"Forms of Mixing": Contemporary History and Sociocultural Anthropology; A Conversation with Debjani Bhattacharyya and Brian Larkin

Abstract

After World War II, many historians in the German-speaking world thought of the relationship between anthropology and history as being largely synonymous with that of 'everyday life' (Alltag) and 'structure'. As Jürgen Kocka (b. 1941) wrote in a retrospective statement to the Zurich historian Rudolf Braun (1930-2012), one of the few prominent figures of 'ethnographic' social history especially in the 1970s and 1980s: 'For while we, a younger generation of social historians, have turned to the large structures and processes that conditioned, encompassed and shaped people's lives, Braun has always supported us, but he insisted - in an untimely but fruitful way - on not missing the people's "inside": the experiences and habits, the hopes and disappointments, the everyday life and mentalities of common people in the age of industrialization.'