Anthropology and History

James D Faubion, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Anthropology engages history not as one but instead as many things: (1) sociocultural change or diachrony; (2) a domain of
events and objects that make manifest systems of signification, purpose, and value; (3) a domain of variable modalities of the
experience and consciousness of being in time; and (4) a domain of practices, methods, and theories devoted to the recording
and the analysis of temporal phenomena. It emerged, and continues to serve, as that branch of ‘natural history’ which
investigates the psychophysical origins and diversification of the human race. As ‘ethnohistory,’ it investigates the documents
of the pasts of native or ‘first’ peoples, paying special attention to the dynamics and consequences of colonization. Emile
Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995/1912) opens the arena of an ‘anthropology of history’ with its
argument for the social causation of the experience and conceptualization of time, but anthropologists remain divided over
what the anthropology of history is or should be. Their disagreements are instructive because they recapitulate a much larger
and more enduring controversy over whether anthropological knowledge is a mode of historical or instead a mode of
scientific knowledge. The controversy is probably also irresolute, at least until either anthropology or history comes to an end.

For anthropology, history is not one but many things. First, it is
the past, especially the past that survives in archives and other
written or oral records; ‘prehistory’ is its more remote coun-
terpart. Second, it is change, diachronic as opposed to
synchronic process. Third, history is a domain of events and
artifacts that make manifest systems of signification, purpose,
and value, the domain of human action. Fourth, it is the
domain of all the diverse modes of the human experience and
consciousness of being in time. Finally, it is a domain
encompassing all those practices, methods, symbologies, and
theories that human beings – professional academic historians
among them – have applied to the collection, recollection, and
comprehension of the past, the present, and the relations
between the two.
Anthropology and Natural History
At the end of the sixteenth century, anthropology emerged in
Europe not in contrast to history but rather within it. Thereafter,
and for some two and a half centuries forward, it would broadly
be understood as that branch of ‘natural history’ which investi-
gated the psychophysical origins and diversification of the
human race, or races, as was very often the case. Demurring
throughout the period to the theological calculus of the creation
of Adam, it confined itself to treating developments presumed
to have transpired over only a few millennia. In 1858, miners
at England’s Brixham cave unearthed tools and other human
remains that stratigraphers could prove to be at least 70 000
years old. Theological authority suffered a blow from which it
would not recover; anthropological time suddenly acquired
much greater archaeological depth. Meanwhile, a growing
scholarly coalition was coming together to support the doctrine
that ‘culture’ was that common human possession which made
manifest the basic psychic unity of all the putative races of
mankind. In 1854, James Pritchard would accordingly launch
‘ethnology,’ and send the racialists off on their separate ways
(Stocking, 1987). ‘Cultural’ and ‘physical’ anthropologists
would never again keep their earlier company. Yet, even
through the turn of the twentieth century, natural history
remained the largely uncontested source of the methods and
aims of both. Questions of origin and development continued
to have pride of place. The ‘savage’ or the ‘primitive’ became all
the more entrenched as a disciplinary preserve, among other
things as the rudimentary pole of any number of ambitious
reconstructions of the probable steps or stages that had
marked the human passage to ‘civilization’ or ‘modernity.’
E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), Henry Lewis Morgan’s
Ancient Society (1877), and the several volumes of James
Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) are classic examples of the genre.
Such far-reaching treatises would strike the more meticulous
of the subsequent generation of their readers as undisciplined,
even whimsical. By the 1920s, and despite all their other
differences, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and A. R. Rad-
cliffe-Brown were inaugurating a turn away from ‘speculative
history’ in favor of meticulous observational attention to the
‘ethnographic present.’ Not even these sober empiricists were,
however, opposed in principle to reconstructive or evolutionary
analysis. With due regard for rigor, the more adventurous of
their colleagues would continue to pursue it; and virtually every
subfield of anthropology has contributed to it ever since.
Physical anthropology is now a ‘genetic’ science in both the
larger and the stricter sense of the term. Morgan’s project
survives most explicitly in the United States, from Leslie White
to Marvin Harris, as ‘cultural materialism’ (see Harris, 1968),
but also endures implicitly in the technological determinism
that informs Jack Goody’s argument in The Domestication of
the Savage Mind (1977). Tylor and Frazer are the precursors
not simply of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (see infra)
but also of the burgeoning interdisciplinary and neo-
Darwinist vocation known as ‘evolutionary psychology.’ Boas
himself is among the bridges between an older ‘comparative
philology’ and efforts to trace the family tree of all the world’s
languages (see Kroeber, 1935).
Anthropology and Ethnohistory
A more modest anthropological tradition of diachronic
research has borrowed its methods less from natural history

746 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12012-4

than from empirical historiography. It has a partial fore-
shadowing in the particularistic study of the drift and
dissemination of traits and artifacts from the centers to the
peripheries of cultural production with which ‘diffusionists’ in
England, Germany, and the United States were occupied
between the 1890s and the 1930s. It has its more definitive
commencement in the immediate aftermath of the Second
World War. Its most familiar designation is still ‘ethnohistory,’
however misleading the suggestion of affinities or parallels
with ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomethodology’ may be. In any
event, the signature task of ethnohistory has always been the
investigation and documentation of the pasts of those native
or ‘first’ peoples whom anthropologists had until rather
recently proprietarily or conventionally claimed as ‘their own.’
In the United States, its more concrete initial impetus came
with the 1946 ratification of the Indian Claims Act, which
soon led to anthropologists serving as expert witnesses –
sometimes for the plaintiffs, sometimes for the defense – in
the readjudication of the treaties of the pioneer era. In
the United States and elsewhere, it would have a catalyst in the
granting of public access to the administrative archives of the
pioneers, the missionaries, and the bureaucrats of European
colonization. Hence, its characteristic focus: the dynamics of
contact and conflict between the subaltern and their would-be
overlords: pioneering, missionary, colonizing, or enslaving
(Spicer, 1975; Cohn, 1968, 1980; Leacock and Lurie, 1971;
Rosaldo, 1980; Dirks, 1988, 2001, 2006; Kirch and Sahlins,
1992, 1994; Vansina, 2004, 2010; Hanks, 2009). The most
wide-ranging examples remain Eric Wolf’s Europe and the
People Without History (1997) and Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness
and Power (1986).
Narrowly delimited, ethnohistory remains the specialist’s
craft. Since the 1970s, however, its methods and themes have
met with an ever-widening embrace, and if ‘historical ethnog-
raphy’ and ‘historical anthropology’ are not yet synonymous
with standard disciplinary practice, they are certainly of a piece
with it. The anthropological gaze is now less often ‘from afar’
than it is longitudinal. Such a vantage has been pivotal in the
renovation of political economy. It has also brought fresh and
stimulating perspectives to the address of kinship, race,
national and personal identity, and gender (e.g., Stoler, 1995).
Its deployment and impact may or may not be indications of
greater disciplinary enlightenment, but they are by no means
indications of passing intellectual fashion alone. The
lengthening of the anthropological gaze has rather gone hand
in hand with the ascendance of a postcolonial order in which
social and cultural boundaries have become increasingly
permeable and structures increasingly indistinguishable from
processes. It has gone hand in hand as well with the
ascendance of the postcolonial demand that anthropology
offer a reckoning, not simply of its relation to the colonial
past but also of the status of the knowledge that it claims to
produce (Hymes, 1972; Asad, 1973; Clifford and Marcus,
1986).
Anthropology and Hermeneutics
In our postcolonial order, anthropology itself needs inter-
preting; so, too, do many other sociocultural phenomena.
Anthropology and History 747
Anthropology’s current troupe of interpreters espouses,
however, an even stronger postulate: that sociocultural
phenomena, as historical phenomena, permit only of inter-
pretation; that they permit of contextual understanding, but
not of general explanation. ‘Interpretive anthropology’ thus
stands starkly at odds with the loftier versions of the natural
history of culture, but further with any empirical historiog-
raphy that has the inductive abstraction of general types or
causal relations as its end. It now comes in many versions of
its own. The most venerable of them commences with the
Boasians. In 1935, Alfred Kroeber would accordingly remark
that the ethnographies that Ruth Benedict and his other
colleagues were busy producing were ‘historical’ in type. True
enough, their temporality was synchronic, not diachronic.
Their mode, however, was particularistic; their method con-
textualist; their analyses rarely if ever causal; and their model
consequently that of what Wilhelm Dilthey, pursuing
a ‘critique of historical reason,’ had defined as the Geist-
eswissenschaften – ‘sciences of spirit,’ literally, but better glossed
as ‘sciences of meaning’ or simply ‘hermeneutics’ (Dilthey,
2002). In fact, Kroeber was quite correct; Benedict, Margaret
Mead, and the other cultural anthropologists of Boas’s circle
were indeed hermeneuticians. They were hence establishing
the methodological legacy to which Clifford Geertz is the
most celebrated heir (Geertz, 1973). It should be added that
the long-standing, if methodologically variable, tradition of
life-historical or ‘ethnobiographical’ research, in which
a limited diachronic inquiry serves as the means to
a synchronically contextualizing end, is also Boasian in its
widest parameters (see, e.g., Mintz, 1986; Crapanzano, 1980;
Shostak, 1981; Faubion, 2011).
The more proximate wellspring of contemporary inter-
pretation flows out of the tumult of the late 1960s. Elabo-
rating in 1972 upon the call for a ‘critical and reflexive
anthropology,’ Bob Scholte was among its earliest manifes-
tologists, though he borrowed many of his own philosophical
and methodological tenets from Johannes Fabian’s slightly
earlier exposition of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s revision of
Dilthey’s thought (Scholte, 1972; Fabian, 1971, see also
1983). The channels thus opened have remained critical and
reflexive, if perhaps not always so politically committed as
Scholte might have hoped. Gadamer’s heremeneutics has,
moreover, served as only one of many subsequent grounds
on which to establish interpretive license (see Rabinow and
Sullivan, 1988). Walter Benjamin (see Taussig, 1993) and
Giambattista Vico (see Herzfeld, 1987) have won admirers
of their own. Geertz’s inspirations were diverse: Suzanne
Langer; Gilbert Ryle; Ludwig Wittgenstein; above all, Max
Weber.
Such a well-populated census might suggest that, as much
now as at its beginnings, anthropology belongs to history (as
a discipline) no less than in it (as contingent process). Yet, even
many of those who label themselves ‘historical anthropolo-
gists’ or ‘interpreters’ of one or another stripe would object to
such a subsumption. No doubt, professional territorialism
plays a part in their resistance. Often very palpable differences
of professional sensibility play another part. Matters more
strictly intellectual, however, play a part of their own, and their
stakes are no more evident than within the anthropology of
history itself.
748 Anthropology and History
The Anthropology of History
Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995)
opens the arena of the anthropology of history with its
argument for the social causation of the experience and
conceptualization of time. Maurice Halbwachs’ Collective
Memory (1980) expands it and, after many decades of neglect,
has come to be among the foundational texts of a recent
surge of ethnographic and comparative inquiry into the
techniques, the media, and the politics of remembering and
forgetting (see, e.g., Boyarin, 1994; Shryock, 1997). Paul
Connerton is the most systematic of Halbwachs’ followers,
and moves beyond Halbwach’s own emphasis on the spatial
objectification of collective memory to a consideration of the
embodiment of memory in and as habit (1989).
The most imposing shadow hanging over the broader
anthropology of history is, however, Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage
Mind (1966). A treatise devoted to the analysis of the
analogical – and ahistorical – matrices of mythic and totemic
thought, The Savage Mind, concludes with an extended
polemic against the ‘historical, structural anthropology’ that
Jean-Paul Sartre had advocated in the introduction to his
Critique of Dialectical Reason (2004). Sartre had no time for
totemists. His anthropology instead rested with the charting,
and the heightening, of ‘historical consciousness.’ Against it,
Lévi-Strauss had two general rejoinders. The first was that
‘historical consciousness’ was the expression not of dawning
wisdom but instead of a collective devotion to ‘development,’
and its absence was not of the expression of error but instead
of a collective devotion to homeostasis. Some societies ran
historically ‘hot’; others ran ‘cold.’ All were equally human.
The second was that history – as narrative, as diachronic
interpretation – was always ‘history-for,’ always biased.
Stripped of its bias, it amounted to nothing more than the
methodical application of temporal scales of measure to the
flow of human and nonhuman events alike. If not that, then
it amounted simply to the preliminary ‘cataloging’ with
which any ‘quest for intelligibility’ – the anthropological
quest included – had to begin. But it could be a beginning
only: ‘as we say of certain careers, history may lead to
anything, provided you get out of it’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966).
Lévi-Strauss came to grant that his division between ‘hot’
and ‘cold’ societies was in need of much refinement; that
instead of functioning as a strictly binary opposition, the
division could better be conceived as defining a continuum. It
is good that he did so, since a great deal of ethnographic
evidence had already pointed and continues to point to just
that. The classic cases are those of millenarian movements and
so-called cargo cults, which have been widely documented in
Melanesia and Polynesia (Worsley, 1957; Burridge, 1960,
1969), Amazonia (Hill, 1988), Africa (Peires, 1989), Native
North America (Mooney, 1896), the Caribbean (Littlewood,
1992) and elsewhere, many but not all of them emerging in
the aftermath of one or another colonial encounter and
many but not all of them influenced by the New Testament
Book of Revelation (see also Lindstrom, 1993; Faubion,
2001). Historically grounded studies of Christianization offer
more complex versions of the same theme (Comaroff and
Comaroff, 1991, 1997; Robbins, 2004). Michael Lambek has
explored a decidedly non-millenarian but far from chilly
sense of the relationship among the past, present, and future
in Madagascar (2003). Penelope Papailias (2005) has delved
into the writings of modern Greek historians to discover
senses of the same relationship that are very far from the
boiling point. The list could continue at length.
For all this, Lévi-Strauss never retreated from his division
between historical and properly anthropological knowledge.
On the contrary, from the outset of his career, he consistently
counted history among those disciplines limited to the merely
statistical representation and analysis of their objects. His
anthropology is for its part a model-theoretic discipline, an
axiomatic and deductive science. Its object remains what it was
for Tylor: the psyche. Its quest, however, culminates not in the
hypothetical reconstruction of the path toward enlightened
modernity but instead in the formal exegesis of the universal
‘grammar,’ the structural and structuring properties, of the
mind itself. ‘Structuralism,’ thus construed, is far less influential
than it was in the 1960s, but by no means bereft. In ‘cognitive
anthropology,’ it has its most secure contemporary home; and
there, history (as intellectual or epistemological paragon)
continues to meet with a cool reception.
For Lévi-Strauss as for other philosophical and scientific
rationalists, there is an insuperable gap between the ‘facts’ and
their theoretical intelligibility. For positivists and empiricists,
the relation between facts and theories is putatively more
seamless. Unabashedly positivist anthropologists are a rather
rare breed at present, at least in the sociocultural field, though
many cultural materialists and evolutionary psychologists
might quietly reckon themselves as such. The positivist
anthropology of historical consciousness or the ‘historical
sensibility’ is rare indeed, but has a singularly unabashed
spokesperson in Donald Brown. In History, Hierarchy, and
Human Nature (1988), Brown offers a cross-cultural survey of
those traits – from divination to record-keeping – most
suggestive of a preoccupation with the meaning and
significance of events. Among literate peoples, he discerns
a relatively stable correlation: between the presence and
prominence of such a preoccupation and the absence of caste
or other fixed hierarchies. He concludes that history (as
sensibility, as worldview, and as mode of inquiry) takes its
most regular nourishment from an ideology of social
mobility. Whether or not correct, the conclusion is
compatible with Lévi-Strauss’s own considered judgments.
Here, too, the anthropologist takes history as an analytical
object.
Marshall Sahlins offers an alternative, which also takes
history as its analytical object, but further as its analytical
mode. It preserves the structuralist principle that systems of
signification are never mere derivatives of their social or
material environment. Yet it casts them less as revelations of the
grammar of the psyche than as interfaces or differentials
between the past and the future of given social practice. Their
effect is threefold. First, they determine the internal historical
‘temperature’ of practice, which is relatively colder when gov-
erned by prescriptions, warmer when not. Second, they vary in
their capacity to accommodate potentially anomalous or
disruptive events. They are more or less historically ‘sensitive,’
and the greater their sensitivity, the more the continuity of
practice is itself at risk. Finally, they influence the symbolic
‘weight’ or import of actors and their acts. Where some men are

kings, and their authority unchallenged, the historian is right to
monitor them with especial care; where democracy holds sway,
he or she would do better to monitor status groups or classes or
parties. Hence, the best historian should be a good anthro-
pologist, and the best anthropologist always prepared to be
a good historian as well (Sahlins, 1985).
Sahlins’s standard of goodness is still the standard of
objective accuracy. It thus stands in partial contrast to the
standard that has at least implicitly guided interpretive anthro-
pology since the Boasian ‘golden age.’ Though subject to diverse
formulations – some more vividly critical than others – the latter
standard is practical or pragmatic, a matter of consequences.
Perhaps for a majority of interpretive anthropologists, it has
been nothing short of ‘liberation,’ whether from psychosexual
repression, as for Benedict and Mead, or from political
domination and economic exploitation, as for Scholte. Many
of its prominent inflections remain reformist, though of more
qualified scope. For the Geertzian, however, the pragmatic
proof of an interpretation lies in its facilitating conversation,
its translational efficacy. For Geertz and others, it lies in
a broadening or enrichment of our imagination of the ways of
being human. For a few others still, it lies in therapeutic
release – perhaps from prejudice, perhaps from alienated
isolation. Interpretation must in every case be factually
informed; but at its best, is always also ‘informative.’ Its
analytical mode is historical; but however much Lévi-Strauss
or Sahlins might disapprove, it is always also ‘history-for’ and
‘anthropology-for’ alike. So, too, the interpretive history of
anthropology and the interpretive anthropology of history
must occupy the same epistemological plane. Here, historical
and anthropological knowledge are of precisely the same kind.
Consistent with such a position is Matti Bunzl’s proposal for
the development of a ‘neo-Boasian’ anthropology, a hybrid of
the Boasian tradition of particularistic contextualization and
Michel Foucault’s genealogical ‘history of the present’ (Bunzl,
2003; Foucault, 1998). In Foucault’s first sustained
articulation of it, genealogy has as its exemplar Friedrich
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1956). Following in
Nietzsche’s footsteps, it is grounded in the marshaling of
evidence of the partiality of the presumptively universal. It
exposes the contingency of the presumptively necessary. It is
most definitely a history-for. It does not, however, offer
a design for historical inquiry in close accord with Dilthey’s
or other standard historical precedents. It is ‘meticulous,’ but
its aim is not merely nor even primarily to elucidate the
contextual nexus that unites a historical ensemble into
a meaningful complex. It is not hermeneutical in this sense.
Its aim is instead to bring to light that one or another aspect
of the present need not be taken as much for granted as at
first sight it might seem to need to be. Bunzl rightly notes
that the rhetorical force of Foucault’s ‘genealogy of the
present’ notwithstanding, it does not as a matter of its own
methodological constraints arrive at the present as such.
Bunzl’s proposal is that a synthesis of Foucauldean genealogy
and Boasian hermeneutics could yield a genealogical
hermeneutics or hermeneutical genealogy not merely of the
present but also in it.
Bunzl points to Paul Rabinow’s French Modern (1989) as the
first anthropological installment of a history of (if not yet
quite in) the present. In the work leading to the publication
Anthropology and History 749
of Marking Time (2007), however, and in the work since
(Rabinow and Stavrianakis, 2013), Rabinow has been
developing his own diagnostics not merely of the present but
also of the near past that precedes it and the near future that
might follow it. Drawing from Foucault but also from John
Dewey and Gilles Deleuze, he offers an ‘anthropology of the
contemporary’ that would track ‘ratio(s) of modernity,
moving through the recent past and near future in a (non-
linear) space’ and serving as ‘gauges’ in light of which one or
another aspect of the modern can be registered as ‘becoming
historical.’ Once again, a history-for but also as much an
anthropology-for, it borrows some portion of its critical
framework from Foucault’s late formulation of a ‘critical
ontology of ourselves,’ an exercise that in its successes would
extract ‘from the contingency that has made us what we are,
the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking as we
are, do, or think’ (1997). If the specific temporality of
Rabinow’s anthropology of the contemporary is of modest
scope, it is in accord with the modesty that Ulrich Beck et al.
(1994) have implicitly endorsed in their account of the ‘risk
society’ in which we now all live and that Niklas Luhmann
(1998) has similarly endorsed in his account of the
increasingly global ‘ecology of ignorance’ with which we now
all have to cope. Both accounts underscore that relations
between the recent past and the near future are about the
only relations in whose understanding we might dare to have
some confidence. Contemporaneity is thus our lot. It is the
distinctive order of the day. An anthropology of the ratios
between the recent past and the near future could accordingly
be thought to afford an analytical lens through which we
might examine the environment – epistemic, sociocultural,
and political – that is in fact all of our own.
In any event, it is clear that history is not simply a thing of
many anthropological refractions. It is also a thing of plural
and incompatible anthropological estimations. These in turn
are among the most telling indices of the most persistent and
most persuasive of plural and incompatible visions of the
basic enterprise of anthropology itself. One can hence
condemn the discipline for its intellectual indecisiveness or
incoherence. One can applaud it for its perspectival diversity.
One can in any event note that its many byways have
a common point of departure in the question of whether
human nature itself is transhistorically fixed, or instead
historically variable. This is anthropology’s first question,
and if the past is any indication of the future, it is likely
to remain so, at least until either Man or history comes to
an end.
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