Anthropology and History: The Need to Restore a Broken Connection

Abstract (English)

In the middle and second half of the 19th century, when Anthropology was being formed as a special science, in the minds of its first classics it resonated with historical science quite clearly. They saw the meaning and purpose of Anthropology as being a replacement for History for nonliterate peoples – those whose past could not be studied using written sources. However, at the turn of the 20th century, with the establishment of the postulates about the absence of universality and regularity of the world-historical socio-cultural process, when the sense of internal connection was lost not only between different societies, but also between different periods in the history of one society, the break between Anthropology and History occurred. For most of the 20th century and a quarter of the 21st century, Anthropology and History have been increasingly moving away from each other to the point of almost mutual ignorance within the framework of the currently dominant postmodernism, which asserts the absolute uniqueness of each society (and, consequently, the inadmissibility of using the comparative-historical method) and denies the very possibility of objective knowledge of anything related to human and society, including history and culture. The nowadays obvious gap between History and Anthropology has extremely negative consequences for both disciplines. For History, they are expressed, in particular, in the fact that, when dealing with topics to which anthropologists have made a great, fundamental contribution (for example, such as the institution of community or the phenomenon of the sacralization of power), historians do not rely on it, do not use it to the extent necessary, and often simply ignore it. In Anthropology, the feeling of the approaching end of the dominance of postmodernism is slowly but surely growing, and, accordingly, the question is becoming increasingly acute: what will happen to the discipline, what will be its theoretical and methodological foundations after the end of the period of dominance of the extreme relativism postmodernism brought, which denies the legitimacy of creating any general theories, and ultimately the very possibility of cognizing cultural phenomena. Restoring the connection between historical and anthropological knowledge offers the prospect of not only giving a new impetus to anthropological theoretical thought, but also of deepening historians’ understanding of past phenomena. The connection between Anthropology and History needs to be restored not simply at the level of studying specific scientific topics but to the entire spectrum of issues covered by these disciplines, including the study of a wide range of social, economic, political, and cultural phenomena and processes of the past and present.