Hi All;
Just catching up! Agreed with these comments.
I should have typed factual history in quotation
marks!
I think we can learn a lot from Kabbalist notions
that we cannot approach the truth until all interpretations have been
enflamed.
I embrace the notion of history of story with the
caveat that some stories explain the evidence better than others. Caroline
Walker Bynum is delightful in this regard:
"In
comedy, the happy ending is contrived. Thus, a comic stance toward doing history
is aware of contrivance, of risk. It always admits that we may be wrong. A comic
stance knows there is, in actuality, no ending (happy or otherwise) – that doing
history is, for the historian, telling a story that could be told in another
way. For this reason, a comic stance welcomes voices hithertofore left outside,
not to absorb or mute them but to allow them to object and contradict. Its goal
is the pluralistic, not the total. It embraces the partial as partial. And, in
such historical writing as in the best comedy, the author is also a character ….
So
I see my approach in these essays not as a new method but as a new voice or a
new mode in history writing: the partial or provisional voice, the comic mode."
from ,
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on
Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion,
25
Shya
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 12:26
PM
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] Non
Specialists Challenging Specialists
Ted, I think the question of "how much" is at a particularly
interesting juncture right now, due in part to the emerging 'digital
humanities' stuff. In this NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html?sq=digital%20humanities&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&scp=2&adxnnlx=1295982943-fjS/5+zh5xkNP3lN6Cyetw)
one of the profs interviewed makes an interesting claim about this being a
post-theoretical 'methodological moment' in which people are finding new ways
to work with the sheer masses of data that are coming online.
I fear
the downside of this is the potential for many more totalizing arguments. In
some sense it's akin to the apparent inability displayed by many students
weaned on the interwebs to read carefully an individual essay. I guess I
wonder if the monograph will still have a role to play in academia, and what
all this means for those of us who work on what are often perceived as
"boutique" subjects.
- Noah
On 1/25/2011 1:12 PM, Ted Hand
wrote:
[log in to unmask]
type="cite">Noah, I very much agree with your qualification. As Kathryn
said, this "selection" is necessary. The warning about wrongheaded effots to
totalize is well taken, and you're correct to point out the methodological
issue of "how much?" My point was not to criticize academia for making
arguments, I'm just very much interested in these problems concerning what
to include and how this selecting process shapes later searches for larger
stories.
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Noah Gardiner
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
The whole story? Isn't there a
map/territory problem there? I think the urge to tell the whole story --
to contextualize something in the broadest possible manner -- is part of
what often leads to a lack of specificity and sloppy historiographical
generalizations in terms of periods, epistemes, etc. -- mistakes deriving
from assigning causality to temporal coincidence. It seems to me that
those of us who work as historians on concerns pertinent to this list are
precisely in the business of unearthing alterities that have been
lost/suppressed in most tellings of 'the whole story' of a given period or
of transitions from one period to another (e.g. the famous 'scientific
revolution' of Modernity's creation myth).
Sorry if I'm jumping all
over one off-handed thing you said, Ted. This just grabbed my attention
because I'm running into this issue as I write my dissertation prospectus.
I'm trying to follow developments in one fairly discrete corpus of
manuscripts and their producers across the 13th-16th centuries and few
thousand miles, and my advisers are getting jumpy about the scope of it
being too large. It seems to me that this is a methodological issue re how
much context one needs to provide. Returning to the brief exchange from
last week, I think Actor-Network Theory can provide historians with some
important tools/arguments for determining which sets of facts to include
in a given account, while freeing them of the need to account for broad
historical periodizations which come with a great deal of other
ideological baggage.
Of course historians select facts with an
agenda in mind; we write narratives rather than lists of stuff that
happened. It seems to me we just have to make the basis of our selections
as transparent and consistent as possible.
-
Noah
On 1/25/2011 11:47 AM, Ted Hand wrote:
Dave's point about selection of facts is
especially pertinent given the tight focus of most academic historical
and theoretical writing. Making an academic argument leaves little room
for the whole story.
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 7:43 AM, kaostar
<[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
interesting
i have a
problem with the reified and absolute notion of 'factual
history' (and am allegedy a historian) in that while it may be based
on facts there is always a reflexive element or an agenda which acts
as an intermediary. Leave out one fact, or emphasise another one more
than might be appropriate, and it paints a very different picture of
whatever it is that is being historicised ....
one
of (the many) historical biographies of Crowley, for example, makes no
mention of Kenneth Grant; who is significant both as AC's final
secretary, an important pupil and a simply vital posthumous literary
champion through the 60s and 70s, without whom it is arguable that
we'd know Crowley as only a minor and sidelined figure .... it's
rather like writing about UK Union history and failing to cover 1983-4
(Miner's Strike)...
History is contingent,
such as the historian's nightmare of a week after publication of years
of research a data source coming to light which overturns some or all
of the conclusions made
and despite the
democratisation and allowance of multiple viewpoints, pluralities and
perspectives that the 'net allows for these days, there is always the
notion that histories are still to a large extent written by the
winners
Dave E
---------- Original Message -----------
From: Sue/Shya <
[log in to unmask]>
To:
[log in to unmask]
Sent: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:31:29 -0700
Subject: Re:
[ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] Non Specialists Challenging Specialists
>
Dear All; >
Acknowledging the critique of oversimplification,
and noting Fritz's comments via Karen Armstrong; isn't this really a
question authenticity and legitimacy? For Whitmore (and Frew),
authenticity and legitimacy are perhaps based on factual history
rather than the power of sacred history. >
Shya >
>
>
4c. Re: Non
Specialists Challenging Specialists
> Posted
by: "Léon van Gulik" [log in to unmask] leonvangulik
> Date:
Mon Jan 24, 2011 4:07 pm ((PST))
>
> Dear Caroline, and
others,
>
> You wrote:
>
> "I understand
that one can have a religious experience regarding something
>
that isn't, or may not be, historically true - I've had such
experiences
> myself. Is the problem some sort of ill-marriage
between history and
> religious experience/belief? Are the two
simply incompatible?"
>
> Experience has no truth-value.
Often one can distinguish between the
> experience itself, and
the interpretation. I was much impressed by Walter
> Stace's
book 'Mysticism and Philosophy', in which he shows the familiy
> resemblences between mystical experiences as reported by
people from
> different religions. On the whole I would argue
that knowlegde and
> experience are incompatible, even if you
can have knowledge about an
> experience, or and experience
knowledge.
>
> Sometimes the suspension of disbelief is
helpful to get a person the
> experiences he is craving for,
but in the end this does not sit well with
> the way academics
collect data. So yes... I would think history and
> religious
experience are incompatible.
>
> Best,
>
>
Léon
>
> ------- End of
Original Message -------
