History and Anthropology
Historiography
Charles 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, 1910s1920s)
Mid 1950s
• Dominance of quantitative history
• Counting
• Economic and social forces
– Marxism: class, means of production
– Liberalism: development of capitalism
Cultural Anthropology
1950s-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
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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
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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-structuralism
1970s-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?
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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 nonintellectuals, 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