Short Abstract

This panel explores how large-scale histories are experienced through individual lives, and how micro-histories reshape broader narratives, linking history and subjectivity.

Long Abstract

This panel invites ethnographic and theoretical contributions that explore how large-scale historical processes become embedded and experienced through individual lives and social practices, and conversely, how micro-histories inform, influence, and reshape broader historical narratives. The usage of oral history methods, the influence of microhistory, the discovery of subjectivity on the part of the historians, and the rejuvenation of the archive have shaped an intimacy between history and anthropology. Rather than viewing history as abstract, we ask how it becomes personal, shaping subjectivities, moral worlds, states, and memory in specific contexts, while at the same time considering how the personal and the intimate reshape history.

Inspired by the idea of History in Person (Holland and Lave 2001) we ask: How does ‘history’ becomes ‘personal’ and how ‘personal’ becomes ‘history’? We are interested in how people internalize, resist, or reinterpret the social forces and temporalities that shape their lives, how they remember and narrate family or state histories that constitute the political, and what kinds of moral or affective labour are involved in living with history in contexts marked by colonial legacies, displacement, economic precarity, or social transformation and change. We are also interested in exploring, on an epistemological level, how a historical anthropology may differ from a historically minded anthropology, and in what ways the two differ from history and anthropology.

We are particularly interested in papers that situate the ‘history in person’ and the ‘living with history’ perspective within contemporary debates on political emotions, memory, temporality, kinship and decoloniality. We also call for method-based papers that explore oral and informal histories to suggest an anthropology of the past, or bring forth discussions of historicity (Stewart 2016) and the need for historicization of ethnographic data.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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