History and the Anthropology of Firms: A Legal Perspective

Many years ago, social theorists noted the wary, dawning recognition on the part of both historians and anthropologists of the possibility that "history itself was inherently cultural, and culture, inherently historical" (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, 1994:6). There was some hesitation at the start of anthropology's version of a "historic turn" (McDonald 1996), a shift in the field that, as Sherry Ortner observed, might have been characterized equally validly as "a move from structures and systems to persons and practices" as the more obvious "shift from static, synchronic analyses to diachronic, processual ones" (1994:402). Anthropologists' wariness of the unruly prodigal concept of "culture" was also encouraged by this historical shift.