Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Heinrich Schurtz, Arnold van Gennep, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Jack Goody, and Victor Turner.
[2] Historical anthropology was rooted in the Annales school, associated with a succession of major historians such as Fernand Braudel, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Pierre Nora, along with researchers from elsewhere in Europe such as Carlo Ginzburg.
The label historical anthropology has been actively promoted by some recent Annales school historians, such as Jean-Claude Schmitt.
Historical anthropology has been open to similar criticisms to anthropology: 'as Bernard Cohn and John and Jean Comaroff have observed, studies in which societies were represented in this way were often partial, biased, and unwitting handmaidens to the domination of non-Western peoples by Europeans and Americans'.
[2] But since the Second World War, increasingly reflexive approaches have led to sophisticated developments of the field, and the banner of 'historical anthropology' has often attracted Anglo-American historians in ways that the Annales school did not: key figures have been Sidney Mintz, Jay O'Brien, William Roseberry, Marshall Sahlins, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider, Eric Wolf, Peter Burke, and people from elsewhere in the world such as Aaron Gurevich.