Anthropology and Its Relationship with History

Every society carries its past within it. The customs people follow, the institutions they build, and the conflicts they navigate all have roots stretching back through time. Two disciplines have taken on the task of understanding this relationship between human beings and their past: anthropology and history. Though they approach this task from different angles and with different tools, they are bound together so tightly that some scholars see them as two faces of the same project.

A Bold Claim: Why the Two Disciplines Cannot Be Separated

In 1899, Frederic William Maitland made one of the strongest statements ever written about this bond. In his work The Body Politic, he declared that “anthropology is history or it is nothing.” His point was direct: if anthropology does not study how human societies have developed and changed over time, it loses its very purpose.

Other scholars turned this idea around and expressed it as a two-way street. They argued that “history is past anthropology, and anthropology is present history.” In other words, when historians study past societies, they are doing what anthropologists do, just in an earlier time period. And when anthropologists study living communities, they are doing what historians do, just in the present moment.

History, in the traditional sense, can be defined as the study of the past for which written records are available. Anthropology, through its branches like archaeological anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology, maintains a direct and vital connection with this study of the past.

Walking Together: Where the Two Disciplines Converge

Despite their different starting points, anthropology and history overlap in several important ways. Six key similarities tie them together.

• Studying the human past — Both disciplines converge when they try to study and describe how human societies existed and functioned in earlier times. Whether through reading ancient documents or excavating buried settlements, both are driven by the same curiosity about what came before.

• Mutual dependence for interpretation — Neither discipline can do its best work alone. Anthropology depends on history for the historical interpretation of social facts (understanding how present-day social patterns were shaped by past events). History, in turn, depends on anthropology for the social interpretation of historical facts (understanding the social structures and cultural forces behind recorded events). Each discipline fills gaps that the other cannot cover on its own.

• Diachronic studies and historiography — Within socio-cultural anthropology, diachronic studies (research that tracks how a society or culture changes across time, as opposed to studying it at a single point) create a direct bridge to history. Evans-Pritchard, one of the most influential British anthropologists, went so far as to say that socio-cultural anthropology is historiography to a great extent. When anthropologists trace the evolution of marriage customs, political structures, or religious practices over generations, they are essentially writing history.

• Building the foundation for historical knowledge — Archaeological anthropology and paleo-anthropology (the study of ancient human species and their evolution) give us an understanding of societies that existed in prehistoric times, long before any writing system was invented. History begins where written records begin, roughly the last 5,000 years. Everything before that depends on anthropological research. In this sense, anthropology provides the base on which history builds and carries forward.

• History’s broadening scope — For centuries, history was almost exclusively political history. It focused on kings, their lifestyles, their military victories, and their defeats. Ordinary people, their cultures, their economies, and their beliefs barely featured. In recent times, however, history has expanded dramatically to include social, cultural, economic, and religious dimensions of past life. This broadening follows the approach of socio-cultural anthropology, which has always studied societies as complete wholes rather than focusing on rulers alone.

• Each is incomplete without the other — The study of socio-cultural facts without understanding their history is pointless and rootless, like trying to understand a tree by looking only at its branches while ignoring its roots. Equally, the study of history without understanding the social significance behind events is fruitless, like cataloguing dates and names without grasping what they meant to the people who lived through them.

Different Tools for Different Questions: How They Diverge

For all their shared ground, anthropology and history differ in important ways. These differences are not about one being better than the other. They reflect the fact that each discipline was designed to answer a different set of questions, and each has developed its own tools for the job.

Dimension	Anthropology	History
Temporal scope	Covers prehistoric (before writing), protohistoric (limited written evidence), and historic (full written records) societies	Covers only historic, literate societies for which written records exist
Breadth as a science	A whole science: studies human biology, culture, and society together in totality	A part science or dominant field of the humanities: focuses on societies and cultures through written records
Subject matter focus (Kottak)	Less concerned with particular individuals and individual events; focuses on major changes in the forms of human adaptation and institutions	More concerned with specific individuals, individual events, and the chronological sequence of those events
Types of phenomena studied (Levi-Strauss)	Studies both conscious phenomena (what people are aware of) and unconscious phenomena (underlying structures and patterns people follow without realising)	Studies only conscious phenomena as revealed by documents
Intellectual orientation (Radcliffe-Brown)	Nomothetic (law-seeking) and generalising: primary interest is discovering general laws of culture and society	Idiographic (case-describing) and particularising: primary interest is narrating specific events in chronological order
Primary data source	Field data collected through direct observation and participation in living communities	Library data drawn from written documents, archives, and manuscripts
Relationship to data	Concerned with unraveling meanings and creating data through fieldwork	Concerned with finding data that already exists in documentary records

Understanding the Key Terms

• Prehistoric — the period before human beings developed writing systems; all knowledge about this period comes from physical evidence like fossils, tools, and ruins
• Protohistoric — the transitional period where a society itself may not have writing, but is mentioned in the written records of neighbouring literate societies
• Diachronic — studying something across time, tracing how it changes from one period to another (the opposite of synchronic, which studies something at a single point in time)
• Nomothetic — an approach that seeks to establish general laws and universal principles
• Idiographic — an approach that focuses on describing and understanding particular, unique cases
• Historiography — the writing of history, or the study of how history is written and interpreted

Growing Together: The Interdisciplinary Future

The boundaries between anthropology and history, like those between many academic disciplines, are growing thinner. Historians now borrow anthropological concepts to understand the social fabric behind political events. Anthropologists draw on historical records to place the communities they study in their proper context. All disciplines are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary (drawing on methods and ideas from multiple fields rather than staying within a single tradition).

This convergence does not erase the identity of either discipline. Anthropology still brings its commitment to studying human life in totality, its fieldwork tradition, and its search for general patterns. History still brings its mastery of written evidence, its attention to specific events and individuals, and its skill in constructing detailed chronological narratives. Together, they offer a more complete picture of the human story than either could provide alone.