Critical Junctions

The "cultural turn" has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

Preface

Introduction: Critical Junctions—Recapturing Anthropology and History
Don Kalb and Herman Tak 1

Chapter 1. Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective
Don Handelman

Chapter 2. The Past in the Present: Actualized History in the Social Construction of Reality
Christian Giordano

Chapter 3. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Structural Narrative about Long-Duration Provenances of the Holocaust
Hermann Rebel

Chapter 4. Beyond the Limits of the Visible World: Remapping Historical Anthropology
August Carbonella

Chapter 5. “Bare Legs Like Ice”: Recasting Class for Local/Global Inquiry
Don Kalb

Chapter 6. Prefiguring NAFTA: The Politics of Land Privatization in Neoliberal Mexico
Patricia Musante

Chapter 7. Historical Anthropology through Local-Level Research
Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver

Chapter 8. Anthropology and History: Opening Points for a New Synthesis
Gerald Sider

Notes on Contributors
Index