Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.