History and Anthropology

Question 1

Monaghan + Just - lesson to learn from anth

Answer 1

Look not at what they have discovered, but how they think about what they have learned

Question 2

Monaghan + Just - origin of anthropology

Answer 2

Grew out of the intersection of European discovery, colonialism, and natural science

C19 - first anthropologists wanted to reconstruct stages of social and cultural evolution

Question 3

Monaghan + Just - C20 anthropologists

Answer 3

Wanted to go into the ‘field’ as ethnographers to gather their own information - ethnography still distinguishes it from other social sciences

Question 4

Monaghan + Just - early anthropologists

Answer 4

Typically concerned with small-scale, technologically simple societies

Due to desire to record ways of life rapidly changing with colonisation and get at ‘elementary’ form of human institutions

Question 5

Monaghan + Just - example of use of spending long time periods in a culture

Answer 5

Dou Donggo of Indonesia - example of crime and appropriate punishment according to laws (woman attacked by a man)

Invisible to historian as they keep no written records

Even ethnographic historian using oral histories would have difficulty accessing the case, as it is accepted tribal practice never to discuss a dispute once it is settled

Question 6

Monaghan + Just - object of ethnography

Answer 6

Study some particular aspect of social life - culture far too complicated to be understood fully

Question 7

Monaghan + Just - ethnographic problems

Answer 7

Presents a group in complete isolation to time and the world

Representing the wider culture/group

Subjectivity due to observer bias

Question 8

Monaghan + Just - ethics of ethnography

Answer 8

Avoid doing harm to people studied (pseudonyms)

Intervening in practices?

Intellectual property rights - ‘profiting’ from indigenous cultural knowledge

Question 9

Monaghan + Just - culture definition

Answer 9

Ability to conceptualise the world an to communicate these conceptions symbolically

To do with aspects of human cognition and activity that are derived from what we learn as members of society

Question 10

Burrow - Keith Thomas observation

Answer 10

1963 - protested against historical specialisation by subject matter, contrasted it with how anthropologists studied small-scale societies in their totality

Saw overlaps between matters studied by anthropologists in preliterate societies and some phenomena studied by historians of preliterate European society

Question 11

Burrow - British anthropology since 1920s

Answer 11

Partly under influence of Durkheimian ideas, it moved away from evolutionism and towards the conceptual understanding of small societies through the key terms structure and function

Question 12

Burrow - Sir James Frazier

Answer 12

Initially saw the use in combining study of ‘primitive’ societies with European ‘folklore’

However, his aegis of evolutionism relegated superstitious beliefs and rituals to the category of ‘survivals’

Question 13

Burrow - reconceptualisation of ‘survivals’

Answer 13

As Thomas saw

By asking what thoughts hitherto conceptualised as survivals meant to those who thought them, and what people’s ritual did for them, it could be possible to see how those phenomena fitted into people’s lives and conceptions of the world

Opened up the studies of pre-modern societies in a new way

Question 14

Burrow - March Bloch

Answer 14

Pioneer - from the 1920s onwards, greater attention to rituals/exorcisms/etc. as points of access to unseen worlds

Rather than ‘superstition’ or ‘faith’, the phrase ‘system of belief’ relativized and historicised both, and was implicitly comparative

Question 15

Thomas - Radcliffe-Brown statement

Answer 15

Declared history and anthropology as very different subjects - insisted on the need for generalisations and disparaging about ‘conjectural history’ of ethnographies

Question 16

Thomas - Evans-Pritchard statement

Answer 16

Suggested difference between the disciplines were those of technique rather than aim

New anthropologists no longer made sweeping statements, but specialised ion two or three societies, giving intimacy of acquaintance

Question 17

Thomas - comparability of present

Answer 17

Since anthropologists write on fieldwork done in their youth for the rest of their career, there is a sense in which the ‘ethnographic present’ is comparable to the historical present

Question 18

Thomas - anthropological methods

Answer 18

Anthropologists do not generalise lightly, and their conclusions rest upon a sound foundation of empirical fieldwork

Makes historical evidence look very flimsy, also less rhetoric in anthropological writing

Question 19

Thomas - key feature of anthropology

Answer 19

However specialised the anthropologist is, they always make it against a background of their conception of the social system to which it related

Not just ethnographies, but interpretation and interrelation of those facts, leads to serious analysis rather than the random impressionism of some Whig historians

Question 20

Thomas - danger of historical specialisation

Answer 20

Means certain aspects are often isolated from important information - anthropology tries to explain things in terms of each other, rather than treating them separately

Question 21

Thomas - Middle Ages insight

Answer 21

Hagiography of the Middle Ages linked with the festivals of the church year, which reflected the rhythms of agricultural life

Knowledge gained from anthropologists concerning the importance of dancing as a bond of community life tells us something about the Puritan attack on maypoles

Question 22

Thomas - advantage of anthropologists over historians

Answer 22

Provide an inestimable advantage of direct experience in matters historians only read about

Question 23

Thomas - useful of mentality studies

Answer 23

Anthropological studies of primitive mentality could provide valuable reinforcements to historians confronted by a paucity of evidence for the mental life of the lower reaches of the distant society they are studying

Question 24

Thomas - use of anthropology to historians

Answer 24

Not just due to surface resemblances

It can help to widen the present subject matter of history

Also gives the historian the technique to deal with both his new subject matter and already familiar problems

Question 25

Thomas - value of myths

Answer 25

Since the theories of Malinowski, anthropologists observe myth in primitive society not as an accurate record of the past but as a validating ‘charter’ for current relationships

Value to historian lies in what they say about the society in which they were composed, not the one they relate to

Question 26

Cloak - anthropology definition

Answer 26

The study, or science, of man

Man as an animal (physical) and person (cultural)