This week we turn to the subject of history, or more precisely, to the subject of time. Rather than speaking about the formal – or even the conceptual – relation between the disciplines of anthropology and history, my comments today are offered in the spirit of Barney Cohn's famous book, An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987): I am thinking about anthropology in a relaxed conversation with history, in order to evoke different ways that we can think about – and use – the arc of history in anthropology. My intention is partly to emphasize the importance of history and historiography, alongside mythography or even, perhaps, what I might call mythopoeiography, the process of the production of myth, in our discipline. But more importantly, it is to consider the concept of time, and specifically how historical trajectories – let us call them cultural flows, or cultural pasts – can be traced or tracked in a particular cultural milieu. My contention is that anthropology is uniquely capable of understanding how what Geertz called “symbolic action” or “symbolic formulations” (1973: 27; 120) can, over time, come to constitute a particular landscape that we are researching in the contemporary moment. Those “systems of symbolic meaning” (49) have led us to where we are today, and anthropology can research both the past and the present through a lens that accommodates such temporal flow.

My discussion of “history” is thus not an archival one as such (cf. Dirks 2001, 2015). I am interested instead in the way we map cultural flows that evolve or develop over time, and how we can use those cultural genealogies – genealogies of ideas; of symbolic nexuses; of praxis and ideology – to help us understand the contemporary formations of social worlds. In short, I am talking about the social – and the historical – construction of the present. To understand the ways ideas have been transmitted and inherited – not in a fixed way, but in a dynamic one – is part of what anthropology must undertake if we are to uncover how they come to be seen as natural.

My genealogy of our discipline in these lectures is not unlike the kind of genealogy I am suggesting is productive for the study of any cultural mode of thought.