ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief introduction to some issues and tensions at the history–anthropology frontier, how it developed, and some key figures in its development. Sociologists and anthropologists began to separate themselves, their disciplines, and methods from those of historians, though many of them, such as Frazer, Weber, and Durkheim had begun their careers as historians. There is a strong sense of action and dynamism in the primary European sources – a feeling that the mariners, marines, naturalists, artists, and astronomers were actually there or knew others who were actually there. Sherry B Ortner has considered in detail the practical relationship between human actors and the cultural contexts in which their lives are played out. “Doing” ethnography and historiography requires the gathering of fragments from historical worlds and assembling them in contexts “without losing their fragile uniqueness and ambiguity”.
