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Studying Russia's past from an anthropological perspective: some trends of the last decade

First of all, let me specify what is meant here by ‘anthropological perspective’. It is simply a way to cover several related fields, which, I believe, have much in common: historical anthropology, microhistory, new cultural history, history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), and the like. (Some people in France and elsewhere say that ‘historical anthropology’ is already dead. I do not agree: in Germany, for example, it is still alive; and in Russia ‘historical anthropology’ has recently become a vogue.) It can easily be shown that all the fields or approaches just mentioned have many common features and have been inspired by similar ideas: all of them focus upon individual or small groups’ strategies, pay special attention to the so-called ‘local knowledge’ (to quote Geertz’s famous catchphrase), and use techniques of close reading and ‘thick description’. It may thus seem more appropriate now to speak of a large ‘anthropological’ (or ‘sociocultural’) sector or field in world historiography where all these trends border upon each other, overlap and intersect.