Toward a Rapprochement

Bibliographic Data

ID4010233
AuthorsBernard S Cohn, Bernard Cohn (corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume12
Issue2
Pages227
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/203026
OpenAlexW2320725322
LanguageEN
Citations received47

Toward a Rapprochement History and anthropology are forms of knowledge, the creation, formalization, and practice of which are deeply embedded in the historical experience of Western Europe from the fifteenth century to the present. Until the eighteenth century anthropology was a part of history. Historians sought to understand otherness in time by postulating a relationship between the past and the present, the past being lineally and causally related to the present. The belief that the present was the result of the past, and the belief that the way men lived, their institutions of governance, and their social forms, as well as their ideas, had been shaped over time, was not merely part of the belief system of scholars, but become deeply embedded in European culture. This past, which affected the present, could be studied and transmitted by identifying evidence of past action and thought in various collective representations embodied in texts, art forms, architecture, social practices, and customs. The European native theory of time itself was transformed into chronology, with the idea that time could be objectively measured and computed through the regular divisions of time into periods to which events could be assigned by dates. Europeans believed that the world, animate and inanimate, had an absolute and datable origin. They had developed the idea of chronology in which time was conceived of in a linear fashion, which enabled them to order by date the reigns of kings, the lives of saints, and the events that affected polities. They also developed a distinction between what they thought of as true history and

Business · Political science · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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