Imagine a fourfold table in which one dimension is “present versus past” and the other “exotic versus home.” Traditionally, social and cultural anthropology’s domain has been the exotic’s present and history’s domain the home’s past. A third box, the home’s present, has been occupied by sociology, while the fourth, the exotic’s past, has usually been the province of anthropologists too because other disciplines—with the exception, perhaps, of ethnohistorians—are usually even less interested in exotic peoples’ past than in their present. These domains are now in flux. I argue, in what follows, that only when the oversimplified ideas about time and space that have created them are seriously questioned will anthropology find a secure “place” in social science history.

Ever since the publication of Voting (Berelson et al. 1954), individual-level electoral studies have underscored the predictive utility of attitudes on voting behavior. More recently, developments in social psychology have led political scientists to examine closely the process by which attitudes guide behavior (Fazio 1986; Aldrich et al. 1989). Findings in this research generally suggest that attitudes must be available and accessible if they are to exert any influence on perceptions, judgments, or behavior.