BOB SCRIBNER Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe

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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.
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