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Social Anthropology and Social Science History
Abstract
In the 1970s, when the social science history movement emerged in the United States, leading to the founding of the Social Science History Association, a simultaneous movement arose in which historians looked to cultural anthropology for inspiration. Although both movements involved historians turning to social sciences for theory and method, they reflected very different views of the nature of the historical enterprise. Cultural anthropology, most notably as preached by Clifford Geertz, became a means by which historians could find a theoretical basis in the social sciences for rejecting a scientific paradigm. This article examines this development while also exploring the complex ways cultural anthropology has embraced—and shunned—history in recent years.
... Para algunos amantes de Clío y estudiosos de lo social (Kertzer, 2009) es permanente la reflexión sobre la historia y su papel que ocupa dentro de las ciencias sociales. Es decir, retos y desafíos teórico-metodológicos y cualidades sintéticas del quehacer historiográfico intrínseco. ...
El concepto y la realidad de la movilidad social intergeneracional no han sido
copiosamente estudiados por la Historia para examinar el fenómeno de la
migración internacional contemporánea. La movilidad social, puede analizarse desde varias aristas de abstracción histórica: movilidad social horizontal
o vertical; ascendente y descendente; la intrageneracional y la intergeneracional; y movilidad individual y de grupo. Epistemológicamente en el tema
de la migración estos conceptos abren rutas analíticas teórica, individual o
comparativamente. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar desde la perspectiva historiográfica de la historia del presente la movilidad social ascendente
e intergeneracional en el fenómeno de la migración internacional en el caso
concreto de estudiantes hijos de migrantes huandacarenses que finiquitaron
carrera universitaria en Estados Unidos. El sustrato teórico y metodológico de
este trabajo esta ceñido al enfoque de la historia del presente y la historia oral.
Adelantamos algunos debates teóricos y resultados sobre esta específica línea
de investigación que es parte de una agenda de investigación que versa sobre
la movilidad social y el cambio social en la migración internacional contemporánea.
Palabras
Theory, Ethnography, Historiography * Ethnography and the Historical Imagination * Of Totemism and Ethnicity * Bodily Reform as Historical Practice Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies * The Long and the Short of It * Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods * The Madman and the Migrant Colonialism And Modernity * Images of Empire, Contests of ConscienceMedicine, Colonialism, and the Black BodyThe Colonization of ConsciousnessHomemade Hegemony
At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the “elegance” of domination and the brutality of its effects. 1 While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages “even politically progressive [North American] audiences” to enjoy “the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.” 2 Still, Nietzsche's warning against “idle cultivation of the garden of history” resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it. 3
In 1945, Bronislaw Malinowski urged anthropology to abandon what he called its “one-column entries” on African societies and to study instead the “no-man's land of change,” to attend to the “aggressive and conquering” European communities as well as native ones, and to be aware that “European interests and intentions” were rarely unified but more often “at war” (1945:14–15). Four decades later, few of us have heeded his prompting or really examined his claim.
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsTranscription of Maya Languages and Personal NamesIntroduction: Democracy, Marginality, and Ethnic Resurgence31Pan-Mayanism and Its Critics on Left and Right332Coalitions and the Peace Process523In Dialogue: Maya Skeptics and One Anthropologist694Civil War: Enemies Without and Within865Narrating Survival through Eyewitness Testimony1136Interrogating Official History1327Finding Oneself in a Sixteenth-century Chronicle of Conquest1488"Each Mind Is a World": Person, Authority, and Community1639Indigenous Activism across Generations177Conclusions: Tracing the "Invisible Thread of Ethnicity"194App. 1Summary of the Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples211App. 2Questions from the 1989 Maya Workshop Directed to Foreign Linguists215Glossary: Acronyms, Organizations, and Cultural Terms217Notes221Bibliography251Index281
This review examines current anthropological literature concerned with migration and other forms of population movement, and with the movement of information, symbols, capital, and commodities in global and transnational spaces. Special attention is given to the significance of contemporary increases in the volume and velocity of such flows for the dynamics of communities and for the identity of their members. Also examined are innovations in anthropological theory and forms of representation that are responses to such nonlocal contexts and influences.
The assumption that the past is an infinite and plastic symbolic resource, wholly susceptible to contemporary purposes, is widespread in contemporary anthropology. It is partly rooted in Malinowski's conception of myth as social charter and partly in Durkheim's formulation concerning the cross-cultural relativity of fundamental categories of human thought. This article is a critique of this assumption, and suggests the existence of culturally variable sets of norms whose function is to regulate the inherent debatability of the past. Such norms, which vary substantively from culture to culture, are neverthless from a formal point of view subject to certain universal constraints. An example from south India is the bass for this argument, which also has implications for the theoretical analysis of social change.
Discussion critique des etudes de S. Mintz et de E. Wolf, de leurs conceptions de l'histoire| problematique du processus de substitution de la valeur d'echange a la valeur d'usage et de l'objectivation du monde a travers l'extension du consumerisme
This article examines the relationship between history and anthropology in South Asia during the past two decades, a relationship that has done much to shape the emerging intellectual practices of postcolonial anthropology. After locating the current conjuncture in an earlier moment of American anthropology in South Asia -village studies of the 1950s - the article reviews a body of interdisciplinary scholarship published during the 1980s and 1990s, paying specific attention to the impact of debates in Indian historiography generated by subaltern studies. The article goes on to identify five interlinked sets of themes in the literature for discussion: the "problem" of Europe, the interpenetration of power and knowledge in the colonial archive, the search for indigenous forms of knowledge, the phenomenon of violence and ethnic conflict, and the specific concerns of gender and feminist criticism. It argues that it is no longer feasible to do anthropology in South Asia without attending to one or more of these five themes. Any concern with contemporary transnational or cultural configurations in South Asia, or with the future of the postcolonial nation state, must be considered in relation to colonial history and the specific formations of modernity it generated.
Transnationalism and identity are concepts that inherently call for juxtaposition. This is so because many peoples' transnational networks of exchange and participation are grounded upon some perception of common identity; conversely, the identities of numerous individuals and groups of people are negotiated within social worlds that span more than one place. In this introductory article, the transnational perspective on migration studies is first discussed, followed by some critiques and outstanding questions. The final section summarises points raised by the contributing authors of the main articles in this themed issue of JEMS, especially with regard to various ways transnational settings and dynamics affect the construction, negotiation and reproduction of identities.
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
Anthropological Quarterly 78.1 (2005) 197-211
In recent years, studies of memory have blossomed in the humanities. (Klein 2000, Radstone 2000, Zelizer 1995) In anthropology in particular, a vast number of scholars are currently occupied with research about memory. (Candau 1998, Climo and Cattell 2002, Olick and Robbins 1998) The list of contributions in this recent field of research is too voluminous to even begin to report. In every new anthropological publication, there is another article about social, cultural or material memory. Anthropology of Memory has become a respected course of many American and European University programs, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Also, conferences and workshops are being organized with a special focus on memory issues, something that would also have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
However, they are many unsettled areas in the field of memory studies. Historians have indeed begun warning us against the "terminological profusion" and the "semantic overload" of the notion (Kansteiner 2002, Klein 2000). Gillis observes that "memory seems to be losing precise meaning in proportion to its growing rhetorical power" (Gillis 1984: 3). As historian Jay Winter cogently writes,
From the idea that "a society or a culture can remember and forget" (Are not only individuals capable of remembering?) to the widely used notion of "vicarious memory" and the questionable validity of the notion of memory in approaching certain trans-culturalcontexts, a broad range of fundamental epistemological issues are still to be raised with regard to memory.
The point that I would like to emphasize here concerns the "danger of overextension" of the concept. A concept losing precise meaning, memory can also be approached as an expansive notion. For Gedi and Elam, "'collective memory' has become the all-pervading concept which in effect stands for all sorts of human cognitive products generally" (Gedi & Elam 1996: 40). In particular, historians have already underscored the risks of entanglement of memory and identity (Gillis 1994, Megill 1998). Some anthropologists, too, started expressing concerns about the "dangers of overextension that are inherent in the current boom of memory" (Fabian 1999: 51). For Fabian, the "concept of memory may become indistinguishable from either identity or culture" (ibid: 51). Jonathan Boyarin concurs, noting that "identity and memory are virtually the same" (Boyarin 1994: 23). In this essay, I contend that the current usage of the notion by anthropologists can be a source of confusion as it tends to encompass many features of the notion of culture itself. I argue that this process of conceptual extension leading to the entanglement of memory and culture merits careful scrutiny as it tells us a great deal about the anthropological project. Needless to say, I will raise many questions and give very few answers. This piece should be taken as an epistemological challenge rather than a pessimistic reproach.
It is unfortunate that there has not been yet a history, a genealogy of the concept of memory in anthropology, whereas the ongoing obsession with memory in the humanities has been abundantly documented. In a powerful article, Klein reminds us that
To explain this triumphal return, historian Jay Winter has shown that there are "distinctive sources of the contemporary obsession with memory that arise out of a multiplicity of social, cultural, medical, and economic trends and developments of an eclectic but intersecting nature" (Winter 2000: 1). Many factors (historical, social and...
This review examines current anthropological literature concerned with migration and other forms of population movement, and with the movement of information, symbols, capital, and commodities in global and transnational spaces. Special attention is given to the significance of contemporary increases in the volume and velocity of such flows for the dynamics of communities and for the identity of their members. Also examined are innovations in anthropological theory and forms of representation that are responses to such nonlocal contexts and influences.
This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...
Ronald Reagan's visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the funeral rites for slain Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, the highly publicized arms negotiations meetings between Soviet and American leaders—these are recent examples of how powerful the effects of political ceremony and ritual can be. In the most comprehensive study of political ritual yet written, David I. Kertzer demonstrates that ritual has always been and will continue to be an essential part of political life, used to symbolize, simplify, and enhance political messages. Weaving together examples from around the world and throughout history, Kertzer shows the many ways in which ritual is employed in politics—from the cannibal rites of the Aztec state to the inauguration of American presidents, from a parade of Ku Klux Klan members in 1946 to the activities of terrorist groups today, from the "healing" ceremonies of seventeenth-century French and British kings to May Day parades in Moscow. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
News from afar sometimes seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to one's own remembered past. This is not because of the banal redundancy of events, but because of memory's inclination to refurbish itself in contemporary designs and novel images. In 1994 I was in northern Sumatra collecting stories from Karo veterans of the Indonesian war of national independence. Every night the television news offered more horrifying pictures of ethnic violence from around the world. In central Africa, roadways were filled with thousands of starving, desperate people traveling toward unknown destinations. This made a big impression on my Karo informants. “That's exactly how it was here,” they told me over and over. “I saw it on TV last night. I told the kids, ‘We were just like that during the evacuation.' Nothing to eat. No clothes. We were living like animals.”
Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.