People with and without History

Abstract

The relation between ethnographic research and the field of history is studied in Chapter 3. As is well known, primitive cultures in non-European peripheries were considered ‘peoples without history’ by historians such as Hegel or Droysen. The chapter reveals, however, that there would have been ample evidence provided by ethnographers to prove the long historical past of the African, pre-Columbian American, and Asian civilizations. What is more, the chapter points out that the European peasantry was also considered to live outside the realm of history, as historical scholarship in the tradition of historicism focused solely on state politics and upper-class elites. The goal of folklorists was to establish that the past of rural populations had to be integrated within the field of historical scholarship as well. Such initiatives sustained the notion of a fundamental distinction between European and non-European peoples and thus widened the gap between folklore studies and colonial anthropology.