ABSTRACT
Good evening. I am delighted to be here. Programme Chair Barbara Hanawalt first suggested the impossible task of talking about how anthropologists, as a discipline, use history in creating narratives. Mercifully, AHA President Eric Foner later reduced this charge to the somewhat more manageable one of ‘reflecting on the construction of historical narration in my own work’. V. S. Naipaul was certainly correct when he said that an author’s least reliable critic is himself, but I am pleased to be here nevertheless and honoured by the invitation.
