Golden ages, dark ages : imagining the past in anthropology and history

In Golden Ages, Dark Ages , a dozen well-known anthropologists and historians bring an exciting new perspective to the task of "imagining the past," while actively challenging the premises of a traditional "historical" approach. The authors clarify important misapprehensions that have hindered both historians and anthropologists, who tend to regard certain social forms—gender, ethnicity, household, and community in particular—as fixed points of departure rather than as changing results of social and political processes. Tradition itself, the subject of many of the essays, cannot be tied to the oppositional models favored by many social theorists in establishing sequence: traditional vs. modern, primitive vs. civilized, etc. Where some views of history would lead us to expect one increasingly homogeneous world, we find new worlds of social, economic, and cultural difference.