Edmund Leach on Roman Jakobson's Contributions to Linguistics
New Books in Literary Studies
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Where Does History Fit In?
For anthropologists, the crucial question is: where does history fit in? The opposition between past and present is contrived and artificial. We experience time as a continuity; we describe it as if it were a sequence of discrete intervals or discrete events. This simple fact has been the bane of my own profession. Ethnographers visiting remote and exotic societies for the first time have almost invariably described their experience as if it was all recorded on a single photographic plate.
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