THE ROL OF LIFE HISTORIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Abstract
In the last decades cultural anthropology has moved from the acceptance of the position that the agents of change were largely located in Western civilizations, while the so-called traditional societies of the Third World and the peasantries of Europe could best be described in static terms, with any dynamic element either merely corresponding to internal cyclical changes or coming from the outside, to models that attribute agency to subaltern societies or part-societies. The recent interest in life history methodologies including testimonials is one attempt to redress traditional biases both in history and in cultural anthropology. In this article we explore some of these studies, including research we undertook in Spain, Bolivia and Germany, and examine the theoretical implications they have for the understanding of the relationship between history and anthropology.
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