Culture, not History

by DRM

An dis­cus­sion about the rela­tion­ship between anthro­pol­ogy and enthnog­ra­phy raises the ques­tion of how to clearly define the dis­cus­sion and knowl­edge of people’s.

His­tory is a sequenc­ing of events, a kind of cause and effect, that is the inevitable out­come of try­ing to under­stand the pat­tern of events that is defined by a period. Yet his­tory is wed­ded to time, while soci­ety and cul­ture are organic, and in that char­ac­ter­is­tic are sep­a­rate from the imper­a­tive of his­tory and con­nected to a cul­tural evo­lu­tion that shifts, shapes and ulti­mately expires.
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Ingold’s pur­pose is not to dis­tin­guish anthro­pol­ogy from ethnog­ra­phy, but to crit­i­cize the “the idea of a one-way pro­gres­sion from ethnog­ra­phy to anthro­pol­ogy” in which method­olog­i­cal rigor pre­cedes the­o­ret­i­cal gen­er­al­iza­tion. The title really should read: “Anthro­po­log­i­cal rea­son­ing is not induc­tive, but dialectical.”

This inte­gra­tive approach leads to an inter­est­ing ques­tion: “the anthro­pol­o­gist describes the social world as the artist paints a land­scape, then what becomes of time?”

Kroe­ber came to the con­clu­sion that time, in the chrono­log­i­cal sense, is inessen­tial to his­tory. Pre­sented as a kind of ‘descrip­tive cross-section’ or as the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of a moment,a his­tor­i­cal account can just as well be syn­chronic as diachronic.