ABSTRACT As a periodization that is generally understood to refer to an era of Terrestrial relationships that developed with modernization and nuclearization, the Anthropocene cannot be applied simply to premodern histories and texts. However, it has introduced historians to geological periodization as a mode of describing periods of changed Terrestrial relationships in time. This article suggests that, in thinking about how historicizing texts conceptualized environments, geological (“‐ocene”) periodization provides a useful model and grammar by which to observe and describe how authors understood their environmental pasts, the agencies involved in reshaping Terrestrial regimes, and the role of environments in periodization. This article uses two genres of historicizing texts from Western Britain in the twelfth century to develop an approach to reading geological periods out of such texts. It suggests that doing so not only reveals important information about how these authors thought about environments in time but also provides a model by which the “geological turn” in the environmental humanities and premodern history can be put into mutually productive conversation without being inappropriately constrained by a term that was developed for modern phenomena. Outwith the Anthropocene, reading texts for what they say about environmental pasts, times, and agencies enables environmental thought to be analyzed in multiple dimensions.
ABSTRACT Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph , aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. As he shows, magical nominalism participates in the process of destroying the Scholastic idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos (an idea that was initiated by nominalism in the fourteenth century) but introduces into the nominalist matrix of thought a reference to an ontological dimension of reality that was initially absent from it. However, as he insists, magical nominalism does not constitute a homogeneous current. This form of thinking resists definition in unequivocal terms. Studying it therefore requires an approach that is capable of articulating a plurality of views.
ABSTRACT In this essay, I provide brief introductions to the notion of “prophetic” historiography that I developed in Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (1995) and to the five essays of this forum that were written in dialogue with it. I argue that “history as prophecy” forms a practice of writing in which the “prophetic historian” seizes hold of a moment of past potency to self‐consciously reinscribe it in the historian's present so that it may become a context for action in the futures of its readers. In my book, that argument is developed by means of a deeply textured reading of a unique nineteenth‐century narrative history of Java's fifteenth‐century transition to Islam, a nearly seven‐thousand‐line poetic history that was written by a royal exile. Each of the five essays engages my notion of “history as prophecy” in conversation, extending it into other realms of historical expression. The subjects of these five essays include contemporary performance cultures in Indonesia, an Arabic‐language Islamic history of the Indonesian past, genealogical practices of Acehnese Sufis, and Indonesian literary history.
ABSTRACT This review essay examines a recurring distinction in the philosophy of history between the phase of establishing historical facts or knowledge claims and the phase of interpreting them. Focusing on two recent books by Aviezer Tucker and Chiel van den Akker, it analyzes how each author conceptualizes historical knowledge by emphasizing one of these phases. Tucker locates the core of historical practice in evidential reasoning and the production of knowledge claims about past events, which he regards as the basis for consensus among historians. In contrast, van den Akker concentrates on the construction and understanding of narrative theses and argues that historical narratives are not direct descriptions of evidence but unique interpretations. This review essay argues that, although the distinction between research and interpretation can be somewhat useful, an attempt to synthesize Tucker's and van den Akker's accounts into a single and more comprehensive theory of historical knowledge would be problematic. Since each framework highlights one phase and leaves the other underdeveloped, a meaningful theory of historical work must be developed internally within one conceptual framework rather than assembled from incompatible accounts with distinct priorities.
ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore accusations of heterodoxy, as well as rebuttals of these accusations, leveled at Sufi groups in late‐colonial and independent Aceh, the last region of what is today Indonesia to fall under Dutch colonial rule. What has been at stake in debates about the orthodoxy of such groups has not simply, or even primarily, been questions of proper belief or practice but concerns over historical and interpersonal relationships among participants in esoteric traditions. Following Nancy K. Florida's attentiveness to the ways in which “prophetic history” entails engagements with the past that entwine people across temporalities, I argue that accounts contesting the alleged heterodoxy of esoteric traditions in Aceh have been infused with an emphasis on seeking active and ongoing relationships across time and space, a mode that I identify as an intercessionary form of prophetic history. The proponents and detractors of any particular tradition make their claims not simply by referencing authoritative precedents but by cultivating relationships with those who populate the pasts that they invoke. This reframes orthodoxy as an ethical act of prophetic historiography.
"The normal exception" has long been a slogan of microhistory. This oxymoronic phrase is the iconic rendering of an incidental sentence that appeared in a 1977 article published by Edoardo Grendi in the Italian journal Quaderni storici, which functioned as the incubator of Italian microhistory. Grendi's article, titled "Micro-analisi e storia sociale" (Microanalysis and Social History), is here translated into English for the first time. Although foundational to the project of Italian microhistory, the article is not entirely self-explanatory. A companion piece by Francesca Trivellato in this issue of History and Theory places this contribution in the context of the historiographical debates of the time, traces its influence, examines the controversies it generated, and points to some of its continued heuristic potentials.
"The normal exception" has long been a slogan of microhistory. This oxymoronic phrase is the iconic rendering of an incidental sentence that appeared in a 1977 article by Edoardo Grendi. His article, titled "Micro-analisi e storia sociale" (Microanalysis and Social History), is cited more often than it is read. In this issue of History and Theory, Grendi's seminal article appears in English for the first time. This companion piece introduces Grendi's contribution by situating it within contemporary debates between historians and anthropologists. It also sheds light on the fate of the concept of "the normal exception" among its supporters and detractors. Finally, it clarifies some of the possibilities that other Italian microhistorians have laid out for deriving generalizations from case studies.
In 1955, Hisayuki Miyakawa published an article that sought to introduce American and European scholars to the work of the Japanese Sinologist Nait & omacr; Konan (1866-1934). Miyakawa drew particular attention to what he called the "Nait & omacr; hypothesis"-that is, Nait & omacr;'s argument that China became modern during the Song dynasty (960-1279). Miyakawa neglected to explain, however, that Nait & omacr; conceived his periodization of the Chinese past in order to interpret current political developments in Japan and China and shape current political decisions rather than to interpret historical documents and that Nait & omacr; adjusted his periodization as relations between Japan and China deteriorated. Nait & omacr; supported and justified Japanese imperialist and colonialist policies by writing newspaper articles and scholarly publications as well as by working for the Foreign Ministry, as his own sons and the Black Dragon Society (or Amur River Society) acknowledged after his death. Nait & omacr;'s historical publications and political activities closely resemble those of German historians of Poland and the Baltic during the Weimar and National-Socialist periods. This article recommends that historians of Middle-Period China (800-1400) stop honoring Nait & omacr; as a founding figure of their field, both because the image of Nait & omacr; they honor derives from deliberately misleading Cold War representations of him and his work and because the political purposes of his scholarship have lastingly compromised his assumptions, analytical terms, evidence, interpretations, and conclusions.
This review essay argues that the realist philosophy of history, as represented by Adam Timmins in Towards a Realist Philosophy of History , raises interesting questions about the nature of historical writing and challenges some of the foundations of idealist philosophy of history. A basic problem with Timmins's book is the conflation of “constructivism” with “idealism” when there are, indeed, quite a few “realists” who are also “constructivists.” After summarizing the main arguments of the book and critically examining them, this essay argues that realism, if combined with constructivism, is appealing for many practicing historians, but it also warns that there can be no foundationalism regarding the institutionalization of professional historiography. Furthermore, it emphasizes skepticism regarding trust in specialization, and it cautions that idealist philosophy of history has had more of an impact on practicing historians than Timmins's book suggests. Because I am not a philosopher of history, I must leave the finer points of philosophy to other reviewers; instead, I focus on the perspective of a practicing historian with an interest in historical theory.
The problem of historical realism has gained some new momentum recently, with a fresh challenge to what is taken to be an anti-realist hegemony in the theory and philosophy of history. Unfortunately, this has also provided the opportunity for the reheating of old polemics and lazy scholarship that characterized the 1990s reaction to “postmodernism.” Ill-defined questions distract us from more important issues. Here, I offer a map that aims to clarify the conceptual space. I distinguish between a metaphysical problem, which is the problem of historical realism proper, and an epistemological problem, which is sometimes treated under the same phrase but is more adequately called the problem of historical skepticism . I then consider what the targets of each of these discussions are and map the conceptual space of possibilities in them.
This article critically examines Dipesh Chakrabarty's concept of Anthropocene history, a philosophy of history that is designed to respond to the universal challenge of the Anthropocene. It uses the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to mitigate the pitfalls of Chakrabarty's concept and to propose an alternative relation between nature and history. I argue that the problem of Chakrabarty's Anthropocene history resides not in its use of the category of the universal per se but in its insufficient articulation of the particular. Even if he is correct in asserting that it is impossible to conceptualize the ecological crisis within the modern logic of history and that it is necessary to conceptualize the ecological crisis from a non-Eurocentric perspective, Anthropocene history still leaves the modern structure of history untouched, resulting in a structure that is unable to meaningfully articulate particularity and universality because of its reliance on teleology and phenomenological emptiness. With this in mind, I show how Merleau-Ponty's conceptual redefinition of nature as a foundational universality, when combined with the chiasmic intertwining of history and nature and a reflection on the concept of the institution as a point of passage between nature and history, enables us to rearticulate universality and particularity in the face of the ecological crisis. This in turn enables a freer conceptual navigation between the existential and political dimensions of the ecological crisis with which environmental philosophy is concerned.
This article is a posthumously published text that was written by Alf Lüdtke and Alexandra Oeser but was left unfinished when Lüdtke died in February 2019. It examines two central notions—and their articulations—that Lüdtke and Oeser use differently in their work: domination and Eigensinn . On domination, it focuses on perspectives of Max Weber's work and different translations in English and French that have led to distinct receptions of the notion of domination in these languages. While locating the notion of Eigensinn back in its 1980s academic context, this article reconceptualizes Eigensinn as a blind spot of Weber's definition of domination that addresses the question of how people produce a “will to obey,” which Weber's work does not tackle. The article also debates the possibilities of using the notion of Eigensinn for liberal and illiberal societies. Oeser has written an introduction to guide the reader through the text and to recall the conditions surrounding its production.
This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philologies. Building on Werner Hamacher's definition of philology as "love of the non sequitur," I turn to founding texts of Western classical philology by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Friedrich August Wolf, and August B & ouml;ckh in order to interrogate their identification with modern classicism and historicism. Examining the science of philology as Altertumswissenschaft, I focus on a language of ambiguity and undecidability with regard to philology's classical object (Greek and Roman pasts) and the discourse of philological science that constructs it. This is grasped as the relation between a transcendental temporality that enunciated classical antiquity's wholeness and a kind of perturbation of time that destabilized philology's alignment with classicism and historicism. For Winckelmann, Wolf, and B & ouml;ckh, the philologist's task required a conceptual and temporal leap toward the past that signaled the absence of philology's grounding. In this sense, it differed from evocations of a seamless movement across a unified horizon of time linking antiquity and modernity. This was conveyed by stressing the past's mutilation, absence, and accidental expression as the vanishing ground on which philology could build its classical vision. By configuring these notions as the self-hollowing basis of its knowledge, classical philology came to be divided by a paradoxical appeal to sequential time and the non sequitur. Tensions produced in this context bring classical philology to the center of debates that seek to interrogate modern historical intelligibility and time. Far from perpetuating ideas of irreversible and linear time, classical philology claims to engage with an absent past, and as such, it disrupts sequential temporalities by desiring something that is always beyond presence or reach and therefore always available for times to come and for future emancipation from regimes of present time.
The global history of philology, like that of writing systems and other technologies, is characterized by diffusion and adaptation. These processes are made more difficult to grasp if we maintain a presentist focus on the Western philological tradition and its deeply Eurocentric legacy. Arguing against those who wish to resolve the problem by abandoning the term "philology" as irredeemably tainted, I propose that we introduce the notion of scale. Heuristically, it is helpful to think in terms of "small-p" philology, the low-level quotidian strategies and tools used by students and scholars to solve problems of textual interpretation, and "big-P" Philology, a larger ideological edifice linked to metahistorical and transhistorical narratives about abstract concepts such as civilization, race, and religious truth. As a first step toward illuminating this issue of scale, this article excavates a highly specific moment of philological scholarship in twelfth-century Japan and shows how a difficult word from a classical waka poem is explicated through the extension of an existing Chinese exegetical system. The example is taken from the & Omacr;gish & omacr;, a pioneering treatise by the Heian period scholar Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104-1177).
In English-speaking academe, philology has virtually disappeared as a defined discipline, although its traditional array of skills and techniques for reading, editing, and interpreting texts are indispensable to fields ranging from biblical studies through every language and literature and are central to historical research. Philology's status "now" seems to be that the analytic skills for dealing with texts, skills developed over centuries, have been appropriated by multiple academic specialties while the framework that used to contain them has been dismantled and nearly forgotten. From a historian's viewpoint, I track the lively resistance movement pressing for a return to philology and a turn to a "new" philology, a revived, recovered, restored discipline with its own coherent identity. This movement of renewal and restoration is complicated by the need to come to terms with philology's deep entanglement with racialist thought and anti-Semitism, a past that has indelibly stained the reputation of philology as a discipline. The guiding intent of this article is to bring philology, with all its complications, back together with history, its formerly yoked companion discipline, and inquire where and how theory emerges-a metaphilology analogous to metahistory.
This article intervenes in recent methodological debates in the history of political thought, particularly those involving the question of whether its practice should be considered primarily as a historical endeavor or as a philosophical endeavor. Moving beyond this binary, I propose an approach that utilizes both historical and philosophical techniques for the sake of recuperating the unintentional meaning embedded within any complex text. In order to clarify the operations characterizing such an approach, I take inspiration from early critical theory to develop an interpretive frame drawn from the philosophical notion of thinking in constellations. The analyst, mining the surplus of meaning that necessarily inheres in the work, can perform an original illocutionary act meant to advance a particular political end. Such an act may proceed through critically identifying the necessary gaps and ambiguities that traverse a substance that is never adequate to the thematization of the political world and reconstructing the text via the creative reorganization of its textual elements in new configurations, configurations that work to illuminate an otherwise concealed dimension of signification.
In The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century , historian Dagmar Herzog explores one of the most remarkable transformations in European approaches to human life: the rise and fall of eugenics. In particular, she explores how Germans debated the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities: in the late nineteenth century, doctors, psychiatrists, and Christian caretakers came to equate productivity with worth. They defined people with disabilities as “unworthy” of life, which legitimized mass atrocities such as sterilization and killing under the Nazis and continued to shape their mistreatment during the postwar era. From the 1970s onward, however, a new cohort of activists challenged the eugenicist mindset and launched new campaigns to endow cognitively disabled people with respect and rights. This review essay assesses Herzog's claim that this shift was powered by the activists’ anti-fascist confrontation with the Nazi past. It argues that their success should also be understood as the product of a broader process: the decline of European efforts to mold “productive” bodies and increase birthrates. Future histories of eugenics’ decline should therefore complement Herzog's illuminative perspective with explaining how advocacy was ironically empowered by growing apathy about productivity.
The Poverty of Anti-Realism: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History , edited by Tor Egil Førland and Branko Mitrović, celebrates the new dawn of historical realism, which it claims supersedes the erroneous and harmful anti-realism. The volume indeed contributes to reinvigorating the debate surrounding realism and anti-realism and draws attention to a relatively neglected philosophical approach in the philosophy of historiography: realism. However, both the tone and content of this New Historical Realism leave much to be desired. The book displays unwarranted confidence regarding the quality of its content and its grasp of philosophical issues. Many of the essays in this volume exhibit a lack of understanding about the basic issues of realism and anti-realism and are riddled with conceptual confusions. Philosophical notions such as anti-realism, irrealism, postmodernism, idealism, and constructivism are used casually and even interchangeably. Although there are some glimmers of light and more measured approaches in the book, its broad-brush categories are premised on an us-against-them view of the scholarly debate, presenting the rival anti-realistic position simplistically as detrimental, deficient, and wholly objectionable. I end my article with a plea for prudent scholarship and reviewing in the philosophy of historiography and philosophy more generally.
In The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History , Chiel van den Akker presents a compelling argument for understanding historical narrative as an instrument of historical cognition rather than as a literary device or an artifact. In the first part of this review essay, I present and explicate van den Akker's sophisticated and lucid account of the content of the narrative as that which comes into view when we adopt the thesis (or perspective) embodied in the composition of the narrative (considered in its entirety). In the second part, I raise some questions concerning van den Akker's attempt to express the resulting conception of the narrative and its meaning in terms borrowed from the analytic philosophy of language, giving rise to what van den Akker calls a “pragmatist theory of narrative truth.” This second part of the essay concludes by suggesting two alternative (potentially simpler) formulations of the pertinent semantic and pragmatic distinctions and relationships that may be worth exploring or evaluating alongside van den Akker's original proposal. I conclude this review essay by questioning whether a sustained engagement with philosophy of language in general constitutes a necessary (or even a promising) way to advance our understanding of cognitive problems in the philosophy of history.
A surge of Arabic studies in Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century responded to specific anxieties connected to national identities. Philology offered a means to contend with Iberia's Islamic past through present-day geopolitics that seemed to threaten national futures. A comparison of lexicographic projects from the last decades of the century shows how philologists relied on translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to recast the history of the Arabic language and its users in Spain and Portugal. Such strategies merged historical and ethnographic techniques that mapped peoples, places, and languages. Collectively, these projects contributed to a revised emplotment of al-Andalus as a vital space for intellectual encounter and especially the translatio studii that was credited as a source of Enlightenment ideals. It became a transhistorical resource for nationalist claims within and beyond Spain and Portugal.
