bigideas

A great night, and a lot of fine points, some of which I’ll try to string together into a summary. Most of these points were made by other people, so apologies for hijacking them to put my own conclusions far more elegantly than I could have on my own.

Apologies also for the length of this, I wanted to get as much of it down as I could before I forgot it all. There were lots of other excellent points made that I’ve forgotten already…

Explanatory History

Early on in the discussion we made a distinction between “empirical” and “explanatory” history. The former asks what happened when, and seeks to establish “basic facts” of chronology. The latter asks why what happened happened: it seeks to establish causal relationships between facts.

History is a story, a narrative we tell ourselves about how the present got to be the way it is. As such, the explanatory history of one era is very likely to be different from that of another, and that’s okay because they’re meeting different needs.

History is studied by people in the present with their own concerns and prejudices, and also of course their knowledge of what happened later. In a world in which Oswald Mosley was elected to parliament in 1959, historians would seek — and find — explanations for why that happened, even given the same historical evidence we have in our world.

We talked a bit about the influence of German idealism, and the idea of history as a process of “plugging” historical facts into a theoretical schema (eg Marxism).

Although many historians would regard that as a crude approach, our suspicion was that all explanatory history works something like this even if the “metanarrative” isn’t a consciously worked-out system.

Empirical History

Empirical history seems much less problematic than the explanatory kind. Unlike the epxlanatory kind, empirical history, we think, is either right or wrong. We didn’t quite mention holocaust denial, but I guess that’s an example of a hard case for people who are inclined to be relativists on chronology — “what happened” — itself.

We might, in other words, accept that there are various different views on why Moseley’s project failed. But we’re not so permissive on the question of whether Modley was elected. Either he was or he wasn’t. Explanatory links aren’t so clear-cut.

But the standard of evidence even for empirical history isn’t clear. Historians use “primary sources” and other artefacts, all of which are known to be potentially unreliable. The only way they have of confirming a conclusion is by recourse to other primary sources or artefacts. Certainly we didn’t feel this led to a laissez-faire “anything goes” approach to empirical history, but it does cast a shadow of doubt over aspects of it. That openness to doubt is typically acknowledged — though presumably with little enthusiasm — by professional historians.

Heritage

When talking about heritage we were particularly interested in artefacts in the present, whether they’re totem poles in the British Museum or languages like Welsh and Cornish. There seems to be something qualitatively different between history, which is about telling stories about what happened in the past, and heritage, which is about experiencing things in the present that are linked by a common past.

One suspicion that hangs over heritage is that it does present a narrative, but doesn’t do it explicitly. It’s hard to be critical of a “heritage experience” that’s been constructed for you in a way that’s informed by, say, nationalist prejudices. It’s much easier to read a history book critically because the narrative laid out in black and white.

We talked a bit about the Jorvik Viking Centre, and the idea of “recreating” history. In a sense it turns the past into a theme park, an “experience” that we accept without analysing it despite knowing it’s likely to be fact mixed with ideology and prejudice of various kinds. In doing so we get a synthetic version of history that can easily be mistaken for simple truth.

But we also recognised the danger of assuming that non-historians are credulous and naive. In fact people consume all kinds of culture, including things packaged as “heritage”, in sophisticated ways. They may not produce the kinds of analyses historians would hope for, but they don’t necessarily swallow whole whatever’s given to them either.

Folklore

We talked a bit about folklore and its relation with heritage. Nathan made a strong distinction between heritage and folklore. The latter is a very specific idea, coming out of the Germanic tradition of the Brothers Grimm, about engaging with and preserving the culture of “the folk”.

We wondered whether any of the assumptions underlying such projects were sound. Who are “the folk”? Do they really have long traditions whose present form informs us about the past? Or are they, like us, constantly changing in response to the world around them — a world that, by definition, includes us? These problems are for anthropologists what some of the problems referred to above are for historians.

I was reminded of modern notions of “folk psychology“, “folk etymology” and even “folk philosophy“, which seem to be similar projects with similar underlying assumptions, proving that the notion of a “folk” and of “folk traditions” has proved more robust than we might have expected.

By Rich on Jan 24, 2008