IF: COUNTERFACTUAL AND CONDITIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Conditionals are a feature of historiography. Despite this, historiographical research is focused predominantly on one kind of conditional, counterfactuals. New trans‐Atlantic contributions to this research by Catherine Gallagher and Richard J. Evans highlight the rich history of counterfactuals in Western thought, and their use by individuals and groups to imagine a present and a future that addresses regrets about the present. Their intimation of a flattening out of history through counterfactual nostalgia is not supported by the artistic expression of Tacita Dean, and new contributions to the philosophy of conditionals, building relations, and causal relations by Karen Bennett and Anthony Kwame Appiah. This review teases out the layered, causally tainted, and metaphysically agnostic world posited by Karen Bennett and conjoins it with David Lewis's reflections on possible worlds to suggest that conditional and counterfactual operators in historiography are building restrictors. This takes us away from Niall Ferguson's argument for the use of counterfactuals as a recognition of the underdetermination of history, and reminds us of the need to—as Appiah argues so succinctly—understand the pervasive role that idealizations play in helping us to manage the world and ourselves. The review rounds out by highlighting the computational implications of our conditional world, inviting historians to be at the table as fairness is debated and coded. In this way, the gap in research on the ethical need for historiographical conditionals in the twenty‐first century is highlighted.     

LESTER GRABBE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN APOLOGIA

This response to Lester Grabbe's review of Th.L. Thompson's The Bible in History marks out substantial differences in their approach to history. It argues that Grabbe appears to overlook the book's intention to offer a critique of historicism and its rhetoric of objectivity. Particularly, Grabbe's understanding of the Bible as historiographical is disputed, and the understanding of social-historians and their concentration on Tendenz critique - a commonplace in ''second temple'' studies - is not shared by the author. Accepting a loss in both detail and accuracy, he rather recommends an approach which uses anthropological and archaeological insights, supplemented by the unwritten implications of texts, geo-political trends and intellectual history. Against Grabbe's strong objections, the necessity of caution in accepting the historicity of specific unconfirmed kings in the synchronisms of Judean and Samaritan kinglists, implied by 2 Kings, is re-asserted. On the other hand, Grabbe's charge of casting greater doubt on biblical texts in contrast to his treatment of extra-biblical texts is falsified by the author's Historicity of 1974 and subsequent known practice. He corrects Grabbe's misunderstanding of his treatment of the deity Yahweh, and, after objecting to the personally derogatory innuendoes of Grabbe's presentation of his understanding of early Judaism, he addresses the question of whether stories lie by addressing the rhetoric of story. In closing, a brief exegesis of Mark 7, 31-37 is offered as an illustration of how historicism has distorted biblical scholarship.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

BACK TO THE FUTURE: POSTNARRATIVIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Jouni‐Matti Kuukkanen has written an important book. It directly confronts a key theoretical dilemma that has shadowed debate in historiography for several decades: histories cannot be written without using some narrative structure or other, but epistemological evaluation cannot be applied to narratives qua narrative. Thus, if empirical inquiry takes the form of a history, then it cannot be rationally evaluable, and if rationally evaluable, empirical inquiry cannot be in the form of a history. Kuukkanen's book both directly confronts and proposes a strategy for surmounting this tired and tiresome theoretical barrier. Kuukkanen deserves great credit for attempting to reshape a long‐stalled debate in a way that enables the theoretical options to be imagined anew. Yet his structuring of the oppositional tendencies engenders some ongoing problems regarding how to understand the philosophical stakes and options. This review argues that achieving Kuukkanen's postnarrativist future requires going back to past epistemic concerns discarded because they were tied to conceptions of logic and explanation that could not be reconciled with narrative form. Kuukkanen practices postnarrativism but still preaches a prenarrativist conception of logic. To reach his promised future, to actually overcome the dilemma that he rightly seeks to transcend, one must actually have the courage of Kuukkanen's pragmatist convictions.     

TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY,INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

Compared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.     

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY: ON THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC CATEGORIES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The long-held conviction of a mutually exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is interested primarily in the analysis of collectives, has significantly hindered dialogue between the disciplines. Norbert Elias's “figurational” sociology, which has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, has the potential to indicate a way in which social science-oriented historical research might investigate the network of relations between individual and “collective” psychic processes without relying on artificial dichotomies. Elias's figurational theory, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the question of a collective or social unconscious, so this article examines approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.     

NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.     

MORTUARY DISPLAY AND CULTURAL CONTACT: A CEMETERY AT KASTRI ON THASOS

Summary.   This article explores how the patterns of development within the local populations prior to Greek colonization, or even Greek contact, can elucidate the process of Greek colonization. Focusing upon the Thracian Early Iron Age cemetery of Kastri on Thasos, it suggests that past interpretations of such cemeteries as undifferentiated is due to the imposition of modern ideas of value. This article instead uses the criterion of diversity to suggest that the cemetery in fact has clear patterns of social differentiation in the first and last periods of use. Furthermore imports are restricted to graves of highest diversity in the last period of use (the early seventh century BC). This pattern is repeated over Early Iron Age Thrace, and is indicative of a social change within Thrace prior to Greek colonization which saw nascent Thracian elites seeking out imports from many areas in order to bolster their status.     

南怀仁在华事迹考

比利时传教士南怀仁于康熙甲寅(1674)所制作的《坤舆全图》,现今珍藏在河北大学图书馆内.由于这幅地图保存的完整性和历史文献资料的重要参考性,引来了众多的中外学者.或对其图文鉴赏,或对其专业考察.为了使人们对南怀仁有一个更清楚的认识,了解他在华、尤其是在清康熙朝的史迹及其贡献,依据有关文献记载,特做介绍,以飨同仁.     

“FUTURE PAST”: TIME AND TELEOLOGY IN (ANCIENT) HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian's account of the past is strongly shaped by the future of the events narrated. The telos, that is, the vantage point from which the past is envisaged, influences the selection of the material as well as its arrangement. Although the telos is past for historians and readers, it is future for historical agents. The term “future past,” coined by Reinhart Koselleck to highlight the fact that the future was seen differently before the Sattelzeit, also lends itself to capturing this asymmetry and elucidating its ramifications for the writing of history. The first part of the essay elaborates on the notion of “future past”: besides considering its significance and pitfalls, I offset it against the perspectivity of historical knowledge and the concept of narrative “closure” (I). Then the works of two ancient historians, Polybius and Sallust, serve as test cases that illustrate the intricacies of “future past.” Neither has received much credit for intellectual sophistication in scholarship, and yet the different narrative strategies Polybius and Sallust deploy reveal profound reflections on the temporal dynamics of writing history (II). Although the issue of “future past” is particularly pertinent to the strongly narrative historiography of antiquity, the controversy about the end of the Roman Republic demonstrates that it also applies to the works of modern historians (III). Finally, I will argue that “future past” alerts us to an aspect of how we relate to the past that is in danger of being obliterated in the current debate on “presence” and history. The past is present in customs, relics, and rituals, but the historiographical construction of the past is predicated on a complex hermeneutical operation that involves the choice of a telos. The concept of “future past” also differs from post‐structuralist theories through its emphasis on time. Retrospect calms the flow of time, but is unable to arrest it fully, as the openness of the past survives in the form of “future past” (IV).     

DIALOGUES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography and Historians of Neuroscience: Towards Diversity in the ISHN

This article introduces and critiques the historiographical tradition of the history of the neurosciences as it has been established in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN). The founding members of the ISHN were practitioner-historians, practitioners of the neurosciences with an interest in the great moments, ideas and controversies in the history of their field. The historiographical precedent set by these clinician-historians emphasized those aspects of history most interesting to them. Academic historians bring a different approach to the history of the neurosciences, particularly an interest in studying the intellectual and cultural contexts of both the inherited and the forgotten ideas about the nervous system. Their approach to history has not been well represented in the ISHN, in part because the current historiographical tradition does not address their interests. This article highlights the methodological and epistemological differences between academic and practitioner-historians and discusses the difficulties that other historical societies have faced in trying to bring them together. The article then suggests ideas for symposia that might facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue and a revised historiographical tradition that speaks to the needs of both academic historians and practitioner historians.     

论史学三书对《史记》的评论

刘知幾《史通》、郑樵《通志总序》和章学诚《文史通义》三书在我国古代史学批评史上占有重要的地位。三书对司马迁创立的纪传体通史都给予充分肯定。同时也就其撰写体例、史料取舍、语言表述等方面提出批评。这些批评或正确、或错误,或偏颇。刘、章两人还对《史记》创设的纪传体史书体例提出了改造或革新的主张。