I think for my first post, I would like to share a thought I had as a student of the state and ethnic identity. I argued in my previous MA program that how the state incorporated various peoples through its bureaucratic machinery had a real impact on how these peoples thought about themselves historically. Mongols, for instance, who were incorporated into the Ming state were labelled as “Ming Mongols”, distinct from fellow Mongols who remained on the other side of Chinese control. Indeed, they seem to accept and act as loyal servitors, especially in a military capacity (at least in the extant records). However, this book in question de-centers and challenges this somewhat too neatly packaged analysis. Men whose ways of knowing and interpreting history, the grand narrative of politics and men, were distinctly different from females in the Mugade. As we talked about in class, women clearly had a epistemological and historical geography that defied, even rejected clear chronology or linear political events. Instead family, relationships and nomenclature seemed to be essential in retelling and even mythologizing the past. Therein how women interpreted historical ethnic identity is also very interesting. In the chapter “Locating a Woman’s Life” (paragraphs 18-19)the author explains how women conflated ethnic identity with their clan. Some linked it to “Shangaan-ness”, while others linked it to the place where they were living. The state, whether colonial or other, seems completely absent from these women’s ethnic identity. That is incredibly interesting to me, because not only are neat ethno-linguistic categories smashed, but it seems to indicate that even within a relatively small area ways of understanding ethnic identity are incredibly gendered and even defiant of the state’s attempts to claim a taxonomizing right or power over its citizens. I am still somewhat pessimistic in being able to recover similar contrasting ways of identity in medieval/early modern China, especially in the case of women.
As I had to read several texts about the “linguistic turn” or “cultural turn” recently, I want to comment on Stein’s essay “Literary criticism and the evidence for history”. First of all, I want to say that this is the first text I have read about this topic, in which the author explains the linguistic turn on a concrete example. This leads me to a simple, but important question (for me), if I have understood this right: Is the specific point in analysing a text following the linguistic turn, to include the grammar in the analyses? I am asking this because the more general approach not only to look for hard facts and dates in a chronic but also to also to ask other question to it doesn’t seem to as specific “linguistic”.
Both the Robert M. Stein and E.H. Carr piece deal with what are more commonly accepted today as the essential challenges of the historian in his or her task. Both Stein in his discussion of “deconstructing” primary sources, with his example of the Hyde chronicle, and E.H. Carr’s discussion of “imaginary understanding,” raise the question of social/cultural context, and the degree of depth of knowledge of a given social/cultural context one needs before they can hope to really grasp a certain object of study. This came up with our class discussion on the Heidi Gengenbach article, as many people in the class questioned whether Gengenbach was truly capable of accurately interpreting the oral testimonies of her interview subjects, due to the linguistic, social and cultural barriers at hand. I imagine most people have had an experience in life that reminded them of what a vast range of levels of familiarity or knowledge of a given society or culture can exist, and of the existence of a certain plane of familiarity/understanding that cannot be learned in books. To take these concerns to the extreme one ends up with a “you have to be Russian to really understand Russia” attitude which most of us aren’t willing to accept; but I do find the dilemma humbling and an important reminder of the need to go beyond libraries and search engines in order achieve that level of understanding of a given object of study that we all want as historians.
I found the subject of the Cruikshank article interesting but her arguments less clear. Her summarizing statement that things like the Yukon storytelling festival “provide locations for engaged exposure to different perspectives and opportunities to investigate how local knowledge and social action are mediated by dialogue” and that “we cannot know the outcomes of such transactions, nor can we expect them to be tidy, but we can learn a great deal if we take seriously the social agency of the participants” a bit vague. For the aim of our class perhaps her discussion on the power or worth of storytelling – e.g. storytelling as a subversive tool, storytelling as representing something wholesome or positive against the ills of the modern age – is more relevant. Her comments on storytelling as enabling a fluid, “adaptive” form of history of course challenge us to rethink our standard ideas of the discipline of history as an aspiration for hard, objective truth (despite the inevitably that we come up short, as the other readings discuss). I think the more interesting subject to be explored here – which she kind of dances around – is the commodification of First Nation’s history and culture; First Nations people “exporting” their history/culture to an outside audience as a source of capital; what it means when different levels of the Canadian government in league with private interests decide they want to “celebrate,” “promote,” or “include” First Nations history/culture (see the recent Pan-American Games); etc..
The question I would like to pose for this week is this: While the authors we read this week provide interesting challenges to what we typically think the practice of history is, in light of their criticisms, how do we judge the worth or quality of a historical work? I’d like to talk about this question because in their attempts to destabilize what we think history is and propose new models for how it should be practiced in the future, Carr, Stein and Cruikshank also indirectly attack how the value of a historical work was judged in the past, whether it be by the gross accumulation of facts or quality of traditional source analysis. I think issues related to this can be more clearly seen in the pieces by Carr and Stein, so I will focus on them, although Cruikshank’s opinion about this might be implicitly assumed to encourage if not require the use of the geography surrounding a subject of enquiry, songs and other non-traditional sources much like those used by Heidi Gengenbach in the readings we did for last week.
At the end of his essay Carr clearly states what he believes the purpose of history is: “a continuous interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialog between the past and the present.” (Carr 30) In this conception of history, facts and interpretation play off one another. “Objective facts” do not precede analysis, but instead historians designate certain past events as historically important facts and arrange those facts while in the process of interpreting the past. Carr punts on telling us how we should judge the quality of the interpretation piece of this interaction saying that “It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history… one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation,” but that he will “have to consider at a later stage what exactly is meant by objectivity in history.” (Carr 27) Without rules for judging interpretation, it is also impossible to judge whether a historian has done a good job in designating past events as important “historical facts,” since whether an event becomes a historical fact hinges on whether an interpretation put forward by a particular author “is accepted by other historians as valid and significant,” (Carr 12) something which they very well can’t do without some kind of rubric. In the end we are left with a murky picture of what Carr would consider a successful “dialog between the past and present.”
What Stein might expect in the kind of analysis he supports in his piece is more clear than in Carr’s, but omissions in his argument make such standards shaky at best. Stein has an interesting perspective on the linguistic turn and the tools literary analysis can provide to historians. Instead of focusing on the epistemological problems that reading historical documents as “texts” may cause in the writing of history, he instead guides us towards the benefits of viewing a source in light of the way it was understood at the time it was constructed, both in relation to its author and their motives as well as to other contemporary texts. Stein is more circumscribed in his claims about what his sort of history is about, calling the practices of literary analysis, “heavy weapons” that are “useful tools for the construction of a past reality of its fragmentary textual remains,” rather than the only proper way to do history as Carr insinuates in his text. However, the criterion available to Stein for judging the quality of texts within his approach must still be very different than in historical accounts that take a more traditional approach to sources. We might judge a Stein-style historical analysis based on how well it teases out the subtleties in the structure of the language used in its source as Stein does in his analysis of the chronicler’s use of time on pages 72 and 73. We might also look at how well it takes into account texts “circulating in culture” which the chronicler may have been directly engaging with in his report as well as contemporary related texts that the chronicler might not necessarily have known about. Both of these standards have issues. In the case of linguistic analysis, Stein totally ignores the fact that language itself is also a social construct. Projecting our ideas of the literary weight of a major event happening in a “single day” onto the text falls into the same trap as ignoring the religious reasoning present in it because it does not fit with modern rationality. In the case of contextualisation, Stein makes an even clumsier move, implicitly assuming that a single unified “culture” which one can define unproblematically always exists around a source in which texts might “circulate.” While Stein’s call for a more in-depth reading of sources is certainly compelling, in light of his failure to address these issues we are left wondering what qualities a more nuanced form of literary analysis must have in order to be considered good.
I see all three readings as commenting on the relation between sources and their contexts. This relation has two elements. The first concerns how we evaluate sources. Understanding context gives us a better understanding of how a source may have been biased, modified, distorted or under-determined in its creation. As Carr points out, this could arise from presentist political motivations of or other “processing” by the recorder/historian, while Cruickshank’s paper gestures in this direction from the composition of one’s audience. The second concerns exploring the range of things a source might tell us (about context). So, for example, one might use a source to understand literary culture or audiences, to use Stein’s and Cruickshank’s examples respectively. Grasping this connection between sources and context thus appears to allow us say things both internal and external to the source.
It also raises some big issues. One such issue, as Cruickshank points out in discussing Fred Meyers, is whether going back to the social/political context of a source might in some cases actually be misleading. For instance, we could read contexts into a source that the source actually isn’t in conversation with just because we believe that its author carried on a certain level of social/political engagement. In short, to what extent does “context” serve as a kind of covering law? And how do we think not only about the degree to which “context” is revisable in light of sources, but rather about the degree to which “context” actually applies to a source at all?
I should mention that I’m taking “context” to apply both in the way Carr uses it (as background info on the historian etc.) and Stein uses it (as other texts). Stein sees the source and the context as more or less inseparable, so I’m kind of begging the question here, but that’s another debate that’s probably better suited for class.
These three texts compliment each other well, and all revisit similar themes in regards to ways to read texts. These are tied up more broadly within the rejection of objectivity in history, but can also be read as road maps that direct future historians where to go (Carr and Stein are more direct in this, but Cruikshank provides valuable insight through example). The problem that I have had with many works (and where my most resent existential crisis began) is that it is hard to specifically define what makes history writing its own field of history. Carr places a connection to the past and present, arguing that it is a give and take between the two. Cruikshank is in the departments of Anthropology and Sociology, yet her work has very strong historical merits. Stein takes a more optimistic approach to where we as historians can go, but is still confident that there is a discipline at the end of his article (through the metaphor of the historical field as a room). We have broken down so many structures, yet have maintained clear discipline boundaries that blur the more we try to examine them. Are the very separations of academic fields problems for trying to determine how best to study the past? Does [h]istory need to be studied by [H]istorians? What makes history history, as opposed to historical sociology, anthropology, or any one of a million different fields and subfields?
For starters, I enjoyed reading Carr and found him to be an agreeable philosopher of history – so very agreeable, in fact, that I had to constantly remind myself that his book, What is History?, was published over half a century ago. That is to say, before the humanities were swept by the linguistic turn(s), whose roots are sometimes traced to Derrida; before historians became acutely aware of the issues of cultural translation, and before academia (most of it, anyway) opened its eyes to the epistemological limitations of language. “[T]he use of language”, Carr already proclaims by 1961, “forbids him” – the historian – “to be neutral” (19). Carr clearly could have used some insight from feminist theorists (his repeated use of the masculine pronoun being the prime example of his own limited grasp of just how heterogeneous past voices were), but the key philosophical insights, it seems to me, are there already. “[T]hat paperwork is as alien to Tlingit tradition as clan ownership is alien to Western law”, as Cruikshank notes in her article (60), would not have been an alien idea to a historian of Carr’s calibre at all.
Even in denouncing the serenity and self-confidence of empiricist historians who see “all information” as “within reach” and “every problem…capable of solution” (1), Carr strikes me as germane to one issue in particular that historians currently face. In a way, he anticipates ever-bigger strides made towards assembling some version of “ultimate history”, which does not rhyme so badly with the contemporary rise of big data, and the recent surge in interest in applying neuro-scientific methods to the study of the humanities. Carr’s lesson is one of humility: the human experience cannot, and will never, be reduced to empirical data. Shreds left from the past are always tainted by the values of those who transmitted them. The data is never pure.
It is along those lines that Stein concludes his chapter: “We cannot simply wish away our consciousness of language and its effects”, he says (81). In one aspect does Stein bring us a step further than Carr: having borne witness to the fiasco around Derrida and the linguistic turn(s), Stein has come to realize that deconstruction leaves nothing behind for the historian to work with; hence his emphasis on the dual role of historians as deconstructors and constructors.
Cruikshank’s article, in my opinion, really brings these discussions down to the ground from the realm of theory by showing us what is at stake in them. For, lest we forget, these are discussions that many people might consider time-consuming chatter in academe’s ivory tower (and not entirely without reason). Reading her piece, we are struck by the simple fact that our societies and legal systems – those that exist in real life, outside the university – remain largely unshaken by Derrida and the linguistic turn(s). The “language of policy making” – the language indigenous people need to employ in order to defend their lands and culture – is, at the end of the day, shaped by a centuries-old, Western tradition (Cruikshank 58). The paradox here – and this is maybe more of a Catch-22 – is that by conforming to this language and all the assumptions underpinning it, indigenous people risk losing what makes them culturally “authentic”, when cultural “authenticity” is what liberal democracies demand in order to legitimize political autonomy (Cruikshank 65).
One is left wondering why the work done by historians and other humanists in the past few decades, and the epistemological issues put forward by people like Carr and Stein, have not been more widely received among policymakers and the larger public. It may sound like a cliché, but I believe that mass education should become a primary objective of historians who have come to realize this divergence between their theories on the one hand and social realities on the other. Historians should bear more political weight than they now do. Whether historians can bear the weight I am proposing they do, I am not sure.
E.H Carr’s “The Historian and His Facts” and Stein’s “Literary Criticism and the Evidence for History” evoked my memory of myself pondering on the substance and purpose of history when I was an undergraduate student. When I was an undergraduate student, I once came across a primary source on the Emperor Constantine: Life of Constantine (by Eusebius). Even though this source is one of the most comprehensive sources for historians to study the religious policies of Constantine and to have a glimpse of his overall life as an emperor, it was extremely subjective based on the religious standing of the author. Before reading that source, I think I more or less resembled the “nineteenth-century historian” in E.H Carr’s article, who had the most ambitious goal to “recover history” as objectively as possible. (Even though I have already realized that all historical articles or books I have read are biased, I still believed that history has an objective hard-core with imaginative pulp surrounding it) However, after reading that source, I became more and more skeptical of the substance of history: I wonder if there is really something we can rely on as history of the past? If all history is biased and subjective, I wonder what is the purpose of being a historian? The answer I gave myself back then was that maybe part of the purposes of historians are first of all to recognize that all history is subjective, and then try to put ourselves in the author’s shoes to see what social, economic, religious and political backgrounds made them subjective.
E. H Carr and Stein helped me elaborate my answer. Carr argues that history is “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”; thus, the function of history is to “master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present” (Carr 30, 26). Therefore, we should first be aware of the subjectivity of history(the author of historical articles made selection of their raw material and we as readers make selection, whether consciously or unconsciously, in our interpretation of the things we read), and then we will be able to have a dialogue with the author, this dialogue would be the the unending dialogue connecting the present and the past.
Stein also told us that we can form this dialogue not only by looking at what was being directly expressed(historical facts), rather, we can use critical thinking in literary criticism to also examine what was being untold(like literary structures).
Hence, history is no longer a boring monograph or a pack of evidence for historians to “decode”; rather, it becomes a vivid dialogue between the reader and writer, between past and present.
I want to mention the third reading “Negotiating with Narratives” just to emphasize the importance of dialogue, or in this context: oral history. Comparing to the previous two articles, this dialogue is no longer between reader and writer, it is between storyteller and audiences. I think maybe it is precisely because of the importance of dialogue, the tradition of oral history remains important for historians since it is no longer what really happened matters, it is the mutual dialogues that really matter.
I’d like to dwell on the Carr article/lecture for this post. In the first place, what a rich, eminently quotable, and occasionally flippant document. I wish I could write with such verve. This piece also strikes me as still relevant and fresh-sounding, despite its production more than six decades ago. Obviously, the central theme here is the essential tension between sources and their meanings, or maybe more accurately the vexed process of assigning certain meanings to certain sources (while deciding other sources are irrelevant) by historians. As Carr puts it, the “dichotomy” between “fact and interpretation” is one of the fundamental conflicts in the production of history (29), and I expect that dichotomy will be a recurring theme of our course. A thought I had is that Carr does an excellent job in unveiling the uncertainty within, and limitations of, sources like the Stresemann memoirs (17-19). Do editors of a collection provide an accurate measure of its overall content, or are they more likely to select according to their audience/tastes? Can one necessarily even trust the author of a source to be honest? Can one trust that said author is honest with themselves? As if those critiques were not destabilizing enough for those in search of objective facts about the past, historians in the decades since Carr’s piece have only added further layers of complexity to interpreting sources (can we trust language to be a neutral medium or is it an opaque lens in many respects?).
I think Carr also raised particular questions about the practice of medieval, ancient, and modern history that I would like comment on. The sources of medieval and ancient times have been substantially filtered and pared down, and yes, as he writes, reduced to a manageable corpus (14). Of course, historians did not perform the filtering process – monks decided what to keep in accordance with their worldviews, and they were assisted in the process of paring down the source base by time (people lose things and stuff gets wrecked – entropy). Plus, ancient and medieval peoples had far less access to writing implements and far less ability to use them if they did have access which doubtless constrained the initial source base. That means scholars of the ancient and medieval worlds function differently compared to those of source-rich eras which are nearer to our own time. I did have a medieval historian tell me once that he was not so sure how other historians could really vet each other’s works – because medieval history does rely on such a relatively small source base, it is likely one’s colleagues have closely read the document(s) you are writing about. Not often so for historians of later times.
Carr also envies the “ignorance” of classicists and medievalists on account of their limited source base (14) – the filtering of important from unimportant facts has been done for them (rightly or not is somewhat beside the point for him). Carr implies it is more difficult to be a historian of periods closer to us in time because of the plethora of sources encountered (14-15). I paused at these comments because it is usually the inverse of what historians are inclined to say – an extensive source base is enlightening and enriching! A limited one is frustrating and disappointing. But for Carr, a small source base was simplifying – ignorance enabled clarity, which struck me as a paradox indeed.
The title of this section of our course website is ‘Conversations,’ which, to me, suggests that we have some flexibility in the way we choose to present some of our thoughts on the readings. I believe I can still make a formal argument or critique, or pose a legitimate historiographical question, in a somewhat less formal way than I would while writing a paper. For that reason, I would like to share my thoughts about the readings in a conversational—but not informal—manner.
Originally my plan was to comment on Carr’s piece. As Barrie notes above, this chapter really is “eminently quotable, and occasionally flippant.” Yet every time I tried to formulate some cohesive thought about what it was I wanted to say in response to Carr—of particular interest to me was his seemingly complete disregard for non-written sources, his acknowledgement that words “have current connotations from which [the historian] cannot divorce them,” and his inability to face, head-on, what he calls the Fall of western historiography—I could not shake the feeling that I was taking the easy way out. I want to be very clear that this position is utterly personal. I do not think that comments preceding mine that deal with Carr in part or in whole “took the easy way out.” Rather, there was a certain recent experience of mine that, I think, made it difficult for me to ignore Cruikshank’s article.
This experience took place two weeks ago during Main Orientation Day (3 September). As a new graduate student, I figured it best to follow the advice of the university and head to the Chan Centre for Performing Arts to start “becoming part of our community,” as the FoG+PS website put it. I did not find much of what was said at Main Orientation particularly useful, in large part because it was not tailored to my interests like the History Department orientation or the TA orientation. There was, however, one speaker who made me feel confused, uncomfortable, and overwhelmed. Elder Larry Grant from the First Nations House of Learning welcomed us to the university, and then spoke earnestly about the unceded land of the Musqueam people—land on which we were now about to embark on our graduate studies. I have had several interactions with First Nations epistemologies before, through undergraduate courses in history, geography, and anthropology; through academic and non-academic books that I have read as requirements or as personal preferences; and through guest lectures and conversations with First Nations people back home in Ontario. But never had I experienced a speaker like Elder Grant. One could feel the big room fill up with discomfort and uncertainty—were we supposed to clap as Elder Grant informed us that the land we were borrowing did not belong to us, and that the land as we conceived it did not do justice to Musqueam understandings of land? That hardly seemed appropriate. Thankfully (perhaps mercifully), Elder Grant ended his speech exactly as he opened it, by welcoming us to the university and wishing us genuine success. The rest of the orientation carried forth, and eventually the room’s collective discomfort subsided. Yet here I am, two weeks later, with unresolved thoughts/feelings about what Elder Grant had to say. I think, though, that Cruikshank’s discussion of storytelling and land has given me at least some insight to work with as I continue to grapple with Elder Grant’s words.
Cruikshank’s fourth example of storytelling at the 1994 Yukon International Storytelling Festival centers on Jessie Scarff, an elder with the Kwanlin Dän First Nation of Whitehorse. Scarff presented various documents while telling her story, including a letter written by Indian agent John Hawksley to the Department of Indian Affairs in 1915, an editorial from the Whitehorse Star in response to Hawksley’s letter, and a letter written to the mayor of Whitehorse by a former Yukon Commissioner in 1962. These documents described in detail the removals of First Nations people from their traditional lands/homes in and around present-day Whitehorse. Cruikshank describes the tone of Scarff’s presentation as “clear, didactic, and uncompromising.” People expressed “discomfort or even hostility as they left.” Of course, if I was left uncomfortable by the well-wishing Elder Grant, I can imagine that non-Native audience members were comparatively more uncomfortable after listening to Elder Scarff. While I struggle to understand why people would express hostility, I can nevertheless empathize with that sense of being overwhelmed.
I cringe at the thought of my feelings being labeled “white guilt,” because I think that oversimplifies and devalues the complexity of my interaction with Elder Grant. Instead, I think it more apposite to engage with Cruikshank’s arguments about land and storytelling. Moreover, I think these arguments can provide insight into why this anthropological essay was included alongside a piece of “traditional” history (i.e., Carr’s) and a piece of literary criticism (i.e., Stein’s). Most importantly, I think I need to address this passage from Cruikshank: “When nonindigenous audiences understand […] Jessie Scarff as talking about politics, that inscription of meaning comes from audiences rather than from performers.” To me this suggests that I really do not and cannot know the full meaning of Elder Grant’s words, but that I can approach a fuller meaning through exploration of and discussion with Elder Grant and other Musqueam people. It reminds me of Carr and Stein in important ways. While I disagree with much of what Carr had to say, I can nonetheless appreciate the idea that history is “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” These ‘facts’ can come from a multitude of sources, that is, not from just the written ones that Carr and Stein consider. They can also come from the stories of Elders Grant and Scarff. They do not need to be ‘historical facts’ cited consistently in footnotes and other academic works. Rather, we can ascertain an endless supply of facts simply from listening to and discovering what it is that people that have to say.
Thanks for this, Conor, it’s a really thoughtful way into all of these readings. I wish it had been posted a little earlier so we could have incorporated it more fully into our discussion!
I think for my first post, I would like to share a thought I had as a student of the state and ethnic identity. I argued in my previous MA program that how the state incorporated various peoples through its bureaucratic machinery had a real impact on how these peoples thought about themselves historically. Mongols, for instance, who were incorporated into the Ming state were labelled as “Ming Mongols”, distinct from fellow Mongols who remained on the other side of Chinese control. Indeed, they seem to accept and act as loyal servitors, especially in a military capacity (at least in the extant records). However, this book in question de-centers and challenges this somewhat too neatly packaged analysis. Men whose ways of knowing and interpreting history, the grand narrative of politics and men, were distinctly different from females in the Mugade. As we talked about in class, women clearly had a epistemological and historical geography that defied, even rejected clear chronology or linear political events. Instead family, relationships and nomenclature seemed to be essential in retelling and even mythologizing the past. Therein how women interpreted historical ethnic identity is also very interesting. In the chapter “Locating a Woman’s Life” (paragraphs 18-19)the author explains how women conflated ethnic identity with their clan. Some linked it to “Shangaan-ness”, while others linked it to the place where they were living. The state, whether colonial or other, seems completely absent from these women’s ethnic identity. That is incredibly interesting to me, because not only are neat ethno-linguistic categories smashed, but it seems to indicate that even within a relatively small area ways of understanding ethnic identity are incredibly gendered and even defiant of the state’s attempts to claim a taxonomizing right or power over its citizens. I am still somewhat pessimistic in being able to recover similar contrasting ways of identity in medieval/early modern China, especially in the case of women.
As I had to read several texts about the “linguistic turn” or “cultural turn” recently, I want to comment on Stein’s essay “Literary criticism and the evidence for history”. First of all, I want to say that this is the first text I have read about this topic, in which the author explains the linguistic turn on a concrete example. This leads me to a simple, but important question (for me), if I have understood this right: Is the specific point in analysing a text following the linguistic turn, to include the grammar in the analyses? I am asking this because the more general approach not only to look for hard facts and dates in a chronic but also to also to ask other question to it doesn’t seem to as specific “linguistic”.
Both the Robert M. Stein and E.H. Carr piece deal with what are more commonly accepted today as the essential challenges of the historian in his or her task. Both Stein in his discussion of “deconstructing” primary sources, with his example of the Hyde chronicle, and E.H. Carr’s discussion of “imaginary understanding,” raise the question of social/cultural context, and the degree of depth of knowledge of a given social/cultural context one needs before they can hope to really grasp a certain object of study. This came up with our class discussion on the Heidi Gengenbach article, as many people in the class questioned whether Gengenbach was truly capable of accurately interpreting the oral testimonies of her interview subjects, due to the linguistic, social and cultural barriers at hand. I imagine most people have had an experience in life that reminded them of what a vast range of levels of familiarity or knowledge of a given society or culture can exist, and of the existence of a certain plane of familiarity/understanding that cannot be learned in books. To take these concerns to the extreme one ends up with a “you have to be Russian to really understand Russia” attitude which most of us aren’t willing to accept; but I do find the dilemma humbling and an important reminder of the need to go beyond libraries and search engines in order achieve that level of understanding of a given object of study that we all want as historians.
I found the subject of the Cruikshank article interesting but her arguments less clear. Her summarizing statement that things like the Yukon storytelling festival “provide locations for engaged exposure to different perspectives and opportunities to investigate how local knowledge and social action are mediated by dialogue” and that “we cannot know the outcomes of such transactions, nor can we expect them to be tidy, but we can learn a great deal if we take seriously the social agency of the participants” a bit vague. For the aim of our class perhaps her discussion on the power or worth of storytelling – e.g. storytelling as a subversive tool, storytelling as representing something wholesome or positive against the ills of the modern age – is more relevant. Her comments on storytelling as enabling a fluid, “adaptive” form of history of course challenge us to rethink our standard ideas of the discipline of history as an aspiration for hard, objective truth (despite the inevitably that we come up short, as the other readings discuss). I think the more interesting subject to be explored here – which she kind of dances around – is the commodification of First Nation’s history and culture; First Nations people “exporting” their history/culture to an outside audience as a source of capital; what it means when different levels of the Canadian government in league with private interests decide they want to “celebrate,” “promote,” or “include” First Nations history/culture (see the recent Pan-American Games); etc..
The question I would like to pose for this week is this: While the authors we read this week provide interesting challenges to what we typically think the practice of history is, in light of their criticisms, how do we judge the worth or quality of a historical work? I’d like to talk about this question because in their attempts to destabilize what we think history is and propose new models for how it should be practiced in the future, Carr, Stein and Cruikshank also indirectly attack how the value of a historical work was judged in the past, whether it be by the gross accumulation of facts or quality of traditional source analysis. I think issues related to this can be more clearly seen in the pieces by Carr and Stein, so I will focus on them, although Cruikshank’s opinion about this might be implicitly assumed to encourage if not require the use of the geography surrounding a subject of enquiry, songs and other non-traditional sources much like those used by Heidi Gengenbach in the readings we did for last week.
At the end of his essay Carr clearly states what he believes the purpose of history is: “a continuous interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialog between the past and the present.” (Carr 30) In this conception of history, facts and interpretation play off one another. “Objective facts” do not precede analysis, but instead historians designate certain past events as historically important facts and arrange those facts while in the process of interpreting the past. Carr punts on telling us how we should judge the quality of the interpretation piece of this interaction saying that “It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history… one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation,” but that he will “have to consider at a later stage what exactly is meant by objectivity in history.” (Carr 27) Without rules for judging interpretation, it is also impossible to judge whether a historian has done a good job in designating past events as important “historical facts,” since whether an event becomes a historical fact hinges on whether an interpretation put forward by a particular author “is accepted by other historians as valid and significant,” (Carr 12) something which they very well can’t do without some kind of rubric. In the end we are left with a murky picture of what Carr would consider a successful “dialog between the past and present.”
What Stein might expect in the kind of analysis he supports in his piece is more clear than in Carr’s, but omissions in his argument make such standards shaky at best. Stein has an interesting perspective on the linguistic turn and the tools literary analysis can provide to historians. Instead of focusing on the epistemological problems that reading historical documents as “texts” may cause in the writing of history, he instead guides us towards the benefits of viewing a source in light of the way it was understood at the time it was constructed, both in relation to its author and their motives as well as to other contemporary texts. Stein is more circumscribed in his claims about what his sort of history is about, calling the practices of literary analysis, “heavy weapons” that are “useful tools for the construction of a past reality of its fragmentary textual remains,” rather than the only proper way to do history as Carr insinuates in his text. However, the criterion available to Stein for judging the quality of texts within his approach must still be very different than in historical accounts that take a more traditional approach to sources. We might judge a Stein-style historical analysis based on how well it teases out the subtleties in the structure of the language used in its source as Stein does in his analysis of the chronicler’s use of time on pages 72 and 73. We might also look at how well it takes into account texts “circulating in culture” which the chronicler may have been directly engaging with in his report as well as contemporary related texts that the chronicler might not necessarily have known about. Both of these standards have issues. In the case of linguistic analysis, Stein totally ignores the fact that language itself is also a social construct. Projecting our ideas of the literary weight of a major event happening in a “single day” onto the text falls into the same trap as ignoring the religious reasoning present in it because it does not fit with modern rationality. In the case of contextualisation, Stein makes an even clumsier move, implicitly assuming that a single unified “culture” which one can define unproblematically always exists around a source in which texts might “circulate.” While Stein’s call for a more in-depth reading of sources is certainly compelling, in light of his failure to address these issues we are left wondering what qualities a more nuanced form of literary analysis must have in order to be considered good.
I see all three readings as commenting on the relation between sources and their contexts. This relation has two elements. The first concerns how we evaluate sources. Understanding context gives us a better understanding of how a source may have been biased, modified, distorted or under-determined in its creation. As Carr points out, this could arise from presentist political motivations of or other “processing” by the recorder/historian, while Cruickshank’s paper gestures in this direction from the composition of one’s audience. The second concerns exploring the range of things a source might tell us (about context). So, for example, one might use a source to understand literary culture or audiences, to use Stein’s and Cruickshank’s examples respectively. Grasping this connection between sources and context thus appears to allow us say things both internal and external to the source.
It also raises some big issues. One such issue, as Cruickshank points out in discussing Fred Meyers, is whether going back to the social/political context of a source might in some cases actually be misleading. For instance, we could read contexts into a source that the source actually isn’t in conversation with just because we believe that its author carried on a certain level of social/political engagement. In short, to what extent does “context” serve as a kind of covering law? And how do we think not only about the degree to which “context” is revisable in light of sources, but rather about the degree to which “context” actually applies to a source at all?
I should mention that I’m taking “context” to apply both in the way Carr uses it (as background info on the historian etc.) and Stein uses it (as other texts). Stein sees the source and the context as more or less inseparable, so I’m kind of begging the question here, but that’s another debate that’s probably better suited for class.
These three texts compliment each other well, and all revisit similar themes in regards to ways to read texts. These are tied up more broadly within the rejection of objectivity in history, but can also be read as road maps that direct future historians where to go (Carr and Stein are more direct in this, but Cruikshank provides valuable insight through example). The problem that I have had with many works (and where my most resent existential crisis began) is that it is hard to specifically define what makes history writing its own field of history. Carr places a connection to the past and present, arguing that it is a give and take between the two. Cruikshank is in the departments of Anthropology and Sociology, yet her work has very strong historical merits. Stein takes a more optimistic approach to where we as historians can go, but is still confident that there is a discipline at the end of his article (through the metaphor of the historical field as a room). We have broken down so many structures, yet have maintained clear discipline boundaries that blur the more we try to examine them. Are the very separations of academic fields problems for trying to determine how best to study the past? Does [h]istory need to be studied by [H]istorians? What makes history history, as opposed to historical sociology, anthropology, or any one of a million different fields and subfields?
For starters, I enjoyed reading Carr and found him to be an agreeable philosopher of history – so very agreeable, in fact, that I had to constantly remind myself that his book, What is History?, was published over half a century ago. That is to say, before the humanities were swept by the linguistic turn(s), whose roots are sometimes traced to Derrida; before historians became acutely aware of the issues of cultural translation, and before academia (most of it, anyway) opened its eyes to the epistemological limitations of language. “[T]he use of language”, Carr already proclaims by 1961, “forbids him” – the historian – “to be neutral” (19). Carr clearly could have used some insight from feminist theorists (his repeated use of the masculine pronoun being the prime example of his own limited grasp of just how heterogeneous past voices were), but the key philosophical insights, it seems to me, are there already. “[T]hat paperwork is as alien to Tlingit tradition as clan ownership is alien to Western law”, as Cruikshank notes in her article (60), would not have been an alien idea to a historian of Carr’s calibre at all.
Even in denouncing the serenity and self-confidence of empiricist historians who see “all information” as “within reach” and “every problem…capable of solution” (1), Carr strikes me as germane to one issue in particular that historians currently face. In a way, he anticipates ever-bigger strides made towards assembling some version of “ultimate history”, which does not rhyme so badly with the contemporary rise of big data, and the recent surge in interest in applying neuro-scientific methods to the study of the humanities. Carr’s lesson is one of humility: the human experience cannot, and will never, be reduced to empirical data. Shreds left from the past are always tainted by the values of those who transmitted them. The data is never pure.
It is along those lines that Stein concludes his chapter: “We cannot simply wish away our consciousness of language and its effects”, he says (81). In one aspect does Stein bring us a step further than Carr: having borne witness to the fiasco around Derrida and the linguistic turn(s), Stein has come to realize that deconstruction leaves nothing behind for the historian to work with; hence his emphasis on the dual role of historians as deconstructors and constructors.
Cruikshank’s article, in my opinion, really brings these discussions down to the ground from the realm of theory by showing us what is at stake in them. For, lest we forget, these are discussions that many people might consider time-consuming chatter in academe’s ivory tower (and not entirely without reason). Reading her piece, we are struck by the simple fact that our societies and legal systems – those that exist in real life, outside the university – remain largely unshaken by Derrida and the linguistic turn(s). The “language of policy making” – the language indigenous people need to employ in order to defend their lands and culture – is, at the end of the day, shaped by a centuries-old, Western tradition (Cruikshank 58). The paradox here – and this is maybe more of a Catch-22 – is that by conforming to this language and all the assumptions underpinning it, indigenous people risk losing what makes them culturally “authentic”, when cultural “authenticity” is what liberal democracies demand in order to legitimize political autonomy (Cruikshank 65).
One is left wondering why the work done by historians and other humanists in the past few decades, and the epistemological issues put forward by people like Carr and Stein, have not been more widely received among policymakers and the larger public. It may sound like a cliché, but I believe that mass education should become a primary objective of historians who have come to realize this divergence between their theories on the one hand and social realities on the other. Historians should bear more political weight than they now do. Whether historians can bear the weight I am proposing they do, I am not sure.
E.H Carr’s “The Historian and His Facts” and Stein’s “Literary Criticism and the Evidence for History” evoked my memory of myself pondering on the substance and purpose of history when I was an undergraduate student. When I was an undergraduate student, I once came across a primary source on the Emperor Constantine: Life of Constantine (by Eusebius). Even though this source is one of the most comprehensive sources for historians to study the religious policies of Constantine and to have a glimpse of his overall life as an emperor, it was extremely subjective based on the religious standing of the author. Before reading that source, I think I more or less resembled the “nineteenth-century historian” in E.H Carr’s article, who had the most ambitious goal to “recover history” as objectively as possible. (Even though I have already realized that all historical articles or books I have read are biased, I still believed that history has an objective hard-core with imaginative pulp surrounding it) However, after reading that source, I became more and more skeptical of the substance of history: I wonder if there is really something we can rely on as history of the past? If all history is biased and subjective, I wonder what is the purpose of being a historian? The answer I gave myself back then was that maybe part of the purposes of historians are first of all to recognize that all history is subjective, and then try to put ourselves in the author’s shoes to see what social, economic, religious and political backgrounds made them subjective.
E. H Carr and Stein helped me elaborate my answer. Carr argues that history is “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”; thus, the function of history is to “master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present” (Carr 30, 26). Therefore, we should first be aware of the subjectivity of history(the author of historical articles made selection of their raw material and we as readers make selection, whether consciously or unconsciously, in our interpretation of the things we read), and then we will be able to have a dialogue with the author, this dialogue would be the the unending dialogue connecting the present and the past.
Stein also told us that we can form this dialogue not only by looking at what was being directly expressed(historical facts), rather, we can use critical thinking in literary criticism to also examine what was being untold(like literary structures).
Hence, history is no longer a boring monograph or a pack of evidence for historians to “decode”; rather, it becomes a vivid dialogue between the reader and writer, between past and present.
I want to mention the third reading “Negotiating with Narratives” just to emphasize the importance of dialogue, or in this context: oral history. Comparing to the previous two articles, this dialogue is no longer between reader and writer, it is between storyteller and audiences. I think maybe it is precisely because of the importance of dialogue, the tradition of oral history remains important for historians since it is no longer what really happened matters, it is the mutual dialogues that really matter.
I’d like to dwell on the Carr article/lecture for this post. In the first place, what a rich, eminently quotable, and occasionally flippant document. I wish I could write with such verve. This piece also strikes me as still relevant and fresh-sounding, despite its production more than six decades ago. Obviously, the central theme here is the essential tension between sources and their meanings, or maybe more accurately the vexed process of assigning certain meanings to certain sources (while deciding other sources are irrelevant) by historians. As Carr puts it, the “dichotomy” between “fact and interpretation” is one of the fundamental conflicts in the production of history (29), and I expect that dichotomy will be a recurring theme of our course. A thought I had is that Carr does an excellent job in unveiling the uncertainty within, and limitations of, sources like the Stresemann memoirs (17-19). Do editors of a collection provide an accurate measure of its overall content, or are they more likely to select according to their audience/tastes? Can one necessarily even trust the author of a source to be honest? Can one trust that said author is honest with themselves? As if those critiques were not destabilizing enough for those in search of objective facts about the past, historians in the decades since Carr’s piece have only added further layers of complexity to interpreting sources (can we trust language to be a neutral medium or is it an opaque lens in many respects?).
I think Carr also raised particular questions about the practice of medieval, ancient, and modern history that I would like comment on. The sources of medieval and ancient times have been substantially filtered and pared down, and yes, as he writes, reduced to a manageable corpus (14). Of course, historians did not perform the filtering process – monks decided what to keep in accordance with their worldviews, and they were assisted in the process of paring down the source base by time (people lose things and stuff gets wrecked – entropy). Plus, ancient and medieval peoples had far less access to writing implements and far less ability to use them if they did have access which doubtless constrained the initial source base. That means scholars of the ancient and medieval worlds function differently compared to those of source-rich eras which are nearer to our own time. I did have a medieval historian tell me once that he was not so sure how other historians could really vet each other’s works – because medieval history does rely on such a relatively small source base, it is likely one’s colleagues have closely read the document(s) you are writing about. Not often so for historians of later times.
Carr also envies the “ignorance” of classicists and medievalists on account of their limited source base (14) – the filtering of important from unimportant facts has been done for them (rightly or not is somewhat beside the point for him). Carr implies it is more difficult to be a historian of periods closer to us in time because of the plethora of sources encountered (14-15). I paused at these comments because it is usually the inverse of what historians are inclined to say – an extensive source base is enlightening and enriching! A limited one is frustrating and disappointing. But for Carr, a small source base was simplifying – ignorance enabled clarity, which struck me as a paradox indeed.
The title of this section of our course website is ‘Conversations,’ which, to me, suggests that we have some flexibility in the way we choose to present some of our thoughts on the readings. I believe I can still make a formal argument or critique, or pose a legitimate historiographical question, in a somewhat less formal way than I would while writing a paper. For that reason, I would like to share my thoughts about the readings in a conversational—but not informal—manner.
Originally my plan was to comment on Carr’s piece. As Barrie notes above, this chapter really is “eminently quotable, and occasionally flippant.” Yet every time I tried to formulate some cohesive thought about what it was I wanted to say in response to Carr—of particular interest to me was his seemingly complete disregard for non-written sources, his acknowledgement that words “have current connotations from which [the historian] cannot divorce them,” and his inability to face, head-on, what he calls the Fall of western historiography—I could not shake the feeling that I was taking the easy way out. I want to be very clear that this position is utterly personal. I do not think that comments preceding mine that deal with Carr in part or in whole “took the easy way out.” Rather, there was a certain recent experience of mine that, I think, made it difficult for me to ignore Cruikshank’s article.
This experience took place two weeks ago during Main Orientation Day (3 September). As a new graduate student, I figured it best to follow the advice of the university and head to the Chan Centre for Performing Arts to start “becoming part of our community,” as the FoG+PS website put it. I did not find much of what was said at Main Orientation particularly useful, in large part because it was not tailored to my interests like the History Department orientation or the TA orientation. There was, however, one speaker who made me feel confused, uncomfortable, and overwhelmed. Elder Larry Grant from the First Nations House of Learning welcomed us to the university, and then spoke earnestly about the unceded land of the Musqueam people—land on which we were now about to embark on our graduate studies. I have had several interactions with First Nations epistemologies before, through undergraduate courses in history, geography, and anthropology; through academic and non-academic books that I have read as requirements or as personal preferences; and through guest lectures and conversations with First Nations people back home in Ontario. But never had I experienced a speaker like Elder Grant. One could feel the big room fill up with discomfort and uncertainty—were we supposed to clap as Elder Grant informed us that the land we were borrowing did not belong to us, and that the land as we conceived it did not do justice to Musqueam understandings of land? That hardly seemed appropriate. Thankfully (perhaps mercifully), Elder Grant ended his speech exactly as he opened it, by welcoming us to the university and wishing us genuine success. The rest of the orientation carried forth, and eventually the room’s collective discomfort subsided. Yet here I am, two weeks later, with unresolved thoughts/feelings about what Elder Grant had to say. I think, though, that Cruikshank’s discussion of storytelling and land has given me at least some insight to work with as I continue to grapple with Elder Grant’s words.
Cruikshank’s fourth example of storytelling at the 1994 Yukon International Storytelling Festival centers on Jessie Scarff, an elder with the Kwanlin Dän First Nation of Whitehorse. Scarff presented various documents while telling her story, including a letter written by Indian agent John Hawksley to the Department of Indian Affairs in 1915, an editorial from the Whitehorse Star in response to Hawksley’s letter, and a letter written to the mayor of Whitehorse by a former Yukon Commissioner in 1962. These documents described in detail the removals of First Nations people from their traditional lands/homes in and around present-day Whitehorse. Cruikshank describes the tone of Scarff’s presentation as “clear, didactic, and uncompromising.” People expressed “discomfort or even hostility as they left.” Of course, if I was left uncomfortable by the well-wishing Elder Grant, I can imagine that non-Native audience members were comparatively more uncomfortable after listening to Elder Scarff. While I struggle to understand why people would express hostility, I can nevertheless empathize with that sense of being overwhelmed.
I cringe at the thought of my feelings being labeled “white guilt,” because I think that oversimplifies and devalues the complexity of my interaction with Elder Grant. Instead, I think it more apposite to engage with Cruikshank’s arguments about land and storytelling. Moreover, I think these arguments can provide insight into why this anthropological essay was included alongside a piece of “traditional” history (i.e., Carr’s) and a piece of literary criticism (i.e., Stein’s). Most importantly, I think I need to address this passage from Cruikshank: “When nonindigenous audiences understand […] Jessie Scarff as talking about politics, that inscription of meaning comes from audiences rather than from performers.” To me this suggests that I really do not and cannot know the full meaning of Elder Grant’s words, but that I can approach a fuller meaning through exploration of and discussion with Elder Grant and other Musqueam people. It reminds me of Carr and Stein in important ways. While I disagree with much of what Carr had to say, I can nonetheless appreciate the idea that history is “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” These ‘facts’ can come from a multitude of sources, that is, not from just the written ones that Carr and Stein consider. They can also come from the stories of Elders Grant and Scarff. They do not need to be ‘historical facts’ cited consistently in footnotes and other academic works. Rather, we can ascertain an endless supply of facts simply from listening to and discovering what it is that people that have to say.
Thanks for this, Conor, it’s a really thoughtful way into all of these readings. I wish it had been posted a little earlier so we could have incorporated it more fully into our discussion!