Anthropology versus history

Abstract

The article discusses the relationship between history and anthropology, posing questions about the inequality of the social legitimization of those disciplines, about the reasons for his-tory being treated in popular and public discourse as a source of the objective description of the past, and about the under-representation of the anthropological milieu in the public debate about the past. The author explains the inequality pointing out that anthropology favours subjectivism and constructivism, and that many of anthropologists’ claims, especially those that deconstruct some notions considered to be obvious and based on “the natural order”, contradict dominant popular and political discourses.At the same time, the author stresses, after Katarzyna Kaniowska, that the difference between sources used by a historian and an anthropologist is only apparently so huge, since the truth of an objective description turns out to be a myth when social memory is studied. Using the example of fi eldwork on narratives about Jews in small town communities conducted in 2007–2015 in Podlasie, she demonstrates the problematic status of such categories as memory, reality, national-ity and stereotype. She also shows how and what for the past can be looked into anthropologi-cally; in this particular case the major issue was how to write about people who are no longer physically present but still constitute a point of reference in the life and memory of the locals. The author suggests that a common ground and a connection signifying the values vital for both disciplines can be metaphorically represented by a reference to the Greek etymology of the word historia, which meant “talking to an eye witness, interviewing them, asking for clari-fi cation, an exact description of an event”. In such a view what links the two disciplines is contact with a witness, a human trying to share their subjective description of reality.