Anthropologists and historians began borrowing both theoretical ideas and research methods from each
other with particular intensity about 1970. Soon the two disciplines came to share a number of concerns
and buzzwords: “power” and “hegemony”; “identity” and “performance”; “diversity,” “resistance,” and
“change”; “moral economy” and “political economy”; and of course newly minted conceptions of both
“culture” and “history.” But were they ever really speaking the same language? On the one side, historians
talked about a trend called “the new cultural history”; on the other, anthropologists extolled the virtues of
“historical ethnography.” This terminological difference was but the tip of a larger iceberg of as yet
unborrowed methods and unshared problems that were seldom noticed. Like star-crossed lovers, the two
disciplines saw beautiful things when they looked in each other's eyes; but privately each wondered: “What
does she see in me?” Both deplored the “old way” of doing things – although they associated this old way
with quite different practices, often the very thing the other discipline was most anxious to borrow.