HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY*

THERE IS NOTHING NEW OR ECCENTRIC ABOUT THE SUGGESTION THAT

historians might profit from an acquaintance with anthropology.

Professor Tawney suggested as much in his Inaugural Lecture at the
London School of Economics thirty years ago1 and it was not often
that the advice of this most influential historian went unheeded. That
it did so in this case can probably be attributed to the firmly empirical
tradition of British historical scholarship, whose reputation has long
rested upon a rigorous command of the primary sources, a distaste
for theory and speculation, and a proper aversion to the superficiality
which a nodding acquaintance with other disciplines frequently
brings in its train. These qualities in all their strength and weakness
are best exemplified in the present state of medieval studies austere,
disciplined and profoundly hostile to outside influence.
To some extent, however, the anthropologists have themselves to
blame for this separation. Between the wars social anthropology
under Raddiffe-Brown was a very ambitious affair indeed and one
whose aims were avowedly unhistorical. The subject was defined
as "the study of the phenomena of culture by the same inductive
methods that are in use in the natural sciences". Its basis was
thought to be "the experimental method" and its object the discovery
of sociological laws, generalizations about human society. RadcliffeBrown declared categorically that history and anthropology were "two
quite different methods of dealing with the facts of culture" and that
"there are many disadvantages in mixing the two subjects together
and confusing them". 1 His insistence upon the need for generalization and his justifiably disparaging references to the "conjectural
history" of the ethnographers' helped to give British anthropological
studies a frankly anti-historical bias and to make the chances of
co-operation between the two disciplines increasingly remote.
In recent years, however, there has been a reaction, led by RaddiffeBrown's successor in the Oxford Chair of Social Anthropology. In
his Marett Lecture of 1950, Professor Evans-Pritchard asserted that
the differences between the two subjects were those of technique
rather than of aim, and he has subsequently done much to urge a new
rapprochement between them. "In practice," he says, "social
The author of this article is not an anthropologist (as will be obvious to
the attentive reader). His interest in the subject was first aroused by Professor
Evans-Pritchard's lecture, Anthropology and history, (Manchester, 1961), but
neither Professor Evans-Pritchard nor any other anthropologist is to be held
responsible for any unwitting misinterpretations of their work.

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anthropologists today generalize little more than historians do." 4

Nowadays it is fashionable to regard the strength of British social
anthropology as lying in the intensity and precision of its field-work,
in the tradition of Malinowski, rather than in the formulation of
general laws along the lines urged by Radcliffe-Brown. It is even
said that no such laws have yet been discovered. Nor, it is implied,
are they ever likely to be. 5 A social anthropologist today does not
set out to produce sweeping generalizations about the whole of
human society. He is more likely to devote a lifetime to the
specialized study of at most two or three societies, a study in which he
will be as much concerned as the historian with the uniqueness of fact
and situation, a study which is likely to carry with it a certain degree
of emotional involvement,' and which, in its intimacy of acquaintance,
reminds one of G. M. Young's famous injunction to historians "to
go on reading until you can hear people talking". Some
anthropologists have even engaged in straightforward pieces of
historical writing, for example Evans-Pritchard's The Sanusi of
Cyrenaica, the story of the transformation of a religious movement
into a nationalist one over a period of some hundred years.7
At the same time there are some indications that historians are
more inclined to seek generalizations than they used to be. They do
not ask universal questions or seek universal laws. But, for all their
interest in the individual and the particular, they are more likely to
believe that, in the words of Professor Postan, "the microscopic
problems of historical research are and should be made microcosmic
capable of reflecting worlds larger than themselves".' Historical
fashions change slowly, but there has been no lack of support for
Mr. E. H. Carr's recent statement that "the more sociological history
becomes and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for
both". 9 Certainly it is more representative of opinion in the historical
profession than was Tawney"s almost identical assertion thirty years
ago.10
The whole tendency of recent work in both subjects has thus been
such as to draw together what were always closely parallel lines of
investigation. Anthropologists are no longer exclusively concerned
with primitive societies, any more than historians are solely concerned
with advanced ones. Nor are anthropologists necessarily engaged in
the study of a society at one moment of time rather than over a period
of years. Some of them study social change, notably the
"Westernization" of native societies. Admittedly, the most
characteristic form of anthropological explanation of an institution
is to demonstrate its contribution to keeping a given society in

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

being, and this sort of functionalism often stands in the way of

formulating intelligible theories of social change.11 But it is also true
that historians can sometimes be extremely static themselves. It is
very hard, for example, to extract any sense of movement and change
from the studies of eighteenth-century politics by the followers of Sir
Lewis Namier; the notion of "the eighteenth-century political
system" with which the average undergraduate emerges is certainly
as lacking in dynamic elements as the most austere anthropological
"system". 1 ' A great deal of historical writing today is concerned less
with a succession of events than with enduring relationships.1* As
for the argument that the anthropologist, unlike the historian, is
concerned with the present, it should not be forgotten that the
normal pattern of an anthropologist's career sees him spending the
remainder of his life writing up his memories of a society he visited in
his youth. Evans-Pritchard, for example, has until recently been
publishing books about the Nuer, with whom he spent about a year
between 1930 and 1936.1* Such an act of reconstruction would
seem to involve an effort of what is almost the historical imagination
and there is clearly a sense in which the "ethnographic present" is
comparable to the historic present.
The basic difference between anthropology and history may
therefore be fairly reduced to this, that in most cases18 the
anthropologist did once live in, or at least visit, the society which he is
describing, whereas the historian usually has to work exclusively from
documents or archaeological remains. This distinction is hardly
sufficient to justify our dismissing the two subjects as fundamentally
different disciplines.
If we make the initial assumption that anthropologists are engaged
in a roughly similar activity to our own, it becomes easier to see what
we might learn from them. In the first place, it is hard to deny that
modern social anthropology usually exemplifies greater discipline and
precision of thought than is commonly found in historical writing of
the interpretative kind. Here, the old tradition that anthropology
is a science has been of great advantage. Contemporary anthropological writing is frequently austere, even jagged, but it is seldom
disfigured by the rhetoric and impressionism which is so frequently
encountered in the work of leading practitioners of modern history
(and whose origins may well lie in the educational tradition of
encouraging history undergraduates to produce dogmatic and personal
interpretations on the basis of rapid reading in the secondary sources).
It is true that the reader has usually to take largely on trust what the
anthropologist says about another society, for there are few footnotes,

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and sources may have to be disguised or suppressed; 1 ' indeed the

only objective test of a monograph's reliability seems to be that of its
own internal consistency. Yet, despite the reader's inability to
check sources and the writer's obvious readiness to arrive at
theoretical conclusions on the basis of a single field-study,17 one
cannot escape the impression that anthropologists do not generalize
lightly and that their conclusions rest upon a sound foundation of
empirical fieldwork, beside which the selective use of incomplete
evidence, upon which the writing of history must necessarily depend,
appears flimsy in the extreme.1* The student of contemporary
anthropology is unlikely to encounter such a rhetorical tour de force
as Professor Trevor-Roper's pamphlet on The Gentry;1* neither is he
likely to meet many hypotheses put forward dogmatically as fact, and
substantially discredited largely on the basis of already existing
evidence within five years of their publication. Anthropological
tastes change, and the element of subjectivism can never be entirely
absent, but it seldom seems to get out of control.10 The caution and
unpretentiousness of most social anthropology may make for dull
reading, particularly when combined with a susceptibility to jargon;
but, at least, such qualities afford an agreeable contrast with the work
of those many modern historians whose urge for self-expression and
for reinforcing a personal view of the world is so often more apparent
than a disinterested wish to find out what really happened in tie past.
It would, however, be rash to base the case for social anthropology
upon so unpalatable an assumption as that of the alleged moral
superiority of its practitioners. Instead, emphasis may be more
profitably laid upon what would seem to be the most distinctive
feature of anthropological explanation, namely that, in the words of
Professor Firth, "however specialized be his study of kinship,
witchcraft, chieftainship or social class, the anthropologist always
makes it against a background of his conception of the social system
to which it is related".11 The importance of the contribution made
by an individual anthropologist is not measured by the volume of new
facts which he records, for that is mere ethnography, generally
regarded as a much lower-level activity, but by the interpretation and
interrelation of those facts. He must attempt not just a descriptive
synthesis of events, but a theoretical integration of them," that is to
say, he should aim at serious analysis rather than that random
impressionism of which Macaulay*s Third Chapter provides the most
famous example and some sections of the Oxford History of England
the most recent. Anthropologists frequently take one small society
and study it as a whole. Thus Evans-Pritchard writes about many

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

different aspects of the Nuer political and social structure, kinship

and marriage, religion. But historians still specialize by subjectmatter economic history, legal history, military history as the
titles of their professional journals indicate. For a historian to write
about both eighteenth-century religion and eighteenth-century
agriculture would be highly eccentric.
The consequence for history of this specialization by subject-matter
is that many of a topic's socially most important aspects go unnoticed.
For all the activity of Weber, Tawney and Christopher Hill, the study
of ecclesiastical history, for example, is still largely conducted in
a vacuum, where liturgy, ritual, theology and church government are
isolated from the influence of more secular preoccupations. Similarly,
the study of economic history is much concerned with proving or
disproving current economic theories, to the consequent neglect of
the social aspects of the subject." If, as a reaction to this segmented
approach to the facts of history, many historians now subscribe, if
only implicitly, to a brand of vulgar Marxism, this may be taken to
indicate less the seductive effects of that particular doctrine than thenlack of acquaintance with any other theoretical attempts to effect that
interrelation and mutual explanation of social facts which they would
so much like to see. For such persons, the attraction of anthropology,
whether "functional", "structural" or "cultural", is that it does
constitute such an attempt to explain things in terms of each other,
rather than treating them separately, like patients in a hospital.
Marxism has had many beneficial effects, and the possibilities latent
in the explanation of social facts by their relation to economic ones
are by no means exhausted. But economic wants are themselves
culturally determined, and it is only some form of anthropology which
holds out the hope of providing that sociological explanation of
economic life which the economic interpretation of social life has
come to require. One of the great anthropological lessons is that the
study of economics cannot be isolated from the study of society.
"In a primitive society there is no relationship which is of a purely
economic character"."
If applied to church history, the conclusions of the anthropologist
are just as interesting as are the suggestions of Marx, who, with
Machiavelli, offered the only social interpretation of religious life with
which most of us are familiar. A calendar, says Durkheim, expresses
the rhythm of society's collective activities and assures their
regularity." Armed with this dictum, we can recognize that the
hagiography of the Middle Ages was linked with the festivals of the
Church year, which, in turn, closely reflected the rhythms of

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agricultural life, as Mr. Homans, a sociologist turned historian, has

quite definitively shown." Conversely, the Puritan attack on saints'
days and their emphasis on the Sabbath would seem to be connected
with the new rhythms of a commercial society." One of the functions
of ritual, says Radcliffe-Brown, is to maintain and reinforce the
system of sentiments upon which society depends." Viewed from
this angle, the feelings aroused by the various Protestant attacks upon
Roman Catholic ceremonies at the Reformation become more
intelligible. So do the Puritan objections to the churching of women,
when we recall Raddiffe-Brown's statement that taboos fix the social
value of certain occasions." The knowledge which can be gained
from the anthropologists concerning the importance of dancing as
a bond of community life" tells us something about the possible
implications of the Puritan attack on maypoles and Sabbath sports.
Indeed so many new sidelights upon Puritanism appear when it is
seen from this point of view that historians may yet come to regard
its true significance as lying less in any support of capitalism, of
which so much has been made, than in its implacable hostility to what
can be seen to have been features of a more primitive society not
just community dancing, but ritual sports bordering on animal
sacrifice (such as bear-baiting and bull-baiting), the attachment of
magical qualities to certain places, instruments of worship or days
of the year, taboos surrounding women after childbirth, sexual orgies
at key periods of the year (May Morning, Midsummer and Christmas),
ritual and ceremony generally.
In addition to teaching this first and most essential lesson that
historians should study topics in relation to society as a whole,
anthropologists can also provide the inestimable advantage of direct
experience of matters about which historians have only read in books.
Such features of primitive society as witchcraft or the blood-feud form
a large element of the anthropologist's daily concern, whereas for the
historian they constitute relatively exotic matter. Not that there are
any obvious universal laws about witchcraft to be learned from
anthropology, but, at least, some acquaintance with its findings would
prevent historians from succumbing to the temptation of treating
the practice as some extraordinary survival of unreason to be explained
in Voltairean terms of priestly running and popular credulity.
Instead, witch-beliefs can be closely related to the society in which
they appear. Evans-Pritchard's study of witchcraft among the
Azande shows, among other things, that it can be a positive form of
social cement, since, if we think bur neighbours may have mngirai
power to do us physical harm, we are likely to take care not to offend

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

them.31 Elsewhere, accusations of witchcraft are normally levelled

against those persons whose traits are condemned as anti-social, and
a belief in witches thus becomes a sanction against undesirable social
activity and helps to maintain the current system of values. This is
not the sort of conclusion which the historian would be likely to
come to without external aid, for he is not personally acquainted with
the circumstances which produce displaced aggression of this kind
and has never observed the ways in which tensions in social relationships may resolve themselves in the form of witch-beliefs. Yet it is
clear that the majority of persons accused of witchcraft in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England were already regarded as embodying
values hostile to the community in which they lived, by reason of their
isolation, poverty or ugliness. For the most part they were old
women "poore, mellenchollie, envious, mischevous, ill-disposed,
ill-dieted", as a contemporary described them" and they usually
displayed a frank malevolence to the society in which they lived.
Similarly, charges of witchcraft were usually made as an explanation
for social or economic failure of some sort; they accounted for the
failure of the crops to grow, or of the cows to give milk. Was it only
coincidence that the peak of the witch-scare in England occurred at
the end of the Civil War when the consequent political and social
instability bred unusual tensions and when the normal means of
social control, notably the ecclesiastical courts, had collapsed ? We
are told on good authority that "African beliefs about witches are
startlingly like those of Shakespeare's day"." It seems likely that
the student of the one might learn something from the investigator
of the other.
Similarly, those interested in Anglo-Saxon society, where the
historical study of kinship can hardly be avoided, might well learn
something from anthropological analyses of the operation of the
blood-feud in other societies, some of which suggest conclusions very
different from those which historians have reached on more slender
evidence.1* Again, an anthropologist who knows about initiation
rites might well have something fresh to say to historians interested
in the ceremonies surrounding baptism or confirmation, the order of
knighthood, or the admission to medieval gilds or to academic
degrees." The majority of modern anthropological studies have
been concerned with the small, isolated community, and it is upon
analogous historical communities that one would expect their findings
to shed most light. In such a world where ties are personal rather
than anonymous, and where the same individuals appear in a variety
of social roles, social cohesion is greatly enhanced by the absence of

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any conflict of values, such as those between work and church, or

parents and employer, which are a feature of larger industrial societies.
Such must have been the attributes of the medieval village, and
anthropologists have frequently commented upon the resemblances
between this sort of primitive society and that of rural Europe before
the eighteenth century." To reconstruct the texture of life in such
a world seems a disproportionate burden to throw upon the unaided
historical imagination, when there are rigorous and detailed accounts
of such societies available today. Hardly any medievalist has
bothered to draw upon the results of anthropological field-work.
Yet, "how", asks Evans-Pritchard, "can an Oxford don work himself
into the mind of a serf of Louis the Pious?" 37 How indeed.
In most cases he is unlikely to try, but will be content to study
labour services and commutations, treating the serf as a convenient
unit in economic history, but no more. Yet anthropological studies
of primitive mentality could provide valuable reinforcement for
historians confronted by a paucity of evidence for the mental life of
the lower reaches of the distant society they are studying. The
extremes of religious activity trance and ecstasy which were so
common in the Middle Ages and are so rare now, have been observed
by modern students of primitive religion.88 While the anthropological
study of the activities of modern Christian missions in Africa or New
Guinea might throw some light upon the sources of Anglo-Saxon
resistance to the Conversion, as well as upon some of the possible
implications and motives of their surrender."1
Parallels between the historical experience of our society and the
contemporary experience of more primitive societies can be endlessly
adduced. Some are superficial; some are not. All are worth
investigating. Where can one find a better explanation of the Divine
Right of Kings than in Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the kingship of
the Shilluk of Sudan? 40 Where is there a closer analogy with the
medieval and Elizabethan world-picture than in the Tikopia
conception of the future life, in which there are divisions of the
heavens corresponding to the social divisions of the Tikopia
themselves ? 41 The emphasis upon the binding force of oaths among
the Kikuyu is reminiscent of seventeenth-century England, where the
oath provided the sanction for almost every form of legal, official or
ecclesiastical arrangement.41 The Cargo cults of Melanesia are
obviously analogous with such miUenarian movements as that of the
Fifth Monarchy Men in England; 4 ' in this connection, Mr. Worslcy*s
interpretation of the ritual defiance of traditional taboos in Melanesia
makes more intelligible the flouting of social and sexual conventions

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

II

by the Anabaptists or the Quakers.44 It is not surprising that

historians like Professor Cohn or Mr. Hobsbawm felt impelled to
employ anthropological findings in their study of such popular
movements of protest.16
Much can be learnt from anthropology which could be of service to
economic history, where the assumptions on which Western
economists normally operate are often quite inappropriate for the
study of a primitive society.48 Accounts of traditionalized price
systems in primitive economies may help us to understand why the
price of monastic land after the Dissolution tended to remain
stubbornly at twenty years purchase, despite the fluctuations of supply
and demand.47 Monographs on gift exchange in Polynesia may lead
us to pay more attention to the giving and receiving of hospitality as
a means of economic distribution, or to the lavish exchange of New
Year gifts at the court of James I.48 Studies of the social and legal
effects of land hunger upon contemporary African countries can tell
us something about why there was so much litigation in sixteenthcentury England, as well as of the social effects of over-population in
general.4' The Malayan habit of avoiding prohibitions on usury by
lending a sum less than that actually recorded as due to be repaid is
strikingly reminiscent of accounting methods which are said to have
been employed in fifteenth-century England.60 While, if debt was
a form of social cement among the Irish peasantry, it may well have
once served the same purpose in rural England.' 1
The historian interested in the industrialization of eighteenthcentury England would be ill-advised to ignore the many analyses
of the progress of underdeveloped countries today." The problems
involved in persuading Africans to adopt the rhythms of an industrial
society in place of the more erratic pace of primitive life are almost
exactly those which confronted Josiah Wedgwood when he
endeavoured to convert the feckless, easy-going populace of
Staffordshire into "such machines . . . as cannot err"." The
preference for leisure over high wages, which stood in the way of the
creation of a labour force in the early days of the Industrial Revolution,
was presumably broken down only by the appearance of new wants
amongst the labouring classes which provided the incentive for extra
labour. How were these wants created? The answer is not easy
to find in current accounts of the early Industrial Revolution. But
anthropological studies, such as those by Audrey Richards, of the
Southern Bantu and of the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia, help to
suggest some possible answers. Have any historians, for example,
yet considered the connection between regular meals and regular

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work, which she demonstrates to be all-important?1* More

generally, anthropologists can tell us a great deal about the impact of
industrialization upon older ties of kinship and family, illuminating
further the material contained in such accounts as Miss Pinchbeck's
Women workers and the Industrial Revolution.1* While anyone who
has wondered whether to follow up the isolated suggestions of Mr.
S. A. Peyton and Professor Rich concerning the mobility of labour in
Tudor England may gain heart from modern discoveries of the great
distances which African labourers will travel in search of
employment."
One great incentive for historians to read anthropology, therefore,
is that the anthropologists can offer detailed analyses of phenomena
roughly comparable to those which the historians are endeavouring
to reconstruct with a good deal less evidence. It may, however, be
reasonably objected that historians are not all medievalists, studying
relatively primitive societies or their break-up, and that it is only a
minute part of English history which is occupied by blood-feuds,
witchcraft or totemism." To this the answer is that it would be
wrong to give the impression that it is only as regards those features
which Western society has or had in common with primitive society
that the anthropologists have anything to teach us.
For it is not only surface resemblances of the kind outlined above
which make it desirable that some acquaintance with anthropology
should form part of the equipment of every historian. Instead, the
real case for anthropology is twofold: first of all, that it can help to
widen the present subject-matter of academic history; secondly, that
it can provide us with the technique to deal, not only with this new
subject-matter, but with some already familiar historical problems.
As Tawney drily observed, "there is no reason why savages should
have all the science"."
To take the second point first. Anthropologists are notorious for
adopting paradoxical explanations rather than common-sense ones."
Some of these paradoxes might well be applied by historians with
a view to re-scrutinizing the assumptions behind what is normally
regarded as common knowledge. Most medieval historians, for
example, would point to the semi-elective character of the late Saxon
and early Norman kingship, with its corollary of rebellions and
succession wars, as a sign of weakness in the Anglo-Norman state.*0
But if they read Professor Gluckman's account of a comparable
situation in South East Africa they would be confronted by the
argument that, in a primitive society lacking an integrating network
of communications and a single economic structure, it is essential

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

13

for the survival of that state that conflict should take the form of
a contest for the control of centralized power, for the alternative would
be local separatism. In such a situation "periodic civil wars . . .
strengthened the system by canalizing tendencies to segment, and by
stating that the main goal of the leaders was the sacred kingship
itself".*1 Lack of definition about the rules of succession make it
possible for a weak contender to be eliminated and replaced without
the collapse of the monarchy or the setting up of regional states.
"The very structure of kingship thrusts struggles between rival
houses, and even civil war, on the nation; and it is an historical fact
to state that these struggles kept component groups of the nation
united in conflicting allegiance around the sacred kingship."
Struggles over the succession kept the component groups united in
conflict when other factors might have broken it down. A rebellion
against a tyrant or an usurper is a rebellion in defence of the system
of kingship. Similarly, struggles between rival houses for the
succession help to avert class conflict. "A prince can invite
commoners to rebel and attack his kinsman king without invalidating
his family's title. In this situation rulers fear rivals from their own
ranks and not revolutionaries of lower status . . . Every rebellion
therefore is a fight in defence of royalty and kingship and in this
process the hostility of commoners against aristocrats is directed to
maintain the rule of aristocrats, some of whom lead the commons in
revolt"." This seems to be a valuable commentary, not only upon
early English history or the Wars of the Roses, but also upon such
Tudor risings as the Pilgrimage of Grace and such succession rules
as those of the Ottomans or Oriental despots. There are some pages
in Mr. Jolliffe's Constitutional History which come near to saying
this," but they do not go the whole way.
For a second example of the value of peculiarly anthropological
explanation we may take the study of history itself and the attitude of
men to claims to social or political authority founded upon the past.
Ever since the pioneering theories of Malinowski, anthropologists
have observed how myth in primitive society serves less as a
historically accurate record of the past than as a validating "charter"
for current relationships. As those relationships alter, so do the
myths, which are adapted and reshaped to suit changing needs.
Thus the value of myths or legends to the historian lies in what they
tell him about the society in which they were composed, not what he
can learn from them about the distant past to which they purport to
relate.*4
Acting on this principle, Mrs. Bohannan has shown that among the

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NUMBER 2 4

Tiv of Northern Nigeria genealogies arc not to be regarded as

historical accounts of the past so much as a summary of existing
relationships. When the relationships change so do the genealogies.
In this way change can take place without society having to recognize
that it has occurred. "Social change can exist with a doctrine of
social permanence"." This seems an exact description of why so
many sixteenth-century Englishmen had pedigrees forged for
themselves," why Sir Robert Filmer found it necessary to argue that
Charles I was in the direct line of descent from the sons of Noah, and
why the early seventeenth-century House of Commons claimed to be
exercising no more than the rights enjoyed by their fourteenth-century
or even Anglo-Saxon ancestors. But, as Mrs. Bohannan points out,
a lineage system, like that of the Tiv, can probably only survive in an
illiterate society, since, once the genealogy upholding the status quo
is put on record, it soon becomes impossible to change it without the
accusation of forgery. Oral tradition is infinitely more malleable fhun
a written one, and popular education and the availability of public
records will unseat a political system which claims to be based solely
on tradition. Perhaps this explains why the seventeenth century
saw the political argument based on historic rights give way to that
based on natural rights."
The study of historiography from this point of view holds out many
possibilities. Mr. Barnes has shown how an appeal to history was for
the Ngoni of Northern Rhodesia a means of maintaining their separate
existence at a time when cultural distinctions between groups were
breaking down." Similarly, the upsurge of romantic historical
writing in the early nineteenth century can be interpreted as
a reaction against the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth. Such a
connection between history and nationalism is familiar enough, but
there has as yet been no systematic study of the whole range of
European historiography in the light of such dicta as that of Professor
Fortes that "the political and social structure, including the principal
political values of a people, directly shapes the notions of time and of
history that prevail among them"." Members of the Armales
school of French history have made some passing remarks of great
interest upon the medieval sense of time,70 but, with some notable
exceptions, the examination of historical myths and narratives for
the light they throw upon the society in which they were composed
has only just begun.71 The same is true of the scientific study of
folklore, children's stories and popular fiction, although it is obvious
that the type of story which predominates at any one time can tell
one much about the community in which it is popular. Even today

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

15

it might be said that the academic study of history still serves as

a charter validating the assumptions of contemporary society, by
re-interpreting the past in such a way as to find a place there for
problems of economics, sex, class, or whatever our current anxieties
may be.
So much for the way in which anthropology can enhance our
methods of historical explanation. As for the need to widen the
subject-matter of history as it is studied and taught in the
universities, a series of Inaugural Lectures has made this a commonplace. 7t It would be possible, but tedious, to embark upon a catalogue
of the wide range of social behaviour on which anthropological writing
now exists, but which yet awaits its historian." Some important
instances, however, may be cited. Domestic and community
relations form the very stuff of social anthropology and, for that
matter, of most people's lives, but one would never deduce this from
the subject-matter of most historical inquiry. Examination
syllabuses, whatever the private interests of those who compile and
administer them, still reflect the primacy of political history and
a disposition to regard all other aspects of the subject as more or less
peripheral or "fringe". Yet
How small, of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

The study of the family in English history has simply not begun, and
the historian who now attempts it without consulting the
anthropologists runs the risk of missing many of the problems, as well
as having to forgo a whole vocabulary designed to cope with the
description of different systems of marriage, inheritance and descent.
Most students approaching the marriages of the medieval aristocracy,
for example, would be likely to assume that such loveless affairs must
have been unstable. In fact, anthropologists have shown that the
large-scale exchange of property accompanying a marriage is
associated with a low rate of divorce, though, admittedly, they disagree
as to whether this is because such an exchange gives the kin an
interest in maintaining the union, or because such an exchange would
not occur in the first place unless the kinship structure made for the
stability of marriages.74 As for the betrothal of children, which the
historian is normally content to deprecate or to explain in terms of
parental avarice, this unfamiliar practice may be partly related to
society's disapproval of illegitimacy. There is a huge quantity of
interesting work to be done on the fringes of family history and sexual
morality. Is it true, for example, that romantic love is the product
of a poorly integrated society, in the way that the literary form of

16

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 2 4

tragedy is said to be? 76 "In any society", says Professor Firth,

"the structure of kinship is strongly supported by morality"." How
many historians could offer an illustrated commentary upon this
statement? And who knows anything about the relationship
between the norms of sexual morality and the practice; for example,
the working of incest prohibitions in a medieval village ? Where
can one find an explanation of why the number of prohibited degrees
should have been so drastically reduced at the Reformation, or of
why the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have witnessed
a brisk discussion on the merits and de-merits of polygamy ? "
Another obvious topic is the education of children. Modern
pyschology has shown the connection between this and the formation
of social and political attitudes; the popular writings of Margaret
Mead are but the best-known anthropological treatment of the
subject." There is no shortage of historical material here, but it
has never been properly studied, although the results would be most
illuminating and might, among other things, throw a completely new
light upon the origins of well-known religious or political movements.
If there is anything in the Freudian view that the origins of conscience
are to be found in our earliest forms of instruction, then it may be
that the beginnings of Puritanism are better studied at the level of
family education than in sermons designed for adult audiences.
From the union of techniques derived from social anthropology and
social pyschology there could arise a whole new world of historical
investigation which might illuminate so much of what is most
baffling and most crucial to human existence. There would be the
study of social attitudes to birth, adolescence and death, of the
nervous and mental life of society as reflected in dreams," attitudes
to pain,80 suicide,11 the treatment of animals, drunkenness, and the
changing conceptions of sanity and insanity." Neither the American
study of social pyschology" nor the historical investigation of the
mental life of societies pioneered by the French' 4 have yet struck deep
roots in this country. As a consequence, there are whole areas of
human experience which have either not been studied historically at
all or never interwoven with the fabric of social history. There is,
for example, the history of clothes, which has a chronology of its own,
with circa 1800 as the great turning-point, when Western European
man ceased to be the more gaudily dressed of the two sexes." Or
there is the history of art as a reflection of fundamental changes in
human perception.88 How much is made intelligible when we
recall Professor Firth's observation that a primitive artist reflects the
social rather than the physical proportions of a subject.'7 Does this

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

17

explain why fifteenth-century women are usually portrayed as

pregnant? Finally, there is the whole history of personal
relationships. Have we not neglected E. M. Forster's characteristic
observation that "the true history of the human race is the story of
human affections ?""
It is perfectly true that not all these topics are much discussed by
contemporary anthropologists, at least not by the British ones, who
constitute a distinct school, with a prescribed system of training,8*
and a sharply defined range of interests, both geographical and
topical. The concern with Africa and with social structure ("the
foundation of the whole social life of any continuing society"'0) has
produced what appears to the outsider as a disproportionate emphasis
on law, government and, above all, kinship, with a consequent neglect
of pyschology, technology and economics.'1 Anyone whose interest
in the subject has been stimulated by such popular works as those of
Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict" is likely to find his initial
acquaintance with British social anthropology something of a
disappointment.
But these are only questions of emphasis, and highly debatable
ones too. What is more certain is that modern social anthropology
contains much from which the historian can learn. Serious structural
analysis of remote societies can only be done well after the intensive
field-work in which the anthropologist has observed for himself the
inter-connections between social facts. The historian has so often
to rely upon his imagination to trace links or deduce consequences
which the anthropologist can see before his eyes. Is it too much to
suppose that the historian who is familiar with the findings of the
anthropologist is in a better position to ask intelligent questions of his
material and more likely to come up with intelligent answers ?
But it is not only the technique of the professional historian which
is involved; there is also the broader educational question of what
academic history should be about. Whether one regards it as the
serious analytic study of human society or whether we prefer to
engage in the imaginative re-creation of past experience, the present
circumscribed character of historical studies would seem equally
unjustifiable. From the second point of view the case was given
classic statement by Macaulay in his essay on Sir William Temple:
Of that information for the sake of which alone it is worth while to study
remote events, we find so much in the love letters which Mr. Courtenay has
published [the letters of Dorothy Osborne], that we would gladly purchase
equally interesting billets with ten times their weight in state-papers taken
at random. To us it is surely as useful to know how the young ladies of
England employed themselves a hundred and eighty years ago, how far

18

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 24

their minds were cultivated, what were their favourite studies, what degree
of liberty was allowed them, what use they nude of that liberty, what
accomplishments they most valued in men, and what proofs of tenderness
delicacy permitted them to give to favoured suitors, as to know all about the
seizure of Franche Comte and the treaty of Nimuegen. The mutual
relations of the two sexes seem to us to be at least as important as the mutual
relations of any two governments in the world."

From the more austere view-point of the social scientist, the

subject-matter of modern anthropology will be recognized as giving
a better impression of what Fhistoire intigrale might be than do the
pages of most historical journals.
The justification of all historical study must ultimately be that it
enhances our self-consciousness, enables us to see ourselves in
perspective and helps us towards that greater freedom which comes
from self-knowledge. The artificial limitation of the subject-matter
of modern history is educationally a tragedy. It can only be a matter
for regret that the university history schools of this country turn out
men and women whose understanding and self-awareness in everyday
matters are seldom enhanced by their historical studies. They
may realise that political and social structures change, but they have
little conception of the evolution of human and family relationships
or of the social factors which determine them. Yet the historical
study of more immediate aspects of human experience would have
been more likely to capture their imagination than the endless analysis
of the gymnastics of minor politicians. F. W. Maitland once
remarked that anthropology must choose between being history and
being nothing. As Professor Evans-Pritchard observes,*4 the
dictum must also be reversed.
St. John's College, Oxford

Keith Thomas

NOTES
1

R. H. Tawney, "The study of economic history", Economka, xiii (1933).

Tawney had already shown his interest in the subject in his Preface to R. Firth,
Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori, (London, 1929).
1
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and function in primitive society, (London,
1952), pp. 122-3,154,186 n. 1 i Method in social anthropology, ed. M. N . Srinivas,
(Chicago, 1058), pp. 7, 8.
1
Radcliffe-Brown, Method in social anthropology, pp. 5-6, 26-8. In practice,
Radcliffe-Brown's attitude to history was more sympathetic than his theory.
See the editor's introduction to Method in social anthropology, p. jrii.
* The Marett Lecture is printed as "Social anthropology: past and present",
Man, i (1950). See also E. E. Evahs-Pritchard, Anthropology and history,
(Manchester, 1961). The statement quoted is on p. 2.
'Evans-Pritchard, "Social anthropology: past and present", p. 120, and
Social anthropology, (London, 1951), p. 117.

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

19

"An anthropologist has failed unless, when he says goodbye to the natives,
there is on both sides the sorrow of parting", Evans-Pritchard, Social
anthropology, p. 79.
7
(Oxford, 1949). I. Schapera describes his Married life in an African tribe,
(London, 1940), as "a social history" (p. 7). Other good examples of historical
writing by anthropologists are S. F. Nadel, A black Byzantium.
The kingdom
of the Nupe in Nigeria, (London, 1942), pp. 69-146; E. R. Leach, Political
systems of Highland Burma . . . , (London, 1954), pp. 227-63; J. A. Barnes,
Politics in a changing society. A political history of the Fort Jameson Ngoni,
(London, 1954). L - H- Gann, The birth of a plural society. The development
of Northern Rhodesia under the British South Africa Company, 1894-1914,
(Manchester, 1958), is by a historian, but commissioned by anthropologists.
The author in his preface and Professor M. Gluckman in his foreword both
comment on the importance of anthropology for the study of African history.
M. M. Postan, The historical method in social science . . . , (Cambridge,
193?). P. 32 E. H. Carr, What is history ?, (London, 1961), p. 59.
10
"The future of history, and, in particular, of economic history, depends
on its ability to acquire a more consciously sociological outlook", "The study
of economic history", p. 19.
11
See Mr. Leach's comments, Political systems of Highland Burma, pp. 4, 7,
285.
11
Cf. Miss L. S. Sutherland's picture of the "intricate political machine"
which "Walpole ingeniously built up and Pelham painfully maintained", which
suffered a "partial breakdown" with the fall of Newcastle, and "creaked
dismally" under George III and his ministers, but was "working again" under
Pitt. It was, she says, "a stable if inert political system". "The East India
Company in eighteenth-century politics", Econ. Hist. Rev., xvii (1947), p. 17.
" Evans-Pritchard'8 description of anthropologists as engaged in composing
"integrative accounts of primitive peoples at a moment of time" ("Social
anthropology: past and present", p. 122) is hard to distinguish from Postan's
picture of historians "weaving . . . some historical facts with other historical
facts into a cloth of an epoch" ("Function and Dialectic in Economic History",
Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xiv [1962], p. 403).
11
The Nuer . . . , (Oxford, 1940); Kinship and marriage among the Nuer,
(Oxford, 1951); Nuer religion, (Oxford, 1956).
" T h o u g h not alL See, for example, the re-working of Malinowski's
material by J. P. Singh Uberoi, Politics of the Kula Ring, (Manchester, 1962).
li
As is admitted in Schapera, Married life in an African tribe, p. 9.
l7
Cf. E. Gellner, "Time and theory in social anthropology , Mind, lxvii
(1958), p. 185.
" There are important problems relating to the causes of economic and
social change to which anthropological fieldwork has seldom provided the
answer: for example, matters relating to the size of population and its rate of
growtli.
" H. R. Trevor-Roper, The gentry, 1540-1640, (Economic History Review
Supplements, no. 1) n.d. [i953]" T h i s may be wistful. Cf. the criticisms made by Mr. E. R. Leach (Pul
Eliya. A village in Ceylon . . . , [Cambridge, 1961], p. 9), who asserts that
"case-history material in anthropological writings seldom reflects objective
description".
11
R. Firth, Social anthropology as science and as art, (Dunedin, 1958), p. 11.
" Evans-Pritchard, Social anthropology, p. 95.
11
Cf. the comments of O. R. McGregor, Some research possibilities and
historical materials for family and kinship study in Britain", British Journal of
Sociology, xii (1961).
14
R. Firth, Primitive economics of the New Zealand Maori, p. 482. There are
some interesting criticisms of Marxism from an anthropological point of view

20

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 2 4

in R. Firth, Primitive Polynesian economy, (London, 1939), pp. 361-364.

" E. Durkheim, The elementary forms of the religious life, trans. J. W. Swain,
(New York [Collier Books edn.J, 1961), p. 23.
" G. C. Homans, English villagers of the thirteenth century, (Cambridge,
Mass., 1942), chapter 23.
" I hope to offer a detailed discussion of this point on another occasion. It
is made by C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, (Edinburgh, 1961),
pp. 84-5.
" A . R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, (Cambridge, 1933), pp.
233-4" Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and function in primitive society, p. 151.
" Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, pp. 246-55; E. E. EvansPritchard, "The dance", Africa, i (1928); M. Hunter, Reaction to conquest.
Effects of contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa, (London, 1936),
PP. 369-70, 37576. There is interesting medical material in E. L. Bockinan,
Religious dances in the Christian Church and in popular medicine, trans. E. Classen,
(London, 1952).
" E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande,
(Oxford, 1937). P- " 7 11
Quoted by K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate's team . . . , (London, 1962), p. 13.
11
M. Fortes in E. E. Evans-Pritchard et a!., The institutions of primitive
society, (Oxford, 1954), p. 88. Various interpretations of witchcraft are
discussed by S. F. Nadel, Nupe religion, (London, 1954), pp. 201-6. On magic
as a remedy for various kinds of social frustration see B. Malinowski, Magic,
science, and religion and other essays, (Glencoe, 111., 1948), esp. pp. 60-1, and
on witchhunting as displaced aggression see C. Kluckhohn and D. Leighton,
The Navaho, (Cambridge, Mas*., 1946), pp. 172-81. There is a discussion of
the relationship between witchcraft and economic circumstances in
M. Gluckman, Custom and conflict in Africa, (Oxford, 1955), chapter 4. See
also M. S. Marwick, "The Social context of Cewa witch beliefs", Africa, xxii
(1952)14
On the blood-feud as an instrument of cohesion see Gluckman, Custom
and conflict in Africa, chapter 1, esp. pp. 21-2, where the fallacy, common among
medievalists, that the feud led to incessant private warfare is exposed. (The
substance of this chapter is to be found in Professor Gluckman's article, "The
peace in the feud", Past and Present, No. 8 [1955)). His observations do not
seem to have been heeded by the latest historian of Anglo-Saxon society,
H. R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, (London, 1962),
pp. 206, 294-7. They were profitably employed, however, by J. M. WallaceHadrill in his account of the frankish blood-feud, The long-haired tangs and
other studies in frankish history, (London, 1962), pp. 121-47.
Cf. M. Eliade, Birth and rebirth . . . , trans. W. R. Trask, (New York,
1958). Anthropological theory is put to ingenious use by W. J. Ong, "Latin
language study as a Renaissance puberty rite", Studies in Philology, lvi (1959).
'E.g. R. H. Lowie, Social organization, (London, 1950), pp. 19-22;
M. J. Herskovits, The economic life of primitive peoples, (New York, 1940), p. 12.
On some of the features said to be common to all peasant societies see
R. Redfield, Peasant society and culture . . . , (Chicago, 1956), p. 108.
' Anthropology and history, pp. 13-14.
" E. Norbeck, Religion in primitive society, (New York, 1961), chapter 6.
" Cf. I. Schapera's comments on the all-important role of the chief, in
I. Schapera (ed.), The Bantu-speaking tribes of South Africa . . . , (London,
I
937)> P- 362. There are some interesting remarks on the results of Christian
influence m M. Hunter, Reaction to conquest, p. 355.
" E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 77K divirte kingship of tht SMlluk of the Nilotic
Sudan, (Cambridge, 1948), p. 36.
41
R. Firth, Elements of social organization, (London, 1951), p. 236. Cf.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan world picture, (London, 1948).

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

21

41
H. E. Lambert, Kikuyu social and political institutions, (London, 1956);
some impression of the importance of oaths in seventeenth-century England
can be gained from (R. Garnet), The book of oaths, and the several forms thereof,
both antient and modem . . . . (London, 1649).
41
See P. Worsley, The trumpet shall sound . . . , (London, 1957); K. Burridge,
Mambu. A Melanesian millennium, (London, i960); I. Leeson, Bibliography
of cargo cults and other nativistic movements in the South Pacific, (Sydney [South
Pacific Commission], 1952).
44
Tile trumpet shall sound, pp. 249-50.
44
N. Cohn, The pursuit of the Millennium, (London [Mercury Books edn.],
1962): E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive rebels . . . , (Manchester, 1959).
44
See Professor Firth's comments, Primitive Polynesian economy, pp. 7,
22-9, 360-1.
47
R. Thurnwald, Economics in primitive communities, (London, 1932), p. 264;
Herskovits, The economic life of primitive peoples, pp. 210-2; Firth, Elements of
social organization, p. 134. Cf. H. J. Habakkuk, "The market for monastic
property, 1539-1560 , Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., x (1958), esp. p. 372.
41
B. Mahnowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific . . . , (London, 1922);
M. Mauss, The gift. . . , trans. I. Cunnison, (London, 1954). Mr.T. H. Aston
has drawn my attention to the discussion of "dark age" gift exchange by
P. Grierson, "Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence", Trans.
Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., ix (1959), pp. 137-9.
41
Firth, Elements of social organization, pp. 102-6.
" R. Firth, Malay fishermen: their peasant economy, (London, 1946), p. 169.
Cf. K. B. McFarlane, "Loans to the Lancastrian Kings: the problem of
inducement", Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1947), pp. 65-8.
41
C. M. Arensberg, The Irish countryman. An anthropological study,
(London, 1937), pp. 170-6. Cf. a rather different case of social bonds created
by indebtedness in J. C. Holt, The Northerners. A study in the reign of King
John, (Oxford, 1961), pp. 72-7.
41
There are useful bibliographical guides to this subject in Current Sociology,
>> 4 (!953)> i"> 1 (i954" I 955) and vi- 3 (1957) and in M. Mead (ed.), Cultural
patterns and technical change, (New York, 1955), pp. 333 f.
41
Quoted by N. McKendrick, "Josiah Wedgwood and factory discipline",
Historical Journal, iv (1961), p. 46.
44
A. I. Richards, Hunger and work in a savage tribe . . . , (London, 1932);
Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia . . . , (London, 1939).
11
1 . Pinchbeck, Women workers and the Industrial Revolution,
IJ$O-I8SO,
(London, 1930). Cf. H. I. Hogbin, Transformation scene. The changing
culture of a New Guinea village, (London, 1951) and Social Change . . . ,
(London, 1958), pp. 168-73; Hunter, Reaction to conquest, p. 480; W. Watson,
Tribal cohesion in a money economy. A study of the Mambwe people of Northern
Rhodesia, (Manchester, 1958).
44
S. A. Peyton, "The village population in the Tudor lay subsidy rolls",
Eng. Hist. Rev., xxx (1915); E. E. Rich, "The population of Elizabethan
England", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., ii (1950). Cf. M. Read, "Migrant labour
in Africa and its effects on tribal life", International Labour Review, xlv (1942);
I. Schapera, Migrant labour and tribal life . . . , (London, 1947), esp. p. 75;
D. Niddrie, "The road to work: a survey of the influence of transport on
migrant labour in Central Africa", The Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, xv (1954),
esp. p. 36.
4
' O n totemism cf. G. L. Gomme, Folklore as an historical science . . . ,
(London, 1908), pp. 274-96.
14
"The study of economic history", p. 20.
" See Gellner*s comments, "Time and theory in social anthropology",
p. 183.
40
E.g. H. W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevtns, 1066-1372,
(London, 13th edn., 1949), pp. 5-6. "So long as social duties are envisaged

22

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 24

in the form of personal obligations, monarchy is the one practicable form of

government, and it is better that the monarchy should be hereditary".
Harold's failure was a result of his attempt to induce the nation to tamper with
the principle of hereditary succession (p. 6); G. O. Sayles, The medieval
foundations of England, (London, 2nd edn., 1950), p. 179: "Indeed, it is unlikely
that monarchy would have survived as the effective institution it was if it had
been mainly elective, for this would have opened the way to such civil war and
anarchy as was to come later in Stephen's reign".
" M. Gluckman, Rituals of rebellion in S.E. Africa, (Manchester, 1954), p. 25.
" Ibid., pp. 25, 23-4. See also Gluckman, Custom and conflict in Africa,
chapter 2, and P. M. Worsley, "The analysis of rebellion and revolution in
modern British social anthropology", Science and Society, xxv (1961). Professor
Gluckman, whose analysis obviously owes much to Evans-Pritchard, The
Divine kingship of the Sfriltuk of the Nilotic Sudan, esp. pp. 37-8, stresses that,
once the kingdom is integrated by a complex economy and more rapid
communication, the ritual of rebellion is no longer safely enacted, for divergent
class interests are likely to convert rebellion into revolution.
" J. E. A. Jolliffe, The constitutional history of medieval England . . . ,
(London, I937)> PP- 155-65 (on the ritual character of feudal rebellion). The
medieval historian who seems to come nearest to Gluckman's notion of unity
in conflict is, interestingly, W. Stubbs, The Constitutional history of England . . . ,
(Oxford, 4th edn., 1883), voL i, pp. 319, 366 and 585.
4 B. Malinowski, "Myth in primitive pyschology", first published in 1926
and reprinted in Magic, science, and religion and other essays. See also
C. Kluckhohn, "Myths and rituals: a general theory", Harvard Theological
Review, xxxv (1942); S. F. Nadel, A black Byzantium, p. 72; M. Fortes, The
dynamics of kinship among the Tallensi . . . , (London, 1945), pp. 21-7; R. Firth,
History and traditions of Tikopia, (Wellington, N.Z., 1961), esp. chapters 1 and
10. This is the principle animating Mr. M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus,
(London, 1956). Cf. his criticisms of continuing attempts by ancient
historians to reconstruct history from orally transmitted materials in the face of
what the anthropologists have repeatedly taught, New Statesman, 6 July 1962,
pp. 19-20.

' L. Bohannan, "A genealogical charter, "Africa, xxii (1952), p. 314.

See, e.g., J. H. Round, Family origins and other studies, ed. W. Page,
(London, 1930), pp. -6.
" C. Hill, Puntamsm and revolution . . . , (London, 1958), p. 75.
" J. A. Barnes, "History in a changing society", The Rhodes-Livingstone
Journal, xi (1951).
* The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi, p. xi.
70
M. Bloch, Feudal society, trans. L. A. Manyon, (London, 1961), pp. 72-5.
L. Febvre, Le probleme de I incroyance au XVI" siicle. La religion de Rabelais,
(Paris, 1942), pp. 426-34.
71
Some of the possibilities in the study of historical myth are shown in
Mr. Hill's investigation of "The Norman Yoke", Puritanism and revolution,
chapter 3. Mr. E. R. Leach's reminder {Political systems of Highland Burma,
chapter ix) that there may be rival versions of the same myth, reflecting
contradictory claims by different social groups, might possibly help to resolve
the lively controversy on the origins of Robin Hood (Past and Present, Nos. 14,
18, 19 and 20). Instead of assuming that the "real" Robin Hood was the hero,
cither of the gentry or the peasantry, one might reasonably conclude that (in
different versions) he was both, as Mr. Holt suggests (No. 18 [1960], p. 99 and
No. 19 [1961], p. 18). It is common for ballads of aristocratic origin to be
unconsciously adapted by the lower social groups who take them over, e.g.
M. J. C. Hodgart, The ballads, (London, 1950), p. 102. Anthropologists might
have much to say about the Robin Hood question. Apart from some raised
eyebrows at Mr. Holt's talk of "a good yarn" (No. 18, p. 92) and at Mr. Keen's
assertion that "the memory of the common people is the longest on the earth"

HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

23

(The outlaws of medieval legend, [London, 1961], p. 36), they would be

sympathetic to the attempt to study the ballads as the embodiment of popular
values and aspirations, while their belief in the connection between myth and
ritual might lead them to devote more attention to the Robin Hood games,
which Mr. Keen (op. at., pp. 221-2) dismisses rather briefly. (Miss Briggs,
however, argues that the games and ballads ran on different lines, Pale
Hecate's team, p. 216.)
" R. W. Southern, The shape and substance of academic history, (Oxford,
1961) and J. S. Bromley, History and the younger generation, (Southampton,
1962).
" A useful guide to the sort of questions asked by anthropologists is
Notes and Oyurxes on anthropology, by a committee of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, (London, 6th edn., 1951).
71
M. Gluckman in A. R. Raddiffe-Brown and D . Forde (eds.), African
systems of kinship and marriage, (London, 1950), pp. 190-3. Cf. M. Hunter,
Reaction to conquest, p. 212.
" Z. Barbu, Problems of historical psychology, (London, i960), pp. 166 n,
167-79. F OT a cruder theory of the social origins of one kind of tragedy see
L. Goldmann, Le dieu cachi. Etudes sur la vision tragique dans les Pensies de
Pascal et dans le Thiatre de Racine, these, (Paris, n.d. [1956]).
" Elements of social organization, p. 210.
" Some of the relevant texts are cited by A. O. Aldridge, "Polygamy in early
fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras", Publications of the Modem Language
Association of America, lxv (1950) and "Polygamy and Deism", The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, xlviii (1949).
" Coming of age in Samoa, (London, 1929); Growing up in New Guinea . . . ,
(London, 1931); (with M. Wolfenstein [eds.]). Childhood in contemporary
cultures, (Chicago, 1955). There is an older general treatment in N . Miller,
The child in primitive society, (London, 1928), and a history of the study of
primitive childhood in O. F. Raum, Chaga childhood . . . , (London, 1940),
pp. 1-54. P. Aries, Centuries of childhood, trans. R. Baldick, (London, 1962),
is a recent historical study.
" B. Malinowski, Sex and repression in savage society, (London, 1927),
pp. 92-7; J. S. Lincoln, The dream in primitive cultures, (London, 1935);
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951),
chapter 4; G. D. Kelchner, Dreams in Old Norse literature and their affinities
in folklore . . . , (Cambridge, 1935). There is some interesting material in
P. Goodwin, The mystery ofdreames, historically discoursed . . . > (London, 1658).
" M. Zborowski, "Cultural components m response to pain", Journal of
Social Issues, viii (1952) (a modern sociological study).
" A brief guide to the anthropological literature on this subject is provided
by the footnotes to R. Firth, Suicide and risk-taking in Tikopia society",
PysMatry, xxiv (1961).
11
R. Linton, Culture and mental disorders, (Springfield, 111., 1956);
M. Foucault, Folie et dtraium. Histoire de la fohe a Page classique, these,
(Paris, 1961).
" Particularly A. Kardiner, The individual and his society . . . , (New York,
1939) and (et al.), The pyschological frontiers of society, (New York, 1945).
' Urged by L. Febvre (e.g. Combats pour /'histoire, [Paris, 1953], pp. 207-38),
and exemplified by R. Mandrou, Introduction a la Prance modeme. Essm de
psychologie historique, 1500-1640, (Paris, 1961). Cf. A. Dupront, "Problemes
et methodes d'une histoire de La psychologie collective", Annales, i 6 e annee
(196 0 .
On which see J. C. Flugel, The pyschology of clothes, (London, 1930),
pp. 110-3. There are some remarks on the implications of the subject by
H. J. Perkin in H. P. R. Finberg (ed.), Approaches to history. A symposium,
(London, 1962), pp. 69-70, and by R. Barthes, "Histoire et sociologie du
vitement: quelques observations methodologiques", Annales, I2 e annee (1957).

24

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 24

Q. Bell, On hitman finery, (London, 1947)1 is largely an application of the

theories of Thorstein Veblen.
11
P. Francastel, Peinture et sodtti , . . . (Lyon, 1951).
" Elements of social organization, p. 175. On the comparable moral values
of Victorian art and that of the New Zealand Maori see E. R. Leach in
Evans-Pritchard, The institutions of primitive society, p. 37.
" Quoted by Iris Origo in J. L. Clifford (ed.). Biography as an art . . . ,
(London, 1962), p. 213.
Briefly outlined by Evans-Pritchard, Social anthropology, p. 76.
M. Fortes, "The structure of unilineal descent groups", American
Anthropologist, lv (1953)) p. 23.
'' Though, as far as economics go, the work of Professor Firth constitutes
an obvious exception. Mr. E. R. Leach makes some strong criticisms of the
exaggerated emphasis laid on descent as the fundamental principle of social
organization to the exclusion of more obvious economic considerations in Pul
Eliya. A village in Ceylon, p. 301, and Rethinking anthropology, (London,
1961), p. 122.
" R. Benedict, Patterns of culture, (London, [Routledge paperback edn.],
1961) (first published in England in 1935).
" Lord Macaulay's Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome, (London, 1886), p. 424.
4 Anthropology and history, p. 20.

The ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING of the Past and

Present Society will be held at 12.15 p.m. on Thursday n July
1963 in Birkbeck College, London, at the conclusion of the
morning session of the Annual Conference.