In Praise of Historical Anthropology

Perspectives, Methods, and Applications to the Study of Power and Colonialism

Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000038576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In Praise of Historical Anthropology is based on a fundamental conviction: the study of society cannot be undertaken without considering the weight of history and separations between disciplines in academics need to be bridged for the benefit of knowledge. Anthropology cannot be limited to situating its object in its immediate context; rather its true subject of study is society as a historical problem. The book describes the complex attempts to transcend this separation, presenting perspectives, methodologies and direct applications for the study of power relations and systems of social classification, paying special attention to the reconstruction of colonial situations. Following the maxim expounded by John and Jean Comaroff, this book will help us understand that historical anthropology is not a matter of merging the two disciplines of anthropology and history, but rather considering societies in their historically situated dimension and applying the tools of the social and human sciences to the analysis. In this vein, the book reviews the complex attempts to bridge disciplinary separations and theoretical proposals coming from very different traditions. The text, consequently, opens up hegemonic perspectives to include 'other anthropologies.'

1 Anthropology and History

Uncomfortable Dance Partners

[…] research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropology is based on creating data. Obviously, the historian has to find the sources on which to base his research. If he cannot find them, then no matter how good his ideas are or how well thought through the problem is on which he wants to work […]. The anthropologist, on the other hand, often is interested in a problem, descriptive or theoretical, and the question is then one of deciding what types of materials he will need for pursuing the problem.¹

From the outset, the relationship between anthropology and history has fluctuated. In the nineteenth century, the great classic thinkers of the social sciences focused, above all, on change. The emergence of the industrial society, the transition to modernity and the creation of the empires raised a number of questions for authors like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. For most of them, like Marx and Durkheim, the foundations of the philosophy of history were clearly based on linear views of time that shared basic evolutionist concepts and the idea of progress itself. Amongst many of these thinkers, what has been called the ‘watershed theory’ was predominant, that is, an explanatory model for the transition from traditional societies rooted in community ties to modern societies grounded in concepts of the individual and new social structures.²

To understand this artificial partition between anthropology and history, it is necessary to examine not only theoretical questions and the philosophical underpinnings of the different paradigms, but also the relevant political and historical aspects. Verena Stolcke (1993), for example, provided a detailed explanation of the impact of national academic traditions on the formulation of theories, concepts and paradigms. The relationship between anthropology and history as examined in this book is no exception, and not everybody understands the concepts of history and anthropology using the same words.³ For a review of this dialectic, both James D. Faubion (1993) and Pier Paolo Viazzo (2003) have produced interesting historical archaeologies that start with the classics of the nineteenth century and continue to the early 1990s, highlighting the uncertainties that still hang over these dance partners.⁴

Our approach to this topic takes as its starting point an epistemological problem that has yet to be resolved: transcultural concepts inherited from history and temporality (Wolf, 1982; Mintz, 1985; Roseberry, 1989; Amodio, 2010; Altez, 2012). The way in which human beings in their cultural diversity interpret time and divide it into ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ is one of the main concerns of the ethnographic present.⁵ While the academy and disciplines may be fragmented, the societies that they analyse are not.⁶ In the time of the living, there is a present, past and future, but in the appearance of a saint or possession by a spirit, time can be suspended. We, too, greatly fear that in a historical anthropology such as the one that we propose here, societies also speak with their dead in dreams, without any boundaries between past, present and future.

In a lecture given in 1949 at the Sorbonne in Paris, Claude Lévi-Strauss asserted that ‘all societies are historical in the same way, but some acknowledge it candidly, while others are reluctant to do so, or prefer to ignore the fact’.⁷ At that conference, entitled ‘History and Ethnology’ (1949), the French anthropologist was openly sceptical about the possibility of historifying non-writing societies, but he did not deny the importance of history to describe and interpret present-day societies.⁸ In the study of societies, it is essential to bear in mind that history is not an option to choose. For this reason, ethnographic research cannot be separated from the historical context, because this ‘context’ is also the object/subject of study. We take the same stance as John and Jean Comaroff and Eric Wolf (although these authors resist the possibility of constructing a ‘method’ in the style of Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu or Anthony Giddens) and argue that human beings create the worlds in which they live. We propose an analysis that definitively parts ways with the ‘watershed theory’, a foundational myth of modern human sciences that pits modernity/movement against traditionalism/staticism, making the case for an anthropology that is – and must be – a political and ethical practice.⁹ This question goes beyond the supposed Lévi-Straussian division between ‘cold’ societies (in which there is no need to worry about history, basically, because it is a ‘mechanical’ time, i.e., recurring, repetitive and non-cumulative) and ‘hot’ societies (where history matters), because even societies that supposedly do not change require a dynamic to ‘not change’.¹⁰ Likewise, societies that theoretically are in constant transformation carry heavy burdens (dominant social groups or structures). The challenge, then, consists of combining a structural analysis (constrictions, organizations, social reproductions) with an analysis of social agency and dynamics that make it possible to read societies in motion, in continuous reconstruction (and, at times, construction and destruction).

This chapter presents contributions from a series of substantial studies that concur with many of these perspectives. Many hold back from specifying or canonizing approaches that are highly complex. However, they share a collection of elements that are worth gathering, presenting and considering.

1.1 Attempts at Partnering

In 1990, Clifford Geertz pointed out how anthropologists and historians were interested in each other’s work – American anthropologists concerned about reconstructing the history of the Fiji wars and English historians doing fieldwork related to the cults of the Roman emperors.¹¹ In Geertz’s words, ‘everybody seems to be minding everybody else’s business’.¹² It comes as no surprise then that in 1993, Verena Stolcke lamented the difficulty inherent in conceiving a history of anthropology, suggesting that what was needed, above all, was a clear definition of this so-called discipline of anthropology.¹³ Indeed, there are as many definitions as anthropological views and tastes, most of which do not always overlap and are often trivial. However, one of the central elements in Western anthropological thinking consists of understanding human unity in its diversity. According to American anthropologist George W. Stocking, the anthropological enterprise has always been characterized not by the study of cultural diversity as a fact, but by the dilemma of how to reconcile the unity of the human species with its manifest cultural diversity.¹⁴ It is another matter to examine the point at which the European sensibility began to perceive this question as problematic.¹⁵ By the same token, one could ask at what moment anthropology perceived the need to incorporate history into the analysis of the manifest sociocultural multiplicity that characterizes humanity.

What follows is an overview of the primary schools and theories of historical anthropology that draws on a variety of geographical and intellectual spheres to look at anthropology from a contextual and historicist focus. This country-based approach does not presuppose that so-called national traditions and their borders are a fundamental classification factor or that these traditions are necessarily homogenous, but rather provides different non-linear responses to the issues raised here, with themes that emerge, disappear and reappear in the history of ideas. Furthermore, this debate greatly profits from the presentation of strong contributions from some non-hegemonic anthropologies that are often neglected in the centre, as observed by the coiners of the concepts ‘anthropology of the South’ (Krotz, 1997) and ‘world anthropologies’ (Ribeiro & Escobar, 2008).

1.1.1 Great Britain

Anthropology in the early twentieth century was characterized by a fundamental change: the rejection of the rigidity and oversimplification of evolutionist frameworks that held that all societies had passed through similar stages of development. If a supposed psychic unity of humanity did exist, then it was possible to find the laws that governed societal growth.¹⁶ Led by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), the English school of social anthropology developed a relativist functionalist-structuralist focus as an alternative scientific paradigm to the theory and method of sociocultural evolutionism. They based their aversion to history on the impossibility of reconstructing the past of so-called primitive societies due to the lack of documentation. This position led them to view history and social anthropology as opposites. However, there would be dissent. At a conference in Manchester in 1961, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1990) reaffirmed what he had said in 1950 in the now famous Robert Marett Lecture at Oxford: that anthropology is closer to history than to the natural sciences.¹⁷ This position brought a torrent of criticism upon him, including the heated debate that began...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Anthropology and History: Uncomfortable Dance Partners
• 2 Historical-Anthropological “Masters of Thought”
• 3 Epistemologies and Methods
• 4 Colonial Systems of Power and Domination
• 5 Systems of Classification and Social Exclusion
• Epilogue: The Dilemma of Multiculturalism
• Bibliography
• Index