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Historical anthropology is ahistoriographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives fromsocial andcultural anthropology to the study of historical societies.[1] Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with thehistory of mentalities,cultural history,ethnohistory,microhistory,history from below orAlltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology includeEmile Durkheim,Heinrich Schurtz,Arnold van Gennep,Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,Marcel Mauss,Clifford Geertz,Jack Goody, andVictor Turner.[2]
Peter Burke has contrasted historical anthropology withsocial history, finding that historical anthropology tends to focus on qualitative rather than quantitative data, smaller communities, and symbolic aspects of culture.[2] Thus it reflects a turn in 1960sMarxist historiography away from 'the orthodox Marxist approach to human behaviour in which actors are seen as motivated in the first instance by economics, and only secondarily by culture or ideology', in the work of historians such asE. P. Thompson.[2]
Historical anthropology was rooted in theAnnales school, associated with a succession of major historians such asFernand Braudel,Jacques Le Goff,Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie andPierre Nora, along with researchers from elsewhere in Europe such asCarlo Ginzburg. The labelhistorical anthropology has been actively promoted by some recent Annales school historians, such asJean-Claude Schmitt.[3][4] Established in 1929 byMarc Bloch andLucien Febvre, the journalAnnales. Histoire, Sciences sociales is still among the most influential French publications for research in historical anthropology.
Historical anthropology has been open to similar criticisms to anthropology: 'asBernard Cohn andJohn andJean Comaroff have observed, studies in which societies were represented in this way were often partial, biased, and unwitting handmaidens to the domination of non-Western peoples by Europeans and Americans'.[2] But since the Second World War, increasingly reflexive approaches have led to sophisticated developments of the field, and the banner of 'historical anthropology' has often attracted Anglo-American historians in ways that the Annales school did not: key figures have beenSidney Mintz, Jay O'Brien, William Roseberry,Marshall Sahlins, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider,Eric Wolf,Peter Burke, and people from elsewhere in the world such asAaron Gurevich.
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