Historiography as a form of political thought

This article seeks to combine two lines of thought that have been little studied: a model history of early modern historiography, and a theory of the impact of historiography on a political society. Under the former heading, it traces the growth of a narrative of European history as a series of sequels to the Roman empire, and a history of historiography as passing from classical narrative to antiquarian study and Enlightened philosophy. Under the latter, it considers the effect on political life of being narrated in a plurality of contexts, and asks whether a modern society can survive if deprived of the capacity for debating its history.     

Active Life Expectancy of Elderly Koreans, 1994–2011

Drawing on data from South Korea, this paper attempts to assess three dominant views on the evolution of morbidity and mortality of the elderly: expansion of morbidity, compression of morbidity, and dynamic equilibrium. The expansion of morbidity perspective argues that elongated life expectancy would comprise of, in large part, disabled life expectancy. The compression of morbidity theory suggests that increases in active life expectancy correspond to increases in total life expectancy. The dynamic equilibrium theory posits that, though overall levels of morbidity would rise, the prevalence of severe disability would decrease. The study is based on mortality data from Life Tables for Korea and the morbidity data from five nationally representative cross-sectional surveys conducted in 1994, 1998, 2004, 2008, and 2011. Sullivan's method is used to compute the active, mildly disabled, and severely disabled life expectancies. Results reveal that the total life expectancy of elderly Koreans has markedly increased, and this has been accompanied by an impressive extension of active life expectancy. In addition, results show negligible declines in the mildly disabled life expectancy but rapid drops in the severely disabled life expectancy. Collectively, these observations strongly support the compression hypothesis, and provide partial support for a dynamic equilibrium.     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Abandonment,Authority, and Religious Continuity in Post-Classical Greece

Scholars have frequently invoked the abandonment of Early Christian basilicas in the sixth and seventh centuries as key evidence for the end of antiquity in Greece. The standard narrative treats the archaeological evidence for abandonment as the physical manifestation of decline recorded in textual sources. The neat equivalency between archaeology and text ignores the role that abandonment plays in the narrative strategies of the textual sources. By reexamining the tie between text and archaeology, we can read the life cycle of the Early Christian basilica in Greece more critically and consequently expand our understanding of this dynamic period in Greek history.     

历史、文化与民族:20世纪前期中国文化史的兴起

20世纪初,西方“文化”概念成为整理传统中国历史遗产的重要概念工具。国人编纂文化史有意展现传统中国的文化成就,反映出中西文化竞争下,国人隐秘的文化争胜意识。“文化”与“历史”结合,逐渐成为历史叙事的核心概念。文化史在史学研究的对象、价值判断、时代分期、研究方法等方面发展出自身特征,亦反映出西方文明史、文化史在理论和实践方面对中国“新史学”的影响。文化史在实践中注重对民族历史生活的呈现,表现出民族史的特征,其叙述特定群体或民族社会生活的方方面面,揭示群体的精神内核。历史、文化与民族融会一体,在西学东渐、传统文化权威失坠的情况下,文化史构建了一种彰显社会凝聚力的叙事。     

Une théorie de l’autobiographie: Georg Misch

Georg Misch, author of a monumental history of autobiography, puts Dilthey’s principles to work: the narrative of a life is as old as history, but it is modified according to the period, and the determinations that it receives in the classical age orient it toward describing the laws of individual development.     

HISTORY AND ITS DEAD

Thomas Laqueur has brought together half a century of research on modern European mortuary culture into an impressive narrative of how the Christian churchyard was replaced by the modern cemetery, how interment was partly replaced by the technology of cremation, and how writing and preserving the names of the dead coincided with democratization and social reform. Beyond the grand narrative of the history of modern burial, he also shows how the modern culture of history and memory is intertwined with the transformation of mortuary practices. On a deeper level, he points toward new ways of conceptualizing the relation between the living and the dead, leading up toward, if not fully confronting, the challenge that propels his own endeavor, namely the existential‐ontological predicament of living after those who have been and the nature of spectrality.     

Writing imperial history in the age of high nationalism: imperial historians on the fringes of the Habsburg monarchy

For a long time, the late period of the Habsburg Monarchy has been characterized as a battlefield of nation-building elites who employed historical scholarship (among other means) to promote nationalistic ideas. More recent studies, however, have examined and called attention to the powerful structures which held this monarchy together. In the age of historicism, the Habsburg Monarchy also needed a plausible historical narrative on which it could base claims of the legitimacy of its rule. This narrative was created first and foremost by Viennese historians. Yet there were historians in the Habsburg Monarchy’s regional centres who made significant contributions to the development of concepts of an imperial history, too. In this article, the author examines their efforts. Until around 1900, supranationalism and regionalism were the dominant concepts in the historical writings of the authors in the Military Frontier and Bukovina and also in the works of the renowned Prague historian Anton Gindely. Loyal to Vienna, some Hungarian historians reassessed national history in order to reconcile it with the imperial past. Transnational history was also a method of demonstrating the congruity of national and imperial interests. In the age of high nationalism, historians thus contributed to both national and imperial cohesion.     

Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience

Intellectual cross-pollination between oral history and anthropologyis a long tradition. Editor and contributor Waterson arguesthat the influence of oral history on life narrative researchin anthropology intensified during the 1980s but needs freshemphasis. A primary goal in Southeast Asian Lives is to promotethe thoughtful use of oral history life narratives, especiallyto explore the influence of twentieth-century dramatic historicalchanges on individual lives and cultures. Her "Introduction:Analyzing Personal Narratives" is a useful and thought-provokingsurvey of theoretical issues on oral narratives, especiallyfor anyone doing cross-cultural     

DARWINIAN WE ARE NOT: COUNTERFACTUALISM AS THE NATURAL COURSE OF HISTORY

This article considers Peter Bowler's recent contribution to the genre of counterfactual history as exemplifying a “restrained” counterfactual framework, one that must downplay the role of contingency in the historical process in order to present what Bowler calls a more “natural course” of historical development. This restrained counterfactual methodology is discussed with reference to analogous debates within evolutionary science about the competing roles of contingency and convergence in the history of life, along with recent work done within the humanities about the more subtle nuances of counterfactual reasoning. Although there is little doubt that Bowler's study will help legitimize the genre of counterfactual history, it is argued that the role of contingency—once thought to be integral to the counterfactual—has been necessarily minimized in order to construct a narrative that is a plausible counterfactual history of science. It is in this way that Bowler's world without Darwin sheds light on our historiographical preconceptions about what makes for a plausible historical narrative.     

Time as told: Telling the past in Kyrgyzstan

This paper addresses Kyrgyz ‘time-telling’, exploring how Kyrgyz herders and villagers ‘tell’ of their experience of time through genealogies, family stories and epic poetry. The author takes a phenomenological approach, drawing on different forms of narrative; interweaving history, myth and story; revealing the life within the past, as genres mesh (and not always seamlessly). She argues that the lived experience of ‘time-telling’ works through narrative, memory, sound, performance, and poetics, providing a matrix through which the past is continuously brought to life for performers and audience alike. The paper is in three parts. The first sets the scene, exploring three interwoven, kin-related Kyrgyz genres – family trees, genealogies, and epic poetry. The second looks at diverse manifestations of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and its interpenetration with social life. The third reveals how different forms of performing and remembering the epic bring the past to life through the act of performance.     

Mental Health in the Elderly

Abstract

Increase in life expectancy, together with a reduction in fertility, is causing unprecedented changes in the age structure of the world population. The importance of age-related diseases, mental illness among them, is increasing – in the developed countries, some 25% of the elderly population suffer from mental disorder. This review delineates the factors – social, behavioural, physical, economic, genetic – contributing to severe forms of mental disorder, particularly Alzheimer's disease, cerebrovascular dementia and depression, and discusses recent technological advances. The interaction of physical and mental health is also discussed.     

‘She's always the person with a very global vision’: The Gender Dynamics of Migration,Narrative Interpretation and the Case of Jamaican Transnational Families

Migration and gender are two areas in which oral history and life story evidence has been recognised as having a special potential. The article begins with a review of social and historical research on migration, indicating that there has been a surprising lack of in‐depth research published on gender in migration. It then looks at the contribution of oral historians to this literature, and suggests that the focus on narrative styles may not always help us to understand the gender dynamics of migration. Next it presents a case study of Jamaican families who migrated to Britain and North America, showing how women were as often autonomous migrants as men, and that some women, unlike men, were activators of multiple family migration. In conclusion, it argues for more comparative research, using a broader methodological approach.     

布罗代尔的地中海叙事诗学

叙事主义历史哲学认为,一切历史都是叙事,但是布罗代尔的《地中海与菲利普二世时代的地中海世界》作为非事件史学的代表对此构成了严峻的挑战。本文在梳理不同学者观点的基础上,试图证明《地中海》亦属于叙事的范畴。首先,《地中海》在采用多种辞格的情况下呈现出一种圆形叙事结构,但是由于这种叙事风格的解读未能与内容分析相结合,所以挑战仍然存在;其次,《地中海》凭借新式历史话语大体上实现了总体史学、结构史学和问题史学的主张;最后,利科的历史叙事理论可以将以上两种分析结合起来,并且在该书中梳理出一条清晰的情节线索。它有助于打破将叙事等同于讲故事或事件史学的成见,颠覆以往对历史叙事的理解,拓展叙事主义历史哲学的解释空间。     

The Importance of Cheltenham: Imperialism,Liminality and Gustav Holst

The study of liminality, pioneered by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, and reinvigorated by Victor Turner, considers the ambiguity that exists for individuals as they move between defined groups or identities. Reconsidering the relationship between the British composer, Gustav Holst (1874–1934), and his birthplace, the west country spa town of Cheltenham, provides not only a case study of the general liminality of the professional musician, but of a figure who is betwixt and between in almost all aspects of his life. In essence, Holst is the archetype of a liminal being. This study problematizes Holst's place in the received history of British music, arguing that his liminality has been overlooked in various attempts to make his life and music fit a mainstream narrative for English musical culture, the so-called Second English Musical Renaissance. The origins of that liminality are explored by considering Holst's relationship with Victorian Cheltenham, ranging widely from the civic to the religious, from the public to the private, and from the individual to the social. This includes his contact with prominent influences such as imperialism and evangelicalism, but also elements that are seemingly more marginal to the town but central for Holst, such as Theosophy. Doing so clarifies the origins and importance of Holst's relentlessly liminal status in Victorian and Edwardian society, demonstrating how such reconsiderations can reshape the historical narrative of Victorian influence on the twentieth century.     

Un pasteur actuaire? Ordre de la mortalité, durée de la vie et rentes viagères dansL’Ordre divin de Johann Peter Süssmilch

The government of Providence builds the order which pastor Süßmilch sees in the demographic events and especially the order of mortality. God governs the length of human life and assigns to each person a just balance between fear of death and expectation of life. This authorizes Süßmilch to clarify the notions of probable life and life expectancy with the design to treat of their main application in the field of political arithmetic, that is the computations of Government loans under the form of annuities on lives. So he treats of an important question which concerns the history of actuarial calculation as well as the history of probability, of statistics and demography. We cannot forget also the political and philosophical points of view which the pastor underlines vividly: what sort of contract joins the individual together with the State? And, above all, what sort of contract joins the creature and his God? This study of the contingent but optimal regularities which Providence makes in the world builds an important contribution to the physico-theological current.     

A Reevaluation of the Kesil’s Image in the Book of Qohelet

Abstract

During the early stages of its evolution, the book of Kings was a history narrative uninfluenced by Deuteronomy. Later, as the scroll ceased to express an interpretation of the past—that is to say, ceased to be a history narrative—it began to reflect a literary dialogue with Deuteronomy. At no point in time was Kings both Deuteronomistic and a history, and it was not, therefore, a component of Martin Noth’s hypothetical Deuteronomistic History. Rather, the pre-canonical scroll is best defined as an anthology, or “reader,” of fanciful stories about fallible nebi’im (prophets and kings) who find themselves in relationship with a fallible patron god. Ironically, because Kings was preserved as sacred literature, its god has been reconceptualized, against the plain sense of the text, as a reliable, just, and compassionate patron god.     

TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais‐je? series by Charles‐Olivier Carbonell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadt's volume is intended to bring Carbonell's up to date, but goes in very different directions. There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India. But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth‐century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary historical studies have undergone. For Carbonell's chronological narrative of the history of historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.     

EXPERIENCE AND HISTORY: THE REACH AND LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO HISTORY

Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World presents the summa of David Carr's phenomenological approach to history. I acknowledge the value of this perspective, but I find it doubtful that a phenomenological account can replace the paradigms of memory and representation against which Carr pits it. The concept of historicity is, rather, complementary in that it alerts us to the prethematic presence of history. Phenomenologically, Carr's attempt to tie history closely to experience runs into problems as it is based on a questionable use of Husserl's notion of retention and risks blurring the distinct temporality of history. At the same time, the central concepts of Carr's approach, both experience and narrative, could be deployed in further ways. As literary scholars have come to emphasize, narrative triggers experiences in its readers. Thus, even if it is impossible to recreate the experiences of historical protagonists, narrative lends itself to giving readers a sense of the experiential dimension of the past. In this sense, narrative is not only a medium of representation, but also a means of presence.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”