Anthropology, History, and Memory in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Memoriam Michel Izard
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2014, Vol 13, Issue 2
Abstract
The present special issue explores the manifold relations between history, memory, and anthropological research. Explicitly or not, history has always been a particular reference for anthropological research (Willford and Tagliacozzo 2009). First of all, anthropologists most often deal with the past not only when attempting to reconstruct past events and conditions, but rather to look at social change, innovation, and transformation, enabling then to position their findings in larger theoretical perspectives: from (neo-)evolutionism, the Vienna School, (Neo-)Marxism to globalization theories (Barnard 2000). Evolutionists (from the classics of the nineteenth century to contemporary ‘neoevolutionists’) are, for example, enthusiastic about the prospects of amalgamation of the two disciplines and view anthropology actually as a study of cultural history. On the contrary, anthropologists of different relativistic schools are more or less skeptical in their views on the usefulness of history for anthropological research as a study of contemporary cultures. For example, such a powerful figure as Malinowski argued that what he called conjectural history can give very little to anthropology, if anything at all (see Tokarev 1978: 235–236; Carneiro 2002: 81–82).
Authors and Affiliations
Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Tilo Grätz, Petr Skalník
Keywords
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