Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History

Article published in the «American Anthropologist», New Series — 1983 — Vol. 85 — No. 3 (Sep.) — pp. 517-544Western historians have been arguing for a long time over two polar ideas of right historiography. As opposed to an elite history, narrated with an eye singular to the higher politics, others propose a study whose object would be the life of communities. "For the last fourteen hundred years, the only Gauls, apparently, have been kings, ministers and generals," Voltaire complained, and vowed to write instead a "history of men." The latest "new history" is also of the populist persuasion. Sometimes client of the social sciences, it is concerned with such matters as unconscious structures, collective mentalities, and general economic trends. It tends to be populist in the salience it gives to the practical circumstances of underlying populations. A distinguished historian (Stone 1981:23) invokes Thomas Gray: "Let not . . . grandeur hear with a disdainful smile. The short and simple annals of the poor." The idea is that history is culturally constructed from the bottom up: as the precipitate, in social institutions and outcomes, of the prevailing inclinations of the pcople-in-general.