Social anthropology and history: A case study from Viqueque, East Timor (Swinburne Institute Seminar Series)

At a time when the frontiers separating the traditional scientific and scholarly disciplines are being obliterated the occasion is apt for a reconsideration of the relationships between social anthropology and its sister disciplines such as political science, sociology and literary studies. Professor David Hicks will discuss the overlap between social anthropology and history and make the case for revisiting the well-known contributions to this topic made by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who himself began his academic career as a historian, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose advocacy of a structural approach to the human domain might be thought to imply a anti-historical regard for understanding social institutions. In demonstrating how diachronic and synchronic perspectives may be combined in their respective ways in helping to render institutions intelligible this talk examines some of the lessons learned from several periods of fieldwork in Timor-Leste beginning in 1966 by examining how archival documents and published materials may be conjoined with ethnographic research. The talk firstly describes the background to the first period in the field; then considers the extent to which archival and secondary sources were used during that first period of field research; and finally consider how the use of archival and secondary sources during the later periods of field research compared with the initial period. Presented Friday 19 June 2015