Progress in Historical Studies

Has there been progress in historical studies, in the sense that we understand the past better now than previously? I argue that there has been such progress. In the case of the interpretational controversy over the American Revolution, it has consisted, among other things, in the development of interpretations that are more accurate, more comprehensive, better balanced, and better justified. In addition, the repeated development of interpretations with these characteristics has encouraged interpretational convergence, if not overall, then at least within what I call interpretive polarities, of which the competition between Whig- and Progressive-oriented interpretations of the Revolution is an example. Further, except for a certain sort of ignorance about human nature coupled with the desire for richer and more relevant interpretational meaning, probably there would have been even more convergence. However, the use of interpretational convergence as a criterion of progress in historical studies rests on a profound and widespread misunderstanding of the differences between historical studies and the physical sciences. Interpretational divergence is not necessarily a bad thing. In the case of the controversy over the Revolution, we should want even more interpretational divergence than we have gotten so far, provided it is of the right kind. The seeming-descensus that results, far from being an embarrassment to historical studies, should be regarded as one of its best features. Finally, in response to predictable relativistic and skeptical objections, there are, if not external checks on the adequacy of historical interpretations, then something that is close enough to such checks to promote a kind of growth in historical understanding that is progress worth caring about.     

Moving pictures: Memory and photography among the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,Colombia

This article traces the changing uses and meanings of a set of ethnographic photographs that represent a contentious period in the history of the Arhuaco, an indigenous group that inhabits the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in Northern Colombia. Based on archival sources and fieldwork, I explore their role in the 1910s when they were created by Swedish anthropologist Gustaf Bolinder, and also analyse indigenous re-significations and contests over the meaning of the photographs in 2010s as a process that is intertwined with their present struggles. I study their use by an Arhuaco media-maker who incorporated them into a historical documentary film and debates among community members around possible interpretations of the pictures. Through this case study I seek to contribute to the expanding scholarship on the history of anthropological photography, and in particular to recent efforts to move beyond vertical colonial readings and emphasize indigenous agency. I argue for the need of a more nuanced understanding of indigenous and non-indigenous uses of photography that takes into account a shared history and does not naturalize differences. Furthermore, I trace the changing meanings of photographs in order to illuminate the historicity implied in the process of attributing meaning to the past.     

An Apologia for Theoretical History

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. One can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of long-term historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.     

Linking Theory and Evidence in an Archaeology of Human Agency: Iconography,Style, and Theories of Embodiment

Many of the theories that inspire agency approaches in archaeology identify deep philosophical problems with other lines of thought. This creates challenges for identifying methods: do radical theories require radical methods? Choosing as a case study one of agency’s interpretive frameworks (embodiment) and, further, a single class of evidence (anthropomorphic imagery), I argue that the answer is “no.” In this case, familiar art historical methods, deliberately played off one against the other, provide a middle range framework for linking theory and evidence.     

The search for historical experience

In the first part of my paper I will try to reconstruct a series of attempts at dialogue between history and the social sciences made by historians connected with the “Annales” (Marc Bloch, Ernest Labrousse, Giovanni Levi, Bernard Lepetit). What these attempts have in common is the idea that in history, as in the natural sciences, it is to some extent possible to carry out forms of experimentation on the sources, and that the inclusion of history among the human sciences, and even the scientific future of the discipline itself, ultimately depend on the adoption of this method. In the second part I will discuss the relationship that links historical experimentation with lived experience, and I will conclude by discussing the possible meaning of the idea of experimenting with the sources of history.     

Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/"culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.     

发生学方法与历史研究

发生学方法兴起于自然科学研究领域,随后被人文社会科学研究领域所采用。唯物史观和唯物辩证法使这一方法走向科学,从而形成了具有普遍意义的科学的马克思主义发生学方法。它是对现实及其发生前提和发生过程进行研究的方法,具有科学性、革命性和实践性特征,在马克思主义的历史研究方法体系中处于支配地位。然而,这并非意味着它是历史研究的唯一方法。这对我们加深理解唯物史观与历史学理论方法之间的关系,具有重要启示意义。     

History of Science or History of Learning

This essay presents analogies between the development of historical writing and of physical science during the early modern period. Its necessarily spotty coverage runs from the mid sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. The analogies include arising from practical concerns; preferring material documents and experimental inquiries over texts; making use of mathematical auxiliary sciences; distinguishing between primary and secondary elements; establishing new fundamental principles; undermining the traditional world system; and devising methods to control rapidly multiplying knowledge. A history of learning that meets today's standards of historical scholarship should identify and exploit such parallels, not only because of scholarly interest and responsibility, but also because an understanding of the historical importance of linkages between distant branches of learning may help redress the increasing imbalance in resources among the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in our higher schools and universities.     

Approaching selfhood

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking.     

Beyond ‘resistance’: rethinking nonhuman agency for a ‘more-than-human’ world

This article argues that rethinking historical agency to include nonhuman agents is one way to integrate better animals into historical narratives. Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and forming part of a growing interest in nonhuman, particularly animal, agency, it aims to clear some theoretical and historiographical ground to provide a basis for claims that nature has agency. It then argues that environmental and animal historians have too readily equated nonhuman agency with ‘resistance’, a concept that does not easily map onto animal behaviour and one which also fails to capture the diversity of nonhuman agencies. Using case studies of Police rescue dogs in early twentieth-century France and animals on the Western Front, it argues that exploring the diverse types of nonhuman agencies and their deep and multiple entanglements with human agents will extend studies of nonhumans beyond the resistance model.     

Philosophy of sport

Ernest Gellner was, by all accounts, one of the most unconventional thinkers of the twentieth century. Not only was the content of his theories often strikingly original, but he also arrived at them by use of a singularly personal thought-style. The article describes the most salient features of this thought-style: his quest for overviews, on the one hand, and for penetrating and unexpected insights, on the other, his opposition to what he perceived as humanistic complacency, his academic elitism, and much else. In the final section, an assessment of the most conspicuous feature of Gellner's thought-style—his tendency to downplay the importance of detail and to focus on high-level theory—is given. It is argued that this characteristic served Gellner better in philosophy and the history of ideas than in the social sciences.     

MYTH IN HISTORY,PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS MYTH: ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF HANS BLUMENBERG'S INTERPRETATION OF ERNST CASSIRER'S THEORY OF MYTH

This essay explores the different interpretations proposed by Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg of the relation between Platonic philosophy and myth as a means of bringing to light a fundamental divergence in their respective conceptions of what precisely myth is. It attempts to show that their conceptions of myth are closely related to their respective assumptions concerning the historical significance of myth and regarding the sense of history more generally. Their divergent conceptions of myth and of history, I argue, are at the same time not simply matters of abstract speculation, but spring from fundamental presuppositions concerning myth's political significance. The present elucidation aims not only to set in relief one or another of the ways in which Cassirer or Blumenberg understood myth, nor even to present Blumenberg's critical reception of Cassirer's theories, but above all to contribute to the interpretation of the political implications of myth and of its historical potency in our contemporary epoch.     

The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons

In this article I will challenge a received orthodoxy in the philosophy of social science by showing that Collingwood was right in insisting that reenactment is epistemically central for historical explanations of individual agency. Situating Collingwood within the context of the debate between simulation theory and what has come to be called "theory theory" in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology, I will develop two systematic arguments that attempt to show the essential importance of reenactment for our understanding of rational agency. I will furthermore show that Gadamer's influential critique of the reenactment model distinguishes insufficiently between the interpretation of certain types of texts and the explanation of individual actions. In providing an account of individual agency, we are committed to a realistic understanding of our ordinary scheme of action-explanations and have thus to recognize the centrality of reenactment. Nevertheless, Collingwood's emphasis on reenactment is certainly one-sided. I will demonstrate its limitations even for accounting for individual agency, and show how it has to be supplemented by various theoretical considerations, by analyzing the different explanatory strategies that Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen use to explain the behavior of the ordinary men in Reserve Battalion 101 during World War II.     

‘On a nos mots à dire’: Kanak Women's Experience of Bridewealth in Lifou

Bridewealth in Lifou cannot be discussed on its own; rather it should be considered within the plurality of ceremonial acts which are needed to legitimize a marriage as customary. What do these transactions mean? Where does women's agency lie? Through a longitudinal analysis of ethnographic materials from my fieldwork in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, I consider how Kanak women are engaged in and perceive these ceremonial and cultural processes through a declared women's perspective that highlights their ability to make autonomous choices in an open ended historical context. I argue that it is a case of ‘positive agency’. I emphasize that local categories (june hmala and wenehleng) which define specific moments in this process can be subsumed under the anthropological term ‘bridewealth’. Further, I examine the meaning of money in bridewealth and the fact that the monetary contribution keeps increasing, raising local concerns about the need to regulate the amount circulating in marriage exchanges and its dispersion. Furthermore in Lifou there is no indication that the assembling of the bridewealth by the grooms implies a commoditization and (later) exploitation of women.     

Wissenschaft und Musik – Einführende Bemerkungen

Science and music. Introductory remarks. The article presents a brief introduction to “Science and Music”, theme of the 44^th symposium of the “Society for History of Sciences” held in Munich in Mai 2007. The text begins with a brief reference to the numerous biographical connections between the two fields, but focuses primarily on topics that reveal music and the sciences to be results of shared cultural practices. Examples include: (1) shared objects in the material sense, meaning the use of particular instruments in both music and the sciences; (2) shared semantics, metaphors, and concepts, for example the use of the concepts like clang or tone color in acoustics and the psychology of audition, or talk of ‘mood’ and ‘harmony’ in both music and in literature; (3) direct interactions between mathematics, physics and music, for example in the electronic music of the twentieth century.     

Poverty Point as Structure,Event, Process

A multiscalar analysis of the Poverty Point mound and ridge complex of northeast Louisiana illustrates the value of agency and practice theories to historical interpretations of monumental architecture. The architects of Poverty Point included both ancient mounds in their design and, arguably, symbolic representations of the far-flung places and peoples from which Poverty Point residents acquired raw materials for tools and ornaments. The conjunction of the past with the present, and the local with the nonlocal was the logic of a new social order that was both corporate and pluralistic. Extrapolation of the geometry of Poverty Point earthworks at increasingly larger scales encompasses the places and histories of communities whose migrations, shifting alliances, and transformations contributed to the genesis of Poverty Point culture.     

Metaphor and the Anthropocene: Presenting Humans as a Geological Force

Intellectually as well as materially, the Anthropocene is a deeply cultural phenomenon. This includes its communicative form, which is a contested trope‐rich narrative, even within the sciences. In this essay I focus on the role of metaphor in Anthropocene thought and in particular, on the provocative, ambiguous, and potentially far‐reaching idea of humans as a geological force. By considering the different interpretations and meaning this metaphor encourages – including differences in what is meant by geological and force, both within and beyond stratigraphy and Earth System Science – we gain a stronger sense of the deeply allegorical and theological character of the Anthropocene story and the way it promises to reposition humans in the world.     

陕西文化区划及其机制分析

本文以总结陕西文化区域差异为目的,从形式文化区的角度将陕西全省划分为三个文化区和八个文化亚区。在全面分析了陕西文化区形成的历史、人文过程后,笔者认为自然环境、经济发展水平与土地利用方式、政区、交通条件和移民等是陕西文化区形成的主要机制。     

鄂尔多斯高原自然背景和明清时期的土地利用

鄂尔多斯高原位于我国北方沙漠-黄土边界带的关键位置上,通过百年来沙漠-黄土边界带概念的形成考察,从学术史上获得该论题蕴含有过渡带、敏感带、生态交错带内涵,这是众多学科研究意义所在。明代为防御元蒙势力,沿长城地带实行军屯,清代限于人口压力和财政因素,从长城内到长城外,将"变刍牧而桑麻"的活动扩展到大半个高原。汲取学术界已有成果,尤其是以长城作为判断毛乌素沙地南移及其与明清垦殖活动关系的一种考察方式,在影响毛乌素沙地的走向和幅度上,认为自然因素更显重要。尽管人类利用土地的形式和规模在逐渐升级,但在明清时期的演变过程中,仍只是作为荒漠-草原彼此进退的一种参与力量。