{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02130681818181818, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.270029673590504, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
History, Anthropology, and the Study of Everyday Life. A Review Article

This volume can hardly be expected to surprise anyone. All of the contributions have been published elsewhere, most of them in English (though this is no bad thing, since the individual essays are uniformly excellent). Moreover, the themes and techniques exemplified in the collection have by now become so much a part of historiographical orthodoxy, at least among the younger generation of social historians, that their presentation in the guise of a brief for the defence of the mutual obligations of history and social anthropology already seems rather old hat. Indeed, much of what is presented here, rather defensively, as a bold experiment in the application of ethnographical practice to historical subjects reads to the (admittedly sympathetic) historian more like the self-evident pursuit of empirical enquiry, novel only in its depth and sensitivity. And the one contribution that deals with the traditional objects of anthropology, Renato Rosaldo's piece on the Ilongot islanders, makes a very compelling case of the view that the only people who can't be trusted with ethnographical methods are the ethnographers. Or is it merely a function of the quality of the contributions that they seem to put paid to a debate which has not so much ended as entered a new phase? Among German historians, the discussion of the value of anthropological methods for historical study has always been closely associated with the debate over the legitimacy of Alltagsgeschichte, or the study of everyday life. Alltagsgeschichte is not necessarily conterminous with historical ethnography, but the links between the two are acknowledged by the contributors jointly in their collective introduction and addressed directly in Alf Liidtke's essay on "the reconstruction of everyday life." Liidtke's subtitle, "depoliticizing social history?," is a direct response to the earliest objection to be raised against Alltagsgeschichte. As the study of the lives of "ordinary people" established its popularity among students of history both lay and aca-