History and Anthropology Flashcards
Monaghan + Just - lesson to learn from anth
Look not at what they have discovered, but how they think about what they have learned
Monaghan + Just - origin of anthropology
Grew out of the intersection of European discovery, colonialism, and natural science
C19 - first anthropologists wanted to reconstruct stages of social and cultural evolution
Monaghan + Just - C20 anthropologists
Wanted to go into the ‘field’ as ethnographers to gather their own information - ethnography still distinguishes it from other social sciences
Monaghan + Just - early anthropologists
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
Monaghan + Just - example of use of spending long time periods in a culture
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
Monaghan + Just - object of ethnography
Study some particular aspect of social life - culture far too complicated to be understood fully
Monaghan + Just - ethnographic problems
Presents a group in complete isolation to time and the world
Representing the wider culture/group
Subjectivity due to observer bias
Monaghan + Just - ethics of ethnography
Avoid doing harm to people studied (pseudonyms)
Intervening in practices?
Intellectual property rights - ‘profiting’ from indigenous cultural knowledge
Monaghan + Just - culture definition
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
Burrow - Keith Thomas observation
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
Burrow - British anthropology since 1920s
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
Burrow - Sir James Frazier
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’
Burrow - reconceptualisation of ‘survivals’
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
Burrow - March Bloch
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
Thomas - Radcliffe-Brown statement
Declared history and anthropology as very different subjects - insisted on the need for generalisations and disparaging about ‘conjectural history’ of ethnographies
Thomas - Evans-Pritchard statement
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
Thomas - comparability of present
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
Thomas - anthropological methods
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
Thomas - key feature of anthropology
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
Thomas - danger of historical specialisation
Means certain aspects are often isolated from important information - anthropology tries to explain things in terms of each other, rather than treating them separately
Thomas - Middle Ages insight
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
Thomas - advantage of anthropologists over historians
Provide an inestimable advantage of direct experience in matters historians only read about
Thomas - useful of mentality studies
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
Thomas - use of anthropology to historians
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
