The Anthropology Dimension Of New Historicism

In contemporary Western literary criticism theory, New Historicism is an important genre.New Historicism and Cultural Anthropology can mutually interpret and manifest because of their extensive interconnectedness. New Historicism is involved in past symbol system, while Cultural Anthropology is involved in symbol system of exotic culture, and both methods are comparable. The former tries to carry out intersection and collision among different cultures studied and concerned by people when making criticism to literature; while the later absorbs plentiful literature criticism methods with theory of"thick description".Through the core concept-"culture", New Historicism and Cultural Anthropology integrate objects under their researches respectively. In a sense, both have trans-disciplinary functions and effects. By dating back New Historicism's origin, the concerned culture and history is regarded as a kind of social fact by traditional historicism, which is strangely similar to demonstration and research carried out by traditional anthropology ethnography; while it is regarded to be as having imaginary opinions as literatures have by New Historicism's current discussion about history, which happens to coincide with theory of demonstrating transformation from ethnography to experiential ethnography.New Historicism criticizes anthropology orientation of philosophical sources, summarizes criticism theory of New Historicism, focuses on neatening anthropology philosophy of Vico New Science and interpretive anthropology of Geertz used by New Historicism to criticize anthropology philosophical origin, and expounding cultural poetics influenced by Geertz Cultural Anthropology. Anthropology orientation criticized by New Historicism and attaches importance to the impact of Cultural Anthropology theory on New Historicism's criticism in terms of: Cultural Anthropology's concept of"cultural architecture"affects New Historicism's criticism about"self-fashioning", and transformation of Cultural Anthropology's ethnography composition affects New Historicism's criticism about historical cultural concept, and then reveals consensus of both theories in interconnectedness of literature and culture and emphasizes to discuss internal relationship between Cultural Anthropology concept and New Historicism criticism based on recognition and interpretation of culture, anthropology method as literature criticism and New Historicism's cultural perspective. Cultural Anthropology dimension of New Historicism's criticism method and methodologically discusses that"thick description"used by New Historicism criticism and"deep description"used by Cultural Anthropology will lead to the same end by different means.