History and Theory最新文献

Revisiting the remarkable experimental work of the pioneering early twentieth-century psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky (1875–1940), this article argues for the historiographical significance of her counterintuitive findings concerning the human imagination and the phenomenon of “reverse hallucination.” By means of an exhaustive and forensic archival inquiry, this article reconstructs Perky's heretofore (essentially) unknown biography, providing new insights into the context and broader importance of her research, both with respect to the history of the human sciences and in relation to the history of American artistic modernism. At the same time, these pages recursively deploy her distinctive perspective on the way the perceptual experiences of reality inosculate with projective fantasy, activating her findings as a component of a nontraditional disciplinary practice.

This article treats an analogy that is used persistently in the history of historiography: the equation of historiography with painting and the identification of the historiographer with the painter. In examining the conceptual stakes of this (auto)identification, the article mobilizes the analogy in order to explore larger issues of historical theory and, through the prism of historical painting, reflects on the problem of representation and narrativist approaches to history as text. The article argues that the historiographic desire surfacing in a comparison with painting does not concern painting's ability to capture the past; rather, it concerns its ability to capture the viewer. Opening with a brief survey of the ut pictura historia analogy in the history of historiography, the article makes this claim by analyzing historiographical engagements with the analogy in antiquity (turning to Herodotus and Polybius) and by exploring ancient history painting itself (offering pride of place to the Alexander Mosaic). In thus engaging with the theory of historiography via concrete historical material, the article leverages a historical episode of interaction between textual media and visual media to find that they are structured by the same simple desire that continues to exert its force today: the desire to see for oneself.

With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the “Historical Futures” collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures.

This review essay aims to reconstruct the main tenets of the “narrative constructivist” position defended by Kalle Pihlainen in his book titled Historia fallida and to lay out some of the ambiguities this position generates. I begin by exposing the core commitments underwriting this theoretical project and insist upon the centrality of the distinction between constructivism and constructionism and upon the arguments he advances against the contemporary approaches in the theory of history that advocate the idea of an experience or a presence of the past. Then, I outline the criticism he levels against the understanding of historians’ work as a “conversation with the past” and highlight that, on Pihlainen's account, a responsible historical enterprise must necessarily assume the unavailability of the past and, hence, the ontological distinction between the present and the past. In the final part of the essay, I formulate three interrogations with regard to the overall orientation of this project. First, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's concept of a “historical nonsynchronicity,” I question the possibility of establishing a clear-cut separation between the past and the present and show that the present is never a homogenous field, for it entails different levels of temporality and a plurality of conflicting registers of meaning. Then, I challenge the description of the past as “a closed domain with no room for interaction.” Finally, I point out that the gap Pihlainen introduces between historical narratives and existential narratives cannot be maintained insofar as the historian's practice must be anthropologically grounded—that is, it must be understood as drawing on a narrative capacity (narrativeness) that belongs to the human life-form.

In The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with contemporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philosophers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog's book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog's denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog's “untimely meditations” also show that much.

Historians and anthropologists share a common problem of setting criteria for the validation of their interpretations. While many features are shared and explicit—for example, that a full range of data needs to be considered and that information should be reliably sourced—the actual criteria for assessing supportable interpretations are frequently left unexamined. Following consideration of schemes that have been put forth for validating interpretation in literature, this article considers the criteria applied to the history of an Indonesian town and those employed when scholars have revisited the site of a predecessor's research. Because no interpretation is without some theoretical backdrop, this article considers a particular theory of culture that may facilitate the refinement of standards. The criteria that are then suggested—conjuncture, scope, intersection, comparability, and self-accounting—may help to pinpoint not uniquely correct interpretations but better or worse ones. To test these criteria, this article briefly analyzes two case studies of both historical and anthropological concern: one relates to the history and organization of tribal-based polities and the other concerns the dispute over the circumstances surrounding the death of Captain James Cook. The article concludes that reinvigorating a conversation about such criteria can reinforce the shared interests of historians and anthropologists that have proven so fruitful to recent scholarship.

This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian's attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian's gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as “things of history”? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are “things of history” only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? In this article, I outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items for two main reasons. First, it allows for a “critique of material evidence,” which is still missing in the historical discipline. Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history.