Historical Anthropology

Definition

Historical anthropology names the turn by which social historians borrow the perspectives and methods of social and cultural anthropology in order to study the "inner side" of historical processes — the experiences, meanings and cultural practices of ordinary actors. In Hans Medick's chapter it is the attempt to answer the discipline's "fundamental methodological conundrum": how to comprehend "the dual constitution of historical processes, the simultaneity of given and produced relations" (Medick, p. 43). Medick distinguishes the German "historical anthropology" (which, in its Saeculum/Freiburg variant, is oriented to universal "fundamental modes of human behavior" transcending society and epoch) from the ethnological "anthropologizing of history" (which thrives on the Otherness of foreign cultures and the critique of Eurocentrism) (pp. 45–46). The shared method is thick description; the shared target is the "centrist view of history" that assigns phenomena to margin or centre by their role in modernization.

Key Thinkers

• Hans Medick — the chapter "'Missionaries in the Rowboat'? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History" (no author page yet — see log).
• Alf Lüdtke — the deployment of ethnographic distance and Verfremdung in alltagsgeschichte.
• Clifford Geertz — "thick description" and "all experience is construed experience."
• E. E. Evans-Pritchard — "Anthropology must choose between being history and being nothing."
• Marshall Sahlins — "the problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture"; the Cook case.
• Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Rhys Isaac — the historically oriented anthropologists and anthropologically oriented historians Medick cites.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the habitus/praxis vocabulary that Medick finds both useful and potentially static.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the German historiography historical anthropology feeds.
• Thick Description — its principal method.
• Microhistory — its scale of analysis.
• Otherness — the "double Otherness" of one's own and alien cultures.
• History of Mentalities — the Annales cousin.
• Everyday Life — the sphere the anthropologically oriented historian reconstructs.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Medick's chapter (pp. 41–71) in full: the "missionaries in the rowboat" critique; the shortcomings of historical social science; the critique of "participant observation"; thick description; the Isaac, Sahlins, and Mintz case studies; "the ongoing struggle for meaning(s)"; the socially constituted individual.

Open Questions

• Does the anthropological turn risk "a false romanticization of the past" (Kocka's charge, acknowledged by Medick), or can it avoid the "simple negative reversal in perspective"?
• Is the "double Otherness" of European history a genuine methodological advance or a metaphor that dissolves the specificity of European social relations?