ABSTRACT
Anthropology has been separated from history by barriers higher than those usually erected around disciplines. It was partly a geographic division of labor: historians did the West and the classical Orient, and anthropologists, the smaller societies in the rest of the world-those presumed to have no history, or at least none that could be detected. It was partly that historians found the prevailing views of anthropologists uncongenial, in fact, ahistorical. In its heyday until the 1960s, functionalism (strictly speaking, British structural-functionalism) posited a sociocultural equilibrium. It looked at underlying patterns but was blind to change. Structuralism seemed still more repellent. Not only did Claude Lévi-Strauss and his followers neglect change in their concern for common human structures of thought, but they often ignored social and historical context. Oddly, though social history has long widened its scope to include many topics of concern to anthropology, and anthropologists have turned their attention to larger societies and the modern West, this aversion has persisted among many historians.
