. 71 (05 1976), 102–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Ties that Bind: Culture and Agriculture, Property and Propriety in the Newfoundland Village Fishery,” Social History, 5:1 (1980), 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Family Fun in Starve Harbour: Custom, History, and Confrontation in Village Newfoundland,”in Interest and Emotion, Medick, and Sabean, , eds., 340–70Google Scholar; Vincent, J., Teso in Transition. The Political Economy of Peasant and Class in Eastern Africa (Berkeley, 1982Google Scholar); Schneider, J., “Peacocks and Penguins: The Political Economy of European Cloth and Colors,” American Ethnologist, 5 (1978), 413–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Trousseau as Treasure: Some Contradictions of Late Nineteenth-Century Change in Sicily,” in Beyond the Myths of Culture, Ross, E. B., ed. (New York, 1980), 324–55Google Scholar; see also—with qualifications—several works of Jack Goody, including his The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983Google Scholar); and Cooking, Cuisine, and Class. A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, 1982Google Scholar); see also two interesting German studies: Peukert, W.' Der atlantische Sklavenhandel von Dahomey 1740–1797. Wirtschaftsanthropologie und Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1978Google Scholar); and, further, a work strongly bound methodologically to “historical social science,” Szalay, M.'s Ethnologie und Geschichte. Zur Grundlegung einer ethnologischen Geschichtsschreibung. Mit Beispielen aus der Geschichte der Khoi-San in Südafrika (Berlin, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ On this, see Fabian, J., Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ On this see Wolf, E., “Culture and Ideology: An Essay in Honour of Angel Palerm,” in Festschrift for Angel Palerm, Glantz, Susanna, ed. (Mexico City: forthcomingGoogle Scholar); there, Wolf cites also the criticism of R.Narrols and the traditional cult-units of ethnology; idem, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982), 3–19Google ScholarPubMed.

⁶⁹ See note 68.

⁷⁰ Wallerstein, I., The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974Google Scholar); and his The Modern World-System II. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Frank, A. G., World Accumulation, 1492–1789 (New York, 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁷² See, for example, for the African kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth century, with historical criticism of the Eurocentric historical concept of the “Atlantic theory” and, in particular, of K.Polyani's studies: Peukert, W., Der atlamische SklavenhandelGoogle Scholar. On Peukert, see the assessment in the review by Johnson, M., “Polyani, Peukert, and the Political Economy of Dahomey,” Journal of African History, 21:3 (1980), 395–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ This point is stressed for Africa in a critical review of the state of research on African societies: Cohen, D., “Doing Social History from Pirn's Doorway,” Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, Zunz, O., ed. (Chapel Hill, 1985), 191–235.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ On these changes in anthropological discourse, see Sh. Ortner, B., “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (01 1984), 126–66, at 144ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁶ Geertz, “ “From the Native's Point of View’ ”: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world'scultures. Rather than attempting to place the experience of others within the framework of such a conception, which is what the extolled 'empathy' in fact usually comes down to, understanding them demands setting that conception aside and seeing their experiences within the framework of their own idea of what selfhood is” (p. 59).

⁷⁷ These reflections go back to a discussion with Rhys Isaac and David Sabean. “Person” and “individual” as historical “constructs” of a specific regional social discourse and of changing social relations determined by regional government and village community are a central concern in the Württemberg histories of Sabean, David: Power in the Blood. Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar.