Hybrid Humanities—Integrative Approaches to Humanities Histories

Abstract

Recent history has been unusually eventful in the humanities, with harshening political circumstances in some countries but also attempts to carve out new missions and link the humanities to agendas of relevance on environment, climate, energy, digitalization, migration, and other contemporary challenges. In this context, might there be cause to review the history of humanities as informed by the ongoing rethinking of humanities futures? The point of departure of this article is that there are historical humanities that actually were not so much “humanities” at all in their own time. Rather they were integrative parts of domains such as natural history, field exploration, museums, and collections—a differently embedded version of the humanities that are now reappearing as an elemental, geo-anthropological project under concepts such as the Anthropocene. This history is far from unknown, but it has been less visible, concealed by the historicizing of science, and related intellectual and institutional histories, which have de-emphasized their humanities past. This article attempts to make it more visible as a relevant “deep” history of the reconfigurations of humanities that are emerging in the twenty-first century.