ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the long-established professional relationship between history and anthropology. A discipline in the human sciences is self-evidently constituted by a set of questions which will be intelligible to the members of that particular discipline and a recognizable set of discourses, language-games, etc., for answering them. The first thing to note about such a history is the early presence in all attempts to write about “the other,” of the neo-Kantian distinction between the ideographic and the nomothetic. The most common alternative, so often practiced by modern historians—the entry, that is, from the most familiar place—is, of course, certainly no more instructive. The marriage with anthropology was an outcome of the historian’s quest for his own objective stance. History, of course, lacking any distinctive methodology, and any methodological identity beyond the limits of the academy, need have no anxiety about its future.
