Evolution of Historiography and Anthropology: From Mentalities to Cultural Anthropology

History and Anthropology Historiography Charles Walton

Mentalits Anticipations: Voltaire s Essai sur les moeurs, Le si cle 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, 1910s- 1920s)

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 L vi-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 16thcentury Wars of Religion 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

Wheres the bourgeoisie?

Find the Bourgeoisie

Problems with Marxist categories 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? 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 S verin 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 mentalit s: It is a sort of intellectual history of non- intellectuals, 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