History and Anthropology

HistoriographyCharles Walton

Mentalités

• Anticipations:– Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, Le siècle de Louis

XIV (1740s-1750s)• Burkhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance

in Italy (1860)• Early Annales School– Beliefs and customs: a reflection of material

conditions (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, 1910s-1920s)

Mid 1950s

• Dominance of quantitative history

• Counting

• Economic and social forces– Marxism: class, means of production– Liberalism: development of capitalism

Cultural Anthropology1950s-1970s

• (Historians were not that interested…yet)

• Claude Lévi-Strauss– Structural Anthropology: kinship, mytheme

• Clifford Geertz– Deep play, thick description: Balinese cockfight

(symbolic competition for status)• Victor Turner– Liminality, conflict, ritual

Irony

• As cultural anthropology underwent an existential crisis, historians began borrowing from it…

– Religious and political rituals– Folktales, popular culture

Natalie Zemon Davis

• ‘Rites of Violence’ (1973)– Interpretation of the 16th century Wars of Religion• Opposed Marxist interpretations• Opposed irrational ‘mob’ theories• People expressed violence according to their beliefs• Looks for ‘goals, legitimations and occasions for

violence’• Crowds fill in where authorities are weak or absent• They express their beliefs through violence

– Targeting symbols, purifying through expulsion/destruction

Where’s the bourgeoisie?

Find the Bourgeoisie

Problems with Marxist categories

• Reductive explanation of group behaviour• Bourgeois sought to enter the ranks of nobility• French Revolutionaries were not capitalists• Capitalists did not behave like capitalists– Preferred to be rentiers, not expand the means of

production

Culture meets post-structuralism1970s-1980s

• Culture in the making– Not fixed or given (e.g.: lion = valor)– Play

• Cultural anthropologists borrow from history– Marshal Sahlins • Clash of cultures, under certain historical conditions,

produces certain cultural transfers and changes

But what is culture?

• Semiotics? (Language, symbols)• Discourse? (notions expressed in practices?)• Psychology, emotions

How do we get at culture?

• Anecdotes?• Cultural Anthropology• Psychology• Sociology• Mythology

Robert Darnton

• Who he is– Princeton University (1960s-2006)• with Natalie Zemon Davis and Clifford Geertz

– Director of Harvard Libraries (2006--)

• Social History of Ideas

• Daniel Mornet: what people actually read

‘The High Enlightenment and Low-Life of Literature’ (1971)

• The summit view of eighteenth-century intellectual history has been described so often and so well that it might be useful to strike out in a new direction, to try to get to the bottom of the Enlightenment, and even to penetrate into its underworld, where the Enlightenment may be examined as the Revolution has been studies recently—from below.

• Digging downward in intellectual history calls for new methods and new materials, for grubbing in archives instead of contemplating philosophical treatises.

One archive – Groundbreaking studies

• 1970s– Low-life (still emphasis on class, but class rage

expressed in libels)• The business of the Enlightenment– Causes of Revolution are skirted• Circumstances, political and economic crises• But once crisis hit, these grub street writers exploded

into politics

1980s

• Semiotics• The Great Cat Massacre (1984)– ‘Peasants Tell Tales’– ‘Workers Revolt: the Great Cat Massacre on the rue

Saint Séverin’ – micro-history with heavy semiotic analysis, but still sensitive to class

– ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’• Reading as a practice to cope with life’s difficulties• Moral and emotional activity• Readers bond with authors… What is an author?

1980s

• Culture is asserting itself more as an autonomous sphere of historical inquiry, replacing class…

• Jokes– Fiji-$499… advert in basement of library: analysis

text and context• Metaphors– ‘We think about the world in the same way as we talk

about, by establishing metaphorical relations .’ Kiss of Lamourette

1980s

• The study of mentalités: – ‘It is a sort of intellectual history of non-

intellectuals, and attempt to reconstruct the cosmology of the common man, or, more modestly, to understand the attitudes assumptions, and implicit ideologies of specific social groups.’

1990s

• Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995)– Culture can now have causal force, but not

independently of other material and social forces– Pornography: epistemological shifts expressed– Libel: grafted onto genre of history writing– Books: different than pamphlets-have staying power– ‘Narrative frames’ get set up: the history of Old

Regime is one of monarchy degenerating into corruption and despotism

Public Opinion at origins of French Revolution?

• Cultural approaches– Discourse (Baker)– Content and diffusion (Darnton)– Secularised reading habits (Chartier)

• From intensive to extensive• Less reverential reading

• Darnton’s return to quantification?– He counted book orders for forbidden books to

measure their importance