history at one point in time: “working together” in Maale, 1975

That history is about how things came to be, and that anthropology is about the structure of things once they have come to be, is a notion deeply embedded in anthropology. The difficulty with such an idea is that it promotes a myth of a “restful” present, a present created somehow by the organization of societies and cultures rather than the practices of men and women. This essay, in contrast, attempts to analyze communal labor in a Maale community during 1975 to show how people actively created a particular set of social and cultural forms, a particular way of “working together.” [work, domestic groups, political factions, stratification, history]