Beyond the Colonial Shadow? Delinking, Border Thinking, and Theoretical Futures of Cultural History

In the year 1989, Lynn Hunt proclaimed nothing less than the beginning of a new cultural history (Hunt 1989, 10) and pleaded for consequential anthropological theoretical receptions. Already eight years prior, Natalie Zemon Davis wrote, “anthropology can widen the possibilities, can help us take off our blinders, and give us a new place from which to view the past and discover the strange and surprising in the familiar landscape of historical texts” (Davis 1981, 275). In Germany in 1984, Hans Medick published his legendary – and subsequently updated – article Missionaries in the Rowboat? stating that anthropological knowledge and theories could help enlighten the “complex mutual interdependence between circumstances of life and the concrete practice” of historical actors – their “experiences and modes of behavior” (Medick 1995, 43). All three authors, and many other cultural historians, argued against socio-historical approaches that they considered deficient, particularly due to their theoretical framework. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, new cultural history, as well as historical anthropology (a specific German version of cultural historical approaches), were coined by the constant pleas for an injection of anthropological theories and methods into historical theoretical and methodological approaches. Anthropology might help, the argument went, to see the past as a “strange foreign territory” and the everyday life of historical actors akin to those of “‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ societies” (Davis 1981, 272). With this approach,