Introduction

In this paper, I will discuss ‘culture’ and different point of views of different anthropologists and
a comparative analysis regarding this culture. Beside this, I will describe the relation of ‘history’
with culture in different anthropological texts and monographs.

Culture is one of the basic or most important subjects in anthropology. It has been discussed
from the very beginning of this discipline but still it is too critical to define in a simple way. In
most of anthropological texts and monographs, which had discussed in this course, culture was in
the central point. In these books, different theorists described culture in different ways and their
presentation or illustration of culture was different, which makes me curious to compare their
viewpoints. In early ethnographical works, history and culture are closely related in somewhere.
This also makes me interested to define, how they are connected to each other and how
anthropologist used history in their monographs or texts.

Culture

Culture, can be defined as a methodological concept or tool of inquiry, which tries to figure out
the different characteristics of the society. It may be understood in terms of its historically
layered growth of specifications and differentiations, refined into a series of experimental. In
anthropological study, ‘culture’ has been using as a conceptual tool to figure out the situation or
condition of the society including exchange or economy, kinship, politics, marriage and so on.
The idea of ‘culture’ initially came to define in very subject-matter of anthropology both in
British anthropology and American anthropology. Nevertheless, in one of the many paradoxical
turns of the history of anthropology, Tylor's definition of culture treated as classical. According
to him, “culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habit
acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871: 1). Tylor’s observation may have been as
narrow as his inferences are crude and prejudiced, but he has been an inductive philosopher more
than forty years. He has practically acknowledged definite laws of human thoughts and actions,
and he formulated a general definition of human culture (McGee and Warms 2008). His most
important work was “Primitive Culture” which established his idea that the human mind and
capabilities were the same in all cultures of the world, no matter what the different stages of their

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evolution they are. This evolutionary idea was the foundation of cultural thinking and later many
anthropologists argued with his position and introduced their new thought about culture. I will
discuss some of the theorist and their works in this paper.

Franz Boas, the founding father of empirical anthropology in the United States, rejected Tylor’s
social evolutionism by emphasizing the particularity of each culture. He refers to historical
particularism to understand the culture or the community in perspective of historical
development and environmental condition. He treated ‘culture’ as the product of historical and
social forces, rather than a biological organism and he criticized the racial determinism of
evolutionary prospective (McGee and Warms 2008).

In Britain, Bronislaw Malinowski who is the modern anthropology’s first professional field
worker and ethnographer, carried out fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea
between 1915 and 1918. He looked at social interactions such as their annual Kula Ring
Exchange ceremonies, which he found to be associated with magic and religion, as well as
kinship and trade, and overall ‘culture’ and the functionality of the society. In Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski noted that it was the duty of the ethnographer to describe
“the full extent of the phenomenon in each aspect of tribal culture studied, making no difference
between what is commonplace, or drab, or ordinary, and what strikes him as astonishing or out
of the way. At the same time, the whole area of tribal culture in all its aspects has to be gone over
in research. The consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect make also for
joining them into one coherent whole” (Malinowski 1922: 10)   To this end, Malinowski
described the Trobiand Islanders’ life, including exchange, myth, kinship, ritual magic, and
other forms of  exchanges and interactions under the umbrella of “culture.” In this monograph,
he did not give any straight way definition of culture but he described different institutions of the
society, which are the part of culture. He also noted in his ethnological work “with the help of
such documents and such study of actualities the clear outline of the framework of the natives'
culture in the widest sense of the word, and the constitution of their society, can be presented”
(ibid: 17).

Levi-Strauss starts structuralism from a school of linguistics and his focus was not on the
meaning of the word, but the patterns that the words form. That means he wanted to look at the
formation and inner structure of language (McGee and Warms 2008). Levi-Strauss's contribution

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gave us a theory of how the human mind works. Man passes from a natural to a cultural state as
he uses language, learns to cook, etc. Structuralism considers that in the passage from natural to
cultural, man obeys laws, he does not invent it's a mechanism of the human brain. He used Boas,
Malinowski and others ethnographies and showed the classificatory structure in different society.
Every object and idea has an opposite meaning everywhere and by doing this, people create
meaning. Totemic symbols also have same kind of logical meaning by which he wants to prove
the similar mental structure in different savage groups. The ultimate original principle of
structuralism, that the forms of cultural order reflect general underlying laws of the human mind.
This helps account for the overall trajectory of his work: toward the intellect and the purely
intellectual expressions of culture, passing more or less in sequence from the study of kinship to
the thought systems of preliterate peoples or savage peoples of Native Americans. It is to say, he
made a grand theory by generalizing the universal mental structure of human kind as well as the
unversal underlying structure of culture. He also made opposition between nature and cuture and
in his footnote he mentioned ”the opposition between nature and culture to which I attached
much importance at one time (1 ch. 1 and 2) now seems to be of primarily methodological”
(Levi-Strauss 1969: 247). He gave importance to the culture but not in the same way like other
anthropologists did, he designed a detail structure and culture was a part of that.

Margaret Mead’s ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ (1928) trivialized the cultural relativism. She made
comparative analysis of adolescence age and situation between Samoan society and American
society. She addressed some important issues throughout her book such as: mobility of children
and young, rank, sexual division of labor, education, knowledge of sex etc in Samoan society ,
which all are the part of Samoan culture. She believed that other cultures should not be held to
Western standards, she insisted that in some ways other cultures were superior to her own.

Study of culture or society was not always as an academic research, sometime it was a
supportive work for the ruler. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's 1940 ethnography is a discussion of the
context in which the fieldwork was conducted and the text was constructed. The book ‘The
Nuer’ (1940), was an anthropological research for the British colonial government to understand
the political situation of that area. Despite this, different social system, kinship, age set, ecology
and interconnectedness with nature was apparently illustrated by Evance-Pritchard illustrated in
the ethnography. 

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Evans-Pritchard described the culture by relating nature or ecology. Ecology shapes the nature of
human production, and the Nuer are no exception to this rule. At the time of Evans-Pritchard's
field research, they were predominantly cattle pastoralists who also engaged in limited
horticultural pursuits. According to Evans-Pritchard, "they consider that horticulture is an
unfortunate necessity involving hard and unpleasant labor and not an ideal occupation, and they
tend to act on the conviction that the larger the herd the smaller need be the garden" (Evans-
Pritchard 1940:80). Following this, cattle play an integral role as the cultural core of Nuer
existence. There is a connection between the language of cattle and the labels for human beings.
This is how he described different characteristics of Nuer society as well as Nuer culture.

Clifford Geertz’s ‘The Interpretation of Culture (1973) is most influential work has been in the
area of ethnographic studies, specifically research conducted on Javanese culture. Geertz paid
attention to systems of meaning, the symbolic—in anthropological analysis of culture, how
cultures change, and the study of culture at large. He contends that he is not interested in
perpetuating a specific methodology, but he was more intend to figure out the setting of a tone or
mood or agenda that people could react toward or against of those. His aim was to understand the
‘symbols’ with ‘thick description’1. According to him, “cultural analysis is intrinsically
incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is… There are a
number of ways of escaping this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into
traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and
toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of
culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of
ethnographic assertion as ‘essentially contestable.’ Anthropology, or at least interpretive
anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of the consensus than
by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other”
(Geertz 1973:\29).

 He used many other theorists in his book to describe culture. . The idea of ‘culture’ was defined
by different social scientists in different ways, here I will bring some of them to elaborate Geertz
viewpoint. From Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror of Man, Geertz lists the following potential
meanings of “culture”: 1. "the total way of life of a people", 2. "the social legacy the individual

1
This notion is borrowed from Gilbert Ryle (Geertz 1973: 6)

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acquires from his group", 3. "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing", 4. "an abstraction from
behavior", 5. “a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of
people in fact behave”, 6. "a storehouse of pooled learning", 7. "a set of standardized orientations
to recurrent problems", 8. "learned behavior", 9. “a mechanism for the normative regulation of
behavior”, 10. “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other
men", 11. "a precipitate of history", 12. a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix. Essentially, there is
no standard and it will eventually be “necessary to choose.” (ibid: 5) Geertz himself argues for a
“semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to
be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of
meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical”
(ibid: 5). By describing all these definition and quotes, he tries to present the multiplicity of
culture and its meaning.

In Geertzian prospective, a culture’s web of symbols should be interpret by isolating its

elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize the whole
system in some general way. By doing this, the ideological principles and underlying structure of
the core symbols and its other elements can be understand.

In Geertz’s understanding, ethnography is by definition “thick description”—“an elaborate

venture in.” (ibid: 9) Using the action of “winking,” Geertz examines how the winking differs
from a social gesture of twitch to other meaning. We must move beyond the action to both the
particular social understanding of the “winking” as a gesture, the state of mind of the winker,
his/her audience, and how they construe the meaning of the winking action itself. “Thin
description” is the winking. “Thick” is the meaning behind it and its symbolic import in society
or between communicators. In this way, culture should be understood internal relationship,
ideological principles and underlying structure of the symbols. Geertz’s interpretation about the
meaning of symbols and metaphor of culture; to him, culture is public because “meaning is,” and
systems of meanings are what produce culture, they are the collective property of a particular
people.

An opposition Geertz voices that might be useful in distinguishing between them: Levi-Strauss
sees culture as a language, while Geertz sees it as a series of texts. Both approaches stress

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arbitrariness, meaning, and deep attention to local structure. But "language" - at least as Levi-
Strauss understood it -- allows for a translocal perspective in a way that texts do not. Levi-
Srauss’s universal structure of thinking and language structure made the generalization of the
humankind as well as culture but Geertz’s text and meaning of symbols were not able to
generalize the culture, but it has a great lens to look at the culture and its underlying structures.
Levi-Strauss can find practices that are structurally similar in multiple cultures, but that
transcultural similarity is not useful for Geertz.

Geertz spends forty pages doing dense cultural/literary analysis of the cockfight as a central
symbolic field in Balinese cultural and social life. He then sets out his analytic mode -cultures
are texts and textual interpretation of symbols. After arguing that few anthropologists have
treated culture as a text, in a footnote, he mentions Levi-Strauss thus: “Levi-Strauss’
‘structuralism’ might seem an exception. But it is only an apparent one, for, rather than taking
myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or whatever as texts to interpret,  Levi-Strauss takes them as
ciphers to solve, which is very much not the same thing.  He does not seek to understand
symbolic forms in terms of how they function in concrete situations to organize perceptions
(meanings, emotions, concepts, attitudes); he seeks to understand them entirely in terms of their
internal structure, independent de tout sujet, de tout objet, et de toute contexte” (Geertz 1973:
449). In his second footnote, he problematized the anthropological work based on other works
and the illustration of ‘native’ cultures (ibid: 15).

Culture and History

To understand any socio-cultural issue or particular situation, anthropologist looks back to the
long-term meaning and history of that particular issue. In this way, anthropologists are/were
always in the history and building history in their own way, which is different from the historian
‘history’. Here I want to relate the ‘culture’ and ‘history’ to each other and how ‘history’ has
been discussed in different theoretical stands or in different texts or monographs. William
Roseberry points out this issue in his book History and Anthropologists (1991). According to
him, anthropologists discover different kind of histories and they create two kinds of problems,
‘first, they may write a particular history of the relationship between anthropology and history’
(Roseberry 1991). Until Clifford Geertz’s publication The Interpretation of Cultures (1973),
history was discussed in a very casual way and it ignores a much longer traditions and argument,

6
which is often remained ‘subterranean’ (Vincent 1989 et al Roseberry 1991). Roseberry pointed
the second problem as ‘anthropologists may “turn to history” without specifying what kind of
history in mind’ (Roseberry 1991). Anthropologists mean different things from historians when
they talk or discuss about history. These different meaning and engagement to the history
sometime make connection or seems synonyms to ‘culture’ and ‘history’.

In Levi-Strauss’s work, he emphasized on the structure of the society and the culture is a part of
that structure. Unlike the evolutionary thinkers, Levi-Strauss rejects any overall continuity of
development in history. According to him, “total” history of mankind is impossible and would
lead to “chaos,” he added “insofar as history aspires to meaning, it is doomed to select regions,
periods, groups of men and individuals in these groups and to make them stand out as
discontinuous figures, against a continuity barely good enough to be used as a backdrop... It
inevitably remains partial - that is, incomplete” (Levi-Strauss 1962: 277). From such a standpoint
the totemic period is not the most ancient stage in social history but the totemic classifications
are the earliest from of social relations. To describe the structure of the society, he relates history
in this way, “history seems to do more than describe beings to us from the outside, or at best give
us intermittent flashes of insight into internalities, each of which are so on their own account
while remaining external to each other: it appears to re-establish our connection, outside
ourselves, with the very essence of change”(ibid: 256). However, he was not very much into the
history like historians or other early anthropologists but to him, history is a connecting tool of
humankind.

Levi-Strauss make an oppositional stand of two kind of societies, they are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’
societies. According to him, “the clumsy distinction between ‘peoples without history; and others
could with advantage be replaced by a distinction between what for convenience I called ‘cold’
and ‘hot’ societies: the former seeking, by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the
possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in quasi-automatic
fashion; the latter resolutely internalizing the historical process and making it the moving power
of their developments” (ibid : 233). Of course, the ‘cold’ society does not actually live outside of
the history. Here he makes a clarification of the societies who have ‘history’ and they are best
known as non-savage societies.

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In Geertz work, we can see, he emphasize on the thick description of the cultural codes. When
we seek to converse with subjects in foreign cultures, gain access to their conceptual world; this
is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture. He did not want make generalization of culture,
according to him, “contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the
sweep of its abstractions… the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract
regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to
generalize within them” (Geertz 1973: 25-6). His interpretation on Balinese cockfight paid much
attention to the cultural symbols but he did not paid attention to the history. In Balinese society,
there were many hierarchies, which were constructed in the society over the time. However, in
his description, all these history was out of the discussion.

Roseberry relate history and culture in political economic perspective but he gave us enough
space to rethink about the relation of history and culture. Roseberry made some arguments on his
works, though Geertz mentioned that the cockfight was an important activity in pre-colonial
Balinese states but he did not mention the total history of that cultural system. On the other side,
he explicitly criticizes ideational definition of culture, concentrating on symbols that carry and
communicate meaning to social actors who have created them. But, at no point he make the
bridge between material and ideal perspective of culture like Harris (Roseberry 1991: 19-20)
(Here Harris was much concern on the structure and superstructure of the culture and in his
perspective culture- as a production, he was not concern on the meaning).

Raymond Willams’s perspective on culture and history is important to realize. He discussed

about the meaning of culture, which is socially constructed, and these meaning inform actions in
the society. He also paid attention to the history and domination to understand the actual
meaning of different ideas in the culture. According to him, no order of domination is total.
Domination and cultures are formed in a class-based social order, and to realize the entire
meaning of these domination or subordination in the culture, history is very important (ibid: 26-
27). Cultural and historical materials will explain the process of domination or subordination in
the society.

History was in the concern in Leach’s work. In his book Political Systems of Highland Burma: A
Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954), he tried to give some historical context of that society.
He made a history in this book from his perspective. In the book, Leach formulated his research

8
problem this way: "How far it can be maintained that a single type of social structure prevails
throughout the Kachin area. Is it legitimate to think of Kachin society as being organized
throughout according to one particular set of principles or does this rather vague category Kachin
include a number of different forms of social organization?" (Leach 1965: 3). Leach is perhaps
identified these questions by giving many examples of these societies and the structure of that
society. He was influenced by Levi-Strauss but he was different in his theoretical position. Leach
focuses on detailed explanation, extensive and above all accurate data from the societies. Based
on accurate data Leach formulated theories that were in stark contrast to Levi-Strauss. The most
notable differences between these two structuralist were that whereas Levi-Strauss beleived that
societies divided themselves into opposites and maintained stability by exchanging wealth and
prestige between them, Leach believed that social groupings were more complex and that they
could easily become unstable. Therefore he focused on the historical data and the context of
those societies. He was more concerned with the people’s actual life while Levi-Strauss were
more concerned on the discovery of universal mental stuctures.

Leach used ethnographic examples to in kinship, myth and marriage system in Burma. His
ethnographic work was detailed and he took the part -- political structure in the society and to
analyze this, he gave many explanation of the culture and society. His historical and theoretical
context of this book was detailed analysis of the political organization. Leach identified two
contrasting ideal types of political organization (gumlao/gumsa) which alternated historically
between egalitarian and hierarchical modes. This approach, combined with more traditional
participant-observation fieldwork in a single community, demonstrated that anthropologists
could move beyond ethnography. He intended to make explanation of different factors in the
society. Leach wanted to find out whether it is "possible to describe at all societies which are not
assumed to be in stable equilibrium" (Leach 1965: 4). He claims it is possible because “while
conceptual models of society are necessarily models of equilibrium systems, real societies can
never be in equilibrium. The discrepancy is because when social structures are expressed in
cultural form; the representation is imprecise compared with that given by the exact categories
that sociologists would like to employ. I hold that these inconsistencies in the logic of ritual
expression are always necessary for the proper functioning of any social system” (ibid: 4). Leach
also argues that society would not be in a stable equilibrium state because individuals or groups
acting according to their interests. This means society and its cultural elements will perform in

9
different way but those will be in a structure or it can alter the social structure. However, in this
position, he was not directly concern with the culture of those societies but he made explanation
of the system through history and the political system, which are actually a part of culture.

In ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ (1928), Margaret Mead used cultural relativism to describe the
situation of Samoan society’s teenagers’ adolescence age and their social condition. She
addressed different important issue to illustrate the cultural condition throughout her book such
as: mobility of children and young, rank, sexual division of labor, education, knowledge of sex
etc in Samoan society. Mead mentioned in the forward of the book, “Modern descriptions of
primitive people give us a picture of their culture classified according to the varied aspects of
human life. We learn about inventions, household economy, family and political organization,
and religious beliefs and practices. Through a comparative study of these data and through
information that tells us of their growth and development, we endeavor to reconstruct, as well as
may be, the history of each particular culture. Some anthropologists even hope that the
comparative study will reveal some tendencies of development that recur so often that significant
generalizations regarding the processes of cultural growth will be discovered” (Mead 1928: xiii).
Here she described her research interest and she conveyed the message to the readers, she
intended to look at different culture, which is not ‘developed’ or ‘known’ in history.

In her work, she illustrated Samoan society and the cultural dynamic in comparison to her
society. She made comparison between cultures and she noted “it is with variations within one
great pattern that the student of Europe to-day or the student of our own history sharpens his
sense of appreciation. But if we step outside the stream of Indo-European culture, the
appreciation which we can accord our civilization is even more enhanced” (ibid: 12-13). Here
she actually tried to give an example that all the cultures who are historically establish or well
organized or ‘cultured’ (like American Culture), are not always in higher position. She found that
Samoan society was culturally different from her society. Here she used Boasian cultural
relativism and made the differences between cultures. She did not historicize the Samoan culture
but she made compare with that historically constructed culture where civilized societies are
culturally ahead. Mead makes a great point at the end of chapter 13: “In all of these comparisons
between Samoan and American culture, many points are useful only in throwing a spotlight upon
our own solutions, while in others it is possible to find suggestions for change. Whether or not

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we envy other peoples one of their solutions, our attitude towards our own solutions must be
greatly broadened and deepened by a consideration of the way in which other peoples have met
the same problems. Realizing that our own ways are not humanely inevitable nor God-ordained,
but are the fruit of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine in turn all of our
institution, thrown into strong relief against the history of other civilizations, and weighing them
in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting” (ibid: 233). She cleared her opinion about the
Samoan society and attitude towards culture.

The book “Purity and Danger” 2002 (1966) written by Mary Douglas which focus on religion
and symbolism. She developed fieldwork in a highly pollution-conscious culture of the Congo
and started to look for a systemic approach. In Purity and Danger she analyzed the ideas of
pollution and taboo, considering different cultures from a structural point of view. Her purpose
was to avoid a limited explanation, regarding the phenomena in relation to the entire social
structure. She discussed some general terms like: abominations, restriction and punishment, and
these represent the power of social boundaries. However, dangerous things can have at the same
time creative power. She also discussed about the real differences between primitive and modern
cultures.

She discussed in her book two main characteristics of primitive religions according to the
nineteenth century’s view: fear is the main inspiration, together with the confusion between
defilement and hygiene. Mary Douglas discussed in her book many other anthropologists’ field
studies about culture. However, she explores the subject of hygiene in relationship with the idea
of order and disorder. In other words, moral values and social roles are upheld by beliefs. Here,
she illustrates many cultural aspects and historical concepts to the ideas of pure and impure.

It is fragmentary to analyze rites without considering their relation with the entire cultural
universe. Any culture is not over structured and rigid. Ideas about sexual danger for instance can
be better interpreted as symbols in relation to a larger social system and the difference between
male and female’s position and symbolic embodiment of social boundaries can elucidate the idea
of order. These social ideas are culturally and historically constructed.

The author also analyses the studies made by Robertson Smith, Tylor, Durkheim and Frazer.
Some anthropological theories, influenced by Darwin’s theory, consider the possibility that

11
civilization is the result of gradual progress from an original primitive state. In this case the
modern man represents a long process of evolution through three stages of development: magic,
religion and science. However, this theory also provoked a crisis of faith because religion and
science seemed to be incompatible. Douglas used many theoretical aspects of different social
scientist to analyze different notions on hygiene and dirt and she made a historical connection to
all these notions and how they emerged in the society. To analyze these, she used religious
aspects and socially formulated concepts towards purity and impurity. She re-analyzed the
religious aspect to understand the concepts of sacred and profane.

In Durkheim’s theory, religion is discussed from spiritual aspects but Douglas wants to examine
it also from the social aspect. Comparative religions are dominated by our modern idea of
hygiene and she analyzed the historical changes of idea. The influence of medical materialism
has tried to find a rational basis of primitive ritual. Science knowledge makes all the difference
in the thinking about pollution or our ideas of dirt. However, considering different cultures and
points of view it is possible to realize that dirt is a relative idea. In this way, the old definition of
dirt as matter out of place is a suggestive approach. “It implies two conditions: a set of ordered
relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where
there is dirt there is system” (Douglas 1966: 35). This is how, Douglas gave importance to the
culture and social structure. History is also important in her discussion, she uses many
anthropological works where she gave examples through historical changes. She draws the
historical changes of the idea of dirt by influence of medical science and the previous aspects in
primitive societies.

Conclusion

Anthropologists differed profoundly in their theories and in the aspects of western thought that
they questioned, but they shared an idea of the world as made up of ‘peoples’, each with a
coherent way of life, or ‘culture’. This coherent life illustrated in different texts and monographs
and anthropologists introduced different kind of theoretical framework. All these lens of viewing
culture and society were sometime concerned with history and sometime without history. In this
paper, I tried to elaborate, how different anthropological text or monographs described culture
and the relation of history to the culture. Anthropologists have developed new and more dynamic
ways of thinking about ‘culture’, the old essentialist conception of culture has percolated out

12
from academic discourse and is still widespread in public parlance. The main features of this ‘old
idea of culture’ are that culture is basically a bounded, small-scale entity; with a number of
defined characteristics. Levi-Strauss’s viewpoint was little different from others. In different
monographs and texts, anthropologists pointed out many important issues regarding culture and
societies. In Malinowski’s functionalist approach, culture and the history seems to be timeless
position. His description on Trobiand islander was seems to me, this society is isolated from the
global world. He saw the functionality of different elements in the society and all those functions
were in a rhythm, but he did not depict the history in a proper way. In Max Gluckman words
‘Malinowski did not write descriptions at the level of culture, custom, ritual and belief. He deals
with how people grew up in a society of particular culture, and used rebelled against that culture”
(Gluckman 2006: 14). In the anthropological case study or monograph, different societies were
represented as ‘apt illustration’ (ibid: 15). All the social and cultural contexts were represented
trough different case and these cases were consisting of some specific characteristics of the
society. Through these data and information, each case organized to answer or to describe some
particular point of argument.

In anthropological works, history discussed in partially or anthropologist discussed those history

what they needed. They tried to illustrate history in a useable way which reader can understand
the context of the ethnographical or anthropological subject. In this paper, I discussed different
viewpoint of history. All these historical analysis and cultures give us to look at different
societies in different perspective, but Geertzian perspective to look at culture is much elaborative
and helpful to understand context. Though he did not clear, whose culture he looked at, but we
can analyze a culture in that way by relating different peoples perspective in the society. Beside
this, history is important to understand the detail feature of the context. In society, we can have
multiple dimensions in any single social subject, and we need to concentrate to that social subject
with different viewpoints. This will help us to understand its historical context as well as how
different people or actor perceives this in the society.

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Reference

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