local stories collection

The local stories collection follows interdisciplinary historians Hobsbawm and Ranger as they attempt to locate mythic traditions in national histories. This is an anthropological question (myth) defined by historical political economic variables (nation). Participant-oberver ethnographers are warned against going native as part of their anthropological training. This is loss of scientific objectivity and gain in subjective affinity toward the object. This trap was tripped by Joseph Campbell, Timothy Leary and Margaret Mead--albeit in different ways. Going native applies to interdisciplinary studies too. Bourgeoisie Marxists like Hobsbawm, Ranger, Trevor-Roper, Morgan and Cannadine don't even have a chance to "go" native. Their legitimacy comes from the bourgiousie academy. Their critiques of British traditions comes from inside the commonwealth. This is what makes them authentic. In this way, the "invention of" The Invention of Tradition is a process of British self-awareness.
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Historical tradition is an evolving social construct. To Hobsbawm: "We should not be misled by a curious, but understandable, paradox: modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so 'natural' as to require no definition other than self-assertion. Whatever the historic or other continuities embedded in the modern [nation, people and citizen] concept...these very concepts themselves must include a constructed or 'invented' component. And just because so much of what subjectively makes up the modern 'nation' consists of such constructs and is associated with appropriate and, in general, fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse (such as 'national history'), the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the 'invention of tradition'."

Hobsbawm and his peers are trying to answer an anthropological question about myth using historical units. Their answer, naturally, becomes framed as the evolution of national traditions. Local stories collection tries to blur these lines between participant-obervation and theoretical structure. These are small scale stories that represent large scale themes like overproduction, boom-and-bust, discipline-and-punishment, race and place.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (ed.) The Invention of Tradition London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 14 Of course, Barney Cohn is the exception that proves the rule. He was peer of Hobsbawm featured in the book. Unlike the rest of the authors, Cohn was an American anthropologist from the University of Chicago who taught about south east Asia.