47 (Geertz 1990, 322)

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(Geertz 1990, 322)

...Anthropologists complain that the historian’s reliance on written documents leaves us prey to elitist accounts and literary conventionalisms. Historians complain that the anthropologist’s reliance on oral testimony leaves us prey to invented tradition and the frailties of memory. Historians are supposed to be swept up in “the thrill of learning singular things,” anthropologists in the delights of system building, the one swamping the acting individual in the onrush of surface events, the other dissolving individuality altogether in the deep structures of collective existence. Sociology, Veyne says, meaning by this any effort to discern constant principles in human life, is a science of which the first line has not been written and never will be. History, Lévi-Strauss says, meaning by this any attempt to understand such life sequentially, is an excellent career so long as one eventually gets out of it. [Geertz, Clifford. 1990. "History and Anthropology." New Literary History. 21:2. Pp.321-335]