Historical Anthropology
Discussion
The Historical Anthropological Perspective
Robert Carmack:
Historical Anthropology may be defined as the discipline by which cultural studies are carried out using historical methods; its main concepts, theories, objects of study, and humanitarian goals are those of anthropology in general. Methodologically, Historical Anthropologists tend to be eclectic; they draw data from documentary, archaeological, ethnographic, biological, and geographic among other sources. The term ‘Ethnohistory’ can be seen as a more specialized label that refers to the historiographic methods applied within Historical Anthropology (Carmack 1972). One of the main reasons for adopting Historical Anthropology as а working framework is to emphasize anthropology's current global perspective; anthropologists no longer focus only on native, non-Western peoples – as the term ‘ethnohistory’ still connotes to many – but on the wider field of interaction between both native and highly modernized peoples.
Conceptualizing Historical Anthropology in this broad manner also invites us to consider its close ties to other historical sciences, and thus to exploit their well-established theoretical traditions in the conduct of historical research. Perhaps the closest cognate field to Historical Anthropology is Historical Sociology, and one of the most useful discussions of that field is by Theda Skocpol (1984). She claims that а genre of Historical Sociology has been created that is ‘transdisciplinary’, and it includes Anthropology as well as History itself. Skocpol further argues that Historical Sociology has its roots in the classic writings of scholars like Marx, Durkheim, Weber (and, we might add, Spencer), scholars who sought a satisfactory integration of theory and empirical historical studies.
The key issues studied within the historical disciplines are related to the sociocultural transformations that gave rise to the modern world; it is our position that these same issues are relevant to studies of the pre-modern world. Some of the central issues concern the origin and development of economies and states, the creation and spread of ideologies and religions, the causes and consequences of revolutions, the relations between macrosocial networks and microsocial communities. The general theoretical models by which these issues can be studied, following the Weberian, Marxian, Durkheimian, and Spencerian traditions, would include for example ‘Social Action’ theory, ‘Historical Materialism’, ‘Interpretivism’, ‘Evolutionism’. The theoretical position adopted in this study is most closely associated with Weber's Social Action perspective.
Preference is given to Max Weber (Roth and Wittich 1968; Giddens 1971) because he insisted that we construct histories by placing economic and political relations within their cultural contexts, and vice versa.
Such sociocultural relationships must be studied not only from the inside (endogeny) but also from the outsided (exogeny); that is to say, we must take into account internal influences that come from within the constituent social units as well as external relations (intersocietal) between these units. Weber further insisted that comparative studies provide the best way to obtain an understanding of particular societies and their intersocietal relations. Finally, this theoretical perspective includes the mandate that historical studies are carried out at local, regional, national, and international levels.
For the purposes of this essay, two master concepts that follow from the Weberian genre of Historical Anthropology are highlighted: ‘World Systems’, and ‘Civilizations’. World systems provide crucial social contexts within which large cultural traditions, civilizations, are created and transformed. According to David Wilkinson (1995), these two concepts refer to the same sociocultural ‘entity’, and thus together they make it possible to take into account both the social (world systems) and the cultural (civilizations) dimensions in the widest scope of historical studies. Embedded in the Weberian approach as well are two historical tendencies or strategies that are useful: ‘primordialism’, and ‘instrumentalism’ (A. Smith 1986). The primordial strategy is designed to understand the historical antecedents by which cultural forms such as ethnicity, nationalism, and civilization are constructed. The Instrumental approach requires that we study the contemporary social contexts to which cultural traditions are continually responding and in the process changing.
From a Social Action perspective both tendencies are useful and, despite the popularity of instrumentalism (or ‘constructionism’) in the social sciences today, in this essay preference will be given to primordialism.
The rationale for this is that without an understanding of historical antecedents we can never determine the extent to which instrumental constructions have actually taken place. As the great historian of Russia, Nicholas Riasanovsky (1993: 11), put it: ‘Con-tinuity is the very stuff of history... [and] continuity is indispensable for group culture’.”