HHS Public Access Author manuscript Author Manuscript
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04. Published in final edited form as: Soc Sci Hist. 2009 ; 33(1): 1–16.
Social Anthropology and Social Science History David I. Kertzer, Ph.D. Paul R. Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Italian Studies, Department of Anthropology, Box 1921, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1921, United States, www.davidkertzer.com, [email protected], Telephone: 401-863-3251
Author Manuscript
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.
Author Manuscript
Anthropologists pride themselves on working at the periphery, one among many features of the discipline that tend not to endear them to their fellow social scientists. Their periphery obsession historically led them into trouble, as in some ways they came to have the worst of both worlds. Colleagues in other social sciences charged them with irrelevance, accusing them of being purveyors of exotica. More painfully, while anthropologists liked to cast themselves as defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples, an assortment of postcolonial intellectuals and (self-appointed) spokespeople of indigenous groups branded them lackeys of the imperial powers (Warren 1998: 77, 80–81; Dirks 2001).1 Pity the poor anthropologists who were scorned and patronized by their colleagues in other disciplines while being attacked by the subjects of their study.
Author Manuscript
Anthropologists have responded to these threats to their legitimacy and their morality in various ways. I mention only two that bear most on the point I hope to make here. One response has been to open up the focus of anthropology (and in this presentation I confine myself to sociocultural anthropology, leaving aside archaeology and biological
Correspondence to: David I. Kertzer. An earlier version of this article was presented as the 2007 Presidential Address of the Social Science History Association in Chicago in November 2007. 1Especially in viewing the history of anthropology, this critique has become common in the mainstream of the discipline. Dirks (2002: 56), one of the main figures today straddling anthropology and history, referred to the moment in the nineteenth century when “anthropology supplanted history as the principal colonial modality of knowledge.” The colonial state, he writes, could then properly be characterized as an “ethnographic state.” Eleven anthropologists, mostly Latin American, met in 1971 to assess the relationship between anthropology and indigenous peoples, which they found unsatisfactory (Hale 2006). They issued what they saw as a wake-up call known as the Declaration of Barbados in which they argued that “anthropology … has often rationalized and justified in scientific language the domination of some people by others” (Dostal 1972: 237). For the text of the declaration, see Dostal 1972.
Kertzer
Page 2
Author Manuscript
anthropology, a separate subject). The discipline is no longer defined by any distinctive geographic focus, any privileging (at least theoretical privileging) of peoples living in the most remote locations. Likewise, anthropologists have long been in the process of transcending the discipline’s community-study model, developing methodologies and foci that feature translocal and, increasingly, transnational processes (Appadurai 1991; Kearney 1995; Marcus 1995; Vertovec 2001). The local and the global cannot (and perhaps never could) be disentangled.2 A second response to these challenges has seen anthropologists try to ingratiate themselves with the subjects of their studies by refashioning themselves from scholars to crusaders on behalf of the oppressed. This approach is fine for anthropologists to adopt if they are employed by a political or community organization, but for an academic anthropologist it produces a role conflict that undermines any scholarly credibility that anthropology might otherwise have.
Author Manuscript
In principle, the move to open up anthropology geographically and methodologically should have major consequences for a greater opening of anthropology to history. It involves, for one, a move away from the local and toward larger geographic contexts. It also entails the study of larger social processes and hence inevitably demands a better understanding of historical dynamics. Yet the move of anthropology toward history has proceeded much more haltingly than these developments might have led us to expect.
Author Manuscript
Let me boil down many decades of often shrill debate in the field to a simple set of observations. For the reasons that I have just mentioned, a discipline that came to be defined with a particular object of study (rural, peripheral communities) rejected that identity and sought a broader range of study. In doing so, it inevitably had to confront the limits of an approach based heavily on the single methodology of participant observation. Its identity no longer based on participant observation in peripheral sites, anthropology returned in some ways to an earlier self-definition as the comparative study of social organization and culture. Insofar as this was to be anthropology’s focus, any sphere of social relationships, any cultural processes anywhere, should be grist for the anthropological mill. The subject could be factional politics in a tiny Mexican town or the politics of the European Union; it could be shamanism in an Amazonian hamlet or television preachers in the United States. The goal of anthropology, in this perspective, is to document and explain human diversity and commonalities. If one takes such a view, historical cases are as relevant and potentially as valuable as contemporary ones.3
Author Manuscript
But one implication of this transition has not been fully considered: once anthropology became redefined in this way, its presentist bias came inevitably into question. If anthropologists’ goal is to understand social structure or religion or the social construction of identity, if it is to document both the range of cultural diversity and the principles that account for cultural similarity, why should historical cases be off the table? What is the justification for considering only contemporary evidence?
2A point discussed by many anthropologists, among them Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 5). 3This is essentially the view expressed by two of the most influential materialist anthropologists who attempted historical study, Mintz and Wolf (1989: 26), reacting to an attack by Taussig (1989). For their principal historical works, see Mintz 1985 and Wolf 1982. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 3
Author Manuscript
Of course, a number of answers can be offered to this question. The most prominent one, often articulated in the 1930s and identified with various forms of functionalism, held that the anthropologist’s expertise lay in examining the links among the parts of living social organisms (in the structural version of functionalism) or the link between human needs and social forms (in the more biological functional model). There was a simple academic division of labor envisioned here, leaving the study of historical materials to the professional historians. But this is not really an intellectual or a theoretical justification; it is a political statement, which in addition lost all force once anthropology abandoned its identification with participant observation as its defining feature.4 When we come right down to it, what we confront here is an academic system based on an agreement to divide the intellectual pie into convenient slices so that each contender can be given its own. It is a testament to a political deal (a kind of academic Yalta), pure and simple.5
Author Manuscript
In the wake of the changes that anthropology has undergone in recent decades, where do we now find anthropology with respect to history? Has anthropology emerged from its period of self-doubt and redefined itself as a discipline that no longer draws a line separating itself from historical research and historical materials? In attacking the epistemological bases of the old ways that the disciplines—and academic departments—have been defined, has anthropology emerged in a different place with respect to history?
Author Manuscript
The answer to these questions is mixed. One feature of academic life that anthropologists have embraced as eagerly as any of their social scientific brethren has been the model of the departmental silo. Say what you will about disciplinary distinctions as based on reification or even, in the case of anthropology, as rooted in an embarrassing history tied to the colonial mentality of separating the study of the “natives” from the study of people like us. Just don’t threaten the continuation of anthropology as a separate discipline, and most important, don’t threaten its existence as a separate department in our universities. Of course, something very similar could be said for the attitudes of most sociologists, historians, economists, and other social scientists.6
Author Manuscript
Yet insofar as anthropology’s relation to history goes, the situation is not all bleak. I will not review the history of history’s infatuation with anthropology back in the 1970s and into the 1980s, about which much has been written. It is hard to beat Bernard S. Cohn’s (1987: 39) treatise on anthropologyland and historyland, much less to one-up his definition of an anthropological approach to history as “proctological,” history “from the bottom up.” This is something of the flip side of the phenomenon that I have considered so far and to which I will return. If we keep to the question of how the work of anthropologists has changed in a historical direction, however, the picture is mixed. On the positive side, a number of influential figures have worked at the interstices of the two disciplines. Among others, just 4And abandoned its self-definition as the study of primitive society, which, being illiterate, was presumed not to have left historical records (as expressed by Radcliffe-Brown [1952]). See also Schapera’s (1962) debate with Evans-Pritchard, in his presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, titled “Should Anthropologists Be Historians?” 5John L. Comaroff (1982: 143–44) has made a similar point: “There ought to be no ‘relationship’ between history and anthropology, since there should be no division to begin with.” However, he then links this to the privileging of “positivist empiricism” in Western intellectual life, and here I think the matter is more complicated. 6I would contrast this with the biological sciences, which seem to be in a constant process of redefinition and reorganization. However, for the most part to date this has involved breaking down what was once a single department at most universities (biology) into an assortment of more specialized units and in that sense reflects a reluctance to efface preexisting boundaries. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 4
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
to stick to Chicago for my examples, I could mention David William Cohen (1994, 1996) at Northwestern University on the history side (see also Cohen and Odhiambo 1989) and John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1992) at the University of Chicago on the anthropology side. A few major graduate programs have even arisen that are specifically devoted to the intersection of anthropology and history, among them those at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University. Just as important, some of what mainstream anthropology now regards as the most influential recent work in the discipline has a historical cast, and here I could cite not only the work of the Comaroffs in southern Africa but Arjun Appadurai’s (1981, 1996) and Nicholas B. Dirks’s (1987, 1993, 1996) work in India, Ann Laura Stoler’s (1989, 1992, 2001a, 2001b) work in Southeast Asia (see also Stoler and Strassler 2000), and perhaps more controversially, Marshall Sahlins’s (1985) studies of Hawaii.7 Beginning in the 1970s, moreover, a series of anthropologists influenced by developments in Europe participated in the boom in historical demographic work, which became a central part of the social science history movement.8 Yet if anyone thought that anthropologists would get into historical research in a major way, a quick look at the leading journals in the discipline shows that nothing like that happened. Here I should first point out that anthropologists can publish historical work in numerous special niches, some of them areally focused (most notably, perhaps, African and Asian).9 There is also the special story of ethnohistory, which arose from Native American studies in anthropology, a field that from the beginning was rooted, due to the decimation of Native American cultures, in historical reconstruction. As ethnohistory has been reviewed elsewhere, I leave it aside here.10 But what about mainstream anthropology? How can it be defined?
Author Manuscript
One simple operationalization, for current purposes, is to look at the most prestigious journal in sociocultural anthropology in the United States, American Ethnologist. From the beginning of 2000 through the first half of 2008, American Ethnologist published 268 articles. Of these, only 26 dealt with historical materials in any significant way. What already seems modest becomes all the more striking when we look more closely at the nature of the historical cases that these anthropologists examined. Most simply use some secondary sources to provide brief historical background on their way to a primary focus on contemporary life. Only 13 articles in American Ethnologist contained any serious examination of materials from before 1960, and none examined materials from before the nineteenth century. If any paradigm shift has taken place in sociocultural anthropology toward a fuller engagement with history, there is only a trace of it in the field’s most important American journal.
Author Manuscript
7Recent edited volumes devoted to an examination of the intersection of anthropology and history, focusing primarily on the “cultural turn,” include Axel 2002 and Kalb and Tak 2005. 8Among those involved in a significant way in this work were Hammel (Hammel and Laslett 1974), Brettell (1986), Schneider and Schneider (1986), and Kertzer (Kertzer and Hogan 1989; Kertzer and Laslett 1995). 9For the link between anthropology and history in South Asian work, see Mathur 2000. 10As Krech (1991: 347) points out, the journal Ethnohistory, as well as the field more generally in the United States, emerged in the 1950s as the study of the documentary history of “primitive peoples,” especially American Indian societies. In recent years the journal has expanded to include the entire world, although Native American studies still figure heavily. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 5
Author Manuscript
What is new in anthropologists’ interest in history is an enthusiasm, shared with some other disciplines, for investigating the uses of history in contemporary society. This has indeed been a booming field, triggered in part by the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) on “the invention of tradition.” The role of history in the crafting of people’s identities today, the manipulation of historical materials, the fictions (in the sense of Clifford Geertz [1973: 15]) constructed by museums and monuments, have provided rich materials for anthropologists, as they have for historians (Wachtel 1986; Steedly 2000; Berliner 2005; Anderson 2006). But as anthropologists have been drawn to this area, they have shown little concern for the history itself. Ironically, this new interest in history has become a way to presentize history.
Author Manuscript
If those of us who once hoped that anthropology would redefine itself to embrace history have been disappointed, those who greeted the embrace by historians of anthropology back in the 1970s must likewise be disillusioned.11 From a Social Science History Association (SSHA) perspective, the timing of historians’ enthusiasm for anthropology is worth some reflection. It occurred simultaneously with the enthusiasm for social science history more generally, as evident in the date of the founding of the SSHA itself (1976). Yet while the SSHA was founded on the belief that historians should make more and better use of the other social scientific disciplines, the SSHA founders clearly did not have anthropology in mind, or at least not the kind of anthropology identified with the anthropological mood in history of the time.
Author Manuscript
This becomes clearer when we look at which anthropologists were most commonly invoked by historians in their anthropological embrace. The major names that come to mind here would include Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and most of all Geertz. But while the SSHA drive was to have history turn to the other social sciences in order to follow a more scientific paradigm, historians championed Geertz for the opposite reason, indeed as a way to seem theoretically sophisticated while rejecting what they dismissed as a naive “positivist” model. In Geertz (1973) they saw a thinker who offered a new, exciting, hermeneutic approach to history, a way to use anthropology to create an approach to history that focused on the webs of meaning that people spin.12 The new cultural history could thus be launched.13 Ironically, then, rather than part of a move of history toward social science, historians’ enthusiasm for anthropology in this period can more accurately be seen as a common movement of history (or a portion of history) and anthropology away from the direction in which the other social sciences were moving.14
Author Manuscript
11Not, of course, that all historians were eager to see their discipline invaded by members of other disciplines. Thompson (1972: 46) nicely captured the alarm of some of his colleagues: “In some eyes, the ‘systematic indoctrination’ of historians ‘in the social sciences’ conjures up a scene of insemination, in which Clio lies inert and passionless (perhaps with rolling eyes) while anthropology or sociology thrust their seed into her womb.” In the mid-1970s too Fox-Genovese and Genovese (1976: 215) blasted the “fad” for anthropology in social history as a “bourgeois swindle”! Their worry at the time was that anthropology, with its ethnographic emphasis, would lead historians away from their proper focus on how political power was being wielded by elites. 12And so no work of Geertz was dearer to historians than his collection of essays The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Among the more notable developments by historians in this appropriation of the study of symbolism anthropologically was attention paid to political ritual (Wilentz 1985; Cannadine and Price 1987). I have examined the theoretical bases of this work in Kertzer 1988. 13The impact of the Annales school here is also evident, with much of the anthropological influence coming in French history (Davis 1975; Darnton 1979; Hunt 1984, 1989; Chartier 1991; Goodman 1994). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 6
Author Manuscript
That the movement of history toward anthropology was separate from the movement of history toward the other social sciences, as reflected in the ideology that spawned the SSHA, is clearly on display from data close to home. What role have anthropologists played in the SSHA? After all, the SSHA creed has been to overcome the boundaries separating history from the other social sciences and has called on historians to embrace theory and method from the other social sciences. One might think that the SSHA was in a position to play a significant role in bringing history and anthropology closer together. Yet one soon realizes that it has not done so. It is revealing to look, for example, at the disciplinary backgrounds of those who have served as president of the SSHA.
Author Manuscript
As we see in table 1, after a third of a century I have the distinction of being only the second anthropologist to serve in this role (the first was Caroline B. Brettell). But even if we take a broader view, the picture becomes no better. In fact, it looks worse, and one suspects that it offers evidence that I was selected as an affirmative action candidate for the SSHA presidency, a member of a historically underrepresented minority. As seen in table 2, out of more than 500 people who have occupied formal positions in the SSHA, only 8 have been anthropologists: in other words, only 6 other than the two presidents. To say that this shows scarce involvement of anthropologists in the project that has been the SSHA is putting it mildly. By all rights, following Brettell’s presidency in 2000–2001, the SSHA should have waited more than 50 years to elect its second anthropologist as president.
Author Manuscript
But this is an admittedly parochial approach to the question. Let’s take a broader view of the extent to which historians use anthropology these days. A look at the mainstream historical journals suggests that not much has changed since the 1970s. It is not the social structural, comparative anthropologists who attract the most attention among historians but the culturalists, the interpretivists. Even in the twenty-first century the anthropologist most commonly cited is Geertz, and broadly speaking, he is cited for the reasons I have just mentioned. To verify this, I looked at the 72 “history” journals indexed by JSTOR and chose the two years 2000–2001 (table 3). It should be mentioned that JSTOR’s definition of what constitutes history journals includes many interdisciplinary and, especially, area studies journals.
Author Manuscript
Of all the likely anthropological suspects I could identify, Geertz topped the list with 60 citations broadly distributed across journals. It is worth pausing to consider the other anthropologists often cited. Unless I missed someone, number 2 (albeit with the advantage of being a couple) were the Comaroffs, like Geertz known for an interpretivist rather than a positivist approach to their study.15 Of their 54 citations, 27 came in African-area specialty journals, and another 15 appeared in just two interdisciplinary journals where many of the authors who cite them are anthropologists themselves (Comparative Studies in Society and
14Dirks makes a similar observation, although from a different perspective. In his view, it was history’s realization that borrowing approaches from the more positivist social sciences was not satisfactory—for “quantitative methods could not answer some of the most basic questions about the meaning and shape of lived experience among ordinary people” (Dirks 1996: 18)—that led to the historians’ move to anthropology. Indeed, he would have anthropology, rather than the more commonly cited literary criticism, take responsibility for the cultural turn in history. Here he cites in particular the influence of Geertz (ibid.: 33). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 7
Author Manuscript
History, Law and Society Review). This leaves little evidence of their having a general theoretical impact on the work of historians. Next in the historiographical hit parade comes Appadurai, whose work on postcolonialism, modernity, and uses of memory has been influential among anthropologists. Yet here too it is worth noting that 11 of the 45 citations — and remember, we are dealing with 72 journals—come from a single journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Author Manuscript
That the enthusiasm of history for anthropology has lost momentum is clear from most history departments—of course, there are a handful of notable exceptions—where any notion that preparation as a historian should involve some study of anthropology seems to have been abandoned. To provide an informal test of this proposition, I had a survey taken of our own history graduate students (year two and above) at Brown University in November 2007. We asked them if there were any anthropologists whose work influenced their own. Of the 45 students we asked, only 11 responded, and I find it hard to interpret the silence of the three-quarters who did not as due to anything but embarrassment at having to confess to an anthropologist that they could name no one. Of the 11 who did offer a response, 2 said no anthropologist influenced them, and the name given most often by the rest was Geertz, followed by Douglas and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Of these three, only one, Lévi-Strauss, was still alive, and he was 99 years old. It is hard to detect in these results any sign of active engagement with contemporary anthropology among our rising generation of historians. An exception should probably be made for historians working in Africa and Latin America, where the relations between historians and anthropologists have long been quite strong.
Author Manuscript
Before leaving this question, I want to report on one other measure with which I examined the trend in the use of anthropology by American historians. I looked again at the 72 “history” journals indexed in JSTOR and asked how often citations were found to what are arguably the five leading anthropological periodicals published in the United States. To see if any trend could be spotted, I examined them at 10-year intervals (except the last), using two-year periods. The results are in table 4.
Author Manuscript
This table needs to be interpreted with some caution. First, the number of journals indexed grew over this period from 66 to 72. Second, American Ethnologist first appeared only in 1974 and Annual Review of Anthropology only in 1972, and so especially in the first couplet of years (1974–75) the number of times that articles from these two periodicals were cited is clearly depressed. Our interpretation is further clouded by the heterogeneity of the journals categorized under the history rubric in JSTOR, which, as I mentioned earlier, includes interdisciplinary journals in which anthropologists regularly publish. All that can safely be said from these data is that there is no evidence of increased reading of anthropology journals by American historians in recent times.
15In distinguishing between anthropology and the other social sciences, they agree with Evans-Pritchard (1962) that anthropology should best be described as a “humanist art.” Thus anthropology (or ethnography, which they do not here distinguish from social anthropology) “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 8). Their own approach to combining anthropology and history, they state, “is anti-empiricist, antiobjectivist, anti-essentialist—except in the amended sense in which we deploy these terms—it is also anti-statistical and antiaggregative” (ibid.: 20). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 8
Author Manuscript
More interesting, perhaps, is the question of whether there has been any other change in the use of other social sciences by historians in these years. Here I took the top journals from economics, sociology (two in this case), and political science, using the same approach. As table 5 clearly shows, the numbers are too small to make any confident assertions, and the methodology is too narrow, but there is at least some suggestion of a decreasing influence of both sociology and political science among historians in the United States. By contrast, there is some evidence that the influence of economics may be growing.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
The 2007 SSHA annual conference theme was devoted to taking stock of the state of social science history and looking ahead. That our enterprise continues to thrive is clear from the fact that more colleagues than ever attended that meeting. Those who worried about the aging of the pioneers of the SSHA can take comfort from the substantial number of younger colleagues who have joined the association in recent years. Yet we dare not be too selfcongratulatory. If anyone expected that the impulse behind the SSHA at its founding would result in a radically reconfigured history and a sharp erosion of the boundaries between history and the other social sciences, there must be some disillusionment. As I have tried to show here, the evolving relationship of history with anthropology is complicated. Anthropologists have worked with historical materials and historical topics in a wide variety of ways, just as historians have turned to anthropology for both theoretical and methodological reasons. Yet relatively little of this rapprochement, if that is what it is, has followed the path envisioned by the pioneers in social science history. Indeed, a good part of it seems to constitute an explicit rejection of the key tenets of social science history, which are vilified for embodying naive empiricism, overly muscular positivism, or indeed neoimperialism. And through all of this experimentation, strong evidence remains that sociocultural anthropologists continue to define their field, in practice if not in theory, as the study of the present, historical work being largely relegated to the area studies, interdisciplinary, and specialty journals.
Supplementary Material Refer to Web version on PubMed Central for supplementary material.
Acknowledgment Thanks are due to Caroline Brettell for her comments on the earlier version and to Simone Poliandri for his research assistance.
References Author Manuscript
Anderson, Benedict. Rev. ed. London: Verso; 2006. Imagined Communities. Appadurai, Arjun. The past as a scarce resource. Man. 1981; 16:201–219. Appadurai, Arjun. Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In: Fox, Richard G., editor. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; 1991. p. 191-210. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1996. Axel, Brian Keith, editor. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 9
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Berliner, David C. The abuses of memory: Reflections on the memory boom in anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly. 2005; 78:197–211. Brettell, Caroline B. Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1986. Cannadine, David; Price, Simon, editors. Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1987. Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G., editor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 1991. Cohen, David William. The Combing of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1994. Cohen, David William. Historical anthropology: Discerning the rules of the game. Focaal. 1996; 26– 27:65–67. Cohen, David William; Odhiambo, ES Atieno. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. Athens: Ohio University Press; 1989. Cohn, Bernard S. An Anthropologist among Historians, and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press; 1987. Comaroff, John L. Dialectical systems, history, and anthropology: Units of study and questions of theory. Journal of Southern African Studies. 1982; 8:143–172. Comaroff, John L.; Comaroff, Jean. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview; 1992. Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775– 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1979. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1975. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1987. Dirks, Nicholas B. Colonial histories and native informants: Biography of an archive. In: Breckenridge, Carol; van der Veer, Peter, editors. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1993. p. 279-313. Dirks, Nicholas B. Is vice versa? Historical anthropologies and anthropological histories. In: McDonald, Terrence, editor. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 1996. p. 17-51. Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2001. Dirks, Nicholas B. Annals of the archive: Ethnographic notes on the sources of history. In: Axel, Brian Keith, editor. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002. p. 47-65. Dostal, Walter. Declaration of Barbados. In: Dostal, Walter, editor. The Situation of the Indian in South America. Geneva: World Climate Impact Studies Programme; 1972. p. 376-381. Evans-Pritchard, EE. Social Anthropology, and Other Essays. New York: Free Press; 1962. Anthropology and history; p. 172-191. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth; Genovese, Eugene D. The political crisis of social history: A Marxian perspective. Journal of Social History. 1976; 10:205–220. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books; 1973. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 1994. Hale, Charles L. Activist research v. cultural critique: Indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthropology. Cultural Anthropology. 2006; 21:96–120. Hammel, Eugene A.; Laslett, Peter. Comparing household structure over time and between cultures. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1974; 16:73–109. Hobsbawm, Eric; Ranger, Terence, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1983. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1984.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 10
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Hunt, Lynn, editor. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1989. Kalb, Don; Tak, Herman, editors. Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn; 2005. Kearney M. The global and the local: The anthropology of globalization and transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1995; 24:547–565. Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 1988. Kertzer, David I.; Hogan, Dennis P. Family, Political Economy, and Demographic Change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; 1989. Kertzer, David I.; Laslett, Peter, editors. Aging in the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1995. Krech, Shepard, III. The state of ethnohistory. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1991; 20:345–375. Marcus, George E. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1995; 24:95–117. Mathur, Saloni. History and anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the archive. Annual Review of Anthropology. 2000; 29:89–106. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin; 1985. Mintz, Sidney W.; Wolf, Eric R. Reply to Michael Taussig. Critique of Anthropology. 1989; 9:25–31. Radcliffe-Brown, AR. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: Free Press; 1952. Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1985. Schapera, Isaac. Should anthropologists be historians? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 1962; 92:143–156. Schneider, Jane; Schneider, Peter. Festival of the Poor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; 1986. Steedly, Mary Margaret. Modernity and the memory artist: The work of imagination in Highland Sumatra, 1947–1995. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2000; 42:811–846. Stoler, Ann Laura. Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1989; 31:134–161. Stoler, Ann Laura. ‘In cold blood’: Hierarchies of credibility and the politics of colonial narratives. Representations. 1992; (37):151–189. Stoler, Ann Laura. Tense and tender ties: The politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies. Journal of American History. 2001a; 88:829–865. Stoler, Ann Laura. Matters of intimacy as matters of state: A response. Journal of American History. 2001b; 88:893–897. Stoler, Ann Laura; Strassler, Karen. Casting for the colonial: Memory work in ‘new order’ Java. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2000; 42:4–48. Taussig, Michael. History as commodity: In some recent American (anthropological) literature. Critique of Anthropology. 1989; 11:7–23. Thompson EP. Anthropology and the discipline of historical context. Midland History. 1972; 1:45–55. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism and identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 2001; 27:573–582. Wachtel, Nathan. Memory and history, introduction. History and Anthropology. 1986; 2:2–11. Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1998. Wilentz, Sean, editor. Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1985. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1982.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 11
Table 1
Author Manuscript
SSHA presidents, by discipline, 1976–2009 Discipline
Number
Historya
16
Sociology
6
Economics
5
Political science
4
Anthropology
2
Total
33
a
Includes one British historical demographer.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 12
Table 2
Author Manuscript
SSHA officeholders (including network chairs and committee members), by discipline, 1976–2007 Disciplinea
Number
Percentage
263
52
Sociology
76
15
Political science
51
10
Economics
46
9
Geography
13
2
Anthropology
8
2
Demography
7
1
History
Education Other and not identified Total
5
1
40
8
509
100
Author Manuscript
a
Where more than one discipline was listed, only the first-listed discipline was used here.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 13
Table 3
Author Manuscript
Citations of works by anthropologists in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 2000–2001 Anthropologist
Number
Author Manuscript
Appadurai, Arjun
45
Clifford, James
18
Comaroff, John L. and Jean
54
Douglas, Mary
16
Ferguson, James
16
Geertz, Clifford
60
Gellner, Ernest A.
21
Gluckman, Max
17
Goody, Jack
19
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
25
Malinowski, Bronislaw
20
Ortner, Sherry
12
Rabinow, Paul
16
Stoler, Ann Laura
39
Turner, Victor
20
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 14
Table 4
Author Manuscript
Citations of articles published in five leading anthropology journals, as found in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 1974–2001 Anthropology journals
1974–75
1984–85
1994–95
2000–2001
American Anthropologist
89
71
69
50
American Antiquity
15
19
22
7
5
26
70
56
American Ethnologist Annual Review of Anthropology Current Anthropology Total
4
13
19
19
36
28
32
33
149
157
212
165
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 15
Table 5
Author Manuscript
Citations of articles published in leading economics, sociology, and political science journals, as found in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 1974–2001 Other social science journals
1974–75
1984–85
1994–95
2000–2001
American Economic Review
55
61
71
79
American Journal of Sociology
77
90
74
68
American Sociological Review
73
60
50
52
American Political Science Review Total
77
78
52
41
282
289
247
240
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04. Published in final edited form as: Soc Sci Hist. 2009 ; 33(1): 1–16.
Social Anthropology and Social Science History David I. Kertzer, Ph.D. Paul R. Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Italian Studies, Department of Anthropology, Box 1921, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1921, United States, www.davidkertzer.com, [email protected], Telephone: 401-863-3251
Author Manuscript
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.
Author Manuscript
Anthropologists pride themselves on working at the periphery, one among many features of the discipline that tend not to endear them to their fellow social scientists. Their periphery obsession historically led them into trouble, as in some ways they came to have the worst of both worlds. Colleagues in other social sciences charged them with irrelevance, accusing them of being purveyors of exotica. More painfully, while anthropologists liked to cast themselves as defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples, an assortment of postcolonial intellectuals and (self-appointed) spokespeople of indigenous groups branded them lackeys of the imperial powers (Warren 1998: 77, 80–81; Dirks 2001).1 Pity the poor anthropologists who were scorned and patronized by their colleagues in other disciplines while being attacked by the subjects of their study.
Author Manuscript
Anthropologists have responded to these threats to their legitimacy and their morality in various ways. I mention only two that bear most on the point I hope to make here. One response has been to open up the focus of anthropology (and in this presentation I confine myself to sociocultural anthropology, leaving aside archaeology and biological
Correspondence to: David I. Kertzer. An earlier version of this article was presented as the 2007 Presidential Address of the Social Science History Association in Chicago in November 2007. 1Especially in viewing the history of anthropology, this critique has become common in the mainstream of the discipline. Dirks (2002: 56), one of the main figures today straddling anthropology and history, referred to the moment in the nineteenth century when “anthropology supplanted history as the principal colonial modality of knowledge.” The colonial state, he writes, could then properly be characterized as an “ethnographic state.” Eleven anthropologists, mostly Latin American, met in 1971 to assess the relationship between anthropology and indigenous peoples, which they found unsatisfactory (Hale 2006). They issued what they saw as a wake-up call known as the Declaration of Barbados in which they argued that “anthropology … has often rationalized and justified in scientific language the domination of some people by others” (Dostal 1972: 237). For the text of the declaration, see Dostal 1972.
Kertzer
Page 2
Author Manuscript
anthropology, a separate subject). The discipline is no longer defined by any distinctive geographic focus, any privileging (at least theoretical privileging) of peoples living in the most remote locations. Likewise, anthropologists have long been in the process of transcending the discipline’s community-study model, developing methodologies and foci that feature translocal and, increasingly, transnational processes (Appadurai 1991; Kearney 1995; Marcus 1995; Vertovec 2001). The local and the global cannot (and perhaps never could) be disentangled.2 A second response to these challenges has seen anthropologists try to ingratiate themselves with the subjects of their studies by refashioning themselves from scholars to crusaders on behalf of the oppressed. This approach is fine for anthropologists to adopt if they are employed by a political or community organization, but for an academic anthropologist it produces a role conflict that undermines any scholarly credibility that anthropology might otherwise have.
Author Manuscript
In principle, the move to open up anthropology geographically and methodologically should have major consequences for a greater opening of anthropology to history. It involves, for one, a move away from the local and toward larger geographic contexts. It also entails the study of larger social processes and hence inevitably demands a better understanding of historical dynamics. Yet the move of anthropology toward history has proceeded much more haltingly than these developments might have led us to expect.
Author Manuscript
Let me boil down many decades of often shrill debate in the field to a simple set of observations. For the reasons that I have just mentioned, a discipline that came to be defined with a particular object of study (rural, peripheral communities) rejected that identity and sought a broader range of study. In doing so, it inevitably had to confront the limits of an approach based heavily on the single methodology of participant observation. Its identity no longer based on participant observation in peripheral sites, anthropology returned in some ways to an earlier self-definition as the comparative study of social organization and culture. Insofar as this was to be anthropology’s focus, any sphere of social relationships, any cultural processes anywhere, should be grist for the anthropological mill. The subject could be factional politics in a tiny Mexican town or the politics of the European Union; it could be shamanism in an Amazonian hamlet or television preachers in the United States. The goal of anthropology, in this perspective, is to document and explain human diversity and commonalities. If one takes such a view, historical cases are as relevant and potentially as valuable as contemporary ones.3
Author Manuscript
But one implication of this transition has not been fully considered: once anthropology became redefined in this way, its presentist bias came inevitably into question. If anthropologists’ goal is to understand social structure or religion or the social construction of identity, if it is to document both the range of cultural diversity and the principles that account for cultural similarity, why should historical cases be off the table? What is the justification for considering only contemporary evidence?
2A point discussed by many anthropologists, among them Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 5). 3This is essentially the view expressed by two of the most influential materialist anthropologists who attempted historical study, Mintz and Wolf (1989: 26), reacting to an attack by Taussig (1989). For their principal historical works, see Mintz 1985 and Wolf 1982. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 3
Author Manuscript
Of course, a number of answers can be offered to this question. The most prominent one, often articulated in the 1930s and identified with various forms of functionalism, held that the anthropologist’s expertise lay in examining the links among the parts of living social organisms (in the structural version of functionalism) or the link between human needs and social forms (in the more biological functional model). There was a simple academic division of labor envisioned here, leaving the study of historical materials to the professional historians. But this is not really an intellectual or a theoretical justification; it is a political statement, which in addition lost all force once anthropology abandoned its identification with participant observation as its defining feature.4 When we come right down to it, what we confront here is an academic system based on an agreement to divide the intellectual pie into convenient slices so that each contender can be given its own. It is a testament to a political deal (a kind of academic Yalta), pure and simple.5
Author Manuscript
In the wake of the changes that anthropology has undergone in recent decades, where do we now find anthropology with respect to history? Has anthropology emerged from its period of self-doubt and redefined itself as a discipline that no longer draws a line separating itself from historical research and historical materials? In attacking the epistemological bases of the old ways that the disciplines—and academic departments—have been defined, has anthropology emerged in a different place with respect to history?
Author Manuscript
The answer to these questions is mixed. One feature of academic life that anthropologists have embraced as eagerly as any of their social scientific brethren has been the model of the departmental silo. Say what you will about disciplinary distinctions as based on reification or even, in the case of anthropology, as rooted in an embarrassing history tied to the colonial mentality of separating the study of the “natives” from the study of people like us. Just don’t threaten the continuation of anthropology as a separate discipline, and most important, don’t threaten its existence as a separate department in our universities. Of course, something very similar could be said for the attitudes of most sociologists, historians, economists, and other social scientists.6
Author Manuscript
Yet insofar as anthropology’s relation to history goes, the situation is not all bleak. I will not review the history of history’s infatuation with anthropology back in the 1970s and into the 1980s, about which much has been written. It is hard to beat Bernard S. Cohn’s (1987: 39) treatise on anthropologyland and historyland, much less to one-up his definition of an anthropological approach to history as “proctological,” history “from the bottom up.” This is something of the flip side of the phenomenon that I have considered so far and to which I will return. If we keep to the question of how the work of anthropologists has changed in a historical direction, however, the picture is mixed. On the positive side, a number of influential figures have worked at the interstices of the two disciplines. Among others, just 4And abandoned its self-definition as the study of primitive society, which, being illiterate, was presumed not to have left historical records (as expressed by Radcliffe-Brown [1952]). See also Schapera’s (1962) debate with Evans-Pritchard, in his presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, titled “Should Anthropologists Be Historians?” 5John L. Comaroff (1982: 143–44) has made a similar point: “There ought to be no ‘relationship’ between history and anthropology, since there should be no division to begin with.” However, he then links this to the privileging of “positivist empiricism” in Western intellectual life, and here I think the matter is more complicated. 6I would contrast this with the biological sciences, which seem to be in a constant process of redefinition and reorganization. However, for the most part to date this has involved breaking down what was once a single department at most universities (biology) into an assortment of more specialized units and in that sense reflects a reluctance to efface preexisting boundaries. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 4
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
to stick to Chicago for my examples, I could mention David William Cohen (1994, 1996) at Northwestern University on the history side (see also Cohen and Odhiambo 1989) and John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1992) at the University of Chicago on the anthropology side. A few major graduate programs have even arisen that are specifically devoted to the intersection of anthropology and history, among them those at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University. Just as important, some of what mainstream anthropology now regards as the most influential recent work in the discipline has a historical cast, and here I could cite not only the work of the Comaroffs in southern Africa but Arjun Appadurai’s (1981, 1996) and Nicholas B. Dirks’s (1987, 1993, 1996) work in India, Ann Laura Stoler’s (1989, 1992, 2001a, 2001b) work in Southeast Asia (see also Stoler and Strassler 2000), and perhaps more controversially, Marshall Sahlins’s (1985) studies of Hawaii.7 Beginning in the 1970s, moreover, a series of anthropologists influenced by developments in Europe participated in the boom in historical demographic work, which became a central part of the social science history movement.8 Yet if anyone thought that anthropologists would get into historical research in a major way, a quick look at the leading journals in the discipline shows that nothing like that happened. Here I should first point out that anthropologists can publish historical work in numerous special niches, some of them areally focused (most notably, perhaps, African and Asian).9 There is also the special story of ethnohistory, which arose from Native American studies in anthropology, a field that from the beginning was rooted, due to the decimation of Native American cultures, in historical reconstruction. As ethnohistory has been reviewed elsewhere, I leave it aside here.10 But what about mainstream anthropology? How can it be defined?
Author Manuscript
One simple operationalization, for current purposes, is to look at the most prestigious journal in sociocultural anthropology in the United States, American Ethnologist. From the beginning of 2000 through the first half of 2008, American Ethnologist published 268 articles. Of these, only 26 dealt with historical materials in any significant way. What already seems modest becomes all the more striking when we look more closely at the nature of the historical cases that these anthropologists examined. Most simply use some secondary sources to provide brief historical background on their way to a primary focus on contemporary life. Only 13 articles in American Ethnologist contained any serious examination of materials from before 1960, and none examined materials from before the nineteenth century. If any paradigm shift has taken place in sociocultural anthropology toward a fuller engagement with history, there is only a trace of it in the field’s most important American journal.
Author Manuscript
7Recent edited volumes devoted to an examination of the intersection of anthropology and history, focusing primarily on the “cultural turn,” include Axel 2002 and Kalb and Tak 2005. 8Among those involved in a significant way in this work were Hammel (Hammel and Laslett 1974), Brettell (1986), Schneider and Schneider (1986), and Kertzer (Kertzer and Hogan 1989; Kertzer and Laslett 1995). 9For the link between anthropology and history in South Asian work, see Mathur 2000. 10As Krech (1991: 347) points out, the journal Ethnohistory, as well as the field more generally in the United States, emerged in the 1950s as the study of the documentary history of “primitive peoples,” especially American Indian societies. In recent years the journal has expanded to include the entire world, although Native American studies still figure heavily. Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 5
Author Manuscript
What is new in anthropologists’ interest in history is an enthusiasm, shared with some other disciplines, for investigating the uses of history in contemporary society. This has indeed been a booming field, triggered in part by the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) on “the invention of tradition.” The role of history in the crafting of people’s identities today, the manipulation of historical materials, the fictions (in the sense of Clifford Geertz [1973: 15]) constructed by museums and monuments, have provided rich materials for anthropologists, as they have for historians (Wachtel 1986; Steedly 2000; Berliner 2005; Anderson 2006). But as anthropologists have been drawn to this area, they have shown little concern for the history itself. Ironically, this new interest in history has become a way to presentize history.
Author Manuscript
If those of us who once hoped that anthropology would redefine itself to embrace history have been disappointed, those who greeted the embrace by historians of anthropology back in the 1970s must likewise be disillusioned.11 From a Social Science History Association (SSHA) perspective, the timing of historians’ enthusiasm for anthropology is worth some reflection. It occurred simultaneously with the enthusiasm for social science history more generally, as evident in the date of the founding of the SSHA itself (1976). Yet while the SSHA was founded on the belief that historians should make more and better use of the other social scientific disciplines, the SSHA founders clearly did not have anthropology in mind, or at least not the kind of anthropology identified with the anthropological mood in history of the time.
Author Manuscript
This becomes clearer when we look at which anthropologists were most commonly invoked by historians in their anthropological embrace. The major names that come to mind here would include Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and most of all Geertz. But while the SSHA drive was to have history turn to the other social sciences in order to follow a more scientific paradigm, historians championed Geertz for the opposite reason, indeed as a way to seem theoretically sophisticated while rejecting what they dismissed as a naive “positivist” model. In Geertz (1973) they saw a thinker who offered a new, exciting, hermeneutic approach to history, a way to use anthropology to create an approach to history that focused on the webs of meaning that people spin.12 The new cultural history could thus be launched.13 Ironically, then, rather than part of a move of history toward social science, historians’ enthusiasm for anthropology in this period can more accurately be seen as a common movement of history (or a portion of history) and anthropology away from the direction in which the other social sciences were moving.14
Author Manuscript
11Not, of course, that all historians were eager to see their discipline invaded by members of other disciplines. Thompson (1972: 46) nicely captured the alarm of some of his colleagues: “In some eyes, the ‘systematic indoctrination’ of historians ‘in the social sciences’ conjures up a scene of insemination, in which Clio lies inert and passionless (perhaps with rolling eyes) while anthropology or sociology thrust their seed into her womb.” In the mid-1970s too Fox-Genovese and Genovese (1976: 215) blasted the “fad” for anthropology in social history as a “bourgeois swindle”! Their worry at the time was that anthropology, with its ethnographic emphasis, would lead historians away from their proper focus on how political power was being wielded by elites. 12And so no work of Geertz was dearer to historians than his collection of essays The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Among the more notable developments by historians in this appropriation of the study of symbolism anthropologically was attention paid to political ritual (Wilentz 1985; Cannadine and Price 1987). I have examined the theoretical bases of this work in Kertzer 1988. 13The impact of the Annales school here is also evident, with much of the anthropological influence coming in French history (Davis 1975; Darnton 1979; Hunt 1984, 1989; Chartier 1991; Goodman 1994). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 6
Author Manuscript
That the movement of history toward anthropology was separate from the movement of history toward the other social sciences, as reflected in the ideology that spawned the SSHA, is clearly on display from data close to home. What role have anthropologists played in the SSHA? After all, the SSHA creed has been to overcome the boundaries separating history from the other social sciences and has called on historians to embrace theory and method from the other social sciences. One might think that the SSHA was in a position to play a significant role in bringing history and anthropology closer together. Yet one soon realizes that it has not done so. It is revealing to look, for example, at the disciplinary backgrounds of those who have served as president of the SSHA.
Author Manuscript
As we see in table 1, after a third of a century I have the distinction of being only the second anthropologist to serve in this role (the first was Caroline B. Brettell). But even if we take a broader view, the picture becomes no better. In fact, it looks worse, and one suspects that it offers evidence that I was selected as an affirmative action candidate for the SSHA presidency, a member of a historically underrepresented minority. As seen in table 2, out of more than 500 people who have occupied formal positions in the SSHA, only 8 have been anthropologists: in other words, only 6 other than the two presidents. To say that this shows scarce involvement of anthropologists in the project that has been the SSHA is putting it mildly. By all rights, following Brettell’s presidency in 2000–2001, the SSHA should have waited more than 50 years to elect its second anthropologist as president.
Author Manuscript
But this is an admittedly parochial approach to the question. Let’s take a broader view of the extent to which historians use anthropology these days. A look at the mainstream historical journals suggests that not much has changed since the 1970s. It is not the social structural, comparative anthropologists who attract the most attention among historians but the culturalists, the interpretivists. Even in the twenty-first century the anthropologist most commonly cited is Geertz, and broadly speaking, he is cited for the reasons I have just mentioned. To verify this, I looked at the 72 “history” journals indexed by JSTOR and chose the two years 2000–2001 (table 3). It should be mentioned that JSTOR’s definition of what constitutes history journals includes many interdisciplinary and, especially, area studies journals.
Author Manuscript
Of all the likely anthropological suspects I could identify, Geertz topped the list with 60 citations broadly distributed across journals. It is worth pausing to consider the other anthropologists often cited. Unless I missed someone, number 2 (albeit with the advantage of being a couple) were the Comaroffs, like Geertz known for an interpretivist rather than a positivist approach to their study.15 Of their 54 citations, 27 came in African-area specialty journals, and another 15 appeared in just two interdisciplinary journals where many of the authors who cite them are anthropologists themselves (Comparative Studies in Society and
14Dirks makes a similar observation, although from a different perspective. In his view, it was history’s realization that borrowing approaches from the more positivist social sciences was not satisfactory—for “quantitative methods could not answer some of the most basic questions about the meaning and shape of lived experience among ordinary people” (Dirks 1996: 18)—that led to the historians’ move to anthropology. Indeed, he would have anthropology, rather than the more commonly cited literary criticism, take responsibility for the cultural turn in history. Here he cites in particular the influence of Geertz (ibid.: 33). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 7
Author Manuscript
History, Law and Society Review). This leaves little evidence of their having a general theoretical impact on the work of historians. Next in the historiographical hit parade comes Appadurai, whose work on postcolonialism, modernity, and uses of memory has been influential among anthropologists. Yet here too it is worth noting that 11 of the 45 citations — and remember, we are dealing with 72 journals—come from a single journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Author Manuscript
That the enthusiasm of history for anthropology has lost momentum is clear from most history departments—of course, there are a handful of notable exceptions—where any notion that preparation as a historian should involve some study of anthropology seems to have been abandoned. To provide an informal test of this proposition, I had a survey taken of our own history graduate students (year two and above) at Brown University in November 2007. We asked them if there were any anthropologists whose work influenced their own. Of the 45 students we asked, only 11 responded, and I find it hard to interpret the silence of the three-quarters who did not as due to anything but embarrassment at having to confess to an anthropologist that they could name no one. Of the 11 who did offer a response, 2 said no anthropologist influenced them, and the name given most often by the rest was Geertz, followed by Douglas and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Of these three, only one, Lévi-Strauss, was still alive, and he was 99 years old. It is hard to detect in these results any sign of active engagement with contemporary anthropology among our rising generation of historians. An exception should probably be made for historians working in Africa and Latin America, where the relations between historians and anthropologists have long been quite strong.
Author Manuscript
Before leaving this question, I want to report on one other measure with which I examined the trend in the use of anthropology by American historians. I looked again at the 72 “history” journals indexed in JSTOR and asked how often citations were found to what are arguably the five leading anthropological periodicals published in the United States. To see if any trend could be spotted, I examined them at 10-year intervals (except the last), using two-year periods. The results are in table 4.
Author Manuscript
This table needs to be interpreted with some caution. First, the number of journals indexed grew over this period from 66 to 72. Second, American Ethnologist first appeared only in 1974 and Annual Review of Anthropology only in 1972, and so especially in the first couplet of years (1974–75) the number of times that articles from these two periodicals were cited is clearly depressed. Our interpretation is further clouded by the heterogeneity of the journals categorized under the history rubric in JSTOR, which, as I mentioned earlier, includes interdisciplinary journals in which anthropologists regularly publish. All that can safely be said from these data is that there is no evidence of increased reading of anthropology journals by American historians in recent times.
15In distinguishing between anthropology and the other social sciences, they agree with Evans-Pritchard (1962) that anthropology should best be described as a “humanist art.” Thus anthropology (or ethnography, which they do not here distinguish from social anthropology) “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 8). Their own approach to combining anthropology and history, they state, “is anti-empiricist, antiobjectivist, anti-essentialist—except in the amended sense in which we deploy these terms—it is also anti-statistical and antiaggregative” (ibid.: 20). Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 8
Author Manuscript
More interesting, perhaps, is the question of whether there has been any other change in the use of other social sciences by historians in these years. Here I took the top journals from economics, sociology (two in this case), and political science, using the same approach. As table 5 clearly shows, the numbers are too small to make any confident assertions, and the methodology is too narrow, but there is at least some suggestion of a decreasing influence of both sociology and political science among historians in the United States. By contrast, there is some evidence that the influence of economics may be growing.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
The 2007 SSHA annual conference theme was devoted to taking stock of the state of social science history and looking ahead. That our enterprise continues to thrive is clear from the fact that more colleagues than ever attended that meeting. Those who worried about the aging of the pioneers of the SSHA can take comfort from the substantial number of younger colleagues who have joined the association in recent years. Yet we dare not be too selfcongratulatory. If anyone expected that the impulse behind the SSHA at its founding would result in a radically reconfigured history and a sharp erosion of the boundaries between history and the other social sciences, there must be some disillusionment. As I have tried to show here, the evolving relationship of history with anthropology is complicated. Anthropologists have worked with historical materials and historical topics in a wide variety of ways, just as historians have turned to anthropology for both theoretical and methodological reasons. Yet relatively little of this rapprochement, if that is what it is, has followed the path envisioned by the pioneers in social science history. Indeed, a good part of it seems to constitute an explicit rejection of the key tenets of social science history, which are vilified for embodying naive empiricism, overly muscular positivism, or indeed neoimperialism. And through all of this experimentation, strong evidence remains that sociocultural anthropologists continue to define their field, in practice if not in theory, as the study of the present, historical work being largely relegated to the area studies, interdisciplinary, and specialty journals.
Supplementary Material Refer to Web version on PubMed Central for supplementary material.
Acknowledgment Thanks are due to Caroline Brettell for her comments on the earlier version and to Simone Poliandri for his research assistance.
References Author Manuscript
Anderson, Benedict. Rev. ed. London: Verso; 2006. Imagined Communities. Appadurai, Arjun. The past as a scarce resource. Man. 1981; 16:201–219. Appadurai, Arjun. Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In: Fox, Richard G., editor. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; 1991. p. 191-210. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1996. Axel, Brian Keith, editor. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 9
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Berliner, David C. The abuses of memory: Reflections on the memory boom in anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly. 2005; 78:197–211. Brettell, Caroline B. Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1986. Cannadine, David; Price, Simon, editors. Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1987. Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G., editor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 1991. Cohen, David William. The Combing of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1994. Cohen, David William. Historical anthropology: Discerning the rules of the game. Focaal. 1996; 26– 27:65–67. Cohen, David William; Odhiambo, ES Atieno. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. Athens: Ohio University Press; 1989. Cohn, Bernard S. An Anthropologist among Historians, and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press; 1987. Comaroff, John L. Dialectical systems, history, and anthropology: Units of study and questions of theory. Journal of Southern African Studies. 1982; 8:143–172. Comaroff, John L.; Comaroff, Jean. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview; 1992. Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775– 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1979. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1975. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1987. Dirks, Nicholas B. Colonial histories and native informants: Biography of an archive. In: Breckenridge, Carol; van der Veer, Peter, editors. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1993. p. 279-313. Dirks, Nicholas B. Is vice versa? Historical anthropologies and anthropological histories. In: McDonald, Terrence, editor. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 1996. p. 17-51. Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2001. Dirks, Nicholas B. Annals of the archive: Ethnographic notes on the sources of history. In: Axel, Brian Keith, editor. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002. p. 47-65. Dostal, Walter. Declaration of Barbados. In: Dostal, Walter, editor. The Situation of the Indian in South America. Geneva: World Climate Impact Studies Programme; 1972. p. 376-381. Evans-Pritchard, EE. Social Anthropology, and Other Essays. New York: Free Press; 1962. Anthropology and history; p. 172-191. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth; Genovese, Eugene D. The political crisis of social history: A Marxian perspective. Journal of Social History. 1976; 10:205–220. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books; 1973. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 1994. Hale, Charles L. Activist research v. cultural critique: Indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthropology. Cultural Anthropology. 2006; 21:96–120. Hammel, Eugene A.; Laslett, Peter. Comparing household structure over time and between cultures. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1974; 16:73–109. Hobsbawm, Eric; Ranger, Terence, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1983. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1984.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 10
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Hunt, Lynn, editor. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1989. Kalb, Don; Tak, Herman, editors. Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn; 2005. Kearney M. The global and the local: The anthropology of globalization and transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1995; 24:547–565. Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 1988. Kertzer, David I.; Hogan, Dennis P. Family, Political Economy, and Demographic Change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; 1989. Kertzer, David I.; Laslett, Peter, editors. Aging in the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1995. Krech, Shepard, III. The state of ethnohistory. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1991; 20:345–375. Marcus, George E. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology. 1995; 24:95–117. Mathur, Saloni. History and anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the archive. Annual Review of Anthropology. 2000; 29:89–106. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin; 1985. Mintz, Sidney W.; Wolf, Eric R. Reply to Michael Taussig. Critique of Anthropology. 1989; 9:25–31. Radcliffe-Brown, AR. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: Free Press; 1952. Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1985. Schapera, Isaac. Should anthropologists be historians? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 1962; 92:143–156. Schneider, Jane; Schneider, Peter. Festival of the Poor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; 1986. Steedly, Mary Margaret. Modernity and the memory artist: The work of imagination in Highland Sumatra, 1947–1995. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2000; 42:811–846. Stoler, Ann Laura. Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1989; 31:134–161. Stoler, Ann Laura. ‘In cold blood’: Hierarchies of credibility and the politics of colonial narratives. Representations. 1992; (37):151–189. Stoler, Ann Laura. Tense and tender ties: The politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies. Journal of American History. 2001a; 88:829–865. Stoler, Ann Laura. Matters of intimacy as matters of state: A response. Journal of American History. 2001b; 88:893–897. Stoler, Ann Laura; Strassler, Karen. Casting for the colonial: Memory work in ‘new order’ Java. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2000; 42:4–48. Taussig, Michael. History as commodity: In some recent American (anthropological) literature. Critique of Anthropology. 1989; 11:7–23. Thompson EP. Anthropology and the discipline of historical context. Midland History. 1972; 1:45–55. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism and identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 2001; 27:573–582. Wachtel, Nathan. Memory and history, introduction. History and Anthropology. 1986; 2:2–11. Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1998. Wilentz, Sean, editor. Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1985. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1982.
Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 11
Table 1
Author Manuscript
SSHA presidents, by discipline, 1976–2009 Discipline
Number
Historya
16
Sociology
6
Economics
5
Political science
4
Anthropology
2
Total
33
a
Includes one British historical demographer.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 12
Table 2
Author Manuscript
SSHA officeholders (including network chairs and committee members), by discipline, 1976–2007 Disciplinea
Number
Percentage
263
52
Sociology
76
15
Political science
51
10
Economics
46
9
Geography
13
2
Anthropology
8
2
Demography
7
1
History
Education Other and not identified Total
5
1
40
8
509
100
Author Manuscript
a
Where more than one discipline was listed, only the first-listed discipline was used here.
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 13
Table 3
Author Manuscript
Citations of works by anthropologists in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 2000–2001 Anthropologist
Number
Author Manuscript
Appadurai, Arjun
45
Clifford, James
18
Comaroff, John L. and Jean
54
Douglas, Mary
16
Ferguson, James
16
Geertz, Clifford
60
Gellner, Ernest A.
21
Gluckman, Max
17
Goody, Jack
19
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
25
Malinowski, Bronislaw
20
Ortner, Sherry
12
Rabinow, Paul
16
Stoler, Ann Laura
39
Turner, Victor
20
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 14
Table 4
Author Manuscript
Citations of articles published in five leading anthropology journals, as found in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 1974–2001 Anthropology journals
1974–75
1984–85
1994–95
2000–2001
American Anthropologist
89
71
69
50
American Antiquity
15
19
22
7
5
26
70
56
American Ethnologist Annual Review of Anthropology Current Anthropology Total
4
13
19
19
36
28
32
33
149
157
212
165
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
Kertzer
Page 15
Table 5
Author Manuscript
Citations of articles published in leading economics, sociology, and political science journals, as found in the 72 history journals indexed by JSTOR, 1974–2001 Other social science journals
1974–75
1984–85
1994–95
2000–2001
American Economic Review
55
61
71
79
American Journal of Sociology
77
90
74
68
American Sociological Review
73
60
50
52
American Political Science Review Total
77
78
52
41
282
289
247
240
Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Soc Sci Hist. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 November 04.
