Anthropologists have taken apart Western assumptions about Law, Economics and Religion in order to overcome ethnocentrism in the study of these domains in other societies. The category of History, however, has not been subjected to such treatment. Although anthropologists and historians have collaborated to produce a large and vibrant subfield of ‘History and Anthropology’, they have tended to be guided by a readymade model of history. There has been little systematic reflection on the Western commonsense idea of history, nor much focus on the particular assumptions about the past that animate other societies. With this book series, we are calling for a new orientation that will concentrate squarely on how people, whether far away or within our own society, establish relationships with the past.
Examples of such alternative historicities (culturally particular ways of relating to the past) include spirit possession, popular genealogy and genomics, rituals ranging from shamanic practices to Easter processions, reenactments, and video gaming among many other possibilities. The editors invite monographs that approach the question of history through historical research, ethnography, cultural studies or other relevant methodologies. The past may be experienced through various senses and genres including music, drama, film and digital media thereby making the Anthropology of History a wide domain of interdisciplinary collaboration extending beyond Anthropology and History to approaches from Music, Art, Archaeology, Drama, and STS.
SERIES EDITORS
Stephan Palmié (University of Chicago) [email protected]
Charles Stewart (University College London) [email protected]
By Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
December 30, 2022
What stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, ...
By Diana Espírito Santo
August 10, 2022
Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to ...
By Eric Hirsch
August 01, 2022
Ancestral Presence tells a history that has more than one history in it while also telling the story of the relation between worlds. For the Fuyuge people of the Papuan highlands, the past is not ‘history’ in a conventional sense. For them, the world and its history derive from a creator force ...
By Byron Hamann
November 20, 2019
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved relations of Europeans and Native Americans in the Oaxacan town of Yanhuitlán (in New Spain, today’s Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and ...
Edited
By Stephan Palmié, Charles Stewart
April 02, 2019
This book considers how history is not just objectively lived but subjectively experienced by people in the process of orienting their present toward the past. It analyses affectivity in historical experience, examines the digital mediation of history, and assesses the current politics of competing...
