Hayden White: The Form of the Content

Hayden White's perhaps richest and most profoundly argued book, The Content of the Form, touches many nerves in the American historicalprofession. The entirety of the book, from its premises through its most thoughtful exegeses of historical writing, insists that linguistic form is the primary carrier of content in historical writing, indeed, in historical knowledge. This insistence on a respectful and careful attention tothe formal usages of nonfiction prose, truth-claiming language, goes well against the grain of American tastes. As de Tocqueville presciently and correctly predicted, when Americans take to literature in a serious way, they won't have much patience with precise matters of form.Hayden White's narrative theory has had uphill work to penetrate this pervasive indifference, especially among historians.
He has been joined in recent decades by Paul Ricoeur, whose Time andNarrative , beginning from different premises and a slightly different question, arrives at a sympathetic and complementary analysis of historical narrative. In spite of White's published hesitations about the political/philosophical tendencies of Ricoeur's work, I amconvinced that their books are mutually supporting and, in an important cultural sense, belong together.
Altogether, however, I do feel that the main import and justification of this presentessay must rest on my quite serious reading of Hayden White's best joke, a profound shaggy dog story about the historian monk of St. Gall.     

Pressure groups and Australian health policymaking in the 1980s

In March 1983 the new Labor government was in a position to implement its health policies, including its promised revival of the community health program. Although funds were allocated, substantive issues of policy remained. Various parties at interest could agree on general principles but differed on operational meanings, means, and priorities. Seventy‐five groups whose leaders were interviewed devised an array of organizational strategies to influence policy development. These included reworking their own priorities and internal structures, developing media strategies, and changing their relations with outside organizations. The more successful groups, at least in the short term, tended to be older and larger.     

Ceramic style analysis in archaeology and ethnoarchaeology: Bridging the analytical gap

A refitting study with a sample of sherds from Broken K Pueblo indicates that at least some of the “patterning” in the assemblage identified by Hill (1970, Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 18) results from unrecognized whole vessels and large conjoinable sherds. It is argued that contemporary stylistic analyses are based on many of the same analytical methods employed in the Broken K study and that research findings of ethnoarchaeology are rarely applied in the analysis of prehistoric ceramics. Despite archaeologists' increasing awareness of formation processes, spurred by ethnoarchaeological research, analytic methods that identify and take into account the effects of these processes on archaeological ceramic assemblages are underdeveloped. Suggestions are offered to resolve this problem, for both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological ceramic analysis, that may permit archaeologists to discover in prehistoric assemblages the same types of relationships identified in systemic assemblages.