Is There a Place for Anthropology in Social Science History?

Abstract

Imagine a fourfold table in which one dimension is “present versus past” and the other “exotic versus home.” Traditionally, social and cultural anthropology’s domain has been the exotic’s present and history’s domain the home’s past. A third box, the home’s present, has been occupied by sociology, while the fourth, the exotic’s past, has usually been the province of anthropologists too because other disciplines—with the exception, perhaps, of ethnohistorians—are usually even less interested in exotic peoples’ past than in their present. These domains are now in flux. I argue, in what follows, that only when the oversimplified ideas about time and space that have created them are seriously questioned will anthropology find a secure “place” in social science history.