Twenty years ago, when Brian Keith Axel was summing up a series of workshops dedicated to anthropological history, he stated that after many years of marginalization, researchers and students studying historical anthropology had finally created a shared domain for debate: “There may not necessarily be a consensus on what historical anthropology is or should be, nor is consensus necessarily sought after. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historical anthropology has gained momentum as both a pedagogical practice and a way to interrogate the dynamics of the emergent world order.”

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More than twenty years later, we must admit that historical anthropology has not maintained the unique position it held in the 1990s. Nevertheless, as Jakob Tanner points out, it has had—and continues to have—an impact on “new understandings of history writing, new forms of representation” and the posing of new research questions.

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We are pleased to announce a conference organized by Institute of History in Jagiellonian University in Kraków, under the patronage of Section for Cultural History of  Committee of Historical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The event will be focused on the exchange of methodological experiences among practitioners of anthropological history. We believe the conference will provide an occasion to gather scholars who identify with various areas of study on the past. It assumes that historical anthropology today is distinctly more than just an exchange of knowledge and methods between anthropology and history; it plays the role of a platform for a multiplicity of discourses, research approaches, and methodologies rooted in different historiographical traditions such as History from Below, Alltagsgeschichte, microhistory, biographical studies, or the “revisionist” American Soviet history school etc. All of them focus primarily on understanding people's experiences and practices in the past (e.g., power relations or communication) rather than on exploring impersonal social, economic, political, and even cultural processes and institutions.

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The conference will focus on the methodology of historical anthropology, understood as deeply rooted in empirical studies. We invite contributions that reflect on the details of personally conducted research, including the choice of sources, techniques of data analysis and interpretation, narrative style, the selection of research subjects, and the intended audience. Contributions reflecting concrete archival case studies are particularly encouraged. While we do not wish to restrict the topics, we would like to propose a few questions for consideration in the context of individual scholarly experiences:

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• How can historical anthropology innovate and open new fields of research on past societies?

• How are the main methods of historical anthropology, such as microhistory or the history of everyday life, used today? Have they retained a certain autonomy, or have they become merely auxiliary tools for explaining social change on a macro scale?

• What role does the historical anthropological approach play in explaining social transformations in situations of crisis and conflict?

• What are the main ethical challenges of historical studies connected with bottom-up history?

• How can scholarly works in historical anthropology navigate the academic publishing market?

 

We invite all researchers and teachers engaged in topics under the umbrella of historical anthropology to submit their proposals for papers.