Central tensions and overview

Central tension in anthropological approaches to history?

• Who gets to have history and on whose terms

• Western anthropology has treated history as belonging to the modern world and non-western people were seen as static and pre-modern without history

Fields core question

• Shifted from asking why non-western peoples were excluded from history towards what does it mean that history itself excludes certain ways of being and knowing as real

Early anthropology and history

• Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown focused on the structure and function of present societies, paying little attention to change, colonialism, or global processes

• Societies treated as static and timeless

Four main turns

1. Ethical Turn - how individuals engage with moral ideas

2. Ontological turn - differences as different realities

3. Material turn - Objects have agency

4. De-colonial turn - Critiques Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and anthropology's colonial origins.

Issue with western histography

• Denied non-European peoples agency by treating them as passive recipients of Western forces.

• Privileged written records, making oral traditions and non-documentary historical consciousness appear inferior or absent.