The Discipline of History
Postmodernism is Not the Only Problem
History is the study of the past. So far so good. The problem is that, due to the curious history of academic disciplines, there is no one corner of the modern academy which is responsible for the historical enterprise in its fullness. History, in the sense of the thing we are here discussing, is scattered all over. The result is that those wishing to become competent students of the past will have to cross departmental lines while in school, and also in professional life. The pressures of time and professional identity not to do these things are enormous. That is just too bad. Competence in history can only be achieved by overcoming the pressures.
Here, at least, is a list of where some of the pieces are to be found.
Philology
The pull between inherited classicism (the idea that all wisdom was to be found on the pages, or between the lines, of Homer and Vergil) and modernism (the idea that our modern world requires a different wisdom) came to a crisis in the Renaissance. The Renaissance is usually thought of as a rebirth of the classical past. That is not correct. The essence of the Renaissance is that it distanced itself from classical wisdom, especially wisdom about the operations of nature. Renaissance science is not a rediscovery of Aristotle, it is a rejection of Aristotle and of other booklearning, and a new reliance on direct observation. Galileo, not Aristotle, is the paradigmatic scientist of the Renaissance. That same new consciousness affected the study of the classical texts themselves: it was realized (it had long been known, but now it was realized with special force) that they had been handed down by a complex and flawed process of transmission. The science of philology was developed to solve the problem of getting back to the obscured originals. Thus arose what is sometimes called "source criticism." Its home area was texts in Greek and Latin. Within Greek, its two areas of primary achievement are the study of the classical Greek writers, and the analysis of New Testament documents, which are written in a later form of Greek. These studies themselves went back to classical times, but in the Renaissance they acquired a new character. They became allied with history in general in the more conscious, more systematic, study of the past.
The partnership of philology and history, in the criticism and the interpretation of the source documents for earlier times, became the standard view during the 19th century. It is embodied in the classic manual of Langlois and Seignobos (1894, and still in print), and in later works down to the middle of the 20th century. That way of thinking, however, has not continued strong. At present, text philology is not generally recognized as a concern of historians, and it is taught, if at all, only in Departments of "Classics" and Schools of Theology, where Greek in particular is still a working language. This isolation of a key technique from its practice as part of history has impoverished both philology and history, but perhaps especially the latter. Naivete among historians about the dangers of the sources they use, and how to deal with those dangers, is more widespread now than at any time since the Renaissance. To get back on the wagon, students of History will have to reclaim this heritage outside the course offerings of the Department of History.
Modernity
A related and also injurious development in the structure of academe is the abandoning of ancient history in History departments. What replaced it was modern history. It took a long time, and a great deal of academic debate, before modern history was recognized as a valid subject. When it was so recognized, it proceeded to oust ancient history, more or less completely, from the departmental agenda. The average History Department today tends to agree with its Political Science counterpart, which holds that time began with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), considered to be the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the beginning of the modern way of doing things. It also holds that the modern way of doing things can be studied in a vacuum, without reference to anything older. Modern history as an autonomous discipline has no place for anything before 1648. It has little enough place for anything more than twenty years removed from the present. Now, the value of philology increases as we work at an increasing distance from the present. Its usefulness to more recent subjects, though real, can to a certain extent be downplayed or successfully overlooked. On the whole it has been overlooked. It is widely assumed that recent documents are in principle unproblematical, that when you have gotten hold of them, your troubles are over. Hence it is that manuals of research tell you how to find documents, but don't caution you about what may still need to be done with them once you have found them. That documents may lie, or may be difficult to interpret, is not a concern that weighs heavily in the regular practice of modern historians.
So also with languages. Modern European ones are often thought to suffice. Training in those and all other languages is delegated to other departments. Those other departments will sometimes also pick up responsibility for any study of the premodern histories of those cultures. So the Classics Department of a standard American university will not only teach Latin and Greek, it will be responsible for the subjects of Latin and Greek literature, and perhaps also of Roman and Greek history. But since for other reasons the perceived core discipline of these departments is linguistic, not historical, ancient history has a limited place in their planning too. The result toward which all this tends is that ancient history is abandoned or marginalized by all the departments that might be its logical disciplinary home. And without ancient history, modern history too readily imagines itself as technically no more complicated than reading, and remembering, the morning newspaper.
One relatively recent enthusiasm in the West has been for the study of cultures which have no written history, or written records of any kind. These are of two kinds: contemporary "primitive" cultures and remote or "prehistoric" cultures. Both were first envisioned as places where theories of the origin of civilization and the rise of humankind could be tested or discovered. Studying contemporary tribes requires direct observation, interview techniques, cultural immersion, and other skills not commonly possessed by standard armchair historians. Studying remote civilizations requires digging up and interpreting objects, and these skills are not part of the conventional historian's equipment. These enterprises therefore wound up in separate academic Departments of Anthropology or Archaeology, where the needed skills could be inculcated without having to argue with the conventional historians about whether they were worth the money.
A modern university department requires a raison d'etre in the form of a distinctive "disciplinary" methodology: a body of doctrines which are possessed only by members of that department, and which are both necessary and sufficient for its allotted tasks. Anthropology therefore formulated doctrines of interpretation which rely only on field observation and/or on material objects recovered from excavations. Self-sufficiency was the goal. History played no part in the self-definition of these disciplines.
The anthropological study of the Trobriand Island tribes, and the archaeological study of Cro-Magnon man, went their way without raising issues for conventional historians. But in the study of literate civilizations which are also known archaeologically, the two departmental doctrines do meet and clash. Both the historian (conventionally so called) and the anthropologist feel that their tools and body of evidence can give a complete account of, say, ancient China. As Finley long ago said of the study of ancient Greede, both are wrong. What is needed is a skillful interpretation of material and literary evidence, guided by firm technique and adequate method on both sides. Individuals may try to bring the evidence together, but no existing academic department is going to play the host to that combined effort.
The catch is this: it is only the combined effort that would deserve the name of History.
The Harder Sciences
Dating of objects by carbon 14 tests, dating of events by astronomical calculations of ancient eclipses, glimpsing the ecosystem as encoded in pollen remains and ancient climate as frozen in ice cores, reading ancient economic patterns from the composition of coin hoards and the statistical distribution of trade goods, are an increasingly vital part of retrieving the past. They use evidence that lies beyond the competence of the usual reader of texts. "History" as a department is usually situated in the Humanities, and Anthropology in the Social Sciences. These other methods take us even further away, into the domain of the so-called Sciences. As academe is now configured, none of these departments could legally take responsibility for the historical enterprise in all its range and variety.
Our suggestion, made elsewhere in these pages, is that history be reunified under the aegis of Physics, with Oppenheimer in charge. This may be difficult to realize in practice. For one thing, it is not absolutely certain that Oppenheimer would take the job.
In the absence of overall institutional coordination, and in the absence of systematic individual cooperation, and lacking an atmosphere of acceptance for all the relevant tools, interested individuals will have to equip themselves by their own efforts. They will not need to do radiocarbon dating, but they will need to learn to speak the language of those who report the radiocarbon results. What is worse, those making such an effort will have to anticipate that their effort will be not supported, and may even be penalized, by the thesis advisors and tenure committees which lie along the career paths of individuals. Those coming up the Anthropology side of the tree will need to develop, again on their own and against the grain of their disciplines, a collegial attitude for those who come to the common problems via the text-based side of the tree.
Methodological Difficulties
Two Kinds of History
The Past and the Advocational Agenda
The following was originally posted to the WSW E-mail list, in response to a theoretical question. It is repeated here, somewhat abridged, at the request of several recipients, and as a footnote to our discussion of postmodernism. It addresses a postmodern confusion about whether the past can be known, or whether it is irretrievably subject to our preconceptions about it.
There are two types of history.
Type 1. One is the past as it was; the thing which Ranke and others are trying to get at. In that past, it is either true that Mahavira predeceased Buddha, or true that Buddha predeceased Mahavira, but not both, and not neither. The evidence, in fortunate cases (and not all cases are fortunate), will tend to point to one or the other of these options. It is this kind of history, the set of past happenings to which the evidence in favorable cases may sufficiently point, that we are here concerned with.
Type 2. The other thing might be called attitudinal history. It consists not in discovering the facts, but in taking positions on them, and if necessary making them up so as to have something to take a position on. Cultures do this continually with their own sense of past identities or roots. In the process, they amend details, invent incidents, and reconfigure personas. The motive is either adaptive (reshaping the perceived heritage to meet current needs or to support current self-images) or else frankly glorificational. It is not involved with discovery or verification. It is a different enterprise altogether.
History as a field of activity has its origins in Type 2 behavior: the glorification of an identity-conferring past. The growth of scientific or Type 1 history out of that glorification is a recent development. It remains at all times a minority venture, subject to curtailment in periods of national passion, and vulnerable at all times to the agendas of cultural passion.
The Two Types
Historians of Type 1 will notice the myth-creating or modifying process of Type 2, but in the record, as a datum in its own right; as something that happened at the time. Thus, to an observer of the Han scene, the expanding myth of Confucius is not exclusively a lie about Confucius. It is also, separately, part of the truth about the symbolic position of the "Confucius" persona in Han times. Everything, including frauds and delusions and occasions of mass hysteria, is data for Type 1 history. It merely has to be treated as the thing which it is (in this case, evidence for Han attitudes), and kept from being taken as the thing which it is not (in this case, evidence about the historical Confucius).
Historians of Type 2, on the other hand, are engaged, like the Han Dynasty, in their own emphasis and highlighting and perhaps invention of the received past, in interaction with a contemporary public.
The Role of Imagination
Imagination, or the inventive faculty, is proper in a Type 2 writer. It lays the foundation for a wider appeal. This was true in ancient times as well. We can see the faculty of imagination at work in the Shr Ji, as it dramatizes and embroiders the Jan-gwo Tsv stories (stories which were for the most part already pretty phony). Type 2 historians speak fondly of "the writing of history," that is, the crafting of a compelling narrative, preferably with plenty of sex and violence in it. Those people do not have much to say about the technique of interpreting evidence. You can always spot Type 2 historians (at least among the American scholars of a certain age) by the fact that their favorite book is Garrett Mattingly's "The Armada," a book which opens with an arresting scene: the beheading of red-haired Mary Queen of Scots. Sex and violence. The Shr Ji has more sex and violence than the Jan-gwo Tsv. It is for that reason a more successful "narrative history" than the Jan-gwo Tsv. Questions of accuracy don't enter into these judgements. The sort of success at which they aim is conferred by the judgement of the reading public.
Type 1 historians don't use imagination. Their analogous skill is rather inscenation, the ability, not to invent the past in your own image, but to think your way back into it on its own terms, shedding your identity and, as far as possible in a given case, acquiring a more appropriate identity: one's own acquired citizenship in the past.
The Problem of Interpretation
It should not be supposed that "scientific" or Type 1 history is limited to the accumulation of data bits ("mere facts," as they are snittily called), and that "interpretation" of those facts necessarily brings in Type 2 behavior. No. Interpretation may remain within the past. It doesn't have to be contaminated with the present. It is recognized by serious historians that the less it is contaminated with the present, the better. The interpretation of archaeological data, such as coins with their mint marks and their degrees of wear through handling, can lead to finding out the geographical extent of a long-gone economic system. Such a result is an interpretation, but it is an interpretation about the past, and it is constrained by the evidence about the past. It is not a concept imposed on the past by the present. The coins are there; their circulation is also "there" in the archaeological record, for those who know where to look for it. Modern expertise is brought to bear only to recognize the meaning of the physical artifacts and the implications of their distribution in space.
The fact that concepts have frequently been imposed on the past only shows that historians are not yet very good at what they do. Perhaps they may get better if they keep trying.
We hope they will keep trying. It seems to us too early to draw the conclusion that history is necessarily hot air. There may be another possibility.
Posts
