HISTORIES FOR ANTHROPOLOGY

Ten Years of Historical Research and Writing by Anthropologists, 1980–1990

Susan Kellogg

The past, once considered the exclusive domain of historians and antiquarians, has increasingly been embraced by anthropologists. Today, it is difficult to find a major anthropological study that does not claim to offer a diachronic, processual, historical analysis. In examining ten years of historical anthropological writing, I cover three broad topics in this essay. First, I explain the emergence of a more historical anthropology as a widespread response to a crisis in the conceptualization of culture. Second, I argue that while there are certain identifiable themes that cut across this literature, in general, it reflects long-standing topical interests within anthropology; I review this literature according to these topics rather than divide it into interpretive or cultural studies versus studies of political economy. Third, I try to assess this body of work critically. I concentrate here on anthropological history as both research and textual practice, as well as briefly examine anthropological uses of the concepts of time, colonialism, and structure and agency.

The first point I make is that anthropologists were never as indifferent to history as it now seems fashionable to assume. First and foremost, of course, there is the long influence of evolutionary thinking on both ethnographies and theory making; second, the persistence of an ethnohistory and cultural anthropology concerned with native Americans (e.g., see Eggan 1966; De Laguna 1960; Spicer 1962; Wallace 1970); third, the research of a group of ethnographers who worked from the 1950s on India or China, with their long indigenous trends of literacy, and who therefore found textual sources useful (e.g., Freedman 1958; Singer 1959; also see Cohn 1987), or who worked on Africa and were interested in social change (e.g., Barnes 1951; Cunnison 1951; Evans-Pritchard 1949, 1962; Smith 1960). Fourth, the developmental cycle literature also brought time (if not history) into analysis (Fortes 1949; Goody 1958).

But interest in history among anthropologists was not confined to these particular fields. Even in the dominant areas of study (structural-functional or cultural-symbolic), history was not wholly ignored. Prior to the 1970s, ethnographers working within these frameworks tended to treat history in three distinct ways. The most common was "history as preface." Anthropologists often began books with a few paragraphs, in a preface or introduction, offering historical background to a particular geographic area or social group. While they might allude to the impact of historical trends or developments treated in the main body of the text, these scholars made little effort to integrate historical themes systematically into the argument. It was also common for anthropologists to use "history as contrast": the distinctiveness of present forms gained resonance by comparison with past ones. Finally, those who drew on "history as data bank" used historical examples precisely because they were assumed not to differ fundamentally from the present.

In retrospect, these three uses of history appear to be ahistorical, in the sense that they do not inject a truly diachronic perspective into anthropological scholarship. Thus, symbolic anthropologists tended not to examine the emergence, maintenance, or transformation of symbolic systems; structuralists tended not to analyze the impact of historical developments on structures; and British social anthropologists tended not to examine how social groups, relationships, or institutions, or social structure itself, are produced, reproduced, and transformed.

The Emergence of a More Historical Anthropology

In the late 1970s, however, history began to acquire a much more important place in anthropological writings. The question then becomes, why. The answer to this question lies in a crisis over representation and authority that anthropology underwent during the 1970s (Marcus and Fischer 1986). This crisis called large parts of both anthropological research and theory into question; indeed, the whole concept of culture was thrown into question. One resolution to this crisis was the adoption of a more diachronic, processual conception of culture, which made history central to anthropological understanding.

Thirty years ago, most anthropologists, regardless of their theoretical orientation, accepted a "normative" definition of culture, according to which culture was a unified, coherent unit of analysis characterized by clearly defined behavior patterns and shared symbols and values. There was general recognition that latent tensions and conflict existed in all societies, but symbols, myths, and religious practices were assumed to mask these tensions and oppositions. But three movements outside anthropology profoundly destabilized the concept of culture within it: Marxist scholarship (Nash 1981; Ortner 1984: 138–44; Roseberry 1988), literary studies, and social history.

At least three alternative ideas about what culture is have emerged in recent anthropological writings in response to these different movements. The first conceives of culture as a multiplicity of groups and voices (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986); the second, as a battlefield on which competing groups struggle to define symbols and meanings (Fox 1985; Sider 1986; also see Rebel 1989); and the third, as a process inevitably involving contradiction, conflict, and accommodation and emphasizing actors' agency (Ortner 1989; Fowler 1987). For all their differences, these views each require that some account be taken of temporal phenomena as the sources of multiple social groups, beliefs, symbols, and actions.

This pluralistic conception of culture has been accompanied by a growing sensitivity to the relationship of culture to power and politics (what some call poetics and politics). Thus, many anthropologists attempt to understand how particular aspects of culture reflect, embody, reinforce, or challenge broader social and power relationships within a society. This increased sensitivity has taken diverse forms. For some anthropologists, collective action becomes a means of mediating between more persistent cultural beliefs or ideologies and rapidly changing political and economic structures (e.g., Nash 1979; Comaroff 1985; Fox 1985; Stoler 1985; Collier 1987; Schryer 1990; Taussig 1980, 1987). Other anthropologists, indebted to such figures as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, have focused less on power and politics and more on culture as a system of meaning—as codes, grammars, and structures of seeing embedded in rituals, discourse and rhetoric, and methods of socialization and social organization (e.g., Appadurai 1981; Behar 1986; Burkhart 1989; Dominguez 1986; Fowler 1987; Ortner 1989).

A third important development in anthropology has been a rejection of positivistic conceptions of human behavior in favor of the idea that all human behavior is mediated through the mind and that human perceptions, attitudes, emotions, language, and cognition are...