Review: A Bridge Too Far?

The Relationships between History and Anthropology

Reviewed Work(s): Focaal, tijdschrift voor anthropologie, No. 26/27 (1996), 'Historical
Anthropology: The Unwaged Debate' by Don Kalb, Hans Marks and Herman Tak
Review by: Jon P. Mitchell
Source: Contemporary European History, Vol. 6, No. 3, Theme Issue: Intellectual Life and
the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953-1956 (Nov., 1997), pp. 405-
411
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081641
Accessed: 02-09-2016 20:47 UTC

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 A Bridge Too Far? The

Relationships Between History

and Anthropology

JON P. MITCHELL

Focaal, tijdschrifi voor anthropologie, No. 26/27 (1996), 'Historical Anthropology: the Unwaged
Debate', special issue edited by Don Kalb, Hans Marks and Herman Tak.

The intersection and cross-fertilisation of anthropology and history have been a

major pre-occupation for both disciplines since at least the 1950s. Evans-Pritchard's
Marett Lecture1 and Braudel's piece in the D?bats et Combats section of Annales2
serve as benchmark statements on the necessity of the two disciplines to get
together. This special edition of Focaal attempts to assess the state of play in this
project of disciplinary rapprochement. In doing so, however, it sets up a new boundary
between two different ways of relating anthropology and history. Its editors propose
an unwaged debate, between what they identify as anthropological history and historical
anthropology. To avoid confusion in what follows, I propose to stick to the
definitions offered by the editors, and outlined below. Where I am talking more
neutrally about the project of relating anthropology and history, I shall use the term
anthropology-history.
In preparation for this volume, the editors wrote a position paper that outlines
the distinction between these two types of anthropology-history. Central to the
paper is Clifford Geertz's throw-away comment that anthropologists don't study
villages, but study in villages.3 This they take as an important methodological point,
posing questions about studying in villages and using 'scale reduction' as a technique
of analysis. The issue here is the relationship between the small-scale studies typical
of anthropology-history, and the extent to which they speak to wide historical
processes. What is the relationship between the local and the supra-local, between
structure and agency, hegemony and resistance? These are the first questions for the
unwaged debate. The second relate to the other half of Geertz's comment ? that
anthropologists study the people and culture of a village, not the village itself. Here,
the expansion of small facts to large issues is related not to social or political process

Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, 'Anthropology and History', in idem, Essays in Social Anthropology

(London: Faber and Faber, 1962).
Fernand Braudel, 'History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Dur?e', in idem, Braudel, On
History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Clifford Geertz, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture', in idem, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 22.

Contemporary European History, 6, 3 (1997), pp. 405-411 ? 1997 Cambridge University Press
Printed in the United Kingdom

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 4o6 Contemporary European History

but to the imputation of wider cultural systems that can be identified, analysed and,
above all, written, through exploring the particular. Here, questions revolve around
the extent to which cultural meanings are shared, integrated and static.
These two issues - scale reduction in analysing social relations, and scope
expansion in identifying cultural systems ? shape the two trends in anthropology
history. The first, anthropological history, is concerned with scope expansion,
exploring the particular to feed the abstraction of cultural systems. Informed by the
hermeneutic methods of symbolic anthropology,4 historians here use anthropology
to provide a cultural framework for understanding the past. The implication is that
the synchronie focus of symbolic anthropology offers historians a means by which
their diachronic data can be culturally contextualised. The second trend, historical
anthropology, uses the micro-situation to speak to wider processual issues. Its
method is scale reduction rather than scope expansion, the aim being to refine
concepts of social change, domination and power rather than examining the nature
of collective representations.
The position paper was circulated to almost seventy authors from a variety of
European and North American countries. They were asked to respond to the
position paper, and twenty of the responses form the main body of the volume. The
papers vary in length and scope, but all are shorter than the normal journal
contribution. The result is a rather fragmented volume, which argues round the
debate in a variety of ways ? some enlightening, others less so. It is a rather bitty
read, with contributors not really having the space to develop their arguments fully.
In particular, space for the development of more extended historical and/or
ethnographic examples might have been helpful. Nevertheless, there are some nice
pieces here. The volume might be particularly useful for advanced-level teaching,
using particular contributions to stimulate debate.
The editors tried to sort the responses to their position paper in three sections,
concerned with 'Finding culture (and anthropology)', 'Pluralizing culture (and
history)' and 'Dynamizing culture (and power)'. The first section deals with the
anthropologising of history, the second with a variety of critiques of modernism in
both anthropology and history, and the third with the historicisation of anthro
pology. The division into these sections seems somewhat uneasy. Many of the
papers could have appeared in any of the sections, and perhaps the attempt to
anchor them down in this way reflects the editors' attempts to maintain the
classification they make between historical anthropology and anthropological
history.
Such classifications will always raise the hackles of those who think they fall
outside, or across, their terms. Marshall Sahlins, who declined to contribute, is cited
in the editors' introductory chapter: 'Marshall Sahlins wrote that we were apparently
not familiar with his work since we reproduced dichotomies that he had been trying

For a schematic account of developments in anthropological theory, including symbolic

anthropology, see Sherry B. Ortner, 'Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties', Comparative Studies in
Society and History, Vol. 26 (1984), 126-66.

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 A Bridge Too Far? 407

to go beyond'.5 Many of those who responded also question the terms of the
debate. This suggests that perhaps one of the reasons why it remained so long
unwaged was that it was unwageable.
One of the main issues surrounding the debate is the extent to which scale
reduction and scope expansion reify the categories they uncover, making social
process or cultural system look like monolithic, irresistible forces in people's lives.
The same could be said of the editors' theoretical classification. Anthropological
history and historical anthropology are presented as the only choice in
anthropology-history. The breadth of contributions gives a fragmented feel that in
itself undermines the classification. It is only in theoretical abstraction that a division
between anthropological history and historical anthropology really makes sense.
This raises questions about the relationship between such theoretical work, and the
practice of anthropology-history.
By far the most successful, and convincing, of the contributions are those which
use extended examples from ethnographic or historical research. These papers
demonstrate the power of practice- rather than theory-driven research. Again
instructive are the words of a non-contributor, James Scott, who is cited in the
introductory chapter as saying that he thought theory and research should go
together, 'and that he did not see the point of a presumably abstract debate'.6
There are some papers which pursue a purely theoretical debate, and maintain
the distinction between anthropological history and historical anthropology, indeed
between anthropology and history themselves. Asa Boholm, for example, investi
gates the value of putting history into anthropology and anthropology into history.
The former gives anthropologists' synchronie understanding a diachronic flourish.
With a chronological orientation 'the present day community may be understood as
a product of its past'.7 Thus, history in anthropology is an embellishment to an
essentially synchronie discipline. In putting anthropology into history, the opposite
occurs, introducing synchrony to the diachronic historical focus.
Gabriel van den Brink also maintains the traditional division of labour between
history and anthropology as respectively past-diachronic and present-synchro nie.
He even produces a diagram by way of illustration. For him, the main connection
between the disciplines is otherness ? in time for historians, in space for anthro
pologists. This is what enables cross-disciplinary communication. But communica
tion is always rooted in the distinction synchrony?diachrony. He concludes his
piece with 'the somewhat paradoxical appeal of an historian to the discipline of
anthropology to please continue with the development of timeless models and
unhistoric concepts'.8

Don Kalb, Hans Marks and Herman Tak, 'Historical Anthropology and Anthropological
History: Two Distinct Programs', Focaal, Vol. 26-7 (1996), 9.
6 Ibid., 9.
7 Asa Boholm, 'Anthropology in History - History in Anthropology', Focaal, Vol. 26-7 (1996), 36.
Gabriel van den Brink, 'A Fruitful Alliance ? on the Relationship between History and
Anthropology', Focaal, Vol. 26-7 (1996), 47.

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 408 Contemporary European History

Both Boholm and van den Brink, then, stress the synchronie element in
anthropology. Peter Burke, for his part, asks whether anthropology-informed
history has overstated the synchronie, and ended up becoming simply synchrony in
the past. The implication here is that historians have overstated the synchronie focus
of anthropology and picked up a stereotyped and outmoded version of what it
stands for. Van den Brink himself acknowledges a certain time-lag in historians' use
of anthropology, but sees that as an inevitable consequence of the disciplines'
different approaches. Anthropologists' more recent concern with social change,
process and practice belies this image of the synchronie. Indeed anthropologists'
search for diachronic models is central to Burke's own History and Social Theory.9
Henk Dreissen also signals the dangers of borrowing outmoded tools from
neighbouring disciplines. He points out that in everyday academic life, anthropology
and history are distinct projects, with separate methodologies and contrasting
identities. However, he does not feel that a fusion is impossible. Citing Daniel
Nugent's Spent Cartridges of Revolution, he argues forcefully for the rejection of three
fallacies shared by anthropology-history.10 These are presentism, or an assumption of
the value of synchronie study, centrism, or the exploration of the local purely in
terms of the national or international ? a familiar picture in which what happens at
the local level is merely a reflex of wider processes ? and abstractness. This last fallacy
seems most apposite, as it refers to the tendency to explain socio-cultural process
only in terms of theoretical assumptions. For Dreissen, the beauty of Nugent's
book, an examination of a Mexican town since the 1910?20 revolution, is that it
studies people, not process. He therefore makes a call for practice-orientated
research, rather than theoretical debate.
Dreissen's is one of the three papers that explicitly address the institutional
differences between history and anthropology. The notion of disciplinary bound
aries is forcefully rejected by both Hans Medick and David William Cohen. They
see the power of anthropology-history in its non-doctrinaire approach to both
theory and method. The intersection has produced a 'movement', argues Cohen,
which resists definition and is by its nature heterogeneous.
The issue of homogeneity also looms large, as an institutional, theoretical and
methodological problem. Medick and Cohen present the institutional issue,
doubting the homogeneity of anthropology, history, anthropological history and
historical anthropology. Many of the contributors present the issue of homogeneity
as a theoretical challenge to accepted 'master narratives', whether based on liberal
modernisation theories of Marxian analyses of globalisation/world systems. Here,
there are criticisms of both scope expansion and scale reduction. While the former
threatens to reify cultural systems at the cost of symbolic agency and the ability of
actors to produce their own meanings, the latter reduces action to mere reflex of
political structure. This can be represented either as a positive correlation between

9 Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992).

1 Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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 A Bridge Too Far? 409

structure and action, whereby action is determined by structure, or negatively,

whereby structure provokes resistance, as a response or reflex. Either way, action is
subservient to structure and agency is denied.
Heidi Dahles and Jan de Wolf both argue against these theoretical reifications to
stress the multiplicity of historical experiences, Dahles through the metaphor of
tourism - the post-modern trope par excellence. Even Gerald Sider, who steadfastly
rejects all forms of post-modernist theory, nevertheless insists that we examine the
multiplicity of experiences in our attempts to understand power and history. Placed
in the context of the on-going debate, these arguments agree that scale reduction
can usefully speak to the relationship between the local and the supralocal, but that
neither local nor global processes can be read as reflexes of each other.
The multiplicity of histories is most amply illustrated by Karen Fog Olwig's
examination of an oral history project in the American Virgin Island of St John. The
project set about recording and writing down oral history narratives, particularly
those centred around the slave rebellion of 1733. This was a significant event in the
history of the St John people, and so accounts of it were politically important, but
there were severe misgivings about having these oral accounts written down. There
were profound reservations about the possibility of cultural reification or labelling of
St Johnians if the integrity of particular oral narratives was subverted by a
homogenised, general oral history of the rebellion.
This dilemma is also the dilemma of the anthropologist-historian. On the one
hand, a certain level of generality is needed, in order to convey the sense of a
collective experience of the past and examine the effects of wider social processes.
On the other hand, such generality denies and does injustice to particular people's
experiences at the local level. Like Nugent, Fog Olwig suggests that we turn to an
examination of people's actual experiences of their history. She observed in St John
that people were very capable of integrating and locating themselves at the
crossroads of a whole range of social, economic and cultural forces. She suggests that
rather than reifying these processes as analytical tools, anthropologist-historians
examine the ways in which people in societies understand them. Again, the call for
a practice-orientated research project reveals the relative poverty of theory.
If Sider is critical of post-modern assumptions, his misgivings go alongside a
number of critiques of Geertzian interpretive methods. Don Handelman revisits the
controversy over Darnton's Great Cat Massacre, and criticises him for the static,
reified picture he paints of eighteenth-century French mentalit?.11 This is scope
expansion at its worst, for Handelman, in which the textual metaphor for culture
brings history to a complete standstill. What is even more disturbing, as far as this
reviewer is concerned, is Darnton's reification of the problematic concept of
national culture. In his chapter on peasant folk tales, there is explicit appeal to the
national differences between French and German folk tales, as evidence of different

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).

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 410 Contemporary European History

national cultures.12 This type of reification is the same as that to which Fog Olwig's
St Johnian informants objected, except that in this situation, the act holds no real
political promise. It is merely a construction based on the assumptions of the
historian.
Such reification of cultural systems, through the process of scope expansion, is
deeply suspicious to many of the contributors, but for some, this is a product of
historians' naive use of Geertz, rather than any problem with his methodology as
such. Once again, we might heed the warnings of van den Brink and Dreissen that
interdisciplinary work can lead to misunderstanding.
John Eidson, in an essay on Geertz's notion of agonism, argues that it is precisely
Geertz who can offer a methodology that integrates scope expansion and scale
reduction, and produce a unified anthropology-history dealing with the general and
the particular. Geertz has been much criticised for his assumption of collective
meanings shared at all levels of? particularly Balinese - society. Eidson thinks that
these criticisms miss the point about his notion of cultural system ? namely, that it is
eternally contested. Eidson focuses on the concept of agonism in Geertz's work,
which contradicts the implications of consensus and shared meanings, replacing it
with a politics of meaning. Agonism, he argues, is 'a function of the attempt of
diverse groups to articulate and justify their concerns in a way that is distinct yet
communicable'.13 Rather than being static and determinate, then, cultural systems
are simply the media through which conflict and contest are expressed.
Agonism emancipates protest from the category resistance, which has come to
stand for the knee-jerk reactions of subordinate groups to hegemony and power. It
also emancipates culture from the assumptions of homogeneity and reification. It
therefore takes analysis beyond the privileging of social process characteristic of scale
reduction and the project of historical anthropology. It also takes it beyond scope
expansion and the assumptions of cultural system inherent in anthropological
history. This is a useful theoretical piece that reconciles the terms of the debate,
suggesting new ways of formulating the project of anthropology-history.
The focus on agonism is reminiscent of Robert Davis's account of the ritualised
fist-fights between members of two different factions in Renaissance Venice.14 The
Castellani and Nicolotti, centred around ship-building and fishing communities,
were agonistic rivals. Periodically they would arrange - or have arranged - fights for
the control of important bridges that crossed the canals of Venice. The fights
constituted important moments for the pursuit of honour on the part of the fist
fighters. This honour represented not only themselves but also their neighbour
hoods and factions. They were therefore an opportunity for the groups to emphasise
their difference, while at the same time allowing them to participate in a collective

12 See also James Fernandez, 'Historians Tell Tales: of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights',
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 60 (1988), 113-27.
John Eidson, 'Homo Symbolans Agonisticus: Geertz's "Agonistic" Vision and its Implications for
Historical Anthropology', Focaal, Vol. 26-7 (1996), 115.
14 Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance
Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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 A Bridge Too Far? 411

act. The bridges acted as a literal and symbolic stage for the acting out of group
identity.
This edition of Focaal offers two bridges between history and anthropology, then
invites the rival factions to bare their knuckles and do battle. The results are
inevitably scrappy, but cover a lot of ground. The Venetian wars of the fists died out
in the early eighteenth century. One suspects that this might be the last war of the
anthropologists-historians.
So long as disciplinary interest foments mistrust, then a certain agonism may be
inevitable. But it seems clear that the energies of anthropologists, historians and
anthropologist-historians is best expended in pursuit of practical research, rather
than fighting over theoretical bridges.

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