This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article.
In discussing history and anthropology together, it is often acknowledged 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, turning on dissension and dialogue, are principally premised upon framing anthropology and history as already known, taken for granted disciplines. Here, each pre-figured enquiry is seen as characterized by its own discrete desires and distinct methods, concerning research and writing, analysis and description. Arguably, what is required is another approach to the subjects of history and anthropology, their tensions and intersections, their contentions and crossovers.
Three matters assume salience. First, to juxtapose anthropology and history is to reconsider these enquiries, sieving them against their formidable disciplinary conceits. Second, 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, especially when mapped as careful genealogies and critical poetics of anthropological and historical knowledges. Third, and finally, at stake are bids that stay with and think through received configurations of tradition and temporality, culture and power, and hermeneutic and analytical procedures. These make possible the tracking of astute articulations, often recent, of historical consciousness and subaltern pasts, gender and sexuality, nation and state, and colony and modernity—based on the shared sensibilities of anthropology, history, and associated enquiries and perspectives.