History and Anthropology Reflections on Visits across Borders

This short commentary on Louise Tilly's paper offers a reflection on the usefulness of recognizing disciplinary borders, taking as a point of departure her description of a shift over the past twenty‐five years in dominant styles of analysis in urban history from structural to cultural approaches. Careful consideration of cross‐disciplinary differences in the meanings attributed to such apparently shared terms as "structure" and "culture" promises both to enhance the fruitfulness of exchange across disciplines and to clarify our own disciplinary practices. [History, anthropology, culture, structure, academic disciplines]