On 2010-10-14 14:07, Deepa Mohan wrote:
> This thread is getting as abstruse as its subject....ABHISHEK! what is
> historiography??
Two excellent, lucid, and short introductions to historiography are E.H.
Carr's *What is History?* and Keith Jenkins' *Re-thinking History*.
(And surprisingly, I find myself aiding thread non-drift, at least
vis-à-vis the e-mail subject, by copy-pasting the following paragraphs
on historiography.)
>From an review by Christropher Kent of *On "What is History" : From Carr
and Elton to Rorty and White* by Keith Jenkins:
> "What is history?" asked E.H. Carr. His answer, terse, lucid and dogmatic,
> made his book of that title the best selling introduction to historiography
> that it still remains nearly forty years later. Several generations of
> historians have cut their teeth on it. Chief among its few competitors has
> been Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History (1967), almost as terse, lucid
> and dogmatic, and aimed directly at Carr whose unabashed Whiggism, with its
> presentist and determinist tendencies, is confronted with the Toryism of
> historicism, history for its own sake, and suspicion of social scientism.
> Pairing these two books for teaching purposes staged a satisfying contest
> between history's two most basic theoretical positions. An additional
> attraction was the contrast of intended audiences between Carr's more
> generalized "intelligent reader" -- Carr was a professional diplomat and
> editorial writer for The Times as well as an historian -- and Elton's more
> exclusive attention to the pr
actitioner of academic history. Carr emerged on top, by the verdict of the
market place, not least because his emphasis on the social and his left of
centre progressivism were in tune with the upsurge of social history in the
1960s and 1970s. Elton is out of print: Carr remains profitably in print at
forty times the price of the first Penguin edition of 1964, having sold over a
quarter million copies.
>
> But nobody has yet published a book titled "What is Historiography?"-- rather
> surprisingly, given that historiography is currently all the rage among
> publishers. Whether historians are all that interested is another matter. A
> fairly recent survey of the profession in the U.S. found that only one
> percent of historians considered it their primary or even secondary field.(1)
> One reason for this attitude is perhaps that historiography is considered
> vaguely parasitical. As literary criticism is to literature, so is
> historiography to history: "doing it" is surely superior to writing about how
> it is done. Real historians do it in the archive: with primary sources: like
> Ranke. A related reason for historiography's slightly dubious reputation is
> that it promotes self-consciousness, a characteristic historians tend to view
> with suspicion, as encouraging at best an unhealthy subjectivity and at worst
> a debilitating preoccupation with matters ontological ("What is Reality?) and
> epistem
ological ("What is Truth?") that are the philosophers' business, not ours. From
this standpoint, the pat answer to "What Is Historiography?" is "Trying to
answer the question `What is History?'"
>
> There was a time when historiography did not seem to matter much. At any
> rate, I never encountered an historiography class throughout my entire
> student career, from 1959 to 1968. The terra, if it meant anything, usually
> meant surveying the prior historical literature on a given topic or field --
> a "state of play" report. Or it might be used as a near synonym for research
> methodology. One might read Carr's irresistibly titled (and short) book, or
> even R.G. Collingwood's more tantalizingly titled and much more demanding The
> Idea of History, in the interests of becoming "well-rounded." One might even
> participate in a debate over whether history was an art or a science --
> whatever that meant. But matters seemed fairly clear cut. Everyone seemed to
> know what history was: it was what historians did. Other disciplines
> confirmed this belief, making it very clear that they did not do history.
> Literature was still committed to the "new criticism," strongly
> antihistoricist in its emph
asis on the eternal aesthetic achievement of the masterpiece, firmly fixed in
the canon and untrammelled by temporality. Social sciences were militantly
anti-historical as if their very identities depended on it, as historically
they indeed had. Philosophers were generally scornful of history, which offered
few questions of serious interest to the dominant analytical school in the
Anglo-American world. Epistemologically, historical knowledge was deemed
inferior due to its lack of rigour. Well meant efforts by a school of
philosophers to elevate it to the higher standard of properly scientific
knowledge by forcing it into the Covering Law Model of explanation proved
unconvincing -- the type of generalization that resulted was as inelegantly
encumbered with qualifications as was Ptolemaic astronomy with epicycles. At
bottom, it had to be admitted, history told stories, and what could be less
scientific than that?
