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[The Possibilities of the past]: A Comment Author(s): Carlo Ginzburg Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 2, The New History: The 1980s and beyond (II) (Autumn, 1981), pp. 277-278 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/203029 . Accessed: 16/01/2013 05:32
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xII:2 (Autumn 198I), 277-278.

Anthropology
Carlo Ginzburg

and History in the I980s

The growing influence, in recent years, of history on anthropology, and vice-versa, is well known. The emergence of a common area of research at the border between the two disciplines has been triggered by two crises: the end of the structured, self-confident notion of history and the growing consciousness among anthropologists that the presumed native cultures were themselves a historical product. Both crises are connected to the end of the world colonial system, and to the collapse of the related unilinear notion of history. Two features of anthropologists' work have had a powerful
impact on a good number of historians: the emphasis on cultural

A Comment

distance, and the attempt to overcome it by emphasizing the inner coherence of every aspect of societies widely different from our own. Historians have tried to look at old topics (for instance, political power) or at old evidence (for instance, inquisitorial records) in a different way. Behaviors and beliefs traditionally seen as senseless, irrelevant, or at best marginal curiosities (for instance, magic and supersitition) have been analyzed at last as valid human experiences. The result of this intellectual effort has been a new way of presenting documentary evidence; the revival of narrative, as stressed by Stone in a recent article, has been deeply influenced by the practice of case studies among anthropologists. The emphasis on lived experience and the close reading of evidence are connected with the choice of specific literary devices. It is usual to insist on the rhetorical and emotional value of these literary devices; but it is necessary also to analyze their cognitive, as well as methodological and ideological implications. From a general point of view, it could be said that every history, even if it is filled with statistics and figures, is a story, a piece of narrative:
Carlo Ginzburg is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bologna. He is the Miller (Baltimore, author of The Cheese and the Worms:The Cosmosof a Sixteenth-Century 1977).
0022-1953/81/020277-2 $02.50/0

? I981 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

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278

CARLO GINZBURG

but different models of narrative have been selected by historians in different times. It would be naive to take for granted a model (borrowed by nineteenth-century novels) in which a God-historian knows everything, including the hidden motivations of his characters-individuals, groups, or social classes. An anthropological look at the ways in which anthropologists and historians communicate their findings would be useful to both disciplines.1 The growing number of detailed studies on circumscribed historical phenomena has often been lamented as a fragmentation of the historical discipline. It seems to me, however, that this is a price to be paid for elaborating more powerful analytical tools. Case studies obviously imply generalizations: but it is difficult to predict whether the general frame of reference for this kind of analysis will be provided by history, anthropology, or both.
I Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past & Present, 85 (I979), 3-24.

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