Anthropology and History

Abstract

Abstract Anthropology engages history not as one but instead as many things: (1) sociocultural change or diachrony; (2) a domain of events and objects that make manifest systems of signification, purpose, and value; (3) a domain of variable modalities of the experience and consciousness of being in time; and (4) 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 the documents of 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 an ‘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 disagreements are instructive because they recapitulate a much larger and more enduring controversy over whether anthropological knowledge is a mode of historical or instead a mode of scientific knowledge. The controversy is probably also irresolute, at least until either anthropology or history comes to an end.