Martin,
Yes there are differences of perspective among historians and this is
notably seen in the kinds of history they write. Suffice it to say that
traditional history, ie, the history of "peoples", of "great men", of the
"spirit of the age", etc. is primarily the ideological history you point to.
Nevertheless, a great transformation in the writing of history occurred
during the 20th century and largely under the influence of marxist theory,
or at least we could say materialist approaches and included the Annales
school (Febvre, Braudel, Wallerstein to some degree) and the "social
history" school in England that notably included Eric Hobsbawm ("Captain
Swing', 'Primitive Rebels') and E.P. Thompson whose classic 'The Making of
the Working Class' stand out strongly. Not surprisingly this approach is
largely absent in the U.S. although Eugene Genovese (author of the classic
studies of the ante-bellum American south: The World the Slave Owners Made,
and The World the Slaves Made) stands out.
The histories writtent from this perspective began to portary what happened
in the past, not as an arbitrary flow of events but as the regular processes
that had an internal logic and they also began to approach it with a view
to structures of historical causality. The marxist perspective focuses on
productive relations primarily, the French annales perspective introduced
the geographical element in a significant way. This approach focuses less
on the description of linear events and more on the "structures of everyday
life" that characterized specific epochs (Braudel's long, medium and short
duree). The economists of course have also made their contribution, notably
with the studies of price cycles over long periods--e.g., the effects of the
introduction of Spanish gold and silver into the economies of Europe in the
XVI-XVIII centuries. All of this is a far cry from Thucydides
'Pelloponesian Wars' and Caesar's 'Annals'. There are many historians who
see Ibn Khaldun's "Al-Muqaddimah' (written in the 14th century) as the first
work that attempted to understand the processes that shape the flow of human
events that we call history from the perspective of determinant process
generated out of specific social structures.
It would also be of interest to explore how Dilthey's neo-idealist theories
of historicity and spirit continue to influence the production of the kind
of written histories you point to. On the other extreme, we have
Althusser's attempt to reduce all history to processes absolutely
determined by structural relations between modes of production, an attempt
that E.P. Thompson thoroughly destroyed in his classic work "The Poverty of
Theory", a work that I would think indispensable for any discussion of how
historians actually work, and from which I drew the reference to the
"intelligibility" and the "significance" of history I mentioned in reply to
Diane. Nevertheless, even though he rejected Althusser's reductionism,
Thompson never lost sight of the marxist principle that it is people (a
collective noun) that make history, though not always as they understand it
nor in conditions they choose.
So you are right, events are not history, but what happens (the events) are
"intelligible" not simply from the perspective of the people who are
involved in them, but more importantly from the perspective of the forces
that created the situations to which the people responded, and these forces
are material (ie, geographic, economic, and of course cultural -- the ideal
is a material dimension --). Histories can either make these events
intelligible from the perspective of causal relations that generated the
situations (e.g., Marx's theory of cycles of capitalist expansion), or they
can make these events intelligible from the perspective of how the actor's
experienced them. And, of course, there is a dialectic relationship
between these two dimensions (e.g. E.P. Thompson's study of the poet William
Blake is quite interesting in this respect). But it seems you and Diane
don't acknowledge the existence of the former approach which guides the
practice of most contemporary historians, especially under the influence of
Wallerstein and Frank --world system theory.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Martin Owen <mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2001 3:38 AM
Subject: Re: history-text relations
> Diane writes: in response to Paul
> >
> >the notion of history-as-a-text is not to say that history IS a text,
> >but that text is historical.
>
> and in particular Paul writes:
>
> "I have a hard time seeing how world war 2's pacific armies sweeping
across
> polynesia, micronesia, melonesia can be considered a text. I can see how
> the
> engulfed pacific islanders incorporated that historical experience into
the
> frameworks their culture provided for making sense out of it, but I can't
> see it as a text itself"
>
> In "What is history?", E.H. Carr says "History i made in the writing.
> Knowledge of the events and artifacts of the past is antiquariansim.
> History surely is the interpretation of these events and artifacts.
> Currently there is considerable termoil in the school curriculum of South
> Africa. What was taught to me as history, a child of the end of the
> British Empire, I hope is different to the history as taught in schools
> elsewhere.
>
> That red coated Scots and Irish soldiers battled with other mercaneries
> engaged by English descended cartel of merchants eager to maintain their
> monopolistic position in the provision of high priced tea (and other
> goods)....
>
> is merely a tea party depeneding on your point of view.
>
> Colonial expansion of Japan ocurred, but what was the Japanese point of
> view? What did the Japanese think of the French colonisation of
> Indo-China, Britain in the sub-continent and the Malayas, The Dutch in
> Indonesia and the US in the Philipines?. Events are not history.
>
> Diane, I think many historians would feel that History is text.
>
> Martin
>
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