Review: The past is a foreign country (revisited) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Erecting the Boundaries of That Foreign Country Called the Past
History and Theory, 2008
Although all historians at some point or another reflect upon the nature of this strange thing called the past, few actually write books about it. Fewer still take the time to analyze how people themselves in the eras they have studied conceptualized ideas of time gone by. 1 Peter Fritzsche undertakes this arduous, fundamental task in Stranded in the Present and succeeds on a number of levels, at times brilliantly. Beautifully, even evocatively, written and impressively argued, this is less a historiographical study and more an analysis of affect and reflection, reviewing the ways in which Europeans and Americans reconceptualized their notions of the past in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It ranges widely from very specific issues to global concerns, and if in the end some arguments succeed better than others, this merely underscores the ambition of Fritzsche's project. For many intellectuals, both professional historians and scholars in other disciplines, imagining how to conceive of history has been a major methodological concern. How can we, or indeed can we ever, understand the lives of people in the past? Can we reconstruct their world, or is the past permanently lost to us? For many historians, such debates often center on the use of primary source materials, and the advantages and disadvantages of different types. For example, most historians, especially of the modern period, tend to favor written materials, either published or collected in public archival collections. The advantages of such texts are obvious, but so are the disadvantages: not only did most people in the past not leave written statements about their lives (at least not until the twentieth century), but also such texts are frequently collected and organized in contexts, such as state archives, whose very form, like that of the nation-state in general, would be quite foreign to the individuals whose lives they purport to record. Some fields, notably African and Native American history, have championed the use of oral history, both in isolation and in combination with other approaches, and this of course has raised its own series of methodological objections, or at least caveats, from other historians. 2
Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 2018
Steven Pinker’s thesis on the decline of violence since prehistory has resulted in many popular and scholarly debates on the topic that have ranged—at times even raged— across the disciplinary spectrum of evolution, psychology, philosophy, biology, history, and beyond. Those disciplines that made the most substantial contribution to the empirical data underpinning Pinker’s notion of a more violent prehistoric past, namely, archaeology and bioarchaeology/physical anthropology, have not featured as prominently in these discussions as may be expected. This article will focus on some of the issues resulting from Pinker’s oversimplifi ed cross-disciplinary use of bioarchaeological data sets in support of his linear model of the past, a model that, incidentally, has yet to be incorporated into current accounts of violent practices in prehistory.
Through the recent symbolic appropriation of an archaeological site, an indigenous community in southwestern Colombia is subverting the colonial-created meaning attributed to the physical and cultural remains of ancient peoples; once feared and socially proscribed, these remains are now entering a new symbolic realm and playing an important role in the construction of territory and social life. A reflexive and committed archaeology can contribute to processes such as this one in the larger context of decolonization.
"The Past is a Foreign Country": 1992 Harrington Lecture
The Harrington Lecture at the University of South Dakota is an annual public lecture on the importance of the liberal arts to elements of the selected faculty member's career. In my lecture I outline how changing understandings of the concepts of "time" and "past" influence the sometimes difficult interaction of archaeologists and Native Americans. Some of these ideas appear in other publications, but my experiences in relation to the Yellow Thunder Camp case and my work with the American Indian Movement n the late 1980s don't appear elsewhere and might be of interest.
In this interview, Marek Tamm asks questions concerning some of the main developments and arguments in Eelco Runia's thinking about history. The following topics are discussed: the relations between history, psychology and fiction; the critique of representationalism in the contemporary philosophy of history; the presence of the past; the question of continuity, discontinuity and mutation in history; the importance of metonymy as the quintessential historical trope; the influence of Giambattista Vico on Runia's thinking; the intellectual affinities between Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; and Runia's ongoing research project on Red Queen history.
This paper is essentially an exercise in the Philosophy of History and it aims at exposing the transmodern understanding of history. The transmodern project is a Latin-American school of philosophy which seeks to undo the vestiges of the colonial experience or 'the coloniality of power', as they call it. They do not seek decolonization, they seek decoloniality rather. History is one of the spheres in which they seek to achieve this; and for them, decolonizing history can only be achieved by rethinking history. In their opinion, history can best be conceived as 'Memory Keeping' and not just documentation of facts from the past in books through writing. But this understanding of history is not unique to the transmodern project. Various strands of contemporary theorizations about history have advocated a return to memory. Most prominent of the reasons for these advocacies are: the fragmentary nature of the postmodern condition and the trauma of the first half of the 20th century. Despite these, this essay is poised to show that the transmodern understanding of history as memory which developed as a reaction to the defective connection of history to books and writing is a more nuanced and universal appreciation of the human fact of history. The paper adopts the philosophical methods of analysis, critique and hermeneutics.