Review
"This comparative study of historical consciousness deserves many readers. I read it eagerly and recommend it cordially." C. Vann Woodward"This is a major, and original, contribution to the history of ideas,or perhaps I should say to the philosophy of history. It artfully blends anthropological, sociological and historical thinking--areas which too often find each other incompatible." Paul A. Carter"It deals with issues which are so critical to how social science disciplines are designed that I find it hard for any field not to come to grips with what the author has presented." Aram Y. Yengoyan.
From the Inside Flap
Why have reliable histories been written in some literate civilizations but not in others? Anthropologist Donald Brown here argues that the answer lies in stratification: hereditarily stratified societies--such as India, with its caste system--tend to develop mythological views of the past and are marked by pronounced religiosity, which produces hagiography in place of biography, iconography in place of realistic portraiture, and orthodoxy in place of independent social-scientific investigation. By contrast, civilizations with open social stratification typically develop both sound historical views of the past and sound concomitants to history.
Drawing on the historical writings of South Asia and China, Southeast Asia, the ancient Mediterranean world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Brown demonstrates how their differing conceptions of historiography relate to differences in the nature of societies. The social construction of cultural forms can thus be understood as creating a set of constraints, either positive or negative, not only on history but also on its recording. At a time when the social sciences are increasingly concerned with uniqueness and subjectivity, this book offers a new objective interpretation of both differences and similarities among great civilizations.
