Vēsture un antropoloģija

Kopsavilkums

G.M.Young, the English historian of the Victorian era, recommended that historians should continue reading until they can hear their subjects talking. Only then would they understand why things happened as they did (1948, 112). This much-quoted advice invites us to look more closely at the relationship between history and anthropology and what each discipline can learn from the other. A widespread and now perhaps slightly dated view was that these disciplines have nothing to learn from each other. Anthropologists sought to understand their ethnographic findings by exposing them to the theoretical lens of structure and function. As Ernest Gellner put it, anthropologists looked for «explanations in the interrelations of various features of a society with each other in their reciprocal usefulness as opposed to seeking them in their genesis» (1958, 184). But in order to arrive at this theoretical model the societies in question become petrified in a false and misleading equilibrium. A certain amount of stabilization is necessary if societies are to be mirrored in concepts, but Gellner, quoting Leach, pleads for an awareness of this process. «All I am asking is that the fictional nature of this equilibrium be frankly recognized» (Leach, 1954, 285). The dilemma is that explanatory concepts must have a minimum degree of permanence; otherwise, they cannot perform their function. «But reality is not static» (Gellner 1958, 187). In other words, there is a mismatch between the chaotic, savage and unpredictable course of history and the efforts of socio-anthropological concepts to impose an orderly understanding. The fast-moving and cruel events to our east lay bare these discrepancies. We are all familiar with the saying of Heraclitus that one cannot step into the same river twice. The river is not the same and you are not the same. With equal confidence, we can say that we cannot enter the same society twice. Our eastern neighbours provide painful evidence of this fact.