BOB SCRIBNER Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe

BOB SCRIBNERHistorical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe'Historical anthropology 1 is a distinctive approach to the interpretation ofEuropean history which attracted a surge of scholarly interest in the1970s and 1980s. It was recognizable by its attention to topics previouslyneglected by the historian (witchcraft and magic, ritual, family and kinship,popular thought-modes, peasant economic rationality) and by theuse of an analytical framework deriving from (among others) EmileDurkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz.In the course of the last twenty years the assumptions and methods of thepioneers have been challenged and refined, and a considerable body ofhistorical work has now been produced along these lines, with a largenumber of case-studies for England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.In recent years, new themes have emerged and new methodologies havebeen devised which have positioned historical anthropology at the cuttingedge of current historical debate. Long a preserve largely of French andAnglo-American historians, its waves have recently begun to lap on theshores of the German historical world 1 . Major themes discussed underthis heading include economic and political anthropology as applied to preindustrialEuropean societies; the anthropology of daily life and materialculture; family, kinship and community, honour and patronage; sex andgender; religion, magic and witchcraft; orality and literacy; ritual and ritualbehaviour. Historical anthropology has not confined its attention to anysingle period, but the most significant contributions have undoubtedlybeen made by studies of the early modern centuries (by this is meant the'long early modern period' of 1400 - 1800), followed by those of medievalEurope and most recently an increasing number on the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries.See Richard van Diilmen, 'Historische Anthropologie in der deutschen Sozialgeschichte1 , Ceschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 11 (1991), 692-709; DieterGroh, Anthropologische Dimensionen der Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M., 1992); andmost notably the foundation in 1993 of the journal Historische Anthropologie. Kultur- Gesellschaft - Alltag.

Bob ScribnerThe historical application of anthropological models has not been withoutcontroversy. Two pioneering studies, by Alan Macfarlane and KeithThomas on witchcraft, were accused at an early stage of too glibly takingover the assumptions of functionalist anthropology, so that witchcraftaccusations were seen just to fulfil the function of reducing social strain.Even if their analyses were pitched at the micro- rather than the macrosociologicallevel (the village rather than state or 'society'), both stronglyemphasised the social usefulness of witchcraft accusations. Thomas inparticular was accused of being over-influenced by Malinowski's psychologicalapproach, explaining witchcraft accusations in terms of their rolein overcoming anxiety and guilt. Although Thomas defended himselfagainst this charge, there is no doubt about the psychological orientationof much of his explanation of witchcraft, while psychology certainlyplayed a central role in Macfarlane's study of Essex, where witchcraftaccusations were explained in terms of a transfer of guilt felt by anaccuser for charity refused to the accused. Meanwhile many anthropologistshad come to regard psychology as of dubious value for explainingphenomena such as witch belief, and the emphasis that began to gainground was one orientated to reconstructing the meaning of witch beliefsfor those who held them 2 .Thomas' mode of analysis was actually remarkably eclectic and manysidedand was not wholly incompatible with a meaning-orientated approach.Indeed, he emphasised, albeit late in the book, that the problemwas 'to offer a psychological explanation of the motives of the participantsin the drama of witchcraft accusation, a sociological analysis of the situationin which such accusations tended to occur, and an intellectual explanationof the concepts which made such accusation plausible' 3 . Nonethe-2 A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1970); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973). Criticism of Thomas by Hildred Geertz and Thomas' reply in 'An Anthropology of Religion andMagic', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975), 71 - 109. For the multiplicityof approaches to witchcraft, see the early collection of comparative essays inM. Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and Sorcery (Harmondsworth, 1970).3 Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 559. For a nuanced and highly perceptivereading of Thomas' work and its critics, see Jonathan Barry, 'Keith Thomas and theProblem of Witchcraft. Explanations and Representations of Witchcraft since Religionand the Decline of Magic', in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Studies in Cultureand Belief, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, Gareth Roberts (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 13less, the book's anthropological presuppositions now look rather datedand certainly belong to an earlier generation of anthropological analysis.Noteworthy in the ways historians used social anthropology during theseearly years is that they were often borrowing anthropological approachessometime after these had been called into question by anthropologiststhemselves. Thus, Religion and the Decline of Magic is marred by referencesto 'primitive' mentalities, by implicitly evolutionary overtones andby the assumption that one could easily apply models derived from studyof simple societies to the more complex societies of early modern Europe.Yet even as Thomas was writing his book, the trend in anthropologicalstudies (and later in historical studies) was to analyse European societiesvery much on their own terms and within a developing frameworkof intra-European comparisons - Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean,north and south, centre and periphery 4 , "zA related tendency within early modern European history of the1970s was the borrowing of anthropological concepts as tools of analysis.The most striking example is the 'acculturation' thesis| associatedwith Robert Muchembled's Culture populaire, culture des elites (Paris1978; German edition 1982, English edition 1984) 5 . The notion of 'acculturation',the erosion of an indigenous culture by a dominant colonisingculture, began its career as a concept in anthropological analysis in the1880s, and was in vogue among anthropologists during the 1930s and1940s, but its more general intellectual use had a rather curious origin inpolitical reactions to the French decolonisation of Algeria, whence itslipped into fashionable historical discourse ih the early 1970s. It was4 For example such studies as J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964); ]. Davis, 'Honour and Politics in Pisticci', Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1969), 69 — 81; J. G. Peristiany,ed., Honor and Shame. The Values of Mediterranean Society (1965); in the field ofpopular religion, William A. Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (NewYork, 1972). However, the greatest problem of comparing early modern Europe withAfrican societies seems to have escaped Thomas' gaze, the absence of any equivalentfigure to the devil in African witchcraft, making impossible the kind of intensification of accusations of malificent sorcery into charges of diabolical heresy that typified European witchcraft accusations.5 The thesis also restated briefly in R. Muchembled, 'Lay Judges and the Acculturationof the Masses (France and the Southern Low Countries, 16th - 18th C), in: Religionand Society in Early Modern Europe 1500 - 1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London,1984), pp. 56-65.

14 Bob Scribnerfirst applied to describe the impact of Spanish conquest of the southernAmerican continent in the early sixteenth century in Nathaniel Wachtel'sreconstruction of the mental world of the indigenous peoples in Peru.The Spanish historian Caro Baroja had already used it as a descriptivelabel for the erosion of moorish culture in the Spanish Reconquista 6 .Muchembled's application had a far wider scope, using it to categorisethe subjection of rural popular culture by urban bourgeois culture inearly modern France, driven forward by the interests of the absolutiststate. The thesis was strongly criticised by some historians, not least forits assumption that the rural world of early modern France was as foreignto the urban world as a totally alien culture. There were undoubtedlytendencies among some groups in early modern Europe to regard thepeasant world as 'the other', as 'the Indies at home', and for this reasonsome historians are still inclined to find value in the term 'acculturation 1 ,but Muchembled had certainly placed a burden on the concept that itcould not bear 7 .What was more 'anthropological' in Muchembled's book was his attemptto reconstruct the belief system of the rural world as a culturalwhole, something he shared in common with Keith Thomas' view thatboth religion and magic were part of a common system of belief. Indeed,the 'anthropological approach' as used by social historians has often beenlargely hermeneutic, seeking to understand the mental world andthought-modes of earlier societies, to identify cognitive structures and assumptionsand to locate within them phenomena such as witch beliefs,magic, religious behaviour, social relations and political action. Perhapsfor this reason, historians were strongly attracted to anthropological ex-6 For the concept of 'acculturation', see E. M'Bokolo, 'Acculturation', in: La nouvellehistoire,, ed. J. le Goff, R. Chartier, J. Revel (1978); N. Wachtel, 'L'acculturation', in:Faire I'histoire, ed. J. le Goff & P. Nora (1974), vol. 1, pp. 124 - 46; J. Wirth,'Against the Acculturation Thesis', in: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe1500 - 1800, pp. 66 - 78; P. Burke, 'A Question of Acculturation?' in: Scienze, Credenze,Occulte Livelli di Cultura, ed. P. Zambelli (1982), 197 - 204. Also N. Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished. The Spanish Conquest of Peru through IndianEyes (1971; Engl. 1977), esp. ch. 3; J. C. Baroja. Los moriscos del Reino de Granada (1957).7 The fiercest, if sometimes muddled, criticism from Jean Wirth (see note 6); PeterBurke, 'Popular Culture between History and Ethnology', Ethnologia Europaea 14(1984), 5-13 and History and Social Theory (1992), pp. 125, 138, 155 - 7 is inclined to see the concept as still useful.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 15planations that seemed to offer an overarching view of culture as awhole, although the variants on offer were not all of equal value. Structuralismwas the prevailing fashion in the anthropology of the 1970s, butit made little deep impact on historical work, perhaps because its basicstance was profoundly ahistorical: if everything was reducible to sets ofdeep structures as long as one probed deeply enough, then any disciplineof historical specificity was undermined.Structuralist anthropology probably made its greatest impact on historyby calling attention to the importance of kinship structures and inheritancepatterns, overlapping with the growing interest in demographichistory and history of the family. Here, however, a rather vague commonalityof subject matter (household, lineage, family, inheritance) seems tohave set the tone, rather than any direct dependence on social anthropology8 . Indeed, a major work in the general field of marriage and the familyshowed the reverse process at work, an anthropologist turning to historyto illuminate the long-term development of these institutions in Europe 9 .Meanwhile the history of the 'western family' has taken its own trajectory,influenced by several approaches among whkh the anthropologicaldoes not seem to have been especially strong. The same was true of therelated topic of 'community', a subject dear to the hearts of anthropologists,but one also of interest to sociologists, legal historians, historicaltheologians and historians of political thought. Indeed, the main figurebridging historical studies and social anthropology in the 1970s and1980s, Alan Macfarlane, a trained anthropologist who alternated his fieldworkwith historical studies, was rather sceptical about the notion of8 For example, works by D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., 1985);F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence (1980); C. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (1985); H. Plakans, Kinshipin the Past (1984); D. Sabean, Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen,1700 - 1870 (Cambridge, 1990); M. Segalen, Historical Anthropology of the Family(Cambridge, 1986). Of these, perhaps only the works by Plakans, Sabean and Segalen could be called strongly anthropological in orientation. The volume by J. Goody, J. Thirsk and E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance. Rural Society inWestern Europe 1200 - 1800 (Cambridge, 1976) was an interesting attempt to bridgesociology and history, although without any specific repercussions as to how the history of the family was approached.9 J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge,1983).

16 Bob Scribnercommunity then in circulation, to the extent that he seemed to underminethe subject as a separate field of interest 10 .The same might be said of another trend in social anthropology of the1970s, the burgeoning interest in peasant economic rationality and 'peasantsociety'. Beginning with the work of Robert Redfield and continuedby Eric Wolf, this direction seems to have found stronger interest amonghistorians of the modern period intrigued by the persistence of peasantriesin the face of 'modernising' societies than among their early moderncolleagues, with Hans Medick, David Sabean and a few others representingexceptions to the trend". Any general anthropological orientationseems to have been caught up in the net of the new discipline of 'peasantstudies' which emerged in the early 1970s and which encompassed history,economics, politics and sociology as well as anthropology. Somenotions coined by anthropologists working in this field have found theirway into the historian's vocabulary, such as the peasant idea of the 'limitedgood', but the most influential recent work for historical studies of the10 See A. Macfarlane, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge, 1977), ch. 1;A. Macfarlane, 'History, Anthropology and the Study of Communities', Social History 2 (1977), 631 - 52. For an overview of the different approaches to 'community'see A. P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (1982), esp. pp. 11 - 38.Significantly, there has been only one recent historical work on community stronglyinfluenced by anthropology G. Sider, Culture and Class in Anthropology (Cambridge, 1986), while other important works of the period have not been primarily inspired by anthropology, if at all, for example, J. Blum, The Internal Structure andPolity of the European Village Community from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century', Journal of Modern History 43 (1971), 541 - 76; J. Bossy, 'Blood and Baptism:Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to theSeventeenth Century', in: Studies in Church History, ed. D. Baker, vol. 10 (1973),129-43; M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities. English Villagers in the Sixteenthand Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974); H. Stahl, Traditional Romanian Village Communities (Cambridge, 1980), esp. chs. 3 - 6; K. Wrightson, D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525 - 1700 (New York, 1979).11 See R. Redfield, The Little Community (Stockholm, 1956); Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, 1955), both republished in a single volume in 1973; Eric Wolf, Peasants (New York, 1966). For the interest in modern peasantries T. Shanin, The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy', Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1973) andT. Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971, 2nd ed. 1987),and his more recent collection of essays Defining Peasants. Essays Concerning Rural Societies (Oxford, 1990). While not explicitly mentioning the anthropology of thepeasantry, E. Le Roy Ladurie, 'Peasants', New Cambridge Modern History 13 (1979)embodies many of the basic tenets of the notions of 'peasant economy and society'.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 17peasanty has been produced by James C. Scott, by training and inclinationmore a sociologist than an anthropologist 12 .The result of these developments has been that historians have turnedmore readily to anthropology in the realm of history of religion or thehistory of mentalities. A very pronounced interest in ritual emerged inthe work of several historians of early modern Europe published in the1970s and 1980s. One trend was set by interest in rituals as features ofcontinuity or discontinuity in pre-modern cultures. Taking up the challengeof historians such as George Rude or Edward Thompson, who hadargued that crowd behaviour was highly structured and purposive, therewere several explorations of riots, carnivals and youth groups whichtended to emphasise the ways in which rituals could provide challengesto a given society without bringing it to the point of being overthrown 13 .Some were inspired by the work of Max Gluckman on 'rituals of rebellion',others by Victor Turner on ritual as a form of anti-structure, conceptswhich seemed to allow room for the emergence of radical alternativeseven within relatively immobile societies. Turner also directedattention to the earlier work of van Gennep on the important 'rites "despassage', a notion which has now been firmly appropriated by historicaldiscourse 14 . Other work focussed on the role of ritual in the construction12 G. M. Foster, 'Peasant Society and the Image of Litnited Good', American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 293 - 315; James C. Scott, The.Moral Economy of the Peasant.Subsistence and Rebellion in South-east Asia (New" Haven, 1976); Weapons of theWeak (New Haven, 1985); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990).13 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-CenturyFrance', in: Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975); N. Z. Davis, 'Charivari, Honor and Community in Seventeenth-Century Lyon and Geneva', in: Rite,Drama, Festival, Spectacle, ed. J. J. MacAloon (1984), 42 - 57; R. W. Scribner,'Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside-down', in: Popular Culture andPopular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987); R. Trexler, 'Ritual Behaviour in Renaissance Florence: the Setting', Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies inMedieval and Renaissance Culture, new series 4 (1973), 125 - 44; R. Trexler, Ritualin Florence: Adolescence and Salvation in the Renaissance', in: The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. C. Trinkaus, H. A. Obermann(1974), 200-264.14 M. Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in South-east Africa (Manchester, 1952);V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago, 1969); see also V. Turner, ed., Celebration. Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, D. C.,1982) and the work of Turner pupils, reflected in S. Moore, B. Myerhoff, eds., Sec-

18 Bob Scribnerof power and social consensus. Here the symbolic anthropology of CliffordGeertz was quite influential, although the marxian anthropology ofMaurice Bloch represented an alternative line of thought that found littlewider response among historians 15 .The original interest of historians in ritual undoubtedly emerged becauseit was seen as a way of understanding potent currents of dissentwithin pre-modern societies (exemplified in religious riot, iconoclasm,carnivalesque events, rituals of popular justice, notions of the 'reversibleworld'), but more recently emphasis has shifted to the ways in whichrituals constitute and conserve societies by creating consensus amongtheir members, whether as rites of power or as rites of incorporation 16 .The main thematic lines of argument have concerned the way in whichrituals create symbolic universes and a means of identification with thosewho stage 'rites of power'. However, historical studies in this area haveleft rather too many questions unanswered and there has been a tendencyto accept too uncritically the theoretical stance of the anthropologicalworks cited, as though these were in themselves free from presuppositions.Thus, it, has been too readily assumed that rituals always workand that they are always understood by their audience in the way intendedby those who stage them. The possibility has been overlooked thatsome rites of power are no more than expressive forms of self-displaywhose effect is confined to their performance and which work primarilyon those staging them for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the anthropo-ular Ritual (Assen/Amsterdam, 1977); A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London,1960; orig. ed. 1908).15 M. Bloch, Ritual, History and Power (London, 1989), esp. chs. 2, 9; P. Bourdieu,'Rites as Acts of Institution', in: J. G. Peristiany, J. Pitt-Rivers, eds., Honor andGrace in Anthropology (1992), 79 - 89; D. Cannadine, S. Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987); C. Geertz,'Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power', in: Rites ofPower. Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. S. Wilentz (Philadelphia, 1985), 13 - 38; C. Geertz, Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth CenturyBali (Princeton, 1980); S. Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power. Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985).16 See for example the works by Mervyn James, 'Ritual, Drama and Social Body in thelate-medieval English Town', Past & Present 98 (1983), 3 - 29; Thomas A. Brady,'Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependance: South German Civic Culture in the Ageof Renaissance and Reformation', in: Religion and Culture in the Renaissance andReformation, ed. S. Ozment (1989), Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 11,pp. 9 - 23.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 19logical discussion of ritual has become quite complex in two directions.On the one hand, the question of just what constitutes a ritual and how itworks has been subjected to searching and in some cases devastatingcriticism of the underlying theories by scholars such as Catherine Bell.On the other, studies of ritual have expanded their scope into an interdisciplinaryfield which now encompasses sociology, comparative religion,liturgical studies and even theatre studies 17 . It is thus now harderthan in the past for the historian simply to pick up an anthropologicaltheory of ritual and apply it like a stencil to his or her historical material.A similar set of problems has emerged around the approach probablymost in favour with historians of early modern Europe, the symbolicanthropology of Clifford Geertz, who first began to influence historicalthinking with his sketch of 'religion as a cultural system' and whosenotion of culture as primarily constituted by symbolic action seemed tooffer a viable alternative to the cruder forms of reductionism often embeddedin functionalist and materialist approaches to anthropological analysis.Focussing on how symbols were invested with meaning and constructedinto systems of belief and behaviour seemed to offer a wayforward that retained both the autonomy of ideas and the importance ofthe historical actors who invested the symbols with meaning. Yet as withritual, the interpretation of symbols and symbolic activity turns out to befraught with unforeseen difficulty. The most pertinent issue here has beenthat most symbols are often polysemous and multivalent and it is thusoften difficult to extract an unambiguous meaning from them. Sometimesthe meaning attached to any given form of action is embodied in theperformance, although this need not be repeated if the action is repeated.For some anthropologists, symbolisation is a complex social practice,rather than a matter purely of mentalities, and there are equally complicatedproblems of cultural transmission to be taken into account: whetherthe use and meaning of symbols change over time, why one kind of symbolis favoured at one time rather than another, and indeed whether allsymbols do have evident meaning that can be extracted by the historian.Moreover, the emphasis on symbolising behaviour has certainly swung17 C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992); R. L. Grimes, Beginnings inRitual Studies (Washington, D. C., 1982); the sociological direction in D. Kertzer,Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven, 1988); the interaction with theatre studies inV. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982).

20 Bob Scribnerthe pendulum too far in the direction of idealist interpretations and ignoresa good deal of material culture in its functional and utilitarian aspects:sometimes a pipe is only a pipe. The issue of gender in the constructionand interpretation of symbols has also further complicated theproblem, and it has become clear that male scholars have privileged certainkinds of symbols, while being blind to others 18 .The example that undoubtedly focussed many of these issues for earlymodern historians was Robert Darnton's essay on 'the great cat massacre',which its author saw as representative of how symbolic anthropology inthe Geertzian mode could be applied to historical analysis. The subjectwas provided by an episode retailed in a book of anecdotal reminiscenceson the life of journeymen printers by the Genevan printer Nicolas Contat,written in 1762. This relates how a group of printers' journeymen cameto slaughter a number of cats that were disturbing the sleep of theirmaster and his wife, as they do so taking revenge on the pair by 'inadvertently'killing their mistress's pet cat. Darnton proceeded to treat the'cat massacre' as 'a ritual event and to unravel its symbolism, both as asymbolic act of rebellion against authority, as well as an act of revengeagainst the master's wife permeated (on Darnton's reading) with sexualsymbolism 19 .Criticism of Darnton's interpretation has come from several directions.Some criticisms relate more to failures in historical scholarship than tothe use of anthropological theory. For example, Darnton assumes on veryflimsy ground that he is dealing with a real historical event, so that hecan analyse the story in terms of typical social conflicts between mastersand journeymen in Paris. He seems to have made no attempt to establishfrom historical records whether such a spectacular event ever occurred (it18 An essay that raises some of these problems is J. W. Ferdnandez, The Dark at theBottom of the Stairs: the Inchoate in Symbolic Enquiry and Some Strategies forDealing with it', in: Persuasion and Performances. The Play of Tropes in Culture(1986), pp. 214- 38. M. Bloch, The Myth of the Royal Bath in Madagascar', in:Rituals of Royalty, ed. D. Cannadine, S. Price (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 271 - 97 is acritical approach to a Geertzian reading of symbols; on gender, C. W. Bynum, 'Introduction: the Complexity of Symbols', in: Gender and Religion: On the Complexityof Symbols, ed. C. W. Bynum, S. Harrell, P. Richman (1986), 1 - 20.19 The title essay appears as ch. 2 in Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre andother Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984); there is also a Germanedition, Das grofie Katzenmassaker. Streifziige durch die franzosische Kultur vor derRevolution (Munchen, 1989).

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 21would be strange for this to have gone wholly unrecorded in police filesor other local historical records). He also assumes, without any strongerevidence than supposition that this was a typical form of popular ritual,indigenous to France, thus enabling him to assimilate the event to formsof ritual of rebellion or inversion and to charivari. More damningly,Harold Mali has recently pointed out that the story has been wrenchedout of its entire context in Contat's work, in which a subsequent passagerelates that the journeymen did not escape unpunished for their deed,thus considerably changing the tone and emphasis of the tale 20 . Now it istrue that historians can extract a good deal of cultural and social informationfrom such narrative sources, but Darnton dug himself into an evidentialhole by taking the narrative not as fiction, but as an actual account ofa real event for which he then posited real historical parallels.Much turns for Darnton's interpretation on the validity of symbols, butat the very heart of the argument there resides one crucial and unsubstantiatedassumption: that cats are a symbol of sexuality. Darnton citesno contemporary evidence for this assertion, although it would have beeneasy to check. In germanophone areas the symbolic associations of catsare quite complex and include some of those meanings Darnton ascribedto them: they symbolised something sinister, weird or uncanny, theywere associated with the demonic, they signified misfortune (seeing ablack cat brings bad luck, whoever kills a black cat will have bad luck)or danger (a child should not be left alone with a cat, from fear of bewitchment).Various magical actions can be performed with a cat and ithad an important role in folk medicine. But cats could also be associatedwith good luck (a house in which a cat lives contentedly will have goodfortune) or at least be used positively to predict good or ill fortune, the20 Criticisms of Darnton can be found in R. Chartier, Texts, Symbols and Frenchness:Historical Uses of Symbolic Anthropology', Cultural History between Practices andRepresentation (Oxford, 1988), 95 - 111, originally in: Journal of Modem History57 (1984), 682 - 95; D. La Capra, 'Chartier, Darnton and the Great Symbol Massacre',Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), 95 - 112; J. Fernandez, 'Historians TellTales: of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights', Journal of Modern History 60 (1988),113 - 27; H. Mah, 'Suppressing the Text: the Metaphysics of Ethnographic History inDarnton's Great Cat Massacre', History Workshop 31 (1991), 1 - 20. Darntondefended his analysis in 'History and Anthropology', The Kiss of Lamourette Reflectionsin Cultural History (New York, 1990), pp. 329 - 53, originally published inJournal of Modern History 58 (1986), 218 - 34.

22 Bob Scribnerweather or simply future events 21 . Now in none of this is there any referenceto cats as symbols of sexuality and Darnton's arbitrary applicationof this particular symbol has a decidedly freudian ring to it 22 .The example raises some very acute questions about both methods andsources for the historian who wishes to engage in historical anthropology.The first issue of method is how far one can take over anthropologicaltheories uncritically, without reflection on the appropriate modificationsrequired for the historian's period or subject. Anthropologists are wellaware that the same method and conceptualisation that might apply toAfrican tribal societies cannot be simply transferred to Latin-Americanpeasant societies. But the problem has become more complicated thanthat through the growing awareness in the discipline during the 1980s ofhow anthropology constructs its subject from a very particular point ofview, namely from of white, male, middle-class Western observers. Thisperception is certainly not new and was raised as a decisive objection inan important debate of the early 1960s over attempts to distinguish analyticallybetween religion and magic 23 . Anthropologists are now rethinkingnot only their methods, but even the very basis of their discipline, andthis certainly means that the historian cannot simply turn to anthropologyfor methodological or even conceptual guidance without a good deal ofreflection on the status and the validity of the method to which he orshe feels attracted.There is a further more specific problem of method.It is usually saidthat the difference between the anthropologist and the historian is that theformer can interrogate his or her subjects in fieldwork and so arrive at21 H. Bachthold-Staubli, Handworterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 4 (Berlin,1932), 1107- 1124.22 It is interesting and perhaps informative about Darnton's mode of argument by association that the first edition of the volume (as does the German edition) contained apiece of extremely misleading 'visual evidence', a reproduction of a sketch for Manet's provocative Olympia, in which a cat stretches itself along the buttocks of the reclining nude. The date of this work from the 1850s is some two generations after thestory in question, as is the reproduction of Antoine Wiertz's 1850 depiction of 'ayoung witch 1 . Darnton seems to share with Geertz a preference for the imagery ofthe sexually-liberated 1960s, which it has been argued influenced Geertz's choice oflanguage and metaphor in his analysis of the Balinese cockfight, see Vincent Crapanzo,Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire. On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 60 - 69.23 Murray and Rosalie Wax, 'The Notion of Magic', Current Anthropology 4 (1963),495-518.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 23some more elaborated understanding of their thought-world than if dealingwith written records. Yet even this has become a spiky problem forthe anthropologist, since the anthropologist can not only read into aculture what he or she desires to find (this dilemma is no different forthe historian), but informants can also be only too willing to respond tothe anthropologist's eager questions and provide the answers they believethe inquirer seeks. This awareness has led to a revaluation of the work ofMargaret Mead, who went seeking a society embodying the forms ofsexual liberation she idealised as a woman of the 1930s, and found informantsonly too willing (whether out of politeness, bafflement with thequestions, or a sense of fun) to supply the answers Mead sought 24 . Theapplication of gender analysis has also made us aware of a further problemhere, that the male anthropologist was often blind, perhaps necessarilyso, to female participation, for example, in village rituals: eitherbecause he did think or was not allowed to question women about theirritual roles, or because the village males wished to present themselves asin control of the ritual, or simply because decorum prohibited him fromquestioning women in the same way as the males. Indeed, a male fieldworkermay have had no opportunity to view female ritual roles or evenglimmering of their existence 25 . The relevance for the historian of earlymodern Europe does not require to be spelled out, but every historianwho is aware of the silence of her or his sources about female rolesknows the problem.This brings us to the question of sources. The major task for the historianof early modern Europe is undoubtedly where to find 'ethnographic'sources of the same detail and quality as those apparently available to theanthropologist. The bulk of available sources invariably originate fromthe hands of officials or else those of an educated elite possibly quite unrepresentativeof a society comprised largely of illiterate ruraldwellers.We cannot get around this problem by simply assuming that elites share24 For the discussion over Margaret Mead, see Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead andSamoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, Mass.,1983); Lowell D. Holmes, Quest for the Real Samoa: the Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond (South Hadley, Mass., 1987).25 On these issues see Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Towards an Anthropology of Women (NewYork, 1975), 13 - 16; James Clifford, 'Introduction 1 , in: Writing Culture. The Poeticsand Politics of Ethnography, ed. J. Clifford, G. E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), 17 - 18;and more generally Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Oxford, 1988).

24 Bob Scribnerin the wider culture in the same ways as non-elites, even if we abandon thecruder versions of the two-tier model of a polarised 'elite' and 'popular'culture. It would be as though the anthropologist were to base his or heranalysis largely on reports by colonial officials or those who by virtue ofeducation or social opportunity had set themselves apart from the bulk ofthe indigenous population. The first issue to be addressed is therefore: what isthe relationship between elites of various kinds and the wider surroundingculture? Once we begin to cast light on this problem, we can begin to usesources produced by elites with more confidence. Meanwhile the historianhas to be aware that all written sources are a form of constructedmediation of historical reality.It is sometimes argued that more direct access to personal experiencecan be found in private correspondence, and certainly the kinds of lettersexchanged, for example, by schoolboys with their relatives may bring ussomewhat closer to the texture of daily life, although their interpretationdemands a good deal of care and methodological sophistication 26 . Inrecent years, some historians have turned their attention to so-called 'egodocuments',self-testimonies offered by contemporaries about their ownlives, whether in the form of diaries, autobiographies or reminiscences 27 .26 The best recent example is the letters edited by Steven Ozment, Three Beheim Boys.Growing up in Early Modern Germany (New Haven, 1990), used to recover the experience of youth and young adults. All three were fatherless and their letters revealmuch about relationships with their long-suffering mothers: indeed, they tell us asmuch about motherhood in the sixteenth century as about childhood or youth, although this is overlooked by Ozment. However, problems remain with these letters.One wishes to know how far these children of a major Nuremberg patrician familywere typical! in their school careers (how many children were boarded out?), in theirfamily relationships (how many fatherless children were there in early modernNuremberg?) and indeed in their epistolary habits (how many schoolboys actuallybothered to put pen to paper?).27 For 'ego-documents' see Rudolf M. Dekker, Ego-Documents in the Netherlands1500 - 1814' Dutch Crossing 39 (1989), 61 - 72 and Winfried Schulze, 'Ego-Dokumente:Annahrung an den Menschen in der Geschichte', in: Von Aufbruch und Utopie.Perspektiven einer neuen Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters, hrsg. Bea Lundt,Helma Reimoller (Köln/Weimar/Wien, 1992), 417-50. A similar usage in a sociological tradition is the notion of 'life documents', K. Plummer, Documents of Life. AnIntroduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanistic Method (London, 1983).Others are sceptical of the terminology and prefer 'popular self-testimony', see JanPeters, 'Wegweiser zum Innenleben? Moglichkeiten und Grenzen der Untersuchungpopularer Selbstzeugnisse der Friihen Neuzeit', Historische Anthropologie 1 (1993),235 - 249.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 25Unfortunately those dealing with the experience of the non-urban populationare relatively rare before 1800 and the historian has also to confrontthe issue of the typicality of the 'learned peasant' 28 . Such documentsare nonetheless invaluable and a great deal can be learned from them,even if they represent the views of people who have marked themselvesout as unusual by the very act of writing about themselves. Even in thecase of texts where the author does not so self-consciously present his orher personality, the ethno-historian can uncover a good deal of ethnographicmaterial, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie did with the novels ofRestif de la Bretonne 29 .The pitfalls of using texts as ethnographic sources have yet to beexplored by historical anthropology in any systematic way. We couldmention here the problem of whether such narratives are ever merely'ethnographic' descriptions or whether they are not 'contaminated' by thepurposes of those who wrote them. One thinks immediately of suchmatters as self-fashioning, self-justification or the tacit political concernsof the author, not to mention power and gender relations in the time atwhich they were written. Is it possible to 'read behind' such contaminationand to do so without the personal, political and theoretical assumptionsof the historian-as-interpreter colouring the analysis? Historianshave also turned increasingly to sources such as folktales, popular literatureor forms of entertainment. A common criticism provoked by use ofsuch sources is that it focusses attention on the trivial, the exotic, theunique, even on a realm of fiction and fantasy that may be far removedfrom the reality of daily life. Of course, as Natalie Davis has shown, thestudy of consciously fictitious texts can be very revealing of everydayassumptions and Lyndal Roper reveals in her essay in this volume howmuch can be gleaned from exploration of a fantasy world 30 . Yet the28 Peters lists less than a handful of diaries or chronicles from the seventeenth century,such as those by Kaspar Preis (for the years 1637 - 67), Jost von Brechershausen inSwitzerland, Georg Dotschel from Upper Franconia, Hans Heberle from the territoryaround Ulm or Joseph Wtihrlin from Alsace. However, a research project is currentlyunder way to locate more of these works.29 E. Le Roy Ladurie, 'Retif de la Bretonne as a Social Anthropologist: Rural Burgundyin the Eighteenth Century', in: The Mind and Method of the Historian (Brighton,1981), pp. 211 -69.30 N. Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987); see also Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil.Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in early modern Europe (London, 1994).

26 Bob Scribnerpractitioner of historical anthropology cannot evade the seriousness ofsuch questions, if only because the methodological foundations of a similarprocedure in anthropology is currently being subjected to sustainedcriticism flowing ultimately from post-structuralist and post-modernistliterary criticism. The questions will not go away by either ignoring themor shouting them down 31 .One solution increasingly sought out by ethno-historians is to seize ona situation where a contemporary figure seems to have played the samerole as the anthropologist, to have acted as an inquirer in the same way asthe fieldworker with his or her checklist of targeted questions (even ifthey are not always put to the natives directly). The plethora of judicialrecords and the dominance of inquisitorial procedure in many parts ofEurope suggests that the inquisitor might be viewed as stand-in for theanthropologist, especially where the inquiry concerned matters of beliefor sought to uncover the mundane origins of some offence. In some cassesthe method has worked well (one thinks of Ginzburg's two classic studieson the benandanti and the miller Menocchio), in others it might bethought more dubious (as has been shown by two penetrating critiques ofLadurie's study of Montaillou) 32 . Much depends on the purposes of theinquisitor and how carefully his questions are constructed, and above allon how far those interrogated are allowed to respond freely, so that theyprovide information tangential to that sought by their interrogators butwhich might be of great value to the interested historian.31 Such questions seem to have been ignored, or at least only cursorily dealt with inCarlo Ginzburg, Hexensabbat. Entzifferung einer nächtlichen Geschichte (Berlin,1990). The problems of postmodernism for historical interpretation seem to havebeen more acute in the North American context, no doubt because the modular nature of the degree structure makes it more difficult for academics to simply ignore itin their teaching practice, as is largely possible in the British academic world withits 'single subject' degrees. For the exchange see: Franklin R. Ankersmit, 'Historiography and Postmodernism', History and Theory 28 (1989), 137 - 53; Perez Zagorin,'Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations', History and Theory 29(1990), 263 - 74; F. R. Ankersmit, 'Reply to Professor Zagorin', ibid., 275 - 96.32 For criticism of Montaillou from traditional historical perspectives see the review byDavid Herlihy in Social History 4 (1979), 517 - 20: 'Ladurie gives testimony concerning doings in a medieval peasant village which, regrettably, cannot be trusted'(p. 520); and by an anthropologist, Renato Rosaldo, 'From the Door of his Tent: theFieldworker and the Inquisitor', in: Writing Culture, ed. J. Clifford, G. E. Marcus (asnote 25), pp. 77 - 97, esp. 78 - 97.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 27Both the advantages and disadvantages of the underlying methodicalassumption can be seen in the discussion over the use of visitationrecords to determine the 'state of religion' in early modern German territories.Here we have an inquisitorial procedure par excellence, moreoverone applied without the sanctions of torture and therefore free from thedanger that the subject might under psychological or physical compulsionsimply say what the inquisitor wished to hear or what would bring theordeal to an end. Yet it is possible that visitors of a certain rigorist persuasionor pessimistic outlook might report entire parishes as 'godless' or'irreligious' simply because they were failing to live up to the high standardsset by the visitors or their prince. On the other hand, more permissivevisitors might be willing to accept at face value that all was well ina parish, even though this may have meant no more than that the mostobvious abuses or cases of religious deviance were absent. As with courtrecords, it could also be said that even plentiful examples of religious orsocial deviance could mislead the historian in the same way that study ofmarital dysfunction before church courts may say little about the typicalquality of those marriages that seemed to run a normal course. Certainly,the visitors' reports may reveal little about the strategies adopted by ruralparishes to deal with what was, after all, an unusual intrusion into, anddisruption of, village daily life 33 .Indeed, the idea of the 'inquisitor as anthropologist' may easily comeunstuck if we are faced with individual strategies of evasion and concealmentas a means of response to inquisitorial procedure. The most thoughtprovokingexample is provided by the'case of the prophetess Lu-cretia deLeon, which has been so grippingly chronicled by Richard Ka-gan in aclassic example of 'micro-history'. Confronted with an investigation of herprophetic dreams, which had become politically suspect, Lucretia wasnot only able to frustrate the Inquisition's investigatory procedures, butalso effectively able to disguise her own role in the prophecies. Weknow from reports of her cell-mates that she was not the33 For the debate over visitation records, see G. Strauss, 'Success and Failure in theGerman Reformation', Past and Present 67 (1975), 30 - 63; J. M. Kittelson, 'Successesand Failures in the German Reformation: the Report from Strasbourg', Archivfiir Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982), 153-74; J. M. Kittelson, Visitations and PopularReligious Culture: Further Reports from Strasbourg', in: Pietas in Societas. NewTrends in Reformation Social History, ed. K. C. Sessions, P. N. Bebb (Kirksville,Miss., 1985), 89 - 102.

28 Bob Scribnersimple-minded person she purported to be before her inquisitors, simplywriting down what she was told by her confessor. Rather we have theimpression of a shrewd and street-wise young woman, who knew exactlyhow to play up to a gender stereotype that would deflect responsibilityfrom herself. So effective was her strategy that the investigation was indefinitelyprolonged, her guards were won over and even the Inquisitorcompromised, and finally she escaped with a relatively light punishment.Even the historian, provided with all the copious documents of the case,cannot determine her true role behind the strategic disguise 34 . Inquisitorsand judges were certainly wily men of some worldly experience and theywere often able to read behind courtroom strategies, as Michael Weisserpointed out many years ago in discussing peasant litigation for slander inthe villages of the Monies. Yet in some circumstances the inquisitor maystill be as uninformed as the anthropologist. Indeed, the most assiduousinvestigator, Jean de Coras, the magistrate of the Parlement of Toulousewho popularised the case of Martin Guerre, was still unable to enlightenus about Bertrande de Rols' motives in accepting an imposter into herhome and bed 35 . The best way forward in such cases may involve notseeking out some dispassionate observer who may serve as an early modernsurrogate for the ethno-historian. Rather, we could employ the awarenessof contemporary anthropology that the anthropologist is always indialogue with his or her subjects, and that it is this very dialogue thatconstitutes the hermeneutic possibilities of the encounter with anotherculture. That is, just as the anthropologist may have to be content withchronicling a culture responding to his or her intrusions, the ethno-historianmay have to be content to focus on points of encounter where twomentalities or worlds meet, the official and the inofficial, the clerical andthe lay, the urban and the rural, providing only a refracted image of thesubordinate culture.One of the most challenging departures in these debates over the methodsof historical anthropology has been a recent contribution by GananathObeyesekere, in part a reply to Marshall Sahlins' fascinating essay of1985 on the death of James Cook. Sahlins reorientated our thinking about34 Richard L. Kagan, Lucretia's Dreams. Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth CenturySpain (Berkeley, 1990).35 M. Weisser, The Peasants of the Monies (Chicago, 1972), 101 - 112; N. Z. Davis,The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 29the death of James Cook away from the view that the explorer was slainby treacherous natives who had inexplicably turned hostile by attemptingto reconstruct the 'native's point of view' in terms of Hawaiian religiousbelief. He placed Cook's arrival at, and return to, the Hawaiian islands in1779 within the context of Hawaiian cosmology and mythology. Becauseof the date of his arrival at the island, the Hawaiians identified Cookwith the god Lono, whose coming was celebrated as a harbinger offertility. Thus, the excessive hospitality offered to Cook and his men,including the willing sexual favours of young Hawaiian women, accordingto Sahlins were not to be understood as primitive childlike innocencewhich later turned to treachery, but as a ritual celebration of the appearanceof the god which would ensure plenty for the island. However,when Cook was forced by a damaged mast to return to the island only afew days after his departure, Lono had reappeared at an irregular time;and to make matters worse, Cook had sailed around the island the 'wrongway', in the reverse direction, thus unwittingly introducing an anomalyinto the Hawaiian cosmology which threatened their very existence bythe implied undermining of the guarantee of fertility. There was only "onepossible solution, the god had to be ritually slain to restore cosmic order.Thus, Sahlins was not only able to explain the killing of Cook within thethought-world of the aborigines, he was even able to identify who hadperformed the deed in terms of ritual function 36 .Obeyesekere, however, perceived in this analysis a classic example ofthe way in which Western myth models of the apotheosis of a civilisinghero had been ascribed to the Hawaiians. Obeyesekere's critique proceedson four levels. First, he criticises readings of the historical sources whichhave led Sahlins and others to the conclusions that the Hawaiians regardedCook as a god (rather than revering him as equivalent to a chief).Second, he challenges Sahlins' reading of both Hawaiian religion andritual, especially for its structuralist presuppositions that make them lookstereotyped and rigid and the Hawaiians look naive and irrational.Obeyesekere stresses by contrast the Hawaiians' practical rationality andtheir ritual flexibility and open-endedness. Third, he shows the ways inwhich European myths of apotheosis were projected onto the death of36 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985), 104-35. Sahlins also publishedan earlier version of this argument in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities:Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands (Ann Arbor, 1981).

30 Bob ScribnerCook almost from the very beginning, revealing a long historiographywhich told and retold the story of the god Cook-Lono, sometimes forvery self-interested reasons, as in the case of the early missionaries wholabelled Cook as an idolator for accepting his designation as a god.Finally, he explores the patterns of violence and irrational behaviour inCook that, he argues, led to his death in an act virtually of resistance bythe increasingly terrorized Hawaiians. If Cook was deified after his death,this was the same dignity accorded by the Hawaiians to many greatchiefs 37 .The major issue highlighted in all this is the difficulty of recoveringthe 'native's point of view', even when the anthropologist sets out armedwith the best of intentions. It is still possible to end with a wholly falsifiedaccount, no more than 'the constructed understanding of the constructednative's constructed point of view' 38 . Obeyesekere's main interestis the personality of Cook, and he brings to his analysis an acute awarenessof Cook's role as a bearer of terror and violence to the natives heencountered, sharpened by a sense of the questions of politics and powerinvolved, undoubtedly a consequence being himself, as a Sri Lankan, amember of a colonised people. In an article published around the sametime, he sharpened the critique by addressing the issue of cannibalism, apractice which had fascinated the ethnological curiosity of Cook andother Europeans penetrating the Pacific in the eighteenth century 39 .Through a carefully nuanced reading of the explorers' accounts of nativecannibalism, Obeyesekere showed that the Europeans, by closely questioningand demanding practical proof from the natives about their allegedcannibalistic practices, drew upon themselves the natives' fear thatit was the Europeans who were really cannibals. Moreover, the Europeanobsession with the issue created a discourse to which the natives reactedboth by exploiting the notion of cannibalism for their own purposes (to37 Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking inthe Pacific (Princeton, N.J., 1992).38 The description used by Crapanzo (as note 22), Hermes Dilemma, p. 67, in his critique of Geertz's classic analysis of the Balinese cockfight, but equally applicable toreadings of the Cook story.39 Gananath Obeyesekere, 'Britische Kannibalen'. Nachdenkliches zur Geschichte desTodes und der Auferstehung des Entdeckers James Cook, Historische Anthropologie1 (1993), 273-93; the essay originally appeared in Critical Inquiry 18 (1992),630 - 54.

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 31arouse fear among the Europeans as well as to mock them) and by adaptingtheir own discourse and practice of ritual anthrophagy to the Europeanparadigm. Not only was the later practice of cannibalism a responseof European intervention 40 , but it was virtually impossible to recoverexactly what the original pre-European practice had been. The issue wasfurther confused by the willingness of the explorers to attribute cannibalismindiscriminantly even to those to whom the practice was as abhorrentas it was to Europeans. Thus, the return of only a fragment ofCook's remains (the rest seems to have been ritually cooked but not eaten)convinced his crew that the Hawaiians were cannibals, despite theirprotestations to the contrary. Although Obeyesekere admits that there is acertain tentativeness about the interpretation, he has put his finger on amajor problem for both the historical anthropologist and the contemporaryanthropologist. The mere presence Of an observer changes the situationhe or she intends to observe, indeed, the ethnologist may well findthat what he or she observes is merely the natives observing him or her,so that access to any 'native point of view' is virtually impossible. Theproblem is the more acute for the historian, who- must depend on theobservations of others, who even if they are classic mediators betweenone form of culture and another may only reveal a mediating process atwork. The problem is the more accentuated when the mediator is an inquisitor- even viewing the 'inquisitor as anthropologist' may be of littlehelp. Certainly, as Lyndal Roper's contribution in this volume reveals,great benefit can be derived from study of this process of encounter,whether between inquisitor/torturer and victim or between pastor andparishioners. It can reveal much about mentalities, forms of behaviourand how they might be modified, although it might be better to give upthe pretence that we can recover the status quo ante and concentrate onthe dialogue as the central hermeneutic context.The many problems inherent in attempts to employ anthropological approachesto history seem to suggest that the dangers might outweigh theadvantages of the enterprise. One might well be tempted to ask whetherthere is any point in pursuing this elusive quarry further. The obvious40 Obeyesekere calls it a 'revitalisation' of the practice, hinting that it was perhaps inthe process of dying out, although it is unclear how he is able to come to that conclusion,since he claims that it is impossible to uncover the history of cannibalismprior to contacts with Europeans.

32 Bob Scribnerresponse is that this is no more than a matter of refining concepts andmethodologies after the rough and ready work necessarily associated withany pioneering endeavour. The reasons that tempted many historians toturn to anthropology still remain valid: the desire to move beyond highpolitics and elitist notions of culture and to develop a better understandingof the behaviour, thought and action of those persons usually ignoredin traditional historiography or treated as the passive subjects of history.This was the impetus for much work in the fields of 'popular culture' and'popular belief of the 1970s and 1980s, where the word 'popular' wasmeant inclusively to encompass the broadest masses of any given populationin history. From this point of departure, it was clear that it wasnecessary to study culture as a whole, to look for the belief-systems thatunderpinned a culture and to explore the widest range of social relationshipsthat enabled any period to be described as a distinctive type ofsociety or culture. This gave rise to numerous questions about the formsof cultural transmission, means of social cohesion or elements of continuityand discontinuity that made a given culture stable and/or dynamic.What undoubtedly attracted many anthropologists to their subjects of investigationwas an awareness that these were in fundamental ways wholly'other' than the culture and society of the anthropologists themselves.Historians of early modern Europe had the same perceptions of an 'otherness'requiring explanation, certainly an explanation that simply did notprivilege those aspects which were perceived teleologically as constituentelements of the 'modern world' or which were thought to be exotic featuresof a static, immobile 'world we have lost'.Recent debates in the discipline of anthropology have certainly made itamply clear that anthropologists did not leave behind their own presuppositionsand prejudices when setting off to study the 'other' in distantlands; rather anthropological discourse easily became a means of inscribingthese presuppositions on its subjects. The ethno-historian of earlymodern Europe is certainly not free from that danger, whether usingmethods or concepts drawn from anthropology or any other discipline,while historians eschewing any interdisciplinary endeavour at all may stillbe reading the past through the blurred screen of the historian's presentdayconcerns, whether personal, political or ideological. Yet the mistakes,misconceptions, even self-delusions of previous generations can no moreabsolve the current practitioner of ethno-history from seeking a better understandingof its subjects than the excesses of the whig theory of historyserve as justification for ceasing to write history altogether. The same

Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 33questions remain on the agenda, now made more amenable of analysis,both because of our better awareness of how they should not be approachedand because we have an improved sense of what sources might bestserve our purpose in pursuing them. We could touch briefly on some ofthese by way of conclusion.The issue of elite and non-elite culture remains to be explored indepth, despite nearly two decades having elapsed since Peter Burke'sPopular Culture in Early Modern Europe (first edition 1978) put it firmlyon the research agenda, calling attention to the problem without pretendingto resolve it. A central issue identified there was the attempt tobring about changes in 'popular culture', whether through religious reform,the imposition of social discipline, or the repression of popularentertainments and forms of cultural behaviour considered unseemly, morallydistasteful or socially dysfunctional. Leaving aside those interpretationswhich have simply declared that this process did take place becauselegislators enacted that it should, we have come to an awareness that culturalchange was complex and unpredictable. Exploration of mental structures,of issues such as belief in magic or the devil, the persistence" ofritual as an element in religion and daily life, the curious and still unexploredaspects of popular Catholicism and Protestantism, so differentfrom the official or theological versions of those faiths, shows that weare still far from understanding how cultural change or persistenceworked in this period. We can see from some case studies, such as thatprovided below by Heinrich Richard Schmidt" that intense moral effortcould produce striking change in attitudes and behaviour, at least in smallcommunities. Other studies, such as that by Marc Forster, reveal a processof syncretism at work in which traditional attitudes and values erodedthe endeavours of those seeking to induce change 41 . Part of the storyrevolves around the encounter, even the dialectic, between the agents ofofficial belief and ordinary villages and parishioners, as revealed in Hans-Christoph Rublack's paper. Here the issue was often one of power anddomination, resistance and recalcitrance, even if these were not alwaysovert or carefully articulated. The outcome was not always one to theliking or advantage of the powerful, and those in positions of power andauthority often had to learn to yield and compromise. It is perhaps41 M. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in theBishoprie of Speyer, 1560 - 1720 (Ithaca/London, 1992).

34 Bob Scribnerthe very fragility of power faced with the enormous potential for resistancein traditional culture that explains the frequent recourse to identificationand separation of the 'other' as a means of encouraging cohesion,community and group-identification of different kinds, local, ethnic,confessional, national. We still have a long way to go even to begin todelineate guidelines for understanding the psychological make-up of theperiod or even the principles of that psychology. Gender remains a completelyopen question, where we have just begun to perceive what questionsto ask, rather than how to go about answering them.So far this might be taken as the set of working problems of the averagesocial or cultural historian of the period. What is brought to thisproject by our enlarged awareness of the approach of historical anthropologyis not a magic key to unlock doors previously closed to us, but adifferent kind of awareness of the dimensions of the subject. Indeed, itmay well turn out that the ethno-historian has as much to offer the anthropologistas vice versa. The field of micro-historical studies is certainlyone where the "different experiences of the two disciplines overlap andproduce fruitful interchange. The anthropologist's ability to relate smallscaleanalysis to wider understandings of culture as a whole rescues thehistorian from the charge of interest in the trivial, the unrepresentativeand the exotic. The historian's sense of the individual event, the uniqueand the contingent helps avoid falling into the trap of assuming culturalconstants. The best work in historical anthropology will draw on thestrengths of both disciplines and it is significant that some of the mostinnovative recent work in social anthropology has been distinguished byits recourse to historical analysis. However, the enterprise is yet at itsvery beginning and still has far to grow. Thus, if historical anthropologycurrently seems to have rather indistinct features and to be relativelyshapeless, perhaps this is no more than the formlessness of the infant,who will yet grow into a healthy adult.