History, Literature, Anthropology: Contextualizing Human Meaning :: Essays Papers

History, Literature, Anthropology Contextualizing Human Meaning As culture is the intersection point of kind thought (217), Cohn advocates seeing how meanings are contextualized to better interpret write up and produce practised scholarship (221). In keeping with this awareness of human thought, Anderson contextualizes the cultural roots of home(a)ism through the evolution of early American literature and print-language (7), relying heavily on the historical development of European literacy in developing a national imagination. In doing so, Andersons analysis of nationalism reflects Cohns maxim, that anthropology can became sic much anthropological in becoming more historical (216). Through Andersons contextualizing of nationalism through historical literary trends, his anthropological scholarship is, by Cohns estimation, more true unto itself. Unearthing origins of national consciousness, Anderson examines the development of national memory through literacy and vernacularisms . Believing nationalism to be a cultural construct of political revolutions, merging social ideologies and a natural emphasis on national print-languages (Anderson 46), Anderson declares that men challenged the sacredness of existing societies with sassy conceptions of land and nation through the circulation and spread of shared languages (Anderson 36). Driving a wedge between cosmology and history through Enlightenment discoveries, divinely ordained realities lost clout and cultural artefacts of the eighteenth century similar individual human rights and personal sovereignty, translated from old world to impertinently (Anderson 36). With new languages-of-power in fixating systems of speech, nations built self-identity, and men began to see themselves in profoundly new ways (Anderson 36). Cohn reasserts history and anthropology as dovetailing disciplines, whose scholarship exists outside of this time and all the same rooted in common reality. Floating in imaginary lands of epist emology and printed research, good scholarship relies on a historian with fewer sources and stouter boots (Tawney, qted in Cohn, 221). Historians in and of itself