Historians are chiefly interested in the past, whether remote or recent, their study is to find out what happened and why it happened. On the whole, they are more interested in particular sequences of past events and their conditions, than they are in the general patterns, principles or laws which these events may exhibit. In both of these respects their concern is little from that of social anthropologist. For social anthropologists are centrally (though not exclusively) interested in understanding the present condition of the culture or community which they are studying. But although the disciplines are different, social anthropology has a very close relationship with history in two important ways. First an anthropologist who aims to achieve a complete understanding as possible of the present condition of the society he is studying can hardly fail to ask how it came to be as it is. That is not withstanding that his central interest is in the present, not in the past for its own sake, but often the past may be directly relevant in explaining the present. A difficulty has been that many of the societies which social anthropologists have studied have no histories, in the sense of documented and verifiable accounts of the past or at least they had none before the often very recent impact of western culture. In such societies, the past sometimes is thought of as differing from the present only in respect of the individuals who occupy the different statuses which are institutionalised in the society.
But history may be important to social anthropologists in another sense, that is, not only as an account of past events leading up to and explaining the present, but also as the body of contemporary ideas which people have about these events what an English Philosopher Collingwood aptly called “encapsulated history” people’s ideas about the past are an intrinsic part of the contemporary situation which is the social anthropologists immediate concern and often they have important implications for existing social relationships. Also, different groups of people involved in the same social situation may have very different ideas about the ‘same’ series of historical events. Myths and traditional histories may sometimes give important clues about the past events. History is part of the conscious tradition of a people and is operative in their social life. It is the collective representation of events as distinct from events themselves. Evans-Pritchard in his work Social Anthropology and Other Essays, (1950) had stated that the functionalist anthropologists regard history in this sense, usually a mixture of fact and fancy, as highly relevant to a study of the culture of which it forms part. Neglect of the history of institutions prevents the functionalist anthropologist not only from studying diachronic problems but also from testing the very functional constructions to which he attaches most importance, for it is precisely history which provides him with an experimental situation. It is true that some of the early anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown denied that history had any relevance for anthropology, mainly because they thought history dealt with unique events, and that a scientific study of the past was not possible. But,
Evans–Pritchard (1968) argued that social anthropology was not a generalising discipline, but instead a branch of history. Much earlier Boas (1897), the founder of American anthropology, had included historical inquiry as a central feature of anthropological investigation.
Both social anthropologists and historians attempt to represent unfamiliar social situations in terms not just of their own cultural categories, but, as far as possible, in terms of the categories of the actions themselves. The main difference between social anthropology and history lies not much in their subject matter (though generally this does differ), as in the degree of generality with which they deal with it. Once again it is very much a question of emphasis. Historians are interested in the history of particular institutions in particular places. Although in a very general sense it is true that historians are concerned with what is individual and unique, social anthropologists, like sociologists, are concerned with what is general and typical, and this dichotomy is altogether too simple. As so often in the social sciences, the difference is largely one of emphasis (Ahmad, 1986) Barrett, (2009) rightly summarises that today; most anthropologists would probably agree that a historical perspective enriches one’s ethnography. Unlike historians, however, anthropologists include history not so much in order to document and explain what happened in the past, but rather to help to understand the present. There also appears to be a difference in styles of research. Whereas historians often seem reluctant to draw even modest generalisations from their data, anthropologists are much less cautious and there is more pressure than in history to tie one’s ethnography to general theoretical orientations.