1. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Daniel Bouchard (ed.),Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press [1971] 1977), p. 139.
2. On the “historic turn,” see the introduction to Terrence J. McDonald (ed.),The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). This essay represents a condensed version of Chapter 1 from my book in progress,Along the Archival Grain (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Parts of it are based on the 1996 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures delivered at the University of Rochester entitled “Ethnography in the Archives: Movements on the Historic Turn.” A different version of this piece appears in Carolyn Hamilton (ed.),Refiguring the Archive (forthcoming).
3. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, “Social Anthropology: Past and Present, The Marett Lecture, 1950”,Social Anthropology and Others Essays (New York: Free Press, 1951) p. 152 Claude Levi-Strauss,The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), p. 256.
4. For some sense of the range of different agendas of the current “historic turn,” see Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (eds.),Culture, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1983] 1994), Terrence J. McDonald (ed.),The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); specifically on history in the anthropological imagination, see Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (eds.),Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997). Also see Richard Fox's “For a Nearly New Culture History”, in Richard G. Fox (ed.),Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 93–114, and James Faubion, “History in Anthropology”,Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 35–54.
5. See for example, the introductions to and essays in Nicholas Dirks (ed.),Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) and in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.),Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).