What is Microhistory?

Abstract

The following paper is a michrohistorical intervention in one aspect of David Graeber’s meta-narrative in Debt: the First 5,000 years. Graeber posits four overarching cycles of world history based on the alternation of the systematic use of coinage and virtual credit money. This grand narrative is set explicitly in the context of world-systems analysis and has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. In this intervention, I define what microhistorical practice is, I situate microhistory in the intellectual context of intervening in large grand narratives – either to shed light on them, problematize them, raise new questions about them, or perhaps even in some cases overturn them. Microhistorians do not avoid narrative, but they seek a return to narrative through a close analysis of small events situated within larger frameworks. Finally, I explore preliminary and approximate applications of microhistory to the Axial Age bullion cycle, one cycle in the great alternations between credit and coin. I focus on one specific philosopher – Plato, and create a microhistorical account of his actual relationship with Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher, who I claim, is the living inspiration for the philosopher king’s in Plato’s utopian imaginary Kallipolis, the famous ideal city-state of his Republic. Microhistory is a historical practice aimed at a return to narrative through detailed analysis of primary documents. Microhistorians are generally concerned with overlooked persons, and marginalized voices. They wish to gain understanding and insight into the properties of large-scale global processes and events by looking at the finely textured details of everyday life during the chosen time period under study. Ideally, a microhistory will not simply be a biography, nor will it be primarily the analysis of a small village, although a person's life or village can serve as a site of analysis. Instead, microhistorical practice is about developing an observational lens, or a point of view, onto larger landscapes and structures of history. Paul / What is Microhistory? 65 The larger the landscape, the more important it is to have several sets of eyes, arranged at certain potentially illuminating positions, in order to appreciate the full range and complexity of the historical structures we wish to understand. If we extend this metaphor to the field of all written history, then the role of microhistorians would be to find those points of view from which our limited gaze onto the past can survey such a landscape in its richest diversity (see Levi 1991: 93–113). As the name suggests, a point of view is microscopic and limited. However it may be that it is precisely through those limited, marginalized, and forgotten points of view in history that we stand to gain clear insight into the past. Unlike the geographical landscape in our metaphor, however, the field of time and the passing of events may not be best understood from above. The metaphor fails us because history is not like the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest, large overarching structures best viewed from photographs taken inside the safety and comfort of planes or helicopters. Conceptual frameworks like longue dureés, or class conflict, are like trying to fly over and above history, and photograph enormous features. But, by looking down from these great heights, we can often overlook the human elements below. The structures of history are not simply like the structures of geology. Tectonic plates do not appreciate the beauty of the mountains they form, nor can they experience them. It is the human being who interacts with the structures of geology and in the domain of history, humans also create and fashion those structures in a reciprocal relationship. Social, cultural, and material structures are created by and in turn help create the human world: homes, relationships, universities, cities, links of trade, and written words. Sometimes it may do no good flying above these structures in order to view their complicated interactions. At crucial junctures, we may have to look at all the details of the paths surrounding the sojourns below, and once again change our scale of analysis. Some features we saw from the helicopter no longer matter, while other features we overlooked (perhaps, the wind and the cold) play a role and interact strongly inside the small scale. By moving down from the safe hierarchy of the photographer in the plane to the person who has to make the journey, we gain insight into how the large is felt by the small. Given enough context, we might even be able to recreate the mental life of the participant. If we knew the rocks were razor sharp, the wind was turbulent, and the temperature was below freezing, we can begin to surmise how a climber may have felt. Of course, we would never have direct evidence of how they felt, but through a detailed analysis of the various features and obstacles surrounding the climb, we can make reasonable inferences as to what it might have been like. Perhaps, we can even uncover a narrative, or discover a truth. Social Evolution & History / September 2018 66 The canonical books of microhistory are precisely those works that uncover narratives and shed light on larger historical structures. Natalie Zemon Davis's Return of Martin Guerre, for example, recreates the lives of the sixteenth-century peasants and sheds new light on the social structures of the time. Crucially, it illustrates how peasant women were able to exploit aspects of this patriarchal world to their favor. This comes to light over the course of telling a story about Arnauld du Tihl, a peasant who is able for quite sometime to pretend to be Martin Guerre, fooling most of the villagers and living in every way as if he were the Real Martin Guerre. Through a detailed analysis of inquisitorial records, Davis is able to recreate this drama and unveil a really existing narrative – a story that really happened – and use this story as a way of asking questions about social history (Davis 1983). In this work, Davis is not so much concerned with overarching structures like world-systems, or revolutionary moments, but is choosing to intervene in a well-known story through a close examination of court records. By showing how Arnauld knew almost impossible details about everyone he met, how he was physically different in size, and how the behavior of Bertrande and Arnauld changed over the course of their invented marriage, and the later court case, Davis is able to show that Bertrande was a collaborator who was choosing to go against certain accepted mores in order to maintain a happy relationship (Davis 1988). In choosing this particular point of view, Davis intervenes on certain assumptions about women in the sixteenth-century village life. This was a specific intervention aimed at overturning certain assumptions, but there are broader interventions in microhistory as well. Donald Wright's The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is such a text. By focusing on a small place over a long time period, Wright overturns assumptions about the Atlantic slave trade and sheds new light on how global processes affected the political and social structures in Niumi of The Gambia (Wright 2010). The chosen technique of analysis here is a reduction of spatial scale, while the temporal scale is from the fifteenth through the twenty-first century. In Davis's case we had a reduction of scale spatially, temporally, and structurally (by focusing on a relationship) whereas in Wright's case the reduction of scale is only spatial, and is not concerned with focusing on an individual. However, in both cases we find a detailed analysis aimed at shedding light on larger structures: in one case social structure, in the other case, a world-system/economic structure. The choice of reduction in analysis is up to the microhistorian, and there are probably as many choices as there are historical events. The aim however is the same: to see the world in a grain of sand. 3 There are microhistorical works that combine aspects of both social and economic structure as well. Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou is a thick description of a fourteenth-century village and discusses economics, culPaul / What is Microhistory? 67 ture, the inquisition, religion, magic, power, marriage, and medieval perceptions regarding the fate of the human soul. After reading Ladurie's work one feels as if this French professor succeeded in creating a literary time machine. In this case we have certain assumptions overturned about the past as well. From the perspective developed in Montaillou, life did not seem all that bad in the dark ages – except for maybe the lice. Of course, the inquisition eventually intervenes savagely, but it seems that for most of the time, some of the great centers of power encircling the village and its environment, like the church and the monarchs, more or less kept from intermingling in the villagers' everyday affairs (Le Roy Ladurie 1978). There are also canonical works of microhistory that shed light on the intellectual aspects of global structures. Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, for example, investigates the world-view of a sixteenth-century miller and shows how his philosophy refuses neat categorization into the dominant systems of sixteenth century thought (Ginzburg 1980). This work challenges the intellectual trickle-down theories of philosophical development: as if peasants, workers, or villagers develop their views only to the extent that they can internalize and understand the views of the contemporary literati. Ginzburg shows that there is a rich tradition of peasant culture, replete with honorable and complex ideas, and that these can interact with the dominant systems of power/knowledge of the day from the bottom up. We can see how the microhistorian is confronted with a number of crucial choices. These decisions involve change of scale, aim of intervention, and collection and