Le paradoxe de l’ordinaire et l’anthropologie historique

Historical anthropology has been defined as a history of the collective as opposed to a political and elitist narrative history. The advent of “a history of the ordinary” has exposed a paradox because the conditions of historical knowledge, such as documentary evidence or transmission, as well as the writing of history, are focused on discontinuity and the exceptional. While there is a historical knowledge that one might call homologous (where the object of study conforms to the means of its examination), the historical anthropologist himself engages with a counter history, or an asymmetrical knowledge. This brings with it a formidable epistemological leap. A number of recent reflections on history directly result from this constitutive inversion: for example, the way a corpus or isolated cases may be or may not be representative; the investigation of the object of historical understanding, be it neither singular nor universal; the consequence of “political” decentralization towards a history from the outside. The opposition between these two historiographies, one considered traditional, investigating dates and institutions, and the other more egalitarian and anthropological – is not this gap, at least conceptually, already a thing of the past? Have we not, for several decades, entered into a third paradigm, in which historical anthropology plays a part, already visible at the fore? We would say that presently, we are dealing with symptom-events, the structures at work, and the individual as a civilization. Beyond the givens provided by the fact of not limiting oneself to the conscience aspects, or to talk about Others, this scientific regime is as inexhaustible as the research itself: our categories, vocabulary, and practices are themselves the subjects of study.