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At wider levels of scale, these revisions also mean the introduction of new voicesmany possible kinds of interpretations of categories, texts, and artifacts. Multiple voices and silences are represented in any scheme that attempts to sort out the world. No one classification organizes reality for everyonefor example, the red light, yellow light, green light traffic light distinctions do not work for blind people (who need sound coding). In looking to classification schemes as ways of ordering the past, it is easy to forget those who have been overlooked in this way. Thus, the indeterminacy of the past implies recovering multivocality; it also means understanding how standard narratives that appear universal have been constructed (Star 1991a). |
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There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or anotherformal or informal, hierarchical or not. Take the apparently unproblematic statement: "In 1640, the English revolution occurred; this led to a twenty-year period in which the English had no monarchy." The classifications involved here, all problematic, include the following: |
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The current segmentation of time into days, months, and years. Accounts of the English revolution generally use the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted some 100 years later, so causing translation problems with contemporary documents. |
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The classification of peoples into English, Irish, Scots, French, and so on. These designations were by no means so clear at the time; the whole discourse of "national genius" or character only arose in the nineteenth century. |
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The classification of events into revolutions, reforms, revolts, rebellions, and so forth (see Furet 1978 on thinking the French revolution). There was no concept of "revolution" at the time; our current conception is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx. |
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What do we classify as being a "monarchy?" There is a strong historiographical tradition that says that Oliver Cromwell was a monarchhe walked, talked, and acted like one after all. Under this view, there is no hiatus at all in this English institution; rather a usurper took the throne. |
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There are two major historiographic schools of thought about using classification systems on the past. One maintains that we should only use classifications available to actors at the time, much as an ethnographer tries faithfully to mirror the categories of their respondents. |
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