Since the 1980s, anthropology and history have converged, through mutual interests, overlapping methods, and reciprocal borrowing of methods and concepts. There are now significant areas of overlap between the two disciplines, even if certain basic orientations toward chronological narrative and contemporary field-work make them fundamentally distinct. While these recent developments suggest growing areas of mutual interest, a longer view of anthropology’s development would muddy a story of increasing mutual engagement on the part of the two disciplines. Anthropology has in fact had a succession of historical moments and unhisto-rical ones; while for Scottish Enlightenment writers among others, ‘history’ could refer to the comparative analysis of political institutions as well as to annalistic narrative.
Anthropology was a historical inquiry up to the early twentieth century, in the sense that the comparative method for the study of institutions entailed developmental narrative and drew upon a range of classical, biblical, and ethnological sources. In some forms anthropology’s history was frankly teleological and evolutionist, and in others it was diffusionist. By modern standards, its use of sources was opportunistic and uncritical. Diffusionist arguments, in particular, tended to be highly speculative and tendentious. What was indeed ‘conjectural history’ was dismissed by Radcliffe-Brown and others as the professional discipline of social anthropology was established over the first decades of the twentieth century. Although scope for the study of cultural affinities and migrations persisted in Boasian anthropology in the United States, such ‘history’ became increasingly marginal in synchronic studies of cultural and symbolic systems; longer term diachronic processes came to be studied by archaeologists employing a whole battery of sophisticated techniques that had been unavailable earlier.
Converging disciplines
As Evans-Pritchard noted (1981: 200), Radcliffe-Brown’s exclusion of ‘guesswork history’ in fact entailed the exclusion of all history. He was concerned to establish a sociologically rigorous inquiry, that had a definite identity as a separate discipline, and could not tolerate the messy complexities of historical contingency (Thomas 1989). He and most other British social anthropologists consequently disembedded intensive ethnographic studies from their historical contexts, not only from a prehistory of hazy migrations, but also from colonial interactions and other developments over the decades immediately preceding the time of fieldwork. Just as some ethnographic photographers such as E.S. Curtis notoriously persuaded subjects to resume traditional dress, and airbrushed-out signs of acculturation, anthropologists elided foreign contacts that detracted from the authenticity of the cultures studied. Interactions between traditional societies and colonial powers were reduced to ‘social change’ that might be dealt with in a brief introduction or in a concluding topic to the classic functionalist monograph.
From the 1960s on, anthropologists became increasingly concerned to situate small-scale societies in wider economic and political processes. This interest, more evolutionist than historical, was at first closely linked with the development of Marxist anthropology and with theories of imperialism. The prevailing view was that fine-grained historical research was ‘empiricist’. Any close integration of anthropological and historical knowledge was therefore retarded, as theories of the world system, dependence, modes of production and articulation were elaborated, notably in journals such as Critique of Anthropology and Economy and Society.
The failure to historicize culture during the 1960s and 1970s is only surprising in retrospect. Materialist and culturalist perspectives were more sharply polarized than has subsequently been the case; and history was generally a conservative discipline more remote from anthropology than it has since become. Histories of the non-European world, in particular, were often limited to narratives of the development of colonial policy, and moreover frequently focused less on administrative problems in colonized regions than on metropolitan decision-making — which, it must be said, made for some pretty dull monographs. History generally remained strongly biased towards documentary as opposed to oral records, and perforce therefore toward the perspectives of those who produced documents rather than those whose lives might be marginally noticed in them. This bias was exacerbated by the fact that not only documents, but official documents, were privileged as sources for colonial histories: the more revealing private correspondence and memoirs of officials, missionaries, and traders ‘on the ground’, who frequently conveyed more ironic and revealing accounts of the disordered and partial implementation of colonial policies, were not extensively drawn upon until historians moved toward a more ‘social’ orientation in the 1960s. The essentially ‘democratic’ orientation of anthropological work, the tendency to deal with values and perceptions at the level of local communities, was plainly not compatible with histories in which White officials remained central.
The discipline of history was itself to change both in its approaches to European and non-European societies. Interests in oral history and ethnohistory emerged earlier in Africa than in other regions, but significant studies were being done in the Pacific, Asia and elsewhere by the late 1960s. In European studies, histories of working-class movements, peasants, and women emerged; E.P. Thompson’s classic, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), was especially important. Broader interests in ‘history from below’ and social history generally — drawing in part from the several generations of the French "Annales school — led to a dramatic broadening of historians’ vision. The issue of what was studied was intimately connected with the question of how it was studied; unconventional sources, oral history, and critical and imaginative readings of canonical documents were required, if the lives and perceptions of those beneath or at the margins of the historical record were to be even partially recovered.
From then on, shifts within both disciplines produced common ground. Historians inspired by "Victor Turner and "Clifford Geertz, among other anthropologists, became increasingly interested in culture, drama, and ritual. Although their insights were often only loosely applied, "’thick descriptions’, reflexivity, and sensitivity toward questions of performance, were enlivening in a discipline still generally characterized by precise primary research and objectivistic narrative, particularly in the hands of such eloquent writers as Greg Dening, Natalie Zemon Davis, Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen, Robert Darnton, and Simon Schama.
Studies of colonial processes compelled them to consider how ‘both sides’ of the relationship might be recovered, which was to raise methodological and epistemological questions concerning the form of historical knowledge. As it became increasingly clear that Marxist anthropology needed to move away from the sterile formalism of Althusserian structuralism to more particular accounts of ‘social formations’, anthropologists were prompted to examine colonial histories and relationships more specifically. The kind of historical anthropology that emerged had nothing in common with the earlier conjectural history, but at its best instead aimed to integrate extensive archival research with anthropological sensitivity to the complexities of cross-cultural relationships. This trend had been anticipated, in South Asian studies, in a fine series of essays produced from the 1960s on by Bernard S. Cohn; it is symptomatic of wider intellectual shifts in the discipline that these were not published together and widely appreciated until the late 1980s (Cohn 1987). Among other pioneering works might be mentioned James Fox’s remarkable political and ecological history of eastern Indonesia (1977) and Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting (1980).
Over the same period, a new rigour emerged in histories of anthropology as a discipline.
Earlier these had often been no more than exercises in collective self-congratulation, highly directed toward the validation of current theoretical concerns, and often based more on anecdote than extensive research. The more deeply researched studies were marginal to the discipline, and regarded as being of little more than antiquarian interest. Together with "Fabian’s critique of the denial of coevalness in anthropological writing (1983), the publications of Stocking (1983-91; 1987), Urry (1993) and others did much to bring this area of inquiry back into the centre of the discipline. The formation of anthropological knowledge became an issue increasingly linked with colonial practice, and with the ‘invention of tradition’ (Pels and Salemink 1994).
Structural history
Historical anthropology has at no point been a unified approach. However, the broader level of interest in the field intensified in the mid-1980s in response to Marshall Sahlins’s stimulating interpretations of the death of Cook in Hawaii and contact histories in Fiji and New Zealand (1981; 1985). His culturalist arguments emphasized that history was ordered differently in different societies, that it was not necessarily antithetical to a structuralist frame of analysis but could be integrated with it, since events, at least in Pacific societies, were understood to recapitulate in the short term the mythic structures that they transformed in the longer term. Sahlins’s essays revitalized studies in a number of fields — on divine kingship, that was now correlated with the ‘heroic history’ that assimilated accomplishments to the agency of the king — and on myth, that was drawn out of a dehistoricized Levi-Straussian domain and into a processual account.
But at the same time Sahlins’s work failed to speak to those exploring labour history, peasant resistance, migration, and colonial histories that entailed deep social and cultural disruption. Just as its key case-studies were derived from the ‘heroic societies’ of early Polynesia, its salience as a model seemed restricted to those societies, at the moments in their histories when interaction with outsiders was limited and occasional. Under such circumstances intrusions could indeed be assimilated to prior categories; although the argument did address the transformation of structure in the longer run, in so far as it dealt with the very Hawaiian way in which the Hawaiians ‘abandoned’ their religion for Christianity, it was hard to see how the arguments could be extended to the second half of the nineteenth century in Hawaii, when plantation economies dispossessed and proletarianized many Hawaiians. A number of critics suggested that Sahlins’s arguments could only account for externally stimulated change and introduced no dynamism into local cultures themselves. Sahlins implicitly responded to the point in a subsequent essay (1991) concerning cultural reformulation within the Fijian chiefdoms; but the equally significant line of criticism, that the more radical restructuring of indigenous societies attendant upon later phases of colonization requires some different set of arguments, seemed to require a fundamentally different approach.
Debunking the exotic
While Sahlins’s studies have inspired scholars working in many regions to pursue the dynamic interplay of myth, ritual and history further, historical anthropology elsewhere — in Melanesia and South Asia for example — has emphasized the transformative power of colonial processes, generally from a critical perspective.
A range of phenomena that anthropologists had previously interpreted for their social and cultural logic were shown to arise from a wider historical dynamic, from the interaction between local societies and colonial powers. In many cases precisely the features taken by anthropologists to be hallmarks of cultural difference, such as the Indian caste system and the Bali-nese ‘theatre state’, arguably emerged in the specific forms that had intrigued anthropologists as a result of colonial interventions.
Louis Dumont’s celebrated study of caste, Homo Hierarchicus (1980) rigorously segregated religious and secular status, and associated kingship with a symbolically impoverished political domain, while affirming the centrality of caste and hierarchy in Indian society. While Dumont’s elaborate theory had been questioned from many perspectives, a particularly decisive critique emerged from Nicholas Dirks’s detailed ethnohistoric study of the ‘little kingdom’ of Pudukkottai (1986). Because Dumont neglected colonial history, he failed to consider the degree to which the very separation of religion and politics was a product of colonial intervention. On the basis of a mass of ethnohistorical information Dirks argues convincingly that hierarchy, kingship and status had previously been intimately connected. The British truncated the power of warrior kings, and created a bureaucracy in which literate Brahmans assumed privileged positions, not least in the codification of the social order in terms that emphasized their own high status.
In debate that is in many ways parallel, Clifford Geertz’s characterization of the Balinese states as preoccupied with theatre rather than politics (1980), has been challenged by scholars including "Tambiah (1985), Schulte Nordholt (1986; 1994), and most recently and comprehensively, Margaret Weiner (1994). They have reconstructed the political dynamism that Geertz elided, and argued that the specific conditions described by Geertz could only be associated with the attentuated states subordinated to Dutch rule. Tambiah mischievously suggested that Geertz’s Negara might more aptly have been titled The Twilight of the Balinese State (1985: 336). In both the Indian and Balinese cases, an ambitious anthropological argument, that drew attention to stark contrasts between the West and Asia, would seem flawed by exoticism. In this context, the deeper and more critical approach to the history of anthropological thought, alluded to above, gave a new and powerful edge to the critique. As critics like Inden and "Appadurai had argued, Dumont’s argument was less a distinctive sociological or anthropological analysis than the culmination of a tradition of colonial discourse, that fashioned India as a mystical and archaic domain, and in general as the antithesis of the West. The mutual influences between colonial and professional anthropology, between anthropology and a wider field of discourse, and between anthropology and indigenous representation, were attested to further by "Bernard Cohn (1987: 5864) who argued, on the basis of Peter France’s work, that Fijian origin myths, still widely current in Fiji in official versions that have entered school text topics, possessed no authenticity, but were adapted versions of migration histories postulated by colonial ethnologists.
The ‘debunking’ style of this criticism was initially refreshing, as was the wider project engaged in by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), that drew attention to inventions of tradition, in many contexts. It became clearer, however, with the controversy surrounding similar claims that Allan Hanson made with respect to Maori histories (1989), that such arguments relied in some cases upon the same notions of ‘authenticity’ that they might overtly disavow, and presumed the unique validity of Western ways of knowing the past, effectively discounting local historical understandings. A conflict between foreign scholars and indigenous people with particular investments in the traditions being deconstructed also emerged, that might prove peculiarly difficult to negotiate or overcome. While the immediate repercussions of the controversy were for debates about tradition and identity, there are broader implications for historical anthropology in general: how can a multiplicity of constructions of the past and modes of constructing the past be acknowledged, without lapsing into an uncritical relativism?
One history or many
Oral history projects often had two motivations, one being the recovery of particular groups’ perceptions of the past, the other being more simply the collection of information concerning events that were undocumented in other ways. There is clearly a tension between these projects: the scholar may be prompted to use vernacular accounts as a kind of quarry for shreds of evidence concerning happenings that preceded European contact, or were unnoticed by Europeans, without necessarily acknowledging underlying differences between different expressions and genres of historical knowledge. Data concerning political expansion, migrations, or genealogy, may be extracted from oral narratives without reference to the structure of a narrative or the intentions of narrators.
This positivistic approach to oral history has been displaced by an anthropological relativism that is concerned to do justice to the particular styles and genres of indigenous historicities. Again, Sahlins’s discussion (1985) of Polynesian ‘heroic history’, provides a relevant model. This history is not annalistic or event-structured but tends rather to condense genealogies, to identify deeds in the present with those of ancestors, and to assimilate consequential acts and states to the person of the ruler. The king may encompass the deeds of his subjects and provide a plethora of precedents that may be alluded to in the ongoing rationalization of present strategies. This is, then, an indigenous ‘great man’ theory of history that may be more thoroughgoing than the European variant: the point is not merely that prominent individuals are privileged, but that their practices encompass the historical space.
Many modes of understanding events, agency, continuity, and change in other cultures might similarly be acknowledged. It is indeed important that they be recognized. Yet it is problematic if the result of such interpretive efforts is simply a sense that the world consists of cultural islands, each with its singular culture and history. This was never the case, and is still less so now: cultures are structured as much by interaction as by internal logic, as are histories and historical consciousness. As Dirks and others have shown, phenomena that once seemed to belong to ‘other cultures’ were shaped by the West’s interactions with those cultures, or rather by the intrusive efforts of particular European political and cultural agencies. The futures of historical anthropology and the anthropology of history must lie in inquiries that avoid imposing Western notions of historical action and causation and seek out distinctive indigenous historical narratives and understandings — yet strive also to ground those narratives in the intersocial colonial histories that we share.
