Teaching historical geography in the field

This paper examines the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with teaching historical geography, and archival research specifically, in the context of the undergraduate field trip. In so doing, it draws upon students' own reflections on the experience of conducting archival research during a field trip to New York City and presents the results of an international survey of academics' views as to the current problems and future possibilities associated with the teaching of historical geography and the implications of these perspectives for future curriculum design.     

Atavistic Novelty: Questioning Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism as formulated in her magnum opus—The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It argues that, to comprehend totalitarianism, Arendt forged a heterodox method of historical analysis. Employing that method, she conceived totalitarianism as a form of transcendence of historical context. In doing so, however, she ignored crucial historical contexts that were in fact related to the history of totalitarianism. Subverting her interpretation of totalitarianism as transcendence, these elided contexts erupted inadvertently and repeatedly into her analysis—revealing that totalitarianism was solidly embedded in them. The Origins of Totalitarianism thus exhibits a conceptual contradiction that confuses its attempt to understand totalitarianism.     

Out of the Ivy and into the Arctic: Imitation Coral Reconstruction in Cross-Cultural Contexts

This essay discusses imitation coral reconstruction workshops based on a recipe from a sixteenth-century “book of secrets” that took place in three different educational contexts: Columbia University, Nunavut Arctic College, and Universität Hamburg. It reflects on the utility of reconstruction and material literacy as present-day history of science methodologies in which scholarly textual interpretation meets physical research. It also considers the nature of cultural heritage in shaping material practice through an Inuit cultural context, in which the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge is not rooted in textual traditions, but bodily embedded in oral histories, craft technology, and land stewardship. The essay also presents suggestions for new collaborative practices between humanists, artisans, and scientists that can be facilitated by reconstruction methodology.     

THE CONTINUING MODESTY OF HISTORY

The critique of conventional historical writing has been emergent for a century—it is not the work of a few—and it has immense practical implications for Western society, perhaps especially in English‐speaking countries. Involved are such issues as the decline of representation, the nature of causality, the definitions of identity or time or system, to name only a few. Conventional historians are quite right to consider this a challenge to everything they assume in order to do their work. The challenge is, why do that particular work at all? Understandably, historians have consolidated, especially in North America where empiricism and the English language prevail. But even there, and certainly elsewhere, and given the changes in knowledge and social order during the past century at least, the critique of conventional historical method is unavoidable. Too bad historians aren't doing more to help this effort, and by historians I don't mean the most of us who think constantly in terms of historical causality as we learned it from the nineteenth century and our teachers; by “historians” I mean the experts who continue to teach the young. A major roadblock to creative discussion is the fact that problems such as those just mentioned all exceed disciplinary boundaries, so investigation that does not follow suit cannot grasp the problem, much less respond to it creatively. Of course everyone is “for” interdisciplinary work, but most professional organizations, publications, and institutions do not encourage it, despite lip service to the contrary. Interdisciplinary work involves more than the splicing activity that is all too familiar in academic curricula. Crossing out of one's realm of “expertise” requires a kind of humility that does not always sort well with the kind of expertise fostered by professional organizations, publications, and institutions. And even the willing have trouble with the heady atmosphere outside the professional bubble. In such conditions key terms (“language,”“discourse,”“relativism,”“modernity,”“postmodernity,”“time,”“difference”) are pushed here and pushed there without gaining the focus that would lead to currency until finally the ostensible field of play resembles a gigantic traffic jam like the one that opens the film Fellini Roma. Discussion of these issues leads in the end to Borges and his story, ‘The Modesty of History,” from which the title of this essay is borrowed.     

‘Informed Seeing’: Reading the Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Cabinet at Milton Manor House through its Historical and Social Contexts

This object lesson examines a seventeenth-century cabinet, held at Milton Manor House in Oxfordshire, which has been embroidered with biblical scenes. Starting from the premise that knowledge informs seeing, this article provides a close reading of the cabinet’s iconography and historical context in order to highlight the knowledge — both the general ideologies and the individual interpretation — that may have informed its production. Through a detailed reading, the maker’s negotiation of the virtue of submissiveness, a major tenet of women’s education in the period, is identified as a possible theme.     

HISTORICAL MEANINGFULNESS IN SHARED ACTION

Why should past occurrences matter to us as such? Are they in fact meaningful in a specifically historical way, or do they only become meaningful in being connected to other sorts of meaning—political or speculative, for example—as many notable theorists imply? Ranke and Oakeshott affirmed a purely historical meaningfulness but left its nature unclear. The purpose of this essay is to confirm historical meaningfulness by arguing that our commanding practical interest in how we share action with other actors is distinctively engaged by presumed information about past occurrences. We recognize that past occurrences have determined the conditions of action sharing, constraining our practice with regard to which actors we share practical reality with and which compounding actions we may or must join in progress.     

Public art as public pedagogy: memorial landscapes of the Cambodian genocide

Historical memory in the form of public art acts as a pedagogical tool, both revealing the artist’s interpretation of history and serving as a historical device for the viewer. In Cambodia, new generations are developing an understanding of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) and its effect on their country’s history. Young peoples’ understanding of history is constructed through institutional, living, and public memory pedagogies. These pedagogical channels do not always work in unison, leaving gaps in historical education. In Cambodia, institutional and living memory pedagogies on the Khmer Rouge genocide often fail to transmit this important national history to those who did not live through it. Publicly accessible memorial art has the potential to supplement the historical understanding of young, rural Cambodians. Three murals sites in rural Cambodia act as landscapes of public pedagogy by depicting scenes of Khmer Rouge atrocities. This paper aims to understand the significance of the impact and implications of public memorial art as an educational supplement, and how public art can be utilized as public pedagogy in Cambodia and beyond.     

‘There Was A Third Man…’: Tales from a Global Policy Consultation on Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals

This article reflects on the experience of the two authors as ‘experts’ during consultations on justice and security indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals. The authors examine how the tension between the indeterminacy of the concepts to be measured — justice and security — and the concreteness of indicators shaped the politics of the consultations. Participants used this tension strategically to destabilize notions of time, space and identity on which knowledge production rests. In doing so, they blurred the distinction between academics, advocates and policy makers. They did this to lay claim to some aspects of implementation while distancing themselves from others. The authors then juxtapose this with personal experience of researching South Sudanese citizens, who challenged and deconstructed that distinction. At the same time, experts at the consultations incorporated an image of these citizens as an ethical justification for the discussion. The authors argue that a more complex sociology of knowledge is required to understand how these global knowledge practices work from the global to the local. Such a sociology of knowledge acknowledges fluidity and grapples with how knowledge practices defer and delimit moments of decision; it requires an ethico‐political — rather than just a political — critique.     

Schooling the Quantum Generations: Textbooks and Quantum Cultures from the 1910s to the 1930s

Ever since Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), textbooks have suffered a bad reputation. They have been accused of distorting—at times purportedly—history and of feeding students with an unacceptably simplified and optimistic view of science. This attitude started to change only in recent times. With the increase of attention paid not only to how theories are conceived, but also how they are practiced, disseminated, and appropriated, historians have rehabilitated textbooks as a legitimate site of knowledge production. In this paper, I adopt textbooks as an instrument to unfold multiple facets of the culture that allowed quantum physics to flourish between 1900 and the early 1930s. I organize the article around two stories about two major textbooks, i.e., Sommerfeld′s Atombau und Spektrallinien and Dirac′s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. I explore the complex pedagogical cultures underlying these two masterpieces and how they intersect local agendas.     

HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY: FOUCAULT,CAVAILLÈS,AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE CONCEPT

This paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coherence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historical principles that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accordingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developed a satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Foucault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodological tradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it was taken up, modifed, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès—what I call the phenomenology of the concept. The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpretation of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavaillès's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental—their respective continuations of Cavaillès's phenomenology of the concept. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that came to define his work.     

5. PAST AND “PRESENCE”: REVISITING HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY

The last thirty years have brought about a fundamental revision of historical epistemology. So intense a concentration on the nature of history as a form of inquiry has diminished attention given to the thing that history inquires into: the nature of the past itself. Too readily, that entire domain has turned into a place for dreams, as Hayden White put it: a lost world only available now through the imagination of the author and subject to aesthetic whim. The next thirty years will, I propose, be the period in which ontology returns to the center of historical theory. And nothing short of the reconceptualization of the past—indeed of time itself—must be its objective. It must achieve that objective, moreover, in establishing arguments that are congruent with what revisions of epistemology have taught us about the limits of historical knowledge and the inevitability of textual representation. This paper enters this field by discussing some of the issues involved in rethinking the place of time in historical constructions since Bergson. It demonstrates the confusions inherent in spatial reductions of temporality, which historians have done so much to entrench rather than eradicate, and argues that historians have yet to accommodate the fundamental conceptual shifts inaugurated by heidegger. It then moves to propose a methodological doctrine to which I have given the name “chronism” and seeks to sketch the utility of such a doctrine for bringing one form of presence—that of authenticity—back into the domain of historical study. Doing so invites a number of conceptual and practical difficulties that the paper will address in its conclusions; these may disturb those who have closed their minds to anything beyond the present. Taking ontology seriously interferes both with structuralist assumptions about the nothingness of time and with some of the styles of historical representation that have become fashionable in the postmodern climate. There may be painful lessons to be learned if we are to rescue the past from its current status as a nonentity.     

HISTORY GOES WALKABOUT

Could the methods of history—and not just its objects of study—be decolonized? This essay explores analogous areas of cultural production, such as painting, to determine how historians might begin to produce work that lies outside the Western, Euro‐Christian imaginary. It focuses on the case of Australia and the means by which Aboriginal artists have reanimated and recalibrated traditional forms of knowledge, offering new bases for thinking about the history and temporalities of Australia. The work of the painter Tim Johnson is then presented as an example for history in his demonstration of the ways in which indigenous methods and ways of seeing the world can be deployed by Others. The ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges that accompany such work are detailed, alongside a historiographical account of the way in which these discussions mesh with seminal debates in postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and settler colonialism as they relate to historical theory. Drawing on recent work in History and Theory, the article asks: what might be the consequences for history were it not to develop a meaningful “global turn,” arguing that a critical moment has been reached in which modes of understanding the world that come from outside the West need to be incorporated into historians’ repertoires for thinking and making.     

Talking class,talking race: language,class, and race in the call center industry in South Africa

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography.     

In/out of Nigeria: transnational research and the politics of identity and knowledge production

Abstract

This article explores the murkiness of fieldwork and writing that often comes with simultaneous positioning as insider/outsider. I engage with two key themes: First, identity, legitimacy and representation and, second, the gray spaces between theory and reality. The first theme examines the contradictions of being perceived as both an insider and outsider; the complexities of identity and language while at ‘home’ in the field, and the challenges of performing the native informant role while back ‘home’ in Canada. The second theme explores the uncomfortable dilemma of engaging with the ‘Rush to Theory’ from the global south. I will examine how the theories are sophisticated and provocative, yet prove unsatisfactory in terms of having practical applications. I conclude the article by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, transnational subjects invariably contribute to the creation of a new politics of knowledge production and to the attainment of social justice.     

科学实证与文化阐释:中国新史学之双轨

中国新史学中最常见的两种历史研究方式是科学实证与文化阐释,前者旨在建立历史事实之真或寻求历史演变之理,后者则以探寻历史之意义或彰显切实之史识为目标,此二者可谓中国新史学之"双轨"。中国新史学正是沿此"双轨"向前发展的。从新史学之"双轨"着眼,并依据"新异性的标准",中国新史学界应有"八大家",他们分别是:梁启超、王国维、陈寅恪、胡适、顾颉刚、傅斯年、郭沫若和钱穆。科学实证与文化阐释,这两种不同的历史研究取径,展示了中国新史学研究的多元面相,二者之间是相互融通的,并无根本性的冲突与对垒,其在治史观念与方法上亦可做到相互补益,相得益彰。许冠三在《新史学九十年》中因陷入"科学"迷思的褊狭"新史学观",以科学实证拒斥文化阐释,故而未能将钱穆基于"文化"视角来研究历史的文化史学视为新史学。钱穆的新史学特质主要表现为:在继承中国传统史学遗产之基础上,注重历史研究主体与客体的统一,以文化为本位,以阐释为取径,其典型表现是"以士释史";以中国为立场,注重探寻本国历史文化之意义,探求与本国历史文化相符合之史识,强调历史学的经世致用功能。钱穆的新史学观与后现代主义在批判科学主义历史学、反对文化一元论和西方中心主义历史观等方面多有契合之处,但其以"于客观中求实证"为基础的历史认识论与走向历史虚无主义的后现代主义有着本质的区别。     

Scholarship and the ship of state: rethinking the Anglo‐American strategic decline analogy

This article uses the centenary of the First World War as an opportunity to re‐examine a major element of the existing literature on the war—the strategic implications of supposed British decline—as well as analogies to the contemporary United States based upon that interpretation of history. It argues that the standard declinist interpretation of British strategy rests to a surprising degree upon the work of the naval historian Arthur Marder, and that Marder's archival research and conceptual framework were weaker than is generally realized. It suggests that more recent work appearing since Marder is stronger and renders the declinist strategic interpretation difficult to maintain. It concludes by considering the implications of this new work for analogies between the United States today and First World War‐era Britain, and for the use of history in contemporary policy debates.     

改革开放以来农村改革的历程与经验

实行农村经济体制改革,是我们党在新的时代条件下坚持以马克思主义为指导、结合中国不断发展变化的实际进行的理论创新和新的伟大革命。实践证明,农村实行以家庭联产承包责任制为基础的双层经营体制,是我们党在改革的实践中寻找到的既符合客观规律又符合中国国情的发展之路。为此,梳理、分析我国农村改革与发展的历程,探索和研究其历史经验,把握其发展规律,这对于推进中国特色社会主义事业和全面实现小康目标具有十分重要的理论和实践意义。     

Vico and the disgregation of historia salutis

This study aims to analyse the problem of Vico’s religiosity, still a subject for debate, in the European tradition of universal historiography. Vico’s historical reconstruction has traditionally been considered as orthodox and apologetic. The Neapolitan philosopher, in his major work, New Science, tried to defend not only the historical veracity and authority of biblical narratives as the only source to reconstruct the initial phases of history, but also the temporal and spatial frame of historia salutis, confuting the thesis of a greater antiquity of pagan nations. Nonetheless, it is difficult to conclude that Vico’s historical reconstruction followed the same route of the apologists of his time. Vico demolished not the temporal and spatial sphere, but the unitary frame of historia salutis. In Vico’s setting, all nations formed their civilizations in an autochthonous way and developed them autonomously with diverse timetables. Vico introduced the concept of the plurality of history. In this way, the Neapolitan philosopher contributed to the process of secularization of universal history in a completely different way from his contemporaries.     

Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation

The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French post‐structuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.     

Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders

In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.