Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Historical Narratives (historical + narrative)
Selected AbstractsThe Logic of Action: Indeterminacy, Emotion, and Historical NarrativeHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2001William M. Reddy Modern social theory, by and large, has aimed at reducing the complexity of action situations to a set of manageable abstractions. But these abstractions, whether functionalist or linguistic, fail to grasp the indeterminacy of action situations. Action proceeds by discovery and combination. The logic of action is serendipitous and combinative. From these characteristics, a number of consequences flow: The whole field of our intentions is engaged in each action situation, and cannot really be understood apart from the situation itself. In action situations we remain aware of the problems of categorization, including the dangers of infinite regress and the difficulties of specifying borders and ranges of categories. In action situations, attention is in permanent danger of being overwhelmed. We must deal with many features of action situations outside of attention; in doing so, we must entertain simultaneously numerous possibilities of action. Emotional expression is a way of talking about the kinds of possibilities we entertain. Expression and action have a rebound effect on attention. "Effort" is required to find appropriate expressions and actions, and rebound effects play a role in such effort, making it either easier or more difficult. Recent theoretical trends have failed to capture these irreducible characteristics of action situations, and have slipped into a number of errors. Language is not rich in meanings or multivocal, except as put to use in action situations. The role of "convention" in action situations is problematic, and therefore one ought not to talk of "culture." Contrary to the assertions of certain theorists, actors do not follow strategies, except when they decide to do so. Actors do not "communicate," in the sense of exchanging information, except in specially arranged situations. More frequently, they intervene in the effortful management of attention of their interlocutors. Dialogue, that is, very commonly becomes a form of cooperative emotional effort. From these considerations, it follows that the proper method for gaining social knowledge is to examine the history of action and of emotional effort, and to report findings in the form of narrative. [source] Renegotiating the Historical Narrative: The Case of American Higher EducationHISTORY OF EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2004Paul H. Mattingly [source] Religious Identity as an Historical Narrative: Coptic Orthodox Immigrant Churches and the Representation of HistoryJOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2006GHADA BOTROS This paper looks at how the Coptic Church narrates this history particularly as it transcends the national boundaries of Egypt to serve migrant Copts in Western societies. The historical narrative of the Coptic Church celebrates its contributions to early Christianity; defends its stance in the Chalcedon Council in 451 CE; and celebrates a legacy of triumph and survival after the Arab conquest. Building on theories on collective memory, this paper shows how the present and the past shape one another in a very complex way. The paper is based on interviews with both lay and clerical members of Coptic immigrant communities in Canada and the United States and on textual analysis of books, bulletins and websites launched on and by the Church. [source] Negotiating Historical Narratives: An Epistemology of History for History EducationJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2010JON A. LEVISOHN Historians typically tell stories about the past, but how are we to understand the epistemic status of those narratives? This problem is particularly pressing for history education, which seeks guidance not only on the question of which narrative to teach but also more fundamentally on the question of the goals of instruction in history. This article explores the nature of historical narrative, first, by engaging with the seminal work of Hayden White, and second, by developing the critique of White by David Carr. The picture of historical inquiry that emerges is one in which the fundamental cognitive activity is one of negotiating among narratives. Students, like historians, like any of us, come to the work of historical inquiry in possession of prior narratives, which are then thrown into an encounter with other narratives of varying size and scope. Good historians enact the negotiation among narratives responsibly and well, demonstrating the virtues of historical interpretation. History education, therefore, ought to help students improve their historical interpretations at the same time as it fosters those qualities that make them good interpreters. [source] Moral, Method, and History in Anne Dowriche's The French HistorieENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2004Megan Matchinske In "Truth in the Telling: Moral, Method and History in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie," Megan Matchinske asks readers to consider anew early modern history's propensity to convey moral rather than evidentiary truths. Exploring the formal attributes of historical presentation as they reflect on questions of cause and accountability in Dowriche's Historie, Matchinske underscores the connection between marginalized voice and the shape and direction of historical narrative. The French Historie's polemical style, its focus on structure, trajectory and selection, insists that writers of the past, especially those lacking in power, status or appropriate gender qualification, teach and learn better when their convictions are strong and their storyline directive. Anticipating and disrupting later historico-analytical models in its attention to interpretive closure and instructional force,to "the moral at the end of the story," Dowriche's Historie reminds us of how directive history becomes when "Truth" is on our side. [source] 1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION,HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2009ALON CONFINO ABSTRACT Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction. [source] Future eating and country keeping: what role has environmental history in the management of biodiversity?JOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY, Issue 5 2001D.M.J.S. Bowman In order to understand and moderate the effects of the accelerating rate of global environmental change land managers and ecologists must not only think beyond their local environment but also put their problems into a historical context. It is intuitively obvious that historians should be natural allies of ecologists and land managers as they struggle to maintain biodiversity and landscape health. Indeed, ,environmental history' is an emerging field where the previously disparate intellectual traditions of ecology and history intersect to create a new and fundamentally interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Environmental history is rapidly becoming an important field displacing many older environmentally focused academic disciplines as well as capturing the public imagination. By drawing on Australian experience I explore the role of ,environmental history' in managing biodiversity. First I consider some of the similarities and differences of the ecological and historical approaches to the history of the environment. Then I review two central questions in Australian environment history: landscape-scale changes in woody vegetation cover since European settlement and the extinction of the marsupials in both historical and pre-historical time. These case studies demonstrate that environmental historians can reach conflicting interpretations despite using essentially the same data. The popular success of some environmental histories hinges on the fact that they narrate a compelling story concerning human relationships and human value judgements about landscape change. Ecologists must learn to harness the power of environmental history narratives to bolster land management practices designed to conserve biological heritage. They can do this by using various currently popular environmental histories as a point of departure for future research, for instance by testing the veracity of competing interpretations of landscape-scale change in woody vegetation cover. They also need to learn how to write parables that communicate their research findings to land managers and the general public. However, no matter how sociologically or psychologically satisfying a particular environmental historical narrative might be, it must be willing to be superseded with new stories that incorporate the latest research discoveries and that reflects changing social values of nature. It is contrary to a rational and publicly acceptable approach to land management to read a particular story as revealing the absolute truth. [source] Negotiating Historical Narratives: An Epistemology of History for History EducationJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2010JON A. LEVISOHN Historians typically tell stories about the past, but how are we to understand the epistemic status of those narratives? This problem is particularly pressing for history education, which seeks guidance not only on the question of which narrative to teach but also more fundamentally on the question of the goals of instruction in history. This article explores the nature of historical narrative, first, by engaging with the seminal work of Hayden White, and second, by developing the critique of White by David Carr. The picture of historical inquiry that emerges is one in which the fundamental cognitive activity is one of negotiating among narratives. Students, like historians, like any of us, come to the work of historical inquiry in possession of prior narratives, which are then thrown into an encounter with other narratives of varying size and scope. Good historians enact the negotiation among narratives responsibly and well, demonstrating the virtues of historical interpretation. History education, therefore, ought to help students improve their historical interpretations at the same time as it fosters those qualities that make them good interpreters. [source] NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF'S JUSTICE: RIGHTS AND WRONGS: AN INTRODUCTIONJOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2009Paul Weithman ABSTRACT This introduction sets the stage for four papers on Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs, written by Harold Attridge, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bernstein, and myself. In his book, Wolterstorff defends an account of human rights. The first section of this introduction distinguishes Wolterstorff's account of rights from the alternative account of rights against which he contends. The alternative account draws much of its power from a historical narrative according to which theory and politics supplanted earlier ways of thinking about justice. The second section sketches that narrative and Wolterstorff's counter-narrative. The third section draws together the main points of Wolterstorff's own account. [source] Countering the hegemony of the Irish national canon: the modernist rhetoric of Seán O'Faoláin (1938,50)1NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 3 2009MARK MCNALLY ABSTRACT. The telling and re-telling of national history has long been recognised in studies of nationalism as one of its key legitimising and mobilising strategies. In this article I illustrate how a rhetorical approach can effectively explore this dynamic and emotive dimension of nationalist ideology by examining the rhetorical strategies in the Irish liberal intellectual, Seán O'Faoláin's, attempts to reconstitute the popular canon of Irish history in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, I show that contrary to depictions of O'Faoláin as a European liberal who employed rational argument to undermine and encourage the rejection of Irish nationalism and its emphasis on rhetorical narratives of the past, O'Faoláin's challenge to the Irish national canon reveals that he himself mobilised historical narrative to promote his own modernist version of Irish liberal nationalism and demonstrated in the process that he was one of the most skilful rhetors of his day. [source] National subjects: September 11 and Pearl HarborAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2004Geoffrey M. White ABSTRACT Despite a long tradition of writing on collective representations of the past, anthropology has contributed relatively little to the expanding literature on national memory. Yet ethnographic approaches have the facility to delineate practices that create historical narrative and give it emotive power while keeping in view longer-term political forces that underwrite dominant imaginaries. In this article I inquire into the discursive origins of emotional involvement in national history by juxtaposing two events of spectacular violence, September 11 and Pearl Harbor. Focusing on the representation of these events in public culture and at memorial sites, I argue that personal narratives play a central role in formations of national subjectivity, at times emotionalizing dominant memories and at other times opening possibilities for alternative visions. [source] ,WHY ARE WE CURSED?': WRITING HISTORY AND MAKING PEACE IN NORTH WEST UGANDATHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2005Mark Leopold This article examines the nature of peacemaking and social reconstruction in Arua district, a marginalized border area of Uganda, in the late 1990s. After considering other recent accounts of violence and peacemaking, it focuses on the roles of local history writing and other forms of historical narrative in coming to terms with past violence. Local historians had two main aims: to maintain a particular understanding of the past within the local community itself, and to present themselves to others as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the violence in their past, as part of a wider process of mending relationships with both neighbouring groups and the Ugandan state. In attempting this, they deployed a variety of media that may be understood as historical narratives, from the performance of ritual healing ceremonies to writing conventional local histories. [source] Uncanny Exposures: A Study of the Wartime Photojournalism of Lee MillerCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 4 2009PAULA M. SALVIO ABSTRACT Taking the World War II photojournalism of Lee Miller as my point of departure, this article has several purposes. First, it introduces the wartime photojournalism of Lee Miller to education. I situate Miller's use of surrealist photography within emerging curricular discourses that take as axiomatic the significance of the unconscious in education and thus the challenge of representing histories that are simultaneously present, but cannot be perceived or integrated into conventional historical narratives. Second, I provide a textual analysis of Lee Miller's wartime oeuvre with specific attention paid to how this work alters education's "field of vision" of trauma. While this analysis makes no claims to exhaust education's possibilities for framing the war photography of Lee Miller, it will show how Miller's use of surrealist rhetoric and framing devices offered her the expressive power to represent traumatic experiences that resist being integrated into larger social and cultural contexts. By thinking through Miller's war photography, this article contributes to the scholarship in education that is dedicated to establishing a psychoanalytic history of learning and teaching that is capacious enough to address the "difficult knowledge" we too often cast beyond the pale of the curriculum and to expanding the rhetorical tactics possible for representing such difficult knowledge. [source] Narratives as Cultural Tools in Sociocultural Analysis: Official History in Soviet and Post-Soviet RussiaETHOS, Issue 4 2000Professor James V. Wertsch An approach to sociocultural analysis based on the ideas of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others is used to provide the foundation for discussing narratives as "cultural tools." The production of official, state sponsored historical narratives is examined from this perspective, and it is argued that this production process may be shaped as much by dialogic encounters with other narratives as by archival information. These claims are harnessed to examine the production of post-Soviet Russian history textbooks, especially their presentation of the events surrounding the Russian Civil War of 1918,20. [source] WHO SUFFERED FROM THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM?HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2010A DUTCH EXAMPLE ABSTRACT Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a "narrowly academic crisis," as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working-class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch "neo-Calvinist" Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its "historicist" worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of "historical identifications," or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from "historical identifications." Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms. [source] DIAGNOSING FROUDE'S DISEASE: BOUNDARY WORK AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY IN LATE-VICTORIAN BRITAINHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2008IAN HESKETH ABSTRACT Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they "cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth." This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian's discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as "constitutionally inaccurate." Froude suffered from "an inborn and incurable twist," argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing "Froude's disease" as the inability to "make an accurate statement about any matter." By unpacking the construction of "Froude's disease," the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude. [source] The Cage of Nature: Modernity's History in JapanHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2001Julia Adeney Thomas "The Cage of Nature" focuses on the concept of nature as a way to rethink Japanese and European versions of modernity and the historical tropes that distance "East" from "West." This essay begins by comparing Japanese political philosopher Maruyama Masao and his contemporaries, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Both sets of authors define modernity as the moment when humanity overcomes nature, but Maruyama longs for this triumph while Horkheimer and Adorno deplore its consequences. Maruyama insists that Japan has failed to attain the freedom promised by modernity because it remains in the thrall of nature defined in three ways: as Japan's deformed past, as the mark of Japan's tragic difference from "the West,"and as Japan's accursed sensuality, shackling it to uncritical bodily pleasures. In short, Maruyama sees Japan as trapped in the cage of nature. My argument is that Maruyama's frustration arises from the trap set by modern historiography, which simultaneously traces the trajectory of modernity from servile Nature to freedom of Spirit and at the same time bases the identity of the non-Western world on its closeness to nature. In other words, nature represents both the past and the East, an impossible dilemma for an Asian nationalist desirous of liberty. By revising our historical narratives to take into account the ways in which Western modernity continued to engage versions of nature, it becomes possible to reposition Japan and "the East" within modernity's history rather than treating them as the Other. [source] The History of Children in Australia: An Interdisciplinary HistoriographyHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 10 2010Carla Pascoe Children have long been shadowy or forgotten figures within historical narratives. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that a critical historiography of children and childhood emerged. In the Australian context, histories of young people were not published until the 1980s. Whilst the historiography of the child is now a burgeoning field, it has been haunted by two major challenges: a lack of sources authored by children themselves; and a tendency amongst adult scholars to romanticise children. This article situates the Australian historiography of children within an international context. Given the difficulties of reconstructing the lives of children in the past, it argues for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the insights of folklore, material culture, geography and oral history. [source] The Crisis in the Investiture Crisis NarrativeHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2009Maureen C. Miller Recent research has undermined the connection between lay investiture and the iconic event usually seen as the most dramatic expression of the investiture conflict: the encounter of Pope Gregory VII and King Henry IV of Germany at Canossa. This is just one, however, of many interpretive problems plaguing historical narratives of the investiture crisis. This essay briefly summarizes the classic interpretations that have dominated 20th-century understanding of these events and sets out the major problem raised in more recent research. Arguing that a new interpretive framework is necessary, the author suggests two paths forward: a radical reconsideration of the papacy from a truly post-confessional perspective and a reevaluation of the conflict in the context of new understandings of lordship and political change. [source] Interpretations of the Past and Expectations for the Future Among Israeli and Palestinian YouthAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ORTHOPSYCHIATRY, Issue 1 2002Shifra Sagy PhD This study was developed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian researchers for the purpose of examining social knowledge of young people in the conflicted region of the Middle East. The article examines the relations between measures of interpretations of the past (perceptions of legitimacy and emotional reactions toward the historical "narratives" of Israelis and Palestinians) and measures of expectations of the collective future, as reflected in conflict resolution beliefs. Data were collected from December 1999 to February 2000 (before the present crisis [2000,2002] in Jewish-Palestinian relations) among representative samples of high school students (Grades 10 and 12): 1,183 Palestinians in the Palestinian National Territories and 1,188 Israeli Jewish students. The results are discussed from developmental, social, and cultural perspectives. [source] The Piccolomini library in Siena Cathedral: a new reading with particular reference to two compartments of the vault decorationRENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 3 2005Susan J. May The murals of the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral, featuring episodes from the life of Pope Pius II, are usually discussed as distinctly separate from the vault imagery, predominantly all'antica and mythological scenes. The latter, combined with the centrally-placed, antique statue of The Three Graces, has led some authors to comment on the library's overtly 'pagan' content as shockingly incongruent with its setting in the sacred precincts of the duomo. Little attention is paid to the significance of the stucco relief above the entrance, The Expulsion from Paradise. The article pro-poses that such a prestigious project for so powerful and erudite a patron as Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, and painted by the highly acclaimed artist Pinturicchio, is unlikely to have been devised without careful attention to its iconographical programme. Focussing primarily on the two largest compartments of the vault, it is demonstrated that the four principal figures there should be interpreted as representatives of the four temperaments. By defining their relationship as such to the Expulsion from Paradise relief and to the historical narratives on the walls, this article shows that the mythological scenes in the vault play an allegorical role within the broader scheme and that a coherent programme underpins the entire decoration, with the writings of Saint Augustine and of his fifteenth century followers at its core. [source] ,WHY ARE WE CURSED?': WRITING HISTORY AND MAKING PEACE IN NORTH WEST UGANDATHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2005Mark Leopold This article examines the nature of peacemaking and social reconstruction in Arua district, a marginalized border area of Uganda, in the late 1990s. After considering other recent accounts of violence and peacemaking, it focuses on the roles of local history writing and other forms of historical narrative in coming to terms with past violence. Local historians had two main aims: to maintain a particular understanding of the past within the local community itself, and to present themselves to others as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the violence in their past, as part of a wider process of mending relationships with both neighbouring groups and the Ugandan state. In attempting this, they deployed a variety of media that may be understood as historical narratives, from the performance of ritual healing ceremonies to writing conventional local histories. [source] Written out of history: Contemporary Native American narratives of enslavementANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2009Max Carocci The article looks at historical narratives of enslavement circulating among contemporary Native Americans. These narratives, the author argues, constitute an important element in the construction of current tribal identities as much as they are relevant for a reflection about the role played by hegemonic racial discourses in the politics surrounding ethnically-tied resources. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||