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Historical Anthropology (historical + anthropology)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences83%

Selected Abstracts

Historical Anthropology of Modern India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007
Saurabh Dube
The last three decades have seen acute interchanges between history and anthropology in theoretical and empirical studies. Scholarship on South Asia has reflected these patterns, but it has also reworked such tendencies. Here, significant writings of the 1960s and 1970s brought together processes of history and patterns of culture as part of mutual fields of analysis and description. These emphases have been critically developed more recently. Anthropologists and historians have rethought theory and method, in order not only to crucially conjoin but to explore anew the ,archive' and the ,field'. The blending has produced ,historical anthropology': writings that approach and explain in new ways elaborations of caste and community, colonialism and empire, nation and nationalism, domination and resistance, law and politics, myth and kingship, environment and ethnicity, and state and modernity , in the past and the present. Work in historical anthropology focuses on practice, process, and power, and often combines perspectives from gender, postcolonial, and subaltern studies. [source]

KOSELLECK, ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2010
STEFAN-LUDWIG HOFFMANN
ABSTRACT This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well-known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti-totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience. [source]

Historical Anthropology of Modern India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007
Saurabh Dube
The last three decades have seen acute interchanges between history and anthropology in theoretical and empirical studies. Scholarship on South Asia has reflected these patterns, but it has also reworked such tendencies. Here, significant writings of the 1960s and 1970s brought together processes of history and patterns of culture as part of mutual fields of analysis and description. These emphases have been critically developed more recently. Anthropologists and historians have rethought theory and method, in order not only to crucially conjoin but to explore anew the ,archive' and the ,field'. The blending has produced ,historical anthropology': writings that approach and explain in new ways elaborations of caste and community, colonialism and empire, nation and nationalism, domination and resistance, law and politics, myth and kingship, environment and ethnicity, and state and modernity , in the past and the present. Work in historical anthropology focuses on practice, process, and power, and often combines perspectives from gender, postcolonial, and subaltern studies. [source]

Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2007
MARK A. TVESKOV
Driven by the participation of Native American people in the contemporary political, cultural, and academic landscape of North America, public and academic discussions have considered the nature of contemporary American Indian identity and the persistence, survival, and (to some) reinvention of Native American cultures and traditions. I use a case study,the historical anthropology of the Native American people of the Oregon coast,to examine the persistence of many American Indian people through the colonial period and the subsequent revitalization of "traditional" cultural practices. Drawing on archaeological data, ethnohistorical accounts, and oral traditions, I offer a reading of how, set against and through an ancestral landscape, traditional social identities and relationships of gender and authority were constructed and contested. I then consider how American Indian people negotiated the new sets of social relationships dictated by the dominant society. [source]

Zur Pluralisierung im Luthertum des 17.

BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 3 2003
Jahrhunderts und ihrer Bedeutung für die Deutungen von, Natur'
Abstract Building on methodological considerations in cultural history and historical anthropology, the following contribution proceeds from the concept of ,nature' rather than from ,natural science', with the former understood here as the object of culturally determined projections, values and practices. This ,constructive', practice-oriented concept of nature exposes perceptions of and attitudes towards nature that, owing to the usual reduction of nature to natural science, would otherwise have remained hidden, but which may well be essential to its constitution. To a certain extent, the term ,nature' continues the terminological extension from ,natural science' to ,natural philosophy', but as a heuristic device it more strongly implies the significance of culturally mediated practices and dynamics. The essay raises the following questions: Which religious conceptions entered into which attitudes towards nature and which religious expectations and interpretive matrices were the motivating forces behind which studies of nature? The figures within seventeenth-century Lutheranism who shaped and promoted nature-oriented attitudes and practices were not the ,orthodox' scholars more strongly tied to academic and controversialist theology, but rather reform-oriented theologians critical of the church. In the context of the inner differentiation and pluralization of seventeenth-century Lutheranism, these reform-oriented groups not only inspired innovate theological projects but also assumed a leading role, along with liked-minded Christian laypersons, in interpreting and studying ,nature'. [source]

Historical Anthropology of Modern India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007
Saurabh Dube
The last three decades have seen acute interchanges between history and anthropology in theoretical and empirical studies. Scholarship on South Asia has reflected these patterns, but it has also reworked such tendencies. Here, significant writings of the 1960s and 1970s brought together processes of history and patterns of culture as part of mutual fields of analysis and description. These emphases have been critically developed more recently. Anthropologists and historians have rethought theory and method, in order not only to crucially conjoin but to explore anew the ,archive' and the ,field'. The blending has produced ,historical anthropology': writings that approach and explain in new ways elaborations of caste and community, colonialism and empire, nation and nationalism, domination and resistance, law and politics, myth and kingship, environment and ethnicity, and state and modernity , in the past and the present. Work in historical anthropology focuses on practice, process, and power, and often combines perspectives from gender, postcolonial, and subaltern studies. [source]