Enigma Variations on History in Three Keys: A Conversational Essay

Book reviewed in this article:
History In Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth by Paul A. Cohen.     

神话、传说与历史

本文旨在探讨神话、传说与历史的关系。为此,文章重新启用和评价了爱德华·泰勒关于神话传说属于"原始文化"的概念,从而在理论上找到了由神话传说到历史的通道,因为在此概念下神话传说无论以何种形态出现都包含了构建史前史的要素。为了借鉴这些历史因素,作者尝试性地提出了一种考察和解释神话传说的模式,即以"信史"或"真实的历史"为出发点,以信实性为衡量标准,将世界各主要文明的神话传说分成若干层次。作者认为,由于各种神话传说所包含的历史真实因素具有不同的层次和特点,因此必须综合借鉴社会学、人类学、古文字学、考古学、天文学等多种理论和方法,才能对形态各异的神话传说进行有利于历史研究的考察。     

Review Article: Toynbee,McNeill, and the Myth of History

WILLIAM H. MCNEILL. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. viii, 346. $24.95 (US); Reviewed by Gordon Martel

C.T. MCINTIRE and MARVIN PERRY, eds. Toynbee: Reappraisals. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Pp. viii, 254. $40.00 (CAN). Reviewed by Gordon Martel     

历史与神话:天地会西鲁故事由来及天地会起源

有关创教和起会的历史神话是我国民间教派和帮会共同的现象。合理解读这些神话,既是民间教派和帮会研究的任务,也是进一步探明民间教派和帮会历史的一把钥匙。本文抓住“戏剧化”这一关键环节,对明清民间教派和帮会创教、起会历史神话中的“昏(君)奸(臣)与功(臣)”故事结构模式进行探讨,进而用天地会的历史解析其起会历史神话“西鲁故事”的形成过程,力求廓清笼罩在天地会起源问题上的迷雾。     

The Experience of Time as Crisis: On Croce's and Benjamin's Concept of History

In the early decades of the twentieth century the experience of time as crisis became the catalyst for a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between historical materialism and idealism, leading to the rejection of simplistic mechanical concepts of historical time. This reorientation represents a turning point in the history of European ideas, clearly evident in the work of two major thinkers of this period, usually associated with opposing political ideologies: the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin and the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. Based on a conceptual framework borrowed partly from Reinhart Koselleck, this article explains how the experience of acute crisis led both thinkers to develop a new understanding of historical time, which shows surprising parallels. Both authors used the reorientation in the relationship between idealism and materialism to criticize positivist approaches to the analysis of historical change and to reject deterministic accounts of the future.     

Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth,History and Memory in NW Amazonia

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light.     

Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town

This paper explores rural Australian settler historical narratives through an examination of the landscape of public history in the northwestern Queensland city of Mount Isa. In various sites of public history, including the city's 75th anniversary festivities, tourism sites, and popular historical literature, certain narrative themes are predominant. Themes of ‘discoverers’, ‘firsts’, and ‘pioneers’ coalesce into a ‘timeline’ approach to history, in which the past is ordered sequentially in a linear pattern of development and progress. Aboriginal people are incorporated into linear histories in various ways, notably through the concept of ‘the last of the tribe’, which separates an aboriginal past from a European, colonial present and presumes colonial authority to be effectively established. Aboriginal people, particularly the Kalkadoon, are also incorporated within a second narrative tradition, the Anzac legend, for their heroic, desperate and failed battle in 1884 against European invaders. Aboriginal leaders in Mount Isa use these settler narrative traditions to advance native title claims and to create a respected public space for Aboriginal people in the city. In short, settler historical narratives, while being conservative in language, are continually being reshaped and metaphorically extended to new contexts, and are mobilized for both conservative and critical political agendas..     

Changing Conceptions of the Opium War as History and Experience

Academic and popular accounts of the Opium War have gone through nearly two centuries of change in focus, view, and scope. My study probes this extensive historiography by tracing the evolvement of our understanding of the war through various phases among which we saw the rise of the “China-centered approach” and the beginning of a new trend towards combining government archives with personal records such as memoirs, personal correspondence, and private journals in research. Based on the observation, I will indicate, despite their undeniable achievements, most of the existing scholarships have paid little attention to the ordinary people in China whose lives were deeply affected by the war. It is high time that we pay more attention to human experience of the Chinese people in order to understand not only the war itself but also the history it helped shape.     

History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this confuses memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator,""victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself.