Histories

Journal/Book: Int Soc Sci J. 1997; 49: 108 Cowley Rd, Oxford, Oxon, England OX4 1JF. Blackwell Publ Ltd. 373.

Abstract: Organized in distinct segments, this essay delineates some of the intellectual currents that have promoted a cross-fertilization between history, anthropology and sociology in recent decades. Necessarily oversimplified, the strategy is directed towards providing landmarks and tracks within a vast landscape. These outlines are interwoven with an argument that favours attentiveness to the hermeneutic capacities of the people who are the subject of research; and they suggest that an abiding interest in the subjective world of human beings and their interactions has brought historians and anthropologists into dialogue. They can also be read as 'texts' marking the degree to which literary theory is informing the disciplines of history and anthropology today. It is in arenas of the world where scholars have been forced to rely heavily on oral traditions that the most promising exchanges between the disciplines have developed. Research findings from Africa and Oceania have indicated how the past inhabits the present in, and through, oral performances. Valeri's theoretical clarification of the interplay between two types of historical representation among Hawaiians, Barber's clarification of the praise poetry among the Yoruba, an Aboriginal denunciation of the immoral force of Captain Cook's law, a sixteenth-century Sinhalese story-in-riddle which depicts Portuguese colonialism as evil, and an incident at a cricket match in 1981, are deployed to argue that encoded historical understandings are significant to living humans, and are therefore central to scholarly endeavour in the social sciences.

Note: Article Roberts M, Univ Adelaide, Dept Social Anthropol, Adelaide, SA 5005, AUSTRALIA

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