Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos “Tagungen” (original) (raw)
Related papers
In this context" : the many histories of anthropology
2004
My thanks to Wilson Trajano Filho for his suggestions that helped me clarify several cloudy ideas in the first draft, and to Antonádia Borges for the good conversations that moved me to further develop some of the themes discussed herein. George Stocking read the first draft and contributed with many comments, making this occasion a new experience of dialogue.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2012
Some 45 years ago, I was presented with an examination question that asked me to discuss a dictum by the distinguished Victorian legal historian, F. W. Maitland: "My own belief is that by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing." I had no real idea what the question meant, but, as anthropology and history are and were good things, I had no objection to anthropology's becoming history. However, I did not answer the question. Were I to do so now, I might ask what kind of anthropology and what kind of history are signified, as the answers to such questions depend on temporal, spatial, social, and personal factors, inter alia. Do we mean the old-fashioned high school history with lots of dates and battles, biographies that detail who had tea with whom, Whiggish history, strict historicism, Marxist history, or even Foucauldian genealogy? Do we mean evolutionary anthropology, structural-functionalism, historical particularism (which, after all, contains the word history)? What about French structuralism, political economy, or anthropological postmodernism? Most anthropologists reading Maitland's remarks today would not realize that for him (as for Boas in another country) the details of history were a necessary correction to premature, scientific attempts at comparative, evolutionary generalization. All of this means that one should have an idea what one is discussing when one talks about boundary crossing between academic disciplines and the blurring of genres, because the genres may be blurred to begin with. Accordingly, I approached this collection of chapters, based on a workshop at Cornell University, with a degree of skepticism, thinking that it would be another, tiring attempt to exhaust banal questions. I was favorably surprised in all possible ways. The editors, Willford and Tagliacozzo, claim that the volume's authors "use the interdisciplinary boundaries of history and anthropology to reveal the contingencies of knowledge production" (p. 1). Two of the chapters are primarily theoretical (Arnold and Cohen); the others examine ethnographic or historical issues in particular locales. Arnold's chapter and most of the remainder are to some degree concerned with the relationship between power and the generation of representations, narratives, and identities; and many are concerned with issues of "agency and subjectivity." bs_bs_banner 256 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2
"History, Anthropology, and Rethinking Modern Disciplines"
in *Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Anthropology* , New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
In discussing together history and anthropology, it is often argued that the relationship between the two has been contradictory and contentious, but that their interplay has also been prescient and productive. At the same time, such considerations are principally premised upon framing anthropology and history as already known disciplines. Arguably, what is needed is another approach to the subjects of history and anthropology, sieving them against their disciplinary conceits. Moreover, this requires exploring the constitutive linkages of the two with empire and nation, time and space, race and reason as well as with wider transformations of the human sciences. These reveal curious connections as much as mutual makeovers. Finally, all of this suggests thinking through received configurations of tradition and temporality, culture and power, and hermeneutic and analytical procedures. These make possible the tracking of astute articulations of subaltern formations and historical conceptions, gender and sexuality, colony and nation, slavery and heritage, and empire and modernity-based on the shared sensibilities of anthropology, history, and associated enquiries. I