Revisiting Anthropology and History: Fieldwork, Archive, Temporality

While the disciplines of anthropology and history have developed in a reciprocal relationship of rapprochements, mutual borrowings and fierce annexations, more recently, explicit reflection on this relationship have become rare. Anthropologists engage with temporality, the past, and the archive without necessarily making recourse to historiography. Historians, as they engage in reflections on globalizations – past and present – often ignore anthropology’s conceptual toolkit. However, there are at least two areas in which a cross-disciplinary engagement is promising. For both anthropology and history, an engagement with each other enlarges an understanding of temporality, both with respect to frames of analysis and ways of narrating scholarship. Such an engagement also expands spaces of scholarly analysis that are defined by fieldwork and the archive, i.e., employing archival methods for fieldwork as well as conceptualizing the archive as a field-site.

This workshop, addressing graduate students in both anthropology and history, aims to explore this constellation from two perspectives: 1. the workshop seeks to engage the participants in discussions on the role of history in anthropological approaches to social worlds. 2. participants analyze, employing an anthropological view of historical research, the timeliness and situatedness of their own research projects in the present.

Furthermore, the workshop will address, amongst others, the following questions: What role can fieldwork play in historical work? What might be the position of the archive in anthropological research? How can we think about change over time in anthropological research and how should we reflect on the presence of the present in historiographical work?

Program: Revisiting History and Anthropology