Dyskusje o pograniczu antropologii kulturowej i historii nie będą miały końca (i o to chodzi)

Pointing out new contexts in a contemporary reading of Robert Darnton’s The Great Massacre of Cats and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, the author asks whether the past polemics concerning the book are still valuable with regard to their content. He argues that the answer will depend on the reader’s awareness, that there is no single history today, just as there is no single anthropology. Both these disciplines do not have one, common method of interpretation, as reflected by a series of turns in the humanities which have occurred since the 1980s. the author is also convinced that the historian’s and the anthropologist’s sources will remain different and will never be conflated. the genres of utterances acquired by ethnography and by history constitute two different worlds and use different languages. However, the debate on the methods and scopes of common interpretations within the two disciplines must continue, since each generation of researchers thinks of them differently.