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16 - Anthropology and the Turn to History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2022

By
Joel Isaac
Edited by
Richard Bourke  and
Quentin Skinner
Richard Bourke
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Quentin Skinner
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, I seek to explain why the methods of historical enquiry became so attractive to a generation of anthropologists. I make two major claims: first, that it was the problem of the origins and persistence of institutions that drew social and cultural anthropologists toward history; second, that this concern with institutional reproduction was part of anthropology’s long struggle to offer an alternative to a post-Hobbesian state-centred politics. In defending these claims, I examine in particular the writings of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clifford Geertz.

Keywords

AnthropologyhistoryÉmile DurkheimBronislaw Malinowskiand Clifford Geertz
Type
Chapter
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History in the Humanities and Social Sciences , pp. 379 - 407
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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