ABSTRACT
In discussing together history and anthropology, it is often acknowledged that the relationship between the two has been contradictory and contentious but their interplay has also been prescient and productive. The common grounds of anthropology and history as disciplines of modernity rest upon enduring oppositions between static, traditional groups on the one hand and dynamic, modern societies on the other. The sociocultural evolutionism that characterized British anthropology from the 1860s brought together two separate, prior tendencies: “on the one hand, a study of the variety of mankind that that had yet to free itself from the constraints of biblical assumption; and on the other, a study of the progress of civilization for which a positivistic program was already well established”. The institutionalizations and contentions of anthropology and history as modern enquiries emerged after the wider processes of the French and industrial revolutions.
