Anthropology and History

Abstract

Anthropology engages with history not as one but instead as many things: (a) sociocultural change or diachrony; (b) a domain of events and objects that make manifest systems of signification, purpose, and value; (c) a domain of variable modalities of the experience and consciousness of being in time; (d) a domain of practices, methods, and theories devoted to the recording and the analysis of temporal phenomena. It emerged, and continues to serve, as that branch of ‘natural history’ which investigates the psychophysical origins and diversification of the human race. As ‘ethnohistory,’ it investigates and documents the pasts of native or ‘first’ peoples, paying special attention to the dynamics and consequences of colonization. Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995/1912) opens the arena of the ‘anthropology of history’ with its argument for the social causation of the experience and conceptualization of time, but anthropologists remain divided over what the anthropology of history is or should be. Their disagreement is instructive because it at once recapitulates and epitomizes a much larger and more enduring controversy—over whether anthropological knowledge is itself hermeneutical or scientific. It is probably also irresolute—at least until either ‘man’ or history comes to an end.