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--- On Fri, 15/10/10, Pranesh Prakash <the.solips...@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Pranesh Prakash <the.solips...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [silk] The subaltern studies collective?
> To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
> Date: Friday, 15 October, 2010, 17:52
> 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?
In fact, it is stunningly on topic. If a discussion of GCS' work is not
ultimately a discussion about why historiography seduces a philosopher who
started with literature, it is nothing.
Whole generations of historians have been wrecked psychologically by the
obdurate insistence of history teachers on avoiding any mention of
historiography. Ludicrous; as if it were not the most important thing,
something to be internalised before being allowed anywhere near a professional
programme of learning history. Professional programme is an important
qualifier; I like reading Alex von Tunzelmann or C. V. Wedgwood without
thinking about the historiographic aspects of their work.
Sometimes, the historiography shines through; usually, it doesn't. I've already
mentioned Partha Chatterjee's book, and since this is the second reference I am
making to it, I shall now go look it up.
And here it is: A Princely Impostor: The Kumar of Bhawal & the Secret History
of Indian Nationalism. Unfortunately, it isn't a good first read; a J. Alfred
Prufrock type is liable to have read and re-read it, blogged about it and
tucked it away in the recesses of his mind for frequent allusion. For those
unexposed to at least a first reading of the times and society in that part of
India, it might be heavy going. For some others, as mentioned, it would have
been a breeze and the fun would have been to sense the nature and composition
of society that is revealed, sometimes explicated, but most often left in
implicit terms, and finally tied up in a perorative portion.
Reading E. H. Carr is good; for the uninitiated, it is probably the most
accessible. Unfortunately, it tends to get overwhelmed by Marxian analyses, and
something different is needed, a post-Marxian reading, if that makes any sense.
Again, apart from that, it is clear that most of our discussions are
disastrously narrow-minded, and are restricted to old controversies which are
really not considered very important in the larger order of things; the moment
we use Whiggish and Toryish, we are shown up to be oldish, English,
Oxbridgeish, not even redbrick, just plain old refectory and clerestory and
architrave and flying buttress.
Sorry to be cheeky, but the English are really not the world's best historians.
Never were, never will be. Only those that we get to read because everybody we
know, everybody we read about, is reading them.I continue to use them, to dig
heavily into them, but unfortunately, from Ranke down, the others were better.
Not just the Germans; the French and the Italians too, massively so, before
everything was swamped by the Russians and the Americans.
