the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History

[The Possibilities of the past]: A Comment

Author(s): Carlo Ginzburg
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 2, The New History: The 1980s
and beyond (II) (Autumn, 1981), pp. 277-278
Published by: The MIT Press
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Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, xII:2 (Autumn 198I), 277-278.

Anthropology and History in the I980s

Carlo Ginzburg

A Comment The growing influence, in recent years, of

history on anthropology, and vice-versa, is well known. The
emergence of a common area of research at the border between
the two disciplines has been triggered by two crises: the end of
the structured, self-confident notion of history and the growing
consciousness among anthropologists that the presumed native
cultures were themselves a historical product. Both crises are
connected to the end of the world colonial system, and to the
collapse of the related unilinear notion of history.
Two features of anthropologists' work have had a powerful
impact on a good number of historians: the emphasis on cultural
distance, and the attempt to overcome it by emphasizing the inner
coherence of every aspect of societies widely different from our
own. Historians have tried to look at old topics (for instance,
political power) or at old evidence (for instance, inquisitorial
records) in a different way. Behaviors and beliefs traditionally
seen as senseless, irrelevant, or at best marginal curiosities (for
instance, magic and supersitition) have been analyzed at last as
valid human experiences.
The result of this intellectual effort has been a new way of
presenting documentary evidence; the revival of narrative, as
stressed by Stone in a recent article, has been deeply influenced
by the practice of case studies among anthropologists. The em-
phasis on lived experience and the close reading of evidence are
connected with the choice of specific literary devices. It is usual
to insist on the rhetorical and emotional value of these literary
devices; but it is necessary also to analyze their cognitive, as well
as methodological and ideological implications. From a general
point of view, it could be said that every history, even if it is
filled with statistics and figures, is a story, a piece of narrative:

Carlo Ginzburg is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bologna. He is the

author of The Cheese and the Worms:The Cosmosof a Sixteenth-CenturyMiller (Baltimore,
1977).
0022-1953/81/020277-2 $02.50/0
? I981 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of
Interdisciplinary
History.

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278 CARLO GINZBURG

but different models of narrative have been selected by historians

in different times. It would be naive to take for granted a model
(borrowed by nineteenth-century novels) in which a God-histo-
rian knows everything, including the hidden motivations of his
characters-individuals, groups, or social classes. An anthropo-
logical look at the ways in which anthropologists and historians
communicate their findings would be useful to both disciplines.1
The growing number of detailed studies on circumscribed
historical phenomena has often been lamented as a fragmentation
of the historical discipline. It seems to me, however, that this is
a price to be paid for elaborating more powerful analytical tools.
Case studies obviously imply generalizations: but it is difficult to
predict whether the general frame of reference for this kind of
analysis will be provided by history, anthropology, or both.

I Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past
& Present, 85 (I979), 3-24.

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