Re-Forming History

Mark Sandle, William Van Arragon

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781498299992
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Théorie et critique de l'histoire

Does the discipline of history need a reformation? How should Christian faith shape the ways historians do their work? This book, written for students, considers the "how" of doing history. The authors first examine the current "liturgies" of the historical profession and suggest that the discipline is in crisis. They argue for "re-formed" Christian practices and methodologies for history. The book asks important questions: why do we do history, and for whom? How should faith shape how we do our research and tell stories? What do we owe the dead? How should Christian historians practice "dangerous memory"? And how can Christian historians do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? How might we rethink, reform, renew, reimagine, and re-practice the study of the past? Christian historians must be sentinels of hope against the world's forgetfulness, the authors argue, and this book offers some pathways for rethinking our practices from a Christian perspective.

chapter 1

Where Are We, and How Did We Get Here?

“Learning from the past is a great idea that is almost never taken seriously.”22

Does History Have a Problem?

As we said in the introduction, Ludmilla Jordanova argues that history is best understood as a set of shared practices, rather than any core knowledge. So what are these practices and processes that together constitute what one might term the “liturgies” of the discipline? What we will do in this chapter is briefly examine the development of these liturgies, or these practices and rules that guide our doing of history, and offer some explanation of where these rules came from. If we are to fruitfully rethink the discipline, we need to be aware of the ways in which how we do what we do have been formed.

We began this book with the premise that the discipline of history is in crisis. There are issues within the discipline itself that all historical practitioners either experience or recognize, and these things seem to be calling out for a change in how we do history. Four major issues or areas of tension stand out.

Competition and Collaboration:

The current landscape within which historians work is a deeply ambivalent, almost paradoxical one. The system displays both competition and rivalry but also deep cooperation and collegiality. Practiced and portrayed as an artisanal craft, it actually operates with a deeply industrial ethos. Profoundly individualized, it nevertheless requires collective efforts to function properly. In some contexts it is radically subversive, while in others the discipline serves the interests of the powerful.

(Most) historians are rooted in two separate but related communities: the university and the disciplinary community. In the university, the historian competes for resources, status, promotion, increments, grants, and rewards to further their career. In both the classroom and in their research, the university historian appears as an autonomous agent, seeking career advancement (or job security), tenure, and so on. But the historian is also part of a wider community: the disciplinary community. This community can be seen as acting a little like a guild: a semi-closed organization, governed by a particular set of norms, values, ethics, and practices, fiercely protective of its interests. (Major examples of these guilds include the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association.) Once it begins to coalesce, the system reproduces itself and expands. More and more historians take their place in the guild, competing with one another yet at the same time preserving the system. Historians train undergraduate and graduate students in their ways, and they rise up and join the ranks, perpetuating the essential practices. At the heart of this guild lies a deeply contradictory set of pressures. As in the university, the first of these is an ethos of competition—competing for grants, jobs, esteem, and publishing contracts. But again, the guild is also a place of deep human interaction, creativity, and collaboration. Historians work closely together to improve each other’s work, encourage and inspire one another to seek out new ways of thinking about things, collaborate on research, read manuscripts, and comment on conference papers. The guild operates to foster competition and collaboration and creativity, but it also produces conformity, which is also partly why many of the key developments in historical methodology and practice have come from outside the guild. The discipline of history has been one of the most active borrowers of interpretive theories and practices from other fields, for example from the social sciences and literary theory.

Truth, Skepticism, and the Objectivity Impasse

Postmodernism, for example, is one of those disciplinary imports, emerging first from fields like literature, literary theory, linguistics, and philosophy, and it has altered the terms by which historians understand the past. Since the 1970s, according to its critics, the culture of postmodernism has cut against the authority of the discipline to describe historical reality because there can be no essential distinction between fact and fiction, between history and invention. History, many have said, must be defended against such heresies. This essential and deep-seated skepticism about the validity of historical knowledge, the credibility of the discipline, and the knowability of the past has created something of a crisis for practitioners of traditional history. Where do they go from here?

Perhaps the most contentious (but by no means the only) recent debate since the arrival of postmodernism has been about the possibility and/or desirability of objectivity in the writing and researching of the past. As Christian historian William Katerberg has noted, today the debate has reached something of an impasse.23 The twentieth century began with a fairly widespread acceptance that the heroic model of objectivity from the natural sciences—the lone, detached, autonomous, objective scientist who has the God’s-eye view and is able to transcend their own culture and background and beliefs—could be more or less replicated in the study of human society. Gradually, of course, this came under attack; first, from the recognition of the inescapable subjectivity of all human scholarly practices, and second, because science itself came to be seen as no longer a neutral activity, but as something deeply shaped by politics, ideology, or commerce.

As the discipline of history retreated from the heroic model of objectivity, it decided to circle its wagons around a more limited understanding of objectivity, one marked by communal group accountability and disciplinary conventions. Under the shadow of increasing skepticism unleashed by postmodernism, Katerberg argues that

it is noteworthy that in recent decades the project of defending objectivity in which the professional institutions and methods of the discipline provide checks and balances that keep scholarship honest, and the diverse, contentious and (ideally) democratic community of scholars judges which scholarship is reliable, even if controversial, and which is unreliable. This pragmatic objectivity is grounded institutionally, culturally, socially and indeed politically, and is not heroically transcendent or individually autonomous. The knowledge produced is thus universally valid only insofar as it is judged so by a diverse community of scholars in a given time. And it is stable and reliable rather than completely relative, because some points of view are ruled out of bounds. 24

This pragmatic idea of objectivity has been reinforced by other developments, including the linguistic turn, which argues that language is all that we have in trying to understand the past. We only have the traces left behind by the past—words to look at, hold, decipher, translate, and try to make sense of. We have no direct access to the people of the past, thus the traces produce profound limitations on our ability to know the past, which go beyond our inherent human subjectivity.

Some historians—while still retaining the pragmatic, diluted understanding of objectivity—retreated further, arguing either that the pursuit of historical truth and objectivity was in itself a worthy activity (even if objectivity itself was an illusion and unattainable), or that perhaps an approach rooted in subjectivity and empathy was more valuable. But most historians acknowledged the impasse between those who argued that objectivity was impossible and that history had to change how it worked, and those who argued that history was provisional, limited, and contingent. And so we reached an impasse. No one accepted the old heroic model of objectivity any more. No one was really sure whether or not the word was useful anymore: Should it be retained but redefined, or abandoned? Was it something you pursued, but would never attain? No one could agree on whether history itself was impossible, or whether the discipline could just carry on, but more circumspectly and less confidently.

The impasse dragged on. And everyone just went quietly back to work.

History as Industrial Era Activity

The discipline of history is increasingly coming to bear the imprint of the capitalist industrial modernity in which it exists. The scale of the production of history—the manufacturing output of historians, as it were—is profoundly affecting not just the quantity of history being produced, but also the type of history, and the way in which research is carried out. The pressures to publish or perish in higher education mean that history is being produce...