Anthropology & History Certificate

Program Code: G-ANHT-CER
Degree Designation: Certificate
Department: Anthropology & History

Program Summary

For several decades, historians have been turning to cultural anthropology, and anthropologists to history, for methodological guidance. By now a relatively large number of historians and anthropologists work within a shared framework, asking similar questions, and seeking answers to these questions from similar kinds of evidence. In both disciplines, it is widely understood that cultural diversity and cultural change cannot be accounted for either by the traditional narrative techniques of historians or by the traditional ethnographic descriptions of anthropologists. Instead, historians realize they must look beyond action, intention, and event, to underlying patterns, unspoken presuppositions, institutional, and discursive structures. Anthropologists realize that kinship, ritual, social role, discourse, and belief are all subject to improvisation, contestation, politicization, and thus change. Scholars in both disciplines have looked to practice theory, as developed by Bourdieu, Giddens, Ortner, and Sewell; to postcolonial studies, as developed by Stoler, Dirks, Spivak, Das, and Burton; to performance theory, as developed by Sahlins, Butler, Sedgwick; and to other, related approaches.

Drawing on these streams of theory, anthropologists and historians strive to come to grips with the full implications of cultural diversity and change. The challenge is to understand what all actors in a given context consciously know and intend as well as what they unconsciously take for granted, what they do on purpose and what they do without reflection, and to see how action and conflict have both intended and unintended consequences. One goal of such research is a new kind of total history, of the kind the Comaroffs have attempted for South Africa. Another goal is the recovery of forgotten or suppressed pathways to meaning of the kind rescued from oblivion by recent work on indigenous sexuality in colonial Mexico or Spanish judicial repression in colonial Peru. Still, another is the exploration of historical change in “affect,” the seemingly automatic responses to situations that often encode cultural assumptions and set the parameters of meaning and action. Still another is the extension of ethnographic understandings to the materials of Western history, and the history of anthropology itself.

Collaboration between the faculty of the history and cultural anthropology departments at Duke has been active since the 1980s. Numerous cross-listed graduate seminars and joint work on graduate preliminary examination committees and dissertation defense committees have testified to the vital role of this collaboration for graduate training over the years.

This collaboration has now been formalized with a certificate program to ensure that students who wish to draw on the other discipline gain familiarity with the joint methods of both disciplines in a more systematic way. Students will also receive a tangible token in recognition of their accomplishments.

Students enrolled in the PhD programs of either cultural anthropology or history wishing to earn a certificate in anthropology and history must designate a mentor from among the affiliated faculty of the certificate program. With their mentors, students will draw up a coherent program of study leading to the certificate.

Academic Requirements

Students must designate a mentor from the affiliated faculty of the certificate program. With their mentor, students must draw up a program of study that must include:

• Completion of a core graduate seminar:

  • with two-semester sequence beginning with required graduate-level History and Cultural Anthropology (Anthropology and History); and

  • concluding with—research seminar in which students prepare and present their own papers.

• Participation (while in residence) in an anthropology and history colloquium to be organized by the affiliated faculty and the students.

• One presentation of the student’s own work at the colloquium, usually during the writing phase of the dissertation.

• At least two other courses in the nondegree department.

• Capstone research paper (if in history, this may be a part of the student’s portfolio).

• Preliminary examination field in the nondegree discipline.

The director of graduate studies in each department, assisted by one member of the affiliated faculty from each department, will monitor the student’s progress and review their dossier at least once annually.