In addition to the opening chapters (1 & 2), I decided to read chapters 5, 7, and 10 from Deep History, i.e., Language, Kinship, and Scale. I’ve decided to frame my blog post around chapter 5, as my issues with this chapter are representative of how I feel about the work as a whole.
Chapter 5 (Language) begins with a discussion of mid-19th century historical linguistics, which, by comparing “times and places before and without writing,” could ostensibly “extend the reach of history to cover all humans, not just those who lived in the literate world.” (103) The Darwinian Revolution effectively rendered historical linguistics useless because “it began to seem that the evolution of the human species had begun long before the advent of language.” (104) The chapter then proceeds in a quasi-ascensionist fashion to explain how historical linguistics has been recovered from this nadir. It outlines the history of the traditional language tree, “ideal for mapping relations of divergence,” (105) before suggesting that a ‘language web’ is much more useful as it can be used to trace language convergences in addition to divergences. This process is called a “dual-pathway” approach (112). The authors suggest, ultimately, that different types of models (e.g., ‘branching’ and ‘network’) “can serve as an alternative form of historiography, especially when conventional records of language change are absent.” (117) I immediately saw several issues with this conclusion, and, to their credit, so do the authors: most of the remainder of the chapter is dedicated to acknowledging the limitations of computer simulations in historical linguistics (although the authors do seem to think that in vivo experimentation is the answer here—again, I take issue, but that might best be saved for discussion). Here’s my main issue with this chapter and with Deep History in general: it has not, to my observation, provided an effective explanatory framework for describing historical change in deep time in meaningful and accessible ways; it lacks nuance, and it is shockingly bereft of recognition for causality, while at the same time being committed to contingency and conjecture. Take, for example, this passage from page 125: “Attempts to simulate the evolution of language are valuable precisely because they are a step away from a tradition that localizes language within certain ways of describing human speech and a step toward a new framework in which human language is connected to the more general problem of predictability and repeatability in social life.” Deep historians (or at least the authors of Deep History) are so caught up in uncovering fractals, spirals, and the like for the sake of simply uncovering them, that they don’t stop and reflect on the deterministic nature of their work. The book is rife with speculation and oversimplifications of other literatures. The authors spend a great deal of time attempting to undo our supposed fascination with human exceptionalism, and how this conception of humanity has “straitjacketed” time. (8) For my part, I would have liked to see some consideration about their belief in what I’ll call ‘deep exceptionalism,’ that is, the notion that entire history departments need to be reconfigured because of what they’re unearthing. I’m left unconvinced.
Extra thoughts I wanted to share (and hear from others):
I didn’t get a sense of any overarching coherence from the chapters that I read, nor did I ever find out why the contributors feel that “architecture” is a useful term in this project.
I’m not sure why the authors “straitjacketed” themselves to 2.6 million years of history. If we’re going to take a ‘deep turn,’ why not go deeper? They suggest it’s because of ‘convenience,’ but I’m more inclined to think it’s because they want to stand out from Big History.
Fractal and scalar history are particularly exciting conceptually. The authors attempts to show that metaphors and optics embedded in the concepts of kinship, the body etc… have broken down linear modes of history and bridge the gap between deep history and our more comfortable written history starting in antiquity. The potential is there to have a dialogue between ways of knowing a past with a written record and the remote past which was previously the ground of archaeologists and anthropologists. However, I found that at key points, the evidence the authors use is somewhat contingent and not persuasive. Much of the material which the authors are using for their analyses is so open to such a wide variety of interpretations, I would have a hard time envisioning myself using this material. For instance, in the introduction the case of a bone fragment with an engraving on it is raised. The range of interpretations and contexts which such an item could have been created is staggering, one of which the author tells us is that it could just have been some bored individual from remote antiquity literally whittling away their time. Another example illustrates this. Some of the authors argue that hunters and innovations in how their groups extracted and stored calories accounted for the decline in big game hunting and foraging. However, this seems to border on conjecture. The author does not specifically link population growth, which one would assume would accompany more efficient extraction of biomass, to the decline in animal population. On the contrary, many groups experienced a drop in population. It is not clear, still, whether a decline in animal numbers prompted a turn to agriculture or whether the agriculture was at that point was preferable to hunting big game. The evidence, diminishing piles of bones at hunter gatherer sites is hardly conclusive (250-1). Finally, the author does not take into account another factor, the potential for agriculture to change the ecosystem and render areas inhabitable for large game. It is hard to imagine how one might accept the authors’ conclusions given the highly contingent and fuzzy evidence.
The paucity of the evidence itself is another problem. These authors are making sweeping claims about humanity in general without giving much thought to variation among different groups, separated for instance on a continental basis. When discussing how ontogenic metaphors affect how people conceived of history as starting at a particular date, the authors make the case for Middle Eastern religions, such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all having a place for the book of Genesis, which influenced the discourse and conceptualization of origins. What about Asia? What about Mayan explanations? Their claim to deny universal history has left out large and obvious gaps.
Samples for comparison also seem somewhat problematic. In the last chapter discussing how scalar change occurred in deep history as it did in modern history, the authors look at chieftaincy on Hawaii and other isolated examples vis a vis modern European political systems. This is to show that chiefs and political leaders had to master complex political economies in both cases, thus showing the comparability and continuity between them. This is their conversation between deep history and modern history. Yet, what about all the stuff in the middle? Are there no degrees of change? It seem slightly reductionist to me.
Similarly, the whole concept of scalar change, or the long tail of the “J” curve seems troublesome. The authors themselves admit that the necessary prerequisites for change took a massively long time to achieve the appropriate conditions for change and even then it was thousands of years or more. When we think of large scale change, we think of it being hitched to a certain chronological immediacy: things happen relatively quickly. Here, though, the authors decouple that immediacy from change, but reserve the judgment that it was big. The ability to extract biomass from a given area of the earth is a good example. This took thousands of years to go from 0.1% to 1%, which was in their own words even more significant than achieving 80-90% in the Green Revolution of the 1970s. I feel that in their attempt to bend time and space to their argument, they are losing a basic facet of difference between the different parts of the “J”: events unfold much faster now. I think they needed to acknowledge the slowness of things then and reflect on how that affects the comparison with modernity.
Another issue is the idea of Hegelian historiography that the work seems to both embrace and oppose selectively. On the one hand the authors state that the division between non-history and history is an inheritance of nineteenth century historiography and the particular intellectual climate into which “History” was born. They take issue with this Hegelian divide, and arguable do a fine job of showing that pre-history is history. However, they seem to simultaneously partake in the greater notion of progress. Theirs is arguably still an ascentionist narrative. Breaking down the Anthropocene between pre-history and modern still puts humanity on a trajectory to the modern. Likewise, this is quite evident in their treatment of the evolution of the brain and humanity’s capacity for complex social organization. They draw the conclusion that Homo sapiens and not their predecessors, on account of the development of their neo-cortex, achieved the venerable number of “150” as the maximum number of persons an individual could come deal with face to face in an organized group. This is lent continuity by looking at current organization relationships and their relevance to this number. This is not to say that narratives of progress are incorrect, but I think it is ironic and somewhat dangerous to whitewash the new territory of history in the depths of the past with the same “progressive” primer that so many historians have gone to great lengths to overturn. I wonder if all of pre-history should be seen as some glorious progression. If it should be, to what? Modernity? Hegel would be pleased.
Last, I think I should say that though most of what I have to say here is criticism, I believe that “deep history” like “big history” is a work in progress. Each step in the debates they bring on how scholars put together the remote past and the history of the universe with the present and its particularly human-oriented historiography and objectives is inherently valuable.
I was intrigued by the way the authors use and play with our notions of time. The best example I have of this is on page 48, where figure 6 shows history in relation to BP (Before Present [Before 1950]). I have only ever seen this used in archaeology, with historians more commonly use Christian-centred conceptions of time. While I applaud this playing with time, I must admit that this use brings up more questions than it answers. I wonder if the authors would problematize the notion of “present” being 1950? Does that mean we are negative 65 BP? I am open to the use of scientific terms and conceptions, but I think we then need to historicize those notions, as we have done with Christian time-keeping. The playing with time felt very Braudelian to me. I feel like we can trace a lot of notions in contemporary historiography back to Braudel.
I initially thought there could be a really good question about post-humanism, as I felt as though this work could be argued as a post-humanist text. As early as page four the text makes clear that human exceptionalism was tied within notion of progress (4). The authors use Anderson to show how objectivity in history-writing was deeply flawed and tied to nation-states (9), and that we have now homogenized the subaltern (10). I was even more convinced by the argument that modern historiography has “dehumainzed” prehistory (30). This argument was eroded when the authors ultimately wrote that “humans are unique among primates for keeping up relations–interacting and visiting–with kin who no longer live with us on a daily basis.” (42) I have issue with this statement because I think it unknowingly makes a comment of humanity as progressing from the rest of the world. In this instance I wished that they would have been more careful with language.
I took issue even with the notion of prehistory. I am not sure if I am completely right in this, but I thought that prehistory was tied to societies which did not have a recorded history. This is problematic because it privileges cultures with recorded history over ones with oral or performative history. I may have missed it but I do not recall seeing the authors problematize their own categories of analysis that they pull out of the present. I also with the authors would have been more critical of Darwin. While I liked the idea that this shattered notions of history to the modern world, I was worried that they did not discuss the consequences of Darwin’s work. I always thought that Darwin was really racist himself, though I could be making this up. These are areas I wish the authors would have addressed. Though I suppose they would counter my dissatisfaction by saying I was not trained properly to handle their historical manifesto.
I read chapters 4 (Energy and Ecosystems), 8 (Migration), and 10 (Scale). I think I counted eight men to three women as contributors. I was curious as to why there was this gender imbalance. I loved the idea of ancient technologies, and I want to go back there more in depth one day. I found that the authors made generalizations about modern historiography that they criticize us for making about prehistory. I do not want to over criticize this work, as I do appreciate the ambition of scale, but I remained hesitant to its ideas and methodologies. Ultimately, I am left with asking “should prehistory be used as a category in itself or does this further divide the two histories that the authors claim to bridge?”
The disasters of the first half of the 20th century unveiled the “ideological baggage” that deep histories up to that point had borne, with all their Darwinist or Hegelian connotations about human evolution and progression. The agenda underlying this book is to probe for ways to bring deep history back, and to “remove the barriers that isolate deep histories from temporally shallow ones” (5). The primary way it seeks to do this is by challenging history’s textual methodology, its excessive documentarianism, which in turn condemns it to temporal shallowness.
My concern today will be kept quite short. What happens to this binary of shallow vs. deep history when we add another element into the equation: the ideal of deep analysis? As I went through the chapters I chose (4, 9, 10), I contemplated all the sacrifices in terms of depth and nuance that must have been made from fear of empirical contradiction. Because launching into generalizations becomes considerably harder the longer the timeline is stretched –- something which applies for geographic scale too, I might add. While one can become quite proficient at wrestling with smaller subjects and generalizing from those, it is just a lot harder to do with temporally deep and geographically broad histories, even in the era of big data.
Side note: The discipline’s alleged bias towards the modern era at first sounded odd to my Icelandic ears, because this is simply not the case where I come from. Smail, being a medievalist by specialization, would probably point out the various ways in which Iceland is different from North America and the rest of Europe. It is a young country, its human history has been documented from the first days of its settlement (in the 9th century), and its geological history is simply easier to study than that of other, geologically older places. But then again, this goes back to my prior paragraph about generalizations that sound hollow when tested against this or that.
In their introduction to Deep History, Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail highlight shortcomings in historical research and propose the study of a new interdisciplinary field, “deep history.” The authors explain that, though Biblical time collapsed with the arrival of Darwin’s work, and Prestwich and Evan provided evidence of pre-Adamite humans, deep time could not yet be measured. After the time revolution of the 1860s, the human and natural sciences were divided as fields of inquiry, and by the late nineteenth century the discipline of history emerged, relying primarily on written texts. The absence of the latter in deep history again made the field unapproachable. Rather than engaging in the study of deep history, historians turned to give meaning to nation-states in the nineteenth century, and to examine the history of civilizations, economies, and ideas in the twentieth century. The authors criticize these histories for being driven by a belief in human exceptionalism and for triumph in human achievement (the reversal of which that sometimes occurs, they note, does not solve the problem). At last, advances in biology and dating techniques in the later half of the twentieth century have provided historians the opportunity to come to terms with human evolution and begin to bring together short and long histories.
Shryock and Smail’s argument for the new discipline of deep history includes a justification and a method. They seek to provide room for contingency, change, and insight into the path-dependent nature of variation within systems (12), as opposed to the carefully woven “compelling historical narrative” of big history. The histories included in Deep History are characterized by an emphasis on trends and processes over events and persons, by not being strictly calendrical (i.e. they transcend time and place), and by arguments that do not depend written text, but instead rely on culture and biology (14). The work of this type of historian, the paleohistorian, capitalizes on the ongoing merge between history and the social sciences and moves beyond the limits of anthropocentric research that focuses on a single chronological layer to examine the distant past, prior to the last 5000 years. The paleohistorian studies primates in nature, rather than humans conquering or in conflict with nature. Though the authors admit narratives and reconstructive storytelling are coercive and streamlining, they recognize that they are also “vivid and compelling” and they advocate for a judicious use as narratives help bring different academic disciplines into conversation with paleohistorians (14). They seek to develop “new and productive habits of thought” and call for analytical frames that do not “resort to narratives of ontogeny” (developmental history), which though exciting, result in “flattened and foreshortened” history (19).
Although what I have written amounts to little more than a summary it has helped me ruminate on what I have read (and I suppose opens me for correction tomorrow!) It seems as if the authors are advocating for a worldview shift – something epistemological – without being too explicit. At the end of the paragraph criticizing historians for writing narratives of progress or decline, they say “seeing the humanity of others means recognizing their historical movement toward various forms of mastery, even if the movement is modest and still in its formative stages” (4). What does this mean, and why is “cultivation over mere subsistence” or “civilization over mere habitation” problematic? The authors suggest the blame for the predictable epistemological grid of disciplinary history “lies with a commitment to human exceptionalism, a sensibility that survived the Darwinian revolution largely intact” (8). Are humans, though part of nature, not unique? And why is it then that in chapter six (on food), authors Fernandex-Armesto and Smail highlight the many ways that humans are unique among primates (highly carnivorous, humans cook with fire, engage in cannibalism, feasting, and in their propensity for managing and producing food)?
I was a little skeptical when I read this book, partly because this project is so challenging and huge that even though it was done by collective work of a group of different scholars in different specialties, such an enormous task would always be too general and sometimes lacking persuasive evidence to satisfy historians working on different time and areas. Indeed, in the chapter on “migration” and the final chapter on “scale”, I feel that the arguments are not always persuasive or comprehensive. For example, in the final chapter, it talks about the J-curves of early population increase and early agricultural societies, however, the authors failed to further explain the development of cities and states of the ancient world. I wonder where is the origin and development of Chinese cities, or Rome or Athens, or of civilization in the America, like the Mayas or the Aztecs? This problem is not only exist in this chapter, like throughout the book, there lack a link between the pre-historical era and modernism(with true written history); the authors did touch upon early civilizations but did not really explain how human society evolved through time. The book kind of jumps from the Old Stone Age, before 10,000 years ago to the middle ages, leaving a gap in between.
Moreover, I felt like the book, even though full of details, descriptions and evidences, lacks an overarching historical narrative through time. Those different chapters, even though connected in a way, are largely scattered historically. As Cornor has raised the problem of “architecture”, I would say, for me, this word indicates that there will be some overarching structure that holds everything together, but this book seems not so. Maybe the authors did that deliberately to distinguish the “deep history” from “big history”, as claimed in the introduction. I do not know. But I think if the book would contextualize itself in a historical narrative through time, it would easier for me to follow. Also, I am a little bit confused on the difference between “deep history” and “big history”. I wonder if this two words can be supplement to each other, or are there some fundamental differences or conflicts to this two different histories? Since “deep” history is more like a history “looking back”, can we argue that deep history is a branch of “big history”? If so, why the authors did not just write a global history? I wonder what others think of that.
First of all: I really enjoyed the reading this week (I chose Language, Food, Migration). I had already questioned myself why history in school and university starts with the ancient Greeks and Persians and not earlier and so the issue of this book to expand our field of research is quite interesting for me. Also, on a more philosophical level I’m interested in the question where we draw the line between human and animal.
However, I’m not convinced by this book. I liked reading it, but I still don’t see the connection to more recent history. For example the chapters about language and migration: That was all quite interesting (even if I cannot follow their explanations in detail, especially about the languages), but I don’t see how this should affect our understanding of other ages.
Also the chapter about Food is interesting, even if it was not totally new to me that the kind of nutrition and the ways of eating influence both physiology and social systems. But besides some arguments against vegetarianism it does not help me that much. For example the transformation of North American Prairies (156-158): If I want to understand or explain this process, do I need to know that there has been progress in agriculture and exchange of plants hundreds of years before?
It seems to me that the authors want to show, that history (progress, developments, change, inventions…) exists longer than written texts. That’s true (and I did not doubt that before I read this) and probably some people should know that nothing is stable. But I am not convinced that this knowledge helps me to understand more recent developments better.
One last thought which is not very scientific (but I don’t want to withhold it from you): The question, raised by Douglas Adams, if we made a mistake to leave the trees or if the decline started when we left the oceans is still not answered, but maybe my expectations were too high when I thought “Deep History” could give the answer (see for this the quote #2 on this blog: http://bookriot.com/2012/05/25/the-42-best-lines-from-douglas-adams-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-series/).
Before I say what I liked about Deep History I feel impelled to talk about what I didn’t. This book, while laudable in attempts to bring together academics from a variety of different disciplines, uses science in a way that is not only incredibly misguided, but also arguably dangerous to our understanding of the past. Aside from obvious goof-ups in the introduction where the authors use commonsensical notions to support ideas about both science and its history which are plainly false (for example, take what I sincerely hope is a misreading of Robin Dunbar on page 46 which essentially says that the bigger your brain is, the smarter you are) their claims about specific evolutionary trajectories use a phylogenetic logic which is sometimes deployed by more misguided evolutionary biologists and psychologists.
The clearest example of this is on page 71 in the chapter on bodies which discusses the evolutionary development of our teeth. The authors, Smail and Shryock, conclude that Homo habilis evolved to have teeth similar to ours because they developed tools. Smail and Shryock reason that since hammers, knives, etc replaced many of the functions that studier teeth served for previous iterations of Homo, they naturally evolved smaller teeth. Putting aside the fact that Smail and Shryock’s argument betrays a total misunderstanding of how Darwinian evolution works (Why would smaller teeth increase the fitness of Homo habilis? Wouldn’t having both tools and rugged teeth give them advantages which would help them reproduce?), the type of logic they use allows us to say potentially anything we want about the development of humanity. One example, which shows the kinds of broad claims that can be made using this logic is the Stoned Ape Theory, which posits that the availability of psilocybin containing mushrooms led to the evolution of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens (For a quick summary, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#.22Stoned_ape.22_theory_of_human_evolution).
While it is true that many of the texts we’ve read for this class deploy evidence in ways that some people may find questionable, what Smail and Shryock do is much worse. By invoking the authority and mystique of science they imbue their argument with a sort of protective armor that prevents historians, many of whom are even less versed in the sciences than they are, from critically assessing their arguments and may even give their position credit in the public eye.
All of that being said, I thought the authors’ attack on the metaphors that have constrained the study of deep history in the past is very interesting, especially the notion that biblical metaphors and the natural vs manmade divide that permeate historical works are oftentimes detrimental. That brings me to my questions for this week:
1. How can historians productively use science in our work? Is it possible without being deeply steeped in the works of the scientific disciplines we wish to employ? Those of us in Bill French’s class have already discussed this question in relation to William Reddy’s theories about emotions.
2. What role do metaphors play in the practice of history? Is it possible to avoid them? If not, how can we identify places where they shape historical narratives in negative ways? How can we use them to increase our understanding of history?
To put the following post in context, in addition to the introduction, the chapters I selected to read were “Imagining the human in deep time,” “Energy and ecosystems” and “Scale.”
It seems to me that the major question this book presents is not whether or not people should be studying “deep history” (because some fields already are: geologists, archeologists, anthropologists, etc.) but rather if historians should be doing it. And the key questions this seems to hinge on is a) can historians offer anything new b) is deep history relevant to the “shallow history” historians are generally concerned with. “Energy and ecosystems” seems to achieve the latter somewhat, by demonstrating that humankind’s current poor stewardship of the earth’s natural resource might not be relatively recent consequence of industrial capitalism but speaks to a long standing characteristic of human societies. But while this is insightful (and the article as a whole very interesting) I’m not sure how far its usefulness extends beyond strengthening the convictions of people who think the world is doomed or that we must colonize mars. I would also add that efforts to connecting deep history with “shallow history” doesn’t have a great track record. In other words, while I really enjoyed the book and don’t question its value in its own right, I wasn’t left feeling totally convinced that deep history needs to be rescued from other disciplines who haven’t done an adequate job.
First off, I’m intrigued by all the critiques made above … this is going to be an interesting discussion.
I’ve always liked Smail’s pet project here – some of you may know that three years before the work we read, he wrote (alone) On Deep History and the Brain, which made similar arguments. This work, clearly, was the fruits of the intellectual excitement that On Deep History and the Brain caused amongst some of his colleagues.
As for Smail et al.’s central point, why have historians long avoided discussing human prehistory (is that an insulting term now?), I think it is very much worth considering. As Max already said, why should academic history begin with Herodotus and Thucydides? (Though, to be fair to our history department, I am currently TAing a world history class that seems to have listened to Smail – we began 2.6 million years ago and the first texts we discussed in depth came from ~2500 BCE Egypt and Mesopotamia.) Why are we so intensely focused on the “shallow” history of the last 250 years? As the Introduction to Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present asserts, most scholarly work in historiography today is temporally bound within the last 250 years (11).
I think a couple things about Smail must have led him to this argument and this book. One, he is a medievalist, or he used to be before he became a deep historian (see p. 87 of Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 2008, the large print edition). I think medievalists are especially sensitive to the idea that the general public (and maybe most historians) has forgotten about, or doesn’t care to look into, anything beyond the last few centuries. I also think medievalists think academic history is moving away from anything outside the narrow stretch of shallow history – part of Smail’s motivation for advocating for deep history, he says, is a rueful awareness that historians of the ancient world are increasingly shuffled off into small Classical Studies departments and that medievalists might well be next (Smail, 2008, 12). So definitely keep this in mind: Smail’s extolling of deep history’s vitality and merits has everything to do with the contemporary landscape of academic history. I also think he’s pretty much correct in that assessment of modern history department; my question for you is whether you find that disturbing or whether you think it is natural or perhaps inevitable that more recent history should be paramount in academia?
On another note, a recurring thread in Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present is this comparison between biblical history and the conclusions of modern scientists and historians. This is also a frequent motif in On Deep History and the Brain. I found this such an intriguing aspect of Smail et al.’s thought. Smail really sees the influence of “sacred history”, with its Biblical chronology of 6,000 years, as saturating modern scholarship, even if modern scholars are unaware of this fact (Smail, 2008, 4-5). I think his co-authors share this observation, as it is all over the text we read. In discussing the modern kinship narrative and “African Eve,” the authors eventually return to the notion that Darwin and comparative linguists were merely constructing “a new Genesis narrative (Shryock, et al., 2011, 34-35, 38).” The point gets even more explicit on p. 43, when the authors tell us that modern scientific observations about kinship and human lineage “provide the same kind of information people used to find by opening their Bible.”
Another Biblical comparison with modern science comes in the language chapter. There, the authors compare the Tower of Babel story with recent experiments in linguistics. Note the quote: “Despite moving in opposite directions, the authors of the Babel story and the designers of evolutionary language simulations seem to agree on fundamental points (McMahan, et al., 2011, 123-124).”
Now I have to say, I like Smail and company’s interest on probing the long shadow of old theories, what Smail elsewhere terms “ghost theories” – they are dead, but they haunt us and we don’t realize it (Smail, 2008, 4). But do you buy this line of argumentation in full? Has Biblical thinking really continued to be so influential on scholars? Or is it perhaps not too surprising that Biblical stories and their underlying logic, which in so many ways capture the essentials of human nature, might have some resonance with modern theories about people, their cultures, origins, especially when one is selective about the examples.? In other words, I wondered if the authors were cherry-picking their comparisons a bit. I do think we have discarded a lot of Biblical thinking, especially in Western societies in the last few centuries. Also, I suspect the continued focus amongst historians on what roughly approximates the biblical chronology, deeming only the last 6,000 years (at the outer limit) as true history, is more coincidence based around textual source availability (which Smail, et al., 2011 rightly decries as limiting – p. 7-8) as opposed to sacred history infiltrating secular historiography (Smail, 2008, 5).
One other thing I liked about this book is its warning not to essentialize the peoples of “prehistory”. We should see history before ~7,000 BCE not as a stretch filled with unchanging, unvaried premodern peoples, but as one that featured people that were varied and complex (Smail et al., 2011, XI). I also liked the promotion of different types of sources; as the authors state, history can be written from “the memoir to the bone fragment and the blood type (Smail, et al., 2011, 13).” A final thing I take away from this is to be attentive to ghost theories that might seep into my thought processes!
Ok – so it’s clear that there are some trepidations concerning the logic of the specific arguments within the book. However, I think the real value of this work is the questions it asks. Why don’t we know study “deep history?” Why are we committed to rigid documentarianism? And why does it matter that we’re incapable of addressing the majority of our past?
These questions are important, not only because they interrogate the central tension of history -between the historian and the archive – but also because they force us to interrogate both parties as well. What is a historian? What is an archive? Must they be as we’ve conceived them? The questioning of the model is crucial, as we want to know about so many elements of the past that we just don’t have ‘access’ to through the classic historical discipline, no matter how much we read along, across, and through the grain of the archive. The archive, as it exists simply doesn’t have any answers to give to so many questions worth asking.
Admittedly, I’m a sucker for metaphorical thinking, so I have fewer qualms accepting (or at least entertaining) a lot of the concepts put forward here because I think creative thinking is the most useful tool we can have.
No idea where this is going, but that’s kind of how I felt about the book, so I’m going to follow the lead of Smail & Co and just put it out there into internet infinity. Is it possible to write a history of humans prior to the development of language? My suspicion is that it would be equivalent to writing a history of animals (actually kind of an intriguing idea, but ultimately ridiculous and probably the right domain of other disciplines).
This question seems tied up with the relationship between language, thought and writing.
From an evolutionary perspective, what is important about language has nothing to do with communication, but rather the internal process of organizing and interpreting thought —this is its core property, and the characteristic that distinguishes human from animal language. Every animal system of communication that has been studied functions in the following way, without variation: by reference to measurable, external events ie. noise coming from the east, smell coming from the west etc. Human language, on the other hand, is a free, creative activity and, in this respect, what’s notable about it is not its articulation, which is peripheral to the phenomenon, but rather that core property I mentioned above. What we know, with a high degree of confidence, is that the capacity for language developed in Africa about 75,000 years ago, and it developed fast. Archeological evidence shows a sudden burst of creative activity around this time and virtually no comparable activity before it. Therefore whatever evolutionary development enabled this activity must have been very simple ie. not the complex, formal system of communication we call language, but the internal process of organizing and structuring thought that eventually brings it about — we could perhaps even call this the beginning of Thought. The implication, at least as I see it, is that to write a history of human activity before this time is quite simply to write a history devoid of meaning — an impossible task — regardless of whatever behaviours seem to resemble our own. I can see very little difference between this and a history of the experience of the early-modern amoeba.
Now, a few questions:
Strangely, given its revolutionary program, I felt that perhaps, above all, I gained a clearer understanding of earlier discussions we’ve had in this class regarding narration. The aversion to, and absence of, narrative in this book made its presence in others much more significant for me —a bit like how you notice the mother’s generosity and presence once you’ve left home. My question is the following: Did you all feel this was successfully done, or just a posturing? And by doing this, do you think it gains or loses power (explanatory, pedagogic etc)?
Do you feel the incorporation of Deep History has the potential to add to your own work? And, conversely, do you feel the historian has anything meaningful to add to our understanding of “pre-history”?
A quick concluding comment:
On page 15 the author says, “If this volume may lay claim to any innovation, it will not lie in matters of theory or method but in the realm of imagination.” This really stuck with me. A fair few of you have done a marvellous job of blasting holes through this book with your criticisms, and I don’t think I’ve encountered one I didn’t wholeheartedly agree with. But as a reader of history, and one who places an unfashionable amount of value on the ability and willingness of historians to engage with the notion of capital t truth, I often feel there’s something neglected in the process — namely, an interest in cultivating the reader. Rather than trying to convince me, to tell me what to think, I found this book’s value was showing me HOW I might think. There were moments I found it ridiculous, but all the better for it.
In addition to the opening chapters (1 & 2), I decided to read chapters 5, 7, and 10 from Deep History, i.e., Language, Kinship, and Scale. I’ve decided to frame my blog post around chapter 5, as my issues with this chapter are representative of how I feel about the work as a whole.
Chapter 5 (Language) begins with a discussion of mid-19th century historical linguistics, which, by comparing “times and places before and without writing,” could ostensibly “extend the reach of history to cover all humans, not just those who lived in the literate world.” (103) The Darwinian Revolution effectively rendered historical linguistics useless because “it began to seem that the evolution of the human species had begun long before the advent of language.” (104) The chapter then proceeds in a quasi-ascensionist fashion to explain how historical linguistics has been recovered from this nadir. It outlines the history of the traditional language tree, “ideal for mapping relations of divergence,” (105) before suggesting that a ‘language web’ is much more useful as it can be used to trace language convergences in addition to divergences. This process is called a “dual-pathway” approach (112). The authors suggest, ultimately, that different types of models (e.g., ‘branching’ and ‘network’) “can serve as an alternative form of historiography, especially when conventional records of language change are absent.” (117) I immediately saw several issues with this conclusion, and, to their credit, so do the authors: most of the remainder of the chapter is dedicated to acknowledging the limitations of computer simulations in historical linguistics (although the authors do seem to think that in vivo experimentation is the answer here—again, I take issue, but that might best be saved for discussion). Here’s my main issue with this chapter and with Deep History in general: it has not, to my observation, provided an effective explanatory framework for describing historical change in deep time in meaningful and accessible ways; it lacks nuance, and it is shockingly bereft of recognition for causality, while at the same time being committed to contingency and conjecture. Take, for example, this passage from page 125: “Attempts to simulate the evolution of language are valuable precisely because they are a step away from a tradition that localizes language within certain ways of describing human speech and a step toward a new framework in which human language is connected to the more general problem of predictability and repeatability in social life.” Deep historians (or at least the authors of Deep History) are so caught up in uncovering fractals, spirals, and the like for the sake of simply uncovering them, that they don’t stop and reflect on the deterministic nature of their work. The book is rife with speculation and oversimplifications of other literatures. The authors spend a great deal of time attempting to undo our supposed fascination with human exceptionalism, and how this conception of humanity has “straitjacketed” time. (8) For my part, I would have liked to see some consideration about their belief in what I’ll call ‘deep exceptionalism,’ that is, the notion that entire history departments need to be reconfigured because of what they’re unearthing. I’m left unconvinced.
Extra thoughts I wanted to share (and hear from others):
I didn’t get a sense of any overarching coherence from the chapters that I read, nor did I ever find out why the contributors feel that “architecture” is a useful term in this project.
I’m not sure why the authors “straitjacketed” themselves to 2.6 million years of history. If we’re going to take a ‘deep turn,’ why not go deeper? They suggest it’s because of ‘convenience,’ but I’m more inclined to think it’s because they want to stand out from Big History.
Fractal and scalar history are particularly exciting conceptually. The authors attempts to show that metaphors and optics embedded in the concepts of kinship, the body etc… have broken down linear modes of history and bridge the gap between deep history and our more comfortable written history starting in antiquity. The potential is there to have a dialogue between ways of knowing a past with a written record and the remote past which was previously the ground of archaeologists and anthropologists. However, I found that at key points, the evidence the authors use is somewhat contingent and not persuasive. Much of the material which the authors are using for their analyses is so open to such a wide variety of interpretations, I would have a hard time envisioning myself using this material. For instance, in the introduction the case of a bone fragment with an engraving on it is raised. The range of interpretations and contexts which such an item could have been created is staggering, one of which the author tells us is that it could just have been some bored individual from remote antiquity literally whittling away their time. Another example illustrates this. Some of the authors argue that hunters and innovations in how their groups extracted and stored calories accounted for the decline in big game hunting and foraging. However, this seems to border on conjecture. The author does not specifically link population growth, which one would assume would accompany more efficient extraction of biomass, to the decline in animal population. On the contrary, many groups experienced a drop in population. It is not clear, still, whether a decline in animal numbers prompted a turn to agriculture or whether the agriculture was at that point was preferable to hunting big game. The evidence, diminishing piles of bones at hunter gatherer sites is hardly conclusive (250-1). Finally, the author does not take into account another factor, the potential for agriculture to change the ecosystem and render areas inhabitable for large game. It is hard to imagine how one might accept the authors’ conclusions given the highly contingent and fuzzy evidence.
The paucity of the evidence itself is another problem. These authors are making sweeping claims about humanity in general without giving much thought to variation among different groups, separated for instance on a continental basis. When discussing how ontogenic metaphors affect how people conceived of history as starting at a particular date, the authors make the case for Middle Eastern religions, such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all having a place for the book of Genesis, which influenced the discourse and conceptualization of origins. What about Asia? What about Mayan explanations? Their claim to deny universal history has left out large and obvious gaps.
Samples for comparison also seem somewhat problematic. In the last chapter discussing how scalar change occurred in deep history as it did in modern history, the authors look at chieftaincy on Hawaii and other isolated examples vis a vis modern European political systems. This is to show that chiefs and political leaders had to master complex political economies in both cases, thus showing the comparability and continuity between them. This is their conversation between deep history and modern history. Yet, what about all the stuff in the middle? Are there no degrees of change? It seem slightly reductionist to me.
Similarly, the whole concept of scalar change, or the long tail of the “J” curve seems troublesome. The authors themselves admit that the necessary prerequisites for change took a massively long time to achieve the appropriate conditions for change and even then it was thousands of years or more. When we think of large scale change, we think of it being hitched to a certain chronological immediacy: things happen relatively quickly. Here, though, the authors decouple that immediacy from change, but reserve the judgment that it was big. The ability to extract biomass from a given area of the earth is a good example. This took thousands of years to go from 0.1% to 1%, which was in their own words even more significant than achieving 80-90% in the Green Revolution of the 1970s. I feel that in their attempt to bend time and space to their argument, they are losing a basic facet of difference between the different parts of the “J”: events unfold much faster now. I think they needed to acknowledge the slowness of things then and reflect on how that affects the comparison with modernity.
Another issue is the idea of Hegelian historiography that the work seems to both embrace and oppose selectively. On the one hand the authors state that the division between non-history and history is an inheritance of nineteenth century historiography and the particular intellectual climate into which “History” was born. They take issue with this Hegelian divide, and arguable do a fine job of showing that pre-history is history. However, they seem to simultaneously partake in the greater notion of progress. Theirs is arguably still an ascentionist narrative. Breaking down the Anthropocene between pre-history and modern still puts humanity on a trajectory to the modern. Likewise, this is quite evident in their treatment of the evolution of the brain and humanity’s capacity for complex social organization. They draw the conclusion that Homo sapiens and not their predecessors, on account of the development of their neo-cortex, achieved the venerable number of “150” as the maximum number of persons an individual could come deal with face to face in an organized group. This is lent continuity by looking at current organization relationships and their relevance to this number. This is not to say that narratives of progress are incorrect, but I think it is ironic and somewhat dangerous to whitewash the new territory of history in the depths of the past with the same “progressive” primer that so many historians have gone to great lengths to overturn. I wonder if all of pre-history should be seen as some glorious progression. If it should be, to what? Modernity? Hegel would be pleased.
Last, I think I should say that though most of what I have to say here is criticism, I believe that “deep history” like “big history” is a work in progress. Each step in the debates they bring on how scholars put together the remote past and the history of the universe with the present and its particularly human-oriented historiography and objectives is inherently valuable.
I was intrigued by the way the authors use and play with our notions of time. The best example I have of this is on page 48, where figure 6 shows history in relation to BP (Before Present [Before 1950]). I have only ever seen this used in archaeology, with historians more commonly use Christian-centred conceptions of time. While I applaud this playing with time, I must admit that this use brings up more questions than it answers. I wonder if the authors would problematize the notion of “present” being 1950? Does that mean we are negative 65 BP? I am open to the use of scientific terms and conceptions, but I think we then need to historicize those notions, as we have done with Christian time-keeping. The playing with time felt very Braudelian to me. I feel like we can trace a lot of notions in contemporary historiography back to Braudel.
I initially thought there could be a really good question about post-humanism, as I felt as though this work could be argued as a post-humanist text. As early as page four the text makes clear that human exceptionalism was tied within notion of progress (4). The authors use Anderson to show how objectivity in history-writing was deeply flawed and tied to nation-states (9), and that we have now homogenized the subaltern (10). I was even more convinced by the argument that modern historiography has “dehumainzed” prehistory (30). This argument was eroded when the authors ultimately wrote that “humans are unique among primates for keeping up relations–interacting and visiting–with kin who no longer live with us on a daily basis.” (42) I have issue with this statement because I think it unknowingly makes a comment of humanity as progressing from the rest of the world. In this instance I wished that they would have been more careful with language.
I took issue even with the notion of prehistory. I am not sure if I am completely right in this, but I thought that prehistory was tied to societies which did not have a recorded history. This is problematic because it privileges cultures with recorded history over ones with oral or performative history. I may have missed it but I do not recall seeing the authors problematize their own categories of analysis that they pull out of the present. I also with the authors would have been more critical of Darwin. While I liked the idea that this shattered notions of history to the modern world, I was worried that they did not discuss the consequences of Darwin’s work. I always thought that Darwin was really racist himself, though I could be making this up. These are areas I wish the authors would have addressed. Though I suppose they would counter my dissatisfaction by saying I was not trained properly to handle their historical manifesto.
I read chapters 4 (Energy and Ecosystems), 8 (Migration), and 10 (Scale). I think I counted eight men to three women as contributors. I was curious as to why there was this gender imbalance. I loved the idea of ancient technologies, and I want to go back there more in depth one day. I found that the authors made generalizations about modern historiography that they criticize us for making about prehistory. I do not want to over criticize this work, as I do appreciate the ambition of scale, but I remained hesitant to its ideas and methodologies. Ultimately, I am left with asking “should prehistory be used as a category in itself or does this further divide the two histories that the authors claim to bridge?”
The disasters of the first half of the 20th century unveiled the “ideological baggage” that deep histories up to that point had borne, with all their Darwinist or Hegelian connotations about human evolution and progression. The agenda underlying this book is to probe for ways to bring deep history back, and to “remove the barriers that isolate deep histories from temporally shallow ones” (5). The primary way it seeks to do this is by challenging history’s textual methodology, its excessive documentarianism, which in turn condemns it to temporal shallowness.
My concern today will be kept quite short. What happens to this binary of shallow vs. deep history when we add another element into the equation: the ideal of deep analysis? As I went through the chapters I chose (4, 9, 10), I contemplated all the sacrifices in terms of depth and nuance that must have been made from fear of empirical contradiction. Because launching into generalizations becomes considerably harder the longer the timeline is stretched –- something which applies for geographic scale too, I might add. While one can become quite proficient at wrestling with smaller subjects and generalizing from those, it is just a lot harder to do with temporally deep and geographically broad histories, even in the era of big data.
Side note: The discipline’s alleged bias towards the modern era at first sounded odd to my Icelandic ears, because this is simply not the case where I come from. Smail, being a medievalist by specialization, would probably point out the various ways in which Iceland is different from North America and the rest of Europe. It is a young country, its human history has been documented from the first days of its settlement (in the 9th century), and its geological history is simply easier to study than that of other, geologically older places. But then again, this goes back to my prior paragraph about generalizations that sound hollow when tested against this or that.
In their introduction to Deep History, Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail highlight shortcomings in historical research and propose the study of a new interdisciplinary field, “deep history.” The authors explain that, though Biblical time collapsed with the arrival of Darwin’s work, and Prestwich and Evan provided evidence of pre-Adamite humans, deep time could not yet be measured. After the time revolution of the 1860s, the human and natural sciences were divided as fields of inquiry, and by the late nineteenth century the discipline of history emerged, relying primarily on written texts. The absence of the latter in deep history again made the field unapproachable. Rather than engaging in the study of deep history, historians turned to give meaning to nation-states in the nineteenth century, and to examine the history of civilizations, economies, and ideas in the twentieth century. The authors criticize these histories for being driven by a belief in human exceptionalism and for triumph in human achievement (the reversal of which that sometimes occurs, they note, does not solve the problem). At last, advances in biology and dating techniques in the later half of the twentieth century have provided historians the opportunity to come to terms with human evolution and begin to bring together short and long histories.
Shryock and Smail’s argument for the new discipline of deep history includes a justification and a method. They seek to provide room for contingency, change, and insight into the path-dependent nature of variation within systems (12), as opposed to the carefully woven “compelling historical narrative” of big history. The histories included in Deep History are characterized by an emphasis on trends and processes over events and persons, by not being strictly calendrical (i.e. they transcend time and place), and by arguments that do not depend written text, but instead rely on culture and biology (14). The work of this type of historian, the paleohistorian, capitalizes on the ongoing merge between history and the social sciences and moves beyond the limits of anthropocentric research that focuses on a single chronological layer to examine the distant past, prior to the last 5000 years. The paleohistorian studies primates in nature, rather than humans conquering or in conflict with nature. Though the authors admit narratives and reconstructive storytelling are coercive and streamlining, they recognize that they are also “vivid and compelling” and they advocate for a judicious use as narratives help bring different academic disciplines into conversation with paleohistorians (14). They seek to develop “new and productive habits of thought” and call for analytical frames that do not “resort to narratives of ontogeny” (developmental history), which though exciting, result in “flattened and foreshortened” history (19).
Although what I have written amounts to little more than a summary it has helped me ruminate on what I have read (and I suppose opens me for correction tomorrow!) It seems as if the authors are advocating for a worldview shift – something epistemological – without being too explicit. At the end of the paragraph criticizing historians for writing narratives of progress or decline, they say “seeing the humanity of others means recognizing their historical movement toward various forms of mastery, even if the movement is modest and still in its formative stages” (4). What does this mean, and why is “cultivation over mere subsistence” or “civilization over mere habitation” problematic? The authors suggest the blame for the predictable epistemological grid of disciplinary history “lies with a commitment to human exceptionalism, a sensibility that survived the Darwinian revolution largely intact” (8). Are humans, though part of nature, not unique? And why is it then that in chapter six (on food), authors Fernandex-Armesto and Smail highlight the many ways that humans are unique among primates (highly carnivorous, humans cook with fire, engage in cannibalism, feasting, and in their propensity for managing and producing food)?
I was a little skeptical when I read this book, partly because this project is so challenging and huge that even though it was done by collective work of a group of different scholars in different specialties, such an enormous task would always be too general and sometimes lacking persuasive evidence to satisfy historians working on different time and areas. Indeed, in the chapter on “migration” and the final chapter on “scale”, I feel that the arguments are not always persuasive or comprehensive. For example, in the final chapter, it talks about the J-curves of early population increase and early agricultural societies, however, the authors failed to further explain the development of cities and states of the ancient world. I wonder where is the origin and development of Chinese cities, or Rome or Athens, or of civilization in the America, like the Mayas or the Aztecs? This problem is not only exist in this chapter, like throughout the book, there lack a link between the pre-historical era and modernism(with true written history); the authors did touch upon early civilizations but did not really explain how human society evolved through time. The book kind of jumps from the Old Stone Age, before 10,000 years ago to the middle ages, leaving a gap in between.
Moreover, I felt like the book, even though full of details, descriptions and evidences, lacks an overarching historical narrative through time. Those different chapters, even though connected in a way, are largely scattered historically. As Cornor has raised the problem of “architecture”, I would say, for me, this word indicates that there will be some overarching structure that holds everything together, but this book seems not so. Maybe the authors did that deliberately to distinguish the “deep history” from “big history”, as claimed in the introduction. I do not know. But I think if the book would contextualize itself in a historical narrative through time, it would easier for me to follow. Also, I am a little bit confused on the difference between “deep history” and “big history”. I wonder if this two words can be supplement to each other, or are there some fundamental differences or conflicts to this two different histories? Since “deep” history is more like a history “looking back”, can we argue that deep history is a branch of “big history”? If so, why the authors did not just write a global history? I wonder what others think of that.
First of all: I really enjoyed the reading this week (I chose Language, Food, Migration). I had already questioned myself why history in school and university starts with the ancient Greeks and Persians and not earlier and so the issue of this book to expand our field of research is quite interesting for me. Also, on a more philosophical level I’m interested in the question where we draw the line between human and animal.
However, I’m not convinced by this book. I liked reading it, but I still don’t see the connection to more recent history. For example the chapters about language and migration: That was all quite interesting (even if I cannot follow their explanations in detail, especially about the languages), but I don’t see how this should affect our understanding of other ages.
Also the chapter about Food is interesting, even if it was not totally new to me that the kind of nutrition and the ways of eating influence both physiology and social systems. But besides some arguments against vegetarianism it does not help me that much. For example the transformation of North American Prairies (156-158): If I want to understand or explain this process, do I need to know that there has been progress in agriculture and exchange of plants hundreds of years before?
It seems to me that the authors want to show, that history (progress, developments, change, inventions…) exists longer than written texts. That’s true (and I did not doubt that before I read this) and probably some people should know that nothing is stable. But I am not convinced that this knowledge helps me to understand more recent developments better.
One last thought which is not very scientific (but I don’t want to withhold it from you): The question, raised by Douglas Adams, if we made a mistake to leave the trees or if the decline started when we left the oceans is still not answered, but maybe my expectations were too high when I thought “Deep History” could give the answer (see for this the quote #2 on this blog: http://bookriot.com/2012/05/25/the-42-best-lines-from-douglas-adams-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-series/).
Before I say what I liked about Deep History I feel impelled to talk about what I didn’t. This book, while laudable in attempts to bring together academics from a variety of different disciplines, uses science in a way that is not only incredibly misguided, but also arguably dangerous to our understanding of the past. Aside from obvious goof-ups in the introduction where the authors use commonsensical notions to support ideas about both science and its history which are plainly false (for example, take what I sincerely hope is a misreading of Robin Dunbar on page 46 which essentially says that the bigger your brain is, the smarter you are) their claims about specific evolutionary trajectories use a phylogenetic logic which is sometimes deployed by more misguided evolutionary biologists and psychologists.
The clearest example of this is on page 71 in the chapter on bodies which discusses the evolutionary development of our teeth. The authors, Smail and Shryock, conclude that Homo habilis evolved to have teeth similar to ours because they developed tools. Smail and Shryock reason that since hammers, knives, etc replaced many of the functions that studier teeth served for previous iterations of Homo, they naturally evolved smaller teeth. Putting aside the fact that Smail and Shryock’s argument betrays a total misunderstanding of how Darwinian evolution works (Why would smaller teeth increase the fitness of Homo habilis? Wouldn’t having both tools and rugged teeth give them advantages which would help them reproduce?), the type of logic they use allows us to say potentially anything we want about the development of humanity. One example, which shows the kinds of broad claims that can be made using this logic is the Stoned Ape Theory, which posits that the availability of psilocybin containing mushrooms led to the evolution of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens (For a quick summary, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#.22Stoned_ape.22_theory_of_human_evolution).
While it is true that many of the texts we’ve read for this class deploy evidence in ways that some people may find questionable, what Smail and Shryock do is much worse. By invoking the authority and mystique of science they imbue their argument with a sort of protective armor that prevents historians, many of whom are even less versed in the sciences than they are, from critically assessing their arguments and may even give their position credit in the public eye.
All of that being said, I thought the authors’ attack on the metaphors that have constrained the study of deep history in the past is very interesting, especially the notion that biblical metaphors and the natural vs manmade divide that permeate historical works are oftentimes detrimental. That brings me to my questions for this week:
1. How can historians productively use science in our work? Is it possible without being deeply steeped in the works of the scientific disciplines we wish to employ? Those of us in Bill French’s class have already discussed this question in relation to William Reddy’s theories about emotions.
2. What role do metaphors play in the practice of history? Is it possible to avoid them? If not, how can we identify places where they shape historical narratives in negative ways? How can we use them to increase our understanding of history?
To put the following post in context, in addition to the introduction, the chapters I selected to read were “Imagining the human in deep time,” “Energy and ecosystems” and “Scale.”
It seems to me that the major question this book presents is not whether or not people should be studying “deep history” (because some fields already are: geologists, archeologists, anthropologists, etc.) but rather if historians should be doing it. And the key questions this seems to hinge on is a) can historians offer anything new b) is deep history relevant to the “shallow history” historians are generally concerned with. “Energy and ecosystems” seems to achieve the latter somewhat, by demonstrating that humankind’s current poor stewardship of the earth’s natural resource might not be relatively recent consequence of industrial capitalism but speaks to a long standing characteristic of human societies. But while this is insightful (and the article as a whole very interesting) I’m not sure how far its usefulness extends beyond strengthening the convictions of people who think the world is doomed or that we must colonize mars. I would also add that efforts to connecting deep history with “shallow history” doesn’t have a great track record. In other words, while I really enjoyed the book and don’t question its value in its own right, I wasn’t left feeling totally convinced that deep history needs to be rescued from other disciplines who haven’t done an adequate job.
First off, I’m intrigued by all the critiques made above … this is going to be an interesting discussion.
I’ve always liked Smail’s pet project here – some of you may know that three years before the work we read, he wrote (alone) On Deep History and the Brain, which made similar arguments. This work, clearly, was the fruits of the intellectual excitement that On Deep History and the Brain caused amongst some of his colleagues.
As for Smail et al.’s central point, why have historians long avoided discussing human prehistory (is that an insulting term now?), I think it is very much worth considering. As Max already said, why should academic history begin with Herodotus and Thucydides? (Though, to be fair to our history department, I am currently TAing a world history class that seems to have listened to Smail – we began 2.6 million years ago and the first texts we discussed in depth came from ~2500 BCE Egypt and Mesopotamia.) Why are we so intensely focused on the “shallow” history of the last 250 years? As the Introduction to Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present asserts, most scholarly work in historiography today is temporally bound within the last 250 years (11).
I think a couple things about Smail must have led him to this argument and this book. One, he is a medievalist, or he used to be before he became a deep historian (see p. 87 of Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 2008, the large print edition). I think medievalists are especially sensitive to the idea that the general public (and maybe most historians) has forgotten about, or doesn’t care to look into, anything beyond the last few centuries. I also think medievalists think academic history is moving away from anything outside the narrow stretch of shallow history – part of Smail’s motivation for advocating for deep history, he says, is a rueful awareness that historians of the ancient world are increasingly shuffled off into small Classical Studies departments and that medievalists might well be next (Smail, 2008, 12). So definitely keep this in mind: Smail’s extolling of deep history’s vitality and merits has everything to do with the contemporary landscape of academic history. I also think he’s pretty much correct in that assessment of modern history department; my question for you is whether you find that disturbing or whether you think it is natural or perhaps inevitable that more recent history should be paramount in academia?
On another note, a recurring thread in Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present is this comparison between biblical history and the conclusions of modern scientists and historians. This is also a frequent motif in On Deep History and the Brain. I found this such an intriguing aspect of Smail et al.’s thought. Smail really sees the influence of “sacred history”, with its Biblical chronology of 6,000 years, as saturating modern scholarship, even if modern scholars are unaware of this fact (Smail, 2008, 4-5). I think his co-authors share this observation, as it is all over the text we read. In discussing the modern kinship narrative and “African Eve,” the authors eventually return to the notion that Darwin and comparative linguists were merely constructing “a new Genesis narrative (Shryock, et al., 2011, 34-35, 38).” The point gets even more explicit on p. 43, when the authors tell us that modern scientific observations about kinship and human lineage “provide the same kind of information people used to find by opening their Bible.”
Another Biblical comparison with modern science comes in the language chapter. There, the authors compare the Tower of Babel story with recent experiments in linguistics. Note the quote: “Despite moving in opposite directions, the authors of the Babel story and the designers of evolutionary language simulations seem to agree on fundamental points (McMahan, et al., 2011, 123-124).”
Now I have to say, I like Smail and company’s interest on probing the long shadow of old theories, what Smail elsewhere terms “ghost theories” – they are dead, but they haunt us and we don’t realize it (Smail, 2008, 4). But do you buy this line of argumentation in full? Has Biblical thinking really continued to be so influential on scholars? Or is it perhaps not too surprising that Biblical stories and their underlying logic, which in so many ways capture the essentials of human nature, might have some resonance with modern theories about people, their cultures, origins, especially when one is selective about the examples.? In other words, I wondered if the authors were cherry-picking their comparisons a bit. I do think we have discarded a lot of Biblical thinking, especially in Western societies in the last few centuries. Also, I suspect the continued focus amongst historians on what roughly approximates the biblical chronology, deeming only the last 6,000 years (at the outer limit) as true history, is more coincidence based around textual source availability (which Smail, et al., 2011 rightly decries as limiting – p. 7-8) as opposed to sacred history infiltrating secular historiography (Smail, 2008, 5).
One other thing I liked about this book is its warning not to essentialize the peoples of “prehistory”. We should see history before ~7,000 BCE not as a stretch filled with unchanging, unvaried premodern peoples, but as one that featured people that were varied and complex (Smail et al., 2011, XI). I also liked the promotion of different types of sources; as the authors state, history can be written from “the memoir to the bone fragment and the blood type (Smail, et al., 2011, 13).” A final thing I take away from this is to be attentive to ghost theories that might seep into my thought processes!
I look forward to the discussion!
Ok – so it’s clear that there are some trepidations concerning the logic of the specific arguments within the book. However, I think the real value of this work is the questions it asks. Why don’t we know study “deep history?” Why are we committed to rigid documentarianism? And why does it matter that we’re incapable of addressing the majority of our past?
These questions are important, not only because they interrogate the central tension of history -between the historian and the archive – but also because they force us to interrogate both parties as well. What is a historian? What is an archive? Must they be as we’ve conceived them? The questioning of the model is crucial, as we want to know about so many elements of the past that we just don’t have ‘access’ to through the classic historical discipline, no matter how much we read along, across, and through the grain of the archive. The archive, as it exists simply doesn’t have any answers to give to so many questions worth asking.
Admittedly, I’m a sucker for metaphorical thinking, so I have fewer qualms accepting (or at least entertaining) a lot of the concepts put forward here because I think creative thinking is the most useful tool we can have.
One thought train and a few brief questions.
No idea where this is going, but that’s kind of how I felt about the book, so I’m going to follow the lead of Smail & Co and just put it out there into internet infinity. Is it possible to write a history of humans prior to the development of language? My suspicion is that it would be equivalent to writing a history of animals (actually kind of an intriguing idea, but ultimately ridiculous and probably the right domain of other disciplines).
This question seems tied up with the relationship between language, thought and writing.
From an evolutionary perspective, what is important about language has nothing to do with communication, but rather the internal process of organizing and interpreting thought —this is its core property, and the characteristic that distinguishes human from animal language. Every animal system of communication that has been studied functions in the following way, without variation: by reference to measurable, external events ie. noise coming from the east, smell coming from the west etc. Human language, on the other hand, is a free, creative activity and, in this respect, what’s notable about it is not its articulation, which is peripheral to the phenomenon, but rather that core property I mentioned above. What we know, with a high degree of confidence, is that the capacity for language developed in Africa about 75,000 years ago, and it developed fast. Archeological evidence shows a sudden burst of creative activity around this time and virtually no comparable activity before it. Therefore whatever evolutionary development enabled this activity must have been very simple ie. not the complex, formal system of communication we call language, but the internal process of organizing and structuring thought that eventually brings it about — we could perhaps even call this the beginning of Thought. The implication, at least as I see it, is that to write a history of human activity before this time is quite simply to write a history devoid of meaning — an impossible task — regardless of whatever behaviours seem to resemble our own. I can see very little difference between this and a history of the experience of the early-modern amoeba.
Now, a few questions:
Strangely, given its revolutionary program, I felt that perhaps, above all, I gained a clearer understanding of earlier discussions we’ve had in this class regarding narration. The aversion to, and absence of, narrative in this book made its presence in others much more significant for me —a bit like how you notice the mother’s generosity and presence once you’ve left home. My question is the following: Did you all feel this was successfully done, or just a posturing? And by doing this, do you think it gains or loses power (explanatory, pedagogic etc)?
Do you feel the incorporation of Deep History has the potential to add to your own work? And, conversely, do you feel the historian has anything meaningful to add to our understanding of “pre-history”?
A quick concluding comment:
On page 15 the author says, “If this volume may lay claim to any innovation, it will not lie in matters of theory or method but in the realm of imagination.” This really stuck with me. A fair few of you have done a marvellous job of blasting holes through this book with your criticisms, and I don’t think I’ve encountered one I didn’t wholeheartedly agree with. But as a reader of history, and one who places an unfashionable amount of value on the ability and willingness of historians to engage with the notion of capital t truth, I often feel there’s something neglected in the process — namely, an interest in cultivating the reader. Rather than trying to convince me, to tell me what to think, I found this book’s value was showing me HOW I might think. There were moments I found it ridiculous, but all the better for it.