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History vs. Anthropology - a spirited, short, one-sided essay

This is a strange and complicated world.

But anyway, when deciding on whether or not I wanted to study (cultural) Anthropology or History, I chose the latter. Both disciplines have unique challenges and drawbacks.

History is a top down subject. It stands at a distance and examines events from a perspective of cold objectivity. More importantly, it takes a step back in time, waiting for an events consequence, before trying to explain it. History is not about dates or things that already happened. History is about space, time and humanity. It’s the physics of the liberal arts world.

History sees no event as discreet. Populations form and foment into a set of fuzzy scenarios driven by economic, cultural, geographical and geopolitical events. Those scenarios boil over into situations wherein historians have borrowed or invented a word to define them… like Revolution or revolution.

But there’s the problem. Historians suffer from ivory tower syndrome. They spend a lot of time in libraries reading the work of other historians. Sometimes the debate gets so academic, so theoretical, it stops reflecting whatever reality it’s trying to explain.

And that’s the strength of Anthropology. Anthropology gets out of the library. It is defined by fieldwork. It derives meaning from microcosmic studies. It’s a ground-up discipline. It’s the biology of the liberal arts world.

I’m gonna stop there. Although I ate up all my undergrad electives with (cultural) Anthropology and had a couple History requirements in the subject, I’m not really qualified to discuss it as a discipline.

What I did learn and what made me choose History was its intellectual honesty. It holds no pretense to be anything but pretentious. I found that (cultural) Anthropology was scared of its self-importance and tends to deny the stuffy intellectual qualities that drive its research. Anthropology was a subject founded by a bunch of Europeans trying to live among the ‘other’ while dancing the line between ‘going native’ and conducting ‘scientific’ research. That history is strong within the discipline today and it’s pretty fucking pretentious.

I prefer honest pretension… something you can call out without admitting something you don’t want to. But anyway, I’d write about what really inspired this sudden, random diatribe, but why would I want to get into that here?