Anthropological Approach
Like Trouillot, Robert Darnton made
a valuable contribution to historiography by taking an anthropological approach
to history. He identified a variety of
archival materials that could be explored ethnographically to dig into
previously unexplored perspectives in order to understand the mentality of
people whose stories were left out of the formal history. Rather than tracking social change over time
in one sector of society, or attempting to deconstruct social structures,
cultural historians like Darnton and Trouillot went deeper and proposed
alternate interpretations. Darnton’s “dig” was in 18th
century France and Trouillot’s was in the 18th century French colony
of Saint-Domingue. According to Darnton, the advantage of the cultural approach
is that it gets into the mind of the actors within the local culture. Like Trouillot, Darnton borrowed research
methods from anthropology to make meaning of artifacts and buildings that were
significant to people in a distant time and place. Darnton made the connection that cultural
historians, like archeologists, must have the humility to recognize that they
will never know the whole story. As he
put it, “But one thing seems clear to everyone who returns from field work:
other people are other. They do not
think the way we do. And if we want to
understand their way of thinking, we should set out with the idea of capturing
otherness.”1 In selecting the material for
research Darnton looked for large unusual finds that raised intriguing
questions about the culture. Then he
worked his way through the material meticulously careful not to let his
intuition run away with him. He wrote,
“As I tried to illustrate in explicating the cat massacre of the rue
Saint-Séverin, the most promising moment in research can be the most
puzzling. When we run into something
that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into
an alien mentality. And once we have
puzzled through to the native’s point of view, we should be able to roam about
in his symbol world.”2
