Cohen cracks open the categories

A provocative new book aimed at unsettling 'the constraints of existing academic practice' has just been released by the University of Michigan Press. Co-authored by Professor David William Cohen, an honorary research fellow in the Archive and Public Culture research initiative, Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline 'challenges readers to think of work at the crossroads of anthropology and history as transdisciplinary and anthrohistorical'.

Offering 'a variety of positions taken by anthrohistorians who work in diverse contexts' the book moves beyond 'a partial integration of the disciplines as it critically evaluates their assumptions and trajectories,' reads the publisher's text. 'Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken diverse expressions. Yet it has developed with more coherence since the 1980s, largely in response to the declining promise of global modernity and the rise of poststructuralism and deconstructionism.' Anthrohistory offers a critical and contemporary engagement with this wave of scholarship.

The book is co-authored by Edward Murphy, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson, Julie Skurski and Cohen, who, in addition to his UCT affiliation, is also a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Professor Emeritus of History, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. Adopting an innovative and accessible style, the authors of Anthrohistory aim to 'open a provocative window into broader questions of interdisciplinarity, representation, epistemology, methodology and social commitment'.