HIST2312 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Marc Bloch
Week 6 Lecture – HIST2312
Historical Context:
• Social history and history from below
• Move away from the history of the elite – ordinary people more in focus
• Tend to follow political trends – 20th century decline of the world of the 19th century
and move towards democracy
• Revolutions and parties coming to power
• Reflected in history writing
• Log hae e orked together for a ider ad ore hua history – Marc Bloch
• Anthropology and history together – founded in the 19th century
• Began process of understanding societies on their own terms – cultural
understanding, something fundamentally different
Scholars:
• Snouck Hurgronye (1857-1936) – earliest and most respected, visited Mecca,
married woman from Java, height of racial theory
• Talcott Parsons – The Structure of Social Action, societies were racially or culturally
inferior now how they functioned in their own right
• Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) – anthropologist not a historian, founder of the
syoli athropology approah: uderstanding cultures as systems of signs, go in
and try to understand it as they do, influential outside of anthropology (history,
literary studies, political science, cultural studies), had to emerge in the culture and
dispend value
• Natalie Zemon Davis – early-modern France, attempt to reconstruct the cultural
world
• Robert Darnton -
Functionalism:
• Society as a closed system – aim was to examine relationships and how they are
structured, rituals, government
• Juxtaposition of ideas
• Did not challenge the status quo as much as they should
• If societies are to change, change must come from the outside (form of European
colonial rule)
• Took the lead in replacing model where societies have value in their own right –
cultural relativism
• Very little historical context of the culture – link with the historian
Decolonization:
• Stimulated interest in former colonized countries
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