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While resistance and rebellion have remained core themes in anthropology at least since the 1960s, anthropologists have paid much less attention to the study of political revolutions as real historical events. Yet there are compelling real-world reasons why they should orient their analytical apparatus and ethnographic efforts towards revolutionary events. This article advances a series of reasons why anthropology can enrich and supplement existing political science and history traditions in the study of political revolutions. Anthropology can do so via key concepts developed by Victor Turner: “liminality,” “social drama,” “communitas,” “frame,” and “play.” Turner's ritual approach gains further relevance when linked to another series of concepts developed by Marcel Mauss, Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, and Gregory Bateson, such as “imitation,” “trickster,” “schismogenesis,” and “crowd behavior.” To study revolutions implies not only a focus on political behavior “from below,” but also recognition of moments where “high and low” are relativized or subverted, and where the micro- and macro-levels fuse in critical conjunctions.

This article suggests a need to link the anthropological debate of multiple modernities more closely to Weberian social theory, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadt and Eric Voegelin. This implies readdressing the question concerning the anthropological contribution to the understanding of modernity, forcing a link to historical-social theory. In this context, the article discusses the growing axial age debate in social theory, which was indeed an important background to the very idea of ‘multiple modernities’.

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Emile Durkheim between Gabriel Tardeand Arnold van Gennep: founding moments of sociology and anthropology This article will situate Durkheim's work by revisiting two debates that influenced his attempt to define and give direction to sociology and anthropology: the debates between Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde and the debates between Durkheim and Arnold van Gennep. The battle between Tarde and Durkheim has in recent years been the object of several conferences and publications. This has happened alongside a much needed Tarde revival in sociology. However, Tarde was only one of Durkheim's opponents. For a long period, following Tarde's death in 1904, Arnold van Gennep represented the strongest critique of Durkheim's project. This 'debate' is little known among anthropologists and social scientists. The aim of this article is to situate Durkheim and the birth of the social sciences in France between both of these two figures. The aim is therefore also to bring together two disciplinary debates that for too long have been kept artificially separate in our understanding of Durkheim as 'founding father' of both anthropology and sociology. Arnold van Gennep and Gabriel Tarde opposed Durkheim independently from the perspectives of anthropology and sociology, but also from what can be reconstructed as a shared 'philosophy' of relevance still today. The article will discuss how so, and will highlight the convergences between the critiques of Durkheim offered by Tarde and van Gennep.