HISTORIES

Organized in distinct segments, this essay delineates some of the inte llectual currents that have promoted a cross-fertilization between his tory, anthropology and sociology in recent decades. Necessarily oversi mplified, the strategy is directed towards providing landmarks and tra cks within a vast landscape. These outlines are interwoven with an arg ument that favours attentiveness to the hermeneutic capacities of the people who are the subject of research; and they suggest that an abidi ng interest in the subjective world of human beings and their interact ions has brought historians and anthropologists into dialogue. They ca n also be read as 'texts' marking the degree to which literary theory is informing the disciplines of history and anthropology today. It is in arenas of the world where scholars have been forced to rely heavily on oral traditions that the most promising exchanges between the disc iplines have developed. Research findings from Africa and Oceania have indicated how the past inhabits the present in, and through, oral per formances. Valeri's theoretical clarification of the interplay between two types of historical representation among Hawaiians, Barber's clar ification of the praise poetry among the Yoruba, an Aboriginal denunci ation of the immoral force of Captain Cook's law, a sixteenth-century Sinhalese story-in-riddle which depicts Portuguese colonialism as evil , and an incident at a cricket match in 1981, are deployed to argue th at encoded historical understandings are significant to living humans, and are therefore central to scholarly endeavour in the social scienc es.