- Title
- Cultural change in Oceania: remembering the historical questions
- Creator
- Hempenstall, Peter
- Relation
- Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania p. 313-322
- Relation
- http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-8565-9780824833664.aspx
- Publisher
- University of Hawaii Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Ordinarily a historian among anthropologists is a nervous creature. The Malinowskian tradition of European anthropology condemned the historian to a status of inferior cousin in a family devoted to studying the functional regularities of social structure in "other cultures." History was regarded as an oversimplified project, a fact-grubbing chronicle or speculative flight of fancy incapable of connecting with the reality of past societies. Historical anchropology was a weaker variety of the real anthropology, in which "social change" might be studied by comparing the start and end points of a particular society and evaluating the amount of change that occurred between. But anthrpology has been thoroughly "historicized " since then. Temporality as a process has been incorporated into explanations of cultural shifts, and anthropologists have become adept at exploring how time is differently conceptualized, represented, symbolized, and constructed by social groups. Today, historians of the Pacific Islands will often turn first to the anthropologist, nor just for an understanding of the social structure with which they are dealing, but for a sophisticated exploration of the dynamic of change occurring among a historical island population.
- Subject
- Oceania; historical theory; anthropology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059285
- Identifier
- uon:16562
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780824833664
- Language
- eng
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