Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s. This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Critical Junctions—Recapturing Anthropology and History Don Kalb and Herman Tak 1 Chapter 1. Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective Don Handelman Chapter 2. The Past in the Present: Actualized History in the Social Construction of Reality Christian Giordano Chapter 3. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Structural Narrative about Long-Duration Provenances of the Holocaust Hermann Rebel Chapter 4. Beyond the Limits of the Visible World: Remapping Historical Anthropology August Carbonella Chapter 5. “Bare Legs Like Ice”: Recasting Class for Local/Global Inquiry Don Kalb Chapter 6. Prefiguring NAFTA: The Politics of Land Privatization in Neoliberal Mexico Patricia Musante Chapter 7. Historical Anthropology through Local-Level Research Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver Chapter 8. Anthropology and History: Opening Points for a New Synthesis Gerald Sider Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
Don Kalb is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest, and Senior Researcher at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His books include Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950 (Duke University Press 1997); The Ends of Globalization. Bringing Society back in, (ed., Rowman and Littlefield 2000); Globalization and Development: Key Issues and Debates (ed., Kluwer Academic 2004); Headlines of Nation, Subtext of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe (co-ed (with Gábor Halmai), Berghahn Books 2011). He is the founding editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

Review :
“The editors stake out an appealing middle ground that builds on the expanded notion of class that the cultural turn itself advance against a narrow economism of an earlier generation. Second, the volume reminds us of the legacy of anthropology to historical thinking.”  ·   Journal of Social History “… highly provocative and, for an edited book, unusually even…Whether moved to agreement or to dissent, the reader will learn much from this timely collection.”  ·  Focaal