The anthropological generation of the 1950s and ′60s – including such figures as Clifford Geertz, Victor
Turner, Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Schneider – developed a particularly powerful way of
thinking about culture, quite distinct from their predecessors'.
3
It was this powerful new concept of
culture that first attracted the interest of a number of historians, who set out, with a missionary zeal, to
awaken their colleagues to its virtues. But no sooner had they done so than anthropologists seemed to
develop an allergy to their great achievement; on their side, initial interest in history was sparked by a
search for intellectual ointments that could cure the itching. From this initial miscue, others followed.