The Dynamics of American Jewish Cultures: A Meeting Ground for History and Anthropology

I am immensely honored, but even more humbled, to have received the Lee Max Friedman Medal of the American Jewish Historical Society. In the many decades I have been a member of the Society, I have felt the greatest respect for the contributions of the scholars who have received the award in the past.

I am particularly mindful that we are meeting together at a time of danger. I use that term to echo the anthropologist Mary Douglas's classic work, Purity and Danger, that argued that society is constantly confronting things that defy order and must find ways to contain them. Covid-19 is a pollution-like danger.¹ To evoke her contemporary Victor Turner, we are living in a liminal moment, betwixt and between, with its promise of creativity and its threat of uncertainty.

In the face of this danger, we should be particularly grateful to all of our colleagues who have found creative ways for us to gather via Zoom during this liminal time. Thank you to program co-chairs Judah Cohen and Jessica Cooperman and your committee. Thank you to Lila Corwin Berman, chair of the Society's Academic Council, and to its executive director Annie Polland and her staff.

I situate our present moment, not accidentally, through an anthropological lens. I find nothing more humbling about this award than the fact that I am not an historian, but an anthropologist and an ethnographer, trained at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. Since my earliest field work, I have been mindful of the critical questions that historians raise, and the importance and challenge of the archive to much of what we do.

I was fortunate to have begun my graduate education in that era because it was a key moment when anthropologists began to take history seriously, as well as when historians drew increasingly on anthropologists' questions and concerns in their research. Historians sought methods that would allow them to understand how ordinary people navigated their worlds. At the same time, anthropologists were coming to terms with the field's problematic atemporality, based on their commonly held false assumption that anthropological subjects lacked history prior to colonial encounters with Europe. Eric Wolf ironically dubbed anthropologists' subjects as "People Without History."²

My classmates confronted these new questions differently. Many of us were inspired by Marxist scholars, who saw historical forces at work in the global systems of which indigenous people were a part. Their field work allowed them to demonstrate how those systems played out at the local level, where large forces unfolded in the dynamics of kinship relationships, economy and culture.³

My closest classmates and I pursued a different set of questions growing out of the emergence of symbolic anthropology. Its scholarly leading lights hardly agreed about the nature of the symbolic. Several of these key scholars were, or had recently been, at the University of Chicago during this period—Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and David Schneider, among others. One of the intellectual struggles at the center of this era was over the place of culture. Were there unified systems or models that underlay social life that manifest themselves not only in rituals and performances, but in economy and political change? Or were symbols and rituals part of the dynamic of social life and conflict, rather than idealized systems?⁴

Some of you might well see these questions as forerunners of what came to be called theories of practice, lived religion, or culture as performance. Even the study of material culture has drawn on what is glossed as symbolic processes.⁵

A number of historians, particularly of Early Modern History, were drawn to the work of the symbolic anthropologists who were critical to my own work. Natalie Zemon Davis's dissertation study of the printing workers of Lyon was one important example. As she recalled decades later, her Marxism was challenged by the fact that in the early Reformation in the printing trade in Lyon the masters, publishers, and wage-earners were all primarily Protestant for several decades, which...