HST287 Reading Notes, 23-Sept-2004
History and Social Theory
Peter Burke
Theorists and
Historians
Mapping the difference between
sociology: "the study of human society, with an
emphasis on generalizations about its structure and development"
history: "study of human societies in the plural,
placing the emphasis on the differences between them and also in the
changes which have taken place in each of them over time." (p. 2)
Names:
18th cent. social theorists or "philosophical" historians, sometimes
called fathers of sociology though that is not what they claimed for
themselves, interested in discussing civil societies:
Charles de Montesquieu - French legal theorist - greatness and fall of
Rome
Adam Ferguson - Scottish moral philosopher - progress and termination
of Rome
John Millar - the same - relation between government and society from
Anglo-Saxon to Elizabeth
Adam Smith - economist - Wealth of
Nations - economic history of Europe
19th cent.
Leopold von Ranke - political history (with a bit of social) -
followers, strictly political for 2 reasons: 1) need for nation
building (p. 5), 2) "professionalization" of methods of research of
official records (social history too "soft" based on litereary, etc.)
William Dilthey - distinguished between science (describing the
outside) and humanities, including history, describing from the inside
(like Croce)
late 19th cent.
concern with longterm trends, evolution permeates everything: economic,
historical, etc.
Comte: coined sociology: 3 ages: religion, metaphysics, science
derided historians as collectors of unimportant details (p. 9)
20th cent:
economists drawn in two directions: collecting statistical data to
study development, and,
pure economic theory modelled on math,
psychologists: abandoning the library for the laboratory (p. 12)
anthopologists: fieldwork
sociologists: studying data of contemporary society - survey research
Karl Lamprecht - beyond political towards cultural history
Frederick Jackson Turner (American) - similar to Lamprecht
James Harvey Robinson - the "New History"
France 1920s: Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre (Annales) - replace political
with "wider and more human history" (p. 15) analyse structures - learn
from other disciplines
1960s to today: increasing social history. Why? "In order to orient
themselves in a period of rapid social change, many people find it
increasingly necessary to find their roots and to renew their links
with the past, particularly the past of their own community." (p. 19)
So, "blurred lines and open intellectual frotiers" between disciplines
but, despite the fragmentation, "it is striking how many of the
fundamental disciplines about models and methods are common to more
than one discipline" (p. 21) hence the structure of this book.
Model
and Methods
Comparison
Compare for similarities or for differences. Use comparison to find
"what is missing (Weber)". Dangers: 1) assuming that societies "evolve"
2) ethnocentrism: to compare means to accept one as the norm
Models and Types
Model/type: "an intellectual construct which simplifies reality in
order to emphasize the recurrent, the general, and the typical, which
it presents in the form of clusters of traits or attributes." (p. 28)
examples: Renaissance, feudalism, capitalism, mercantile system,
peasant economy, city-state, class
Danger: "using them leads to indifference to change over time" (p. 31)
monothetic/polythetic
Quantitative Methods
statistical analysis: total and sample surveys
limitations: relies on sources (gi-go), relies on 'hard data' when
'soft data' may actually be more useful
The Social Microscope
microhistory, influenced by social anthropology: Montaillou
(inquisition), Martin Guerre
Geertz, Foucault
limitations: trivial? 'National Enquirer" history
can one extrapolate from micro to macro?
47 ronin
Central
Concepts
Social Role - "norms of
behavior expected from the occupant of a particular position in the
social structure" (p. 47). Child, royal favorites, etc. Do not judge
morally but examine role. By doing so one might see patterns of
structural importance rather than just behavior of individual.
Erving Goffman - impression management
Sex and Gender - man and woman
are social roles. What happens to a historical study that leaves out
women? explicit/implicit
Family and Kinship - by being
aware of sociological methods when studying family groups, historians
can better distinguish between hard and soft data, what impacts these
data have, etc. They have a better vocabulary and can make finer
distinctions
Community and Identity -
Victor Turner: communitas (collective identities e.g. hippies) but
where are the borders - communities are not monolithic - people move
freely between them and perceive them differently (African Brazilians)
Class - Marx: "class is a
social group with a particular function in the process of production"
(p. 59) (see gender!)
Status - better than class?
class implies conflict, status implies harmony or at least minimal
conflict
Social Mobility - some
distinctions: 1) downward mobility, 2) mobility over time,
intergenerational and intragenerational, 3) individual vs. group
mobility (British professors!)
Ottoman devshirme, Chinese civil servants, clerics
Conspicuous Consumption and Symbolic
Capital - cc coined by Thorstein Veblen end of 19th.
"Apparent waste is actually a means for converting economic capital
into political, social, cultural or 'symbolic' capital." (p. 68 quoting
from Bourdieu)
Reciprocity - tribute, gifts,
keeping up appearances, moral economy
Patronage and Corruption -
"political system based on personal relationships between unequals" (p.
72)
Power - should be broadly
envisioned and carefully defined
Centre and Periphery - things
radiate outward from a centre (conquest paying for itself in Ottoman)
dangers: ambiguity, is the relationship complementary or conflictual?
Hegemony and Resistance -
Gramsci (cc the term) - ruled see themselves through rulers eyes so
maintain status quo. Resistance by moving in slow motion.
Social Movements - Hobsbawnm Primitive Rebels charismatic leaders
Mentality and Ideology - "it
is impossible to write social history without introducing the history
of [everyone's] ideas" (p. 91) collective attitudes, unspoken
assumptions, 'common sense' structure of belief systems Problems: how
do they change over time? what about homogenization? problems of
either/or not many
Communication and Reception -
social history of language, cnstruction of meaning, reader response
Orality and Textuality - yeah
but how does it read? McLuhan, Ong, etc.what happens in the shift from
oral to written?
Myth - stories with social
functions that 1) help define good and evil, positive and negative and
2) are recreated generationally and adapted to emphasize what is
important to that society.
Central
Problems
Function - as in "form
follows..." (Louis Sullivan, Bauhaus) or in this case "social
equilibrium follows..." What look
like difficulties are often the ways a society maintains stability - it
will do what it needs to do. Problems with this view: "temptation to
neglect social change, social conflict, and individual motives" (p. 109)
Structures - systems of
thought or culture (Saussure: code and message) Problems: meaning
cannot be abstracted from context. Petterns are too rigid. And if you
study structures do you leave out people.
Psychology - psychohistory,
Problems 1) whose psychology? 2) came at a time when studying "great
men" was going out of fashion. Also, how do you define 'basic'
personality across cultures and time. Yet there are 3 uses:
1) Theory (more exactly, rival theories) may reveal the rational roots
of apparently irrational behavior and vice versa, thus discouraging
historians from assuming too easily that one individual or group acts
rationally, while dismissing other individuals or groups as
irrational." (p. 115)
2) process of source criticism: examine not only the culture and
literary conventions but also age and position of author.
3) can add to debate on relation between individual and society, for
example, psychology of followers of charismatic leader, or practices of
chold rearing
The fit between private motives and public reasons (ex: reasons 19th
cent. women writers gave for writing)
Culture - 1) has moved beyond
"opera/high" culture to embrace popular culture, 2) is thought of as
active rather than passive (ex: gender is culturally constructed, not
an objective structure)
Bourdieu: habitas - regulated improvisation
post-structuralists: undermining categories
the study of change: cultural reproduction - how does a society
replicate itself/its traditions?
Facts and Fictions - [Hayden]
White also claims...like...Northrup Frye, that historians--like poets,
novelists, or playwrights--organize their accounts of the past around
recurrent plots or mythoi."
(p. 126) "The myth of realism": historians claim to write what really
happened (and people claim to know what really happened after reading
them!)
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/burke.html
Questions
1) Collingwood framed history against a backdrop of science. Burke is
framing it against a backdrop of sociology. They both, on occassion,
define what history is by trying to define what it is not. That is,
they both try to carve out a niche for history in the context of other
disciplines. I wonder
how much this is shaped by academia's need for staying within the
confines of
disciplines, or, rather, how much the academic tradition of disciplines
shapes their approach to defining history. In a truly
multi-disciplinary system would such artificial
distinctions be necessary? Could distinctions be made where
needed based on methodologies instead? What changes/developments in
historical theory and practice are missed or ignored by focusing on
history as a product/concern of academics? These types of "what if"
questions are problematic, but perhaps such reframing might provide
another angle on how we define history. (And suggesting that reframing
is a useful tool, is, in itself, an acceptance of and tribute to
Burke's general thesis in this work.)
2) The question came up last time: What distinguishes history from
fiction (myth?), that is, how do we know which is which? Burke
addresses the fluidity of the border between the two, as well as
suggesting that "we should be discussing. . .the compatibility or
conflict between [the criteria used to define history and fiction] and
different forms of text or rhetoric" (p. 129). I'd like to
enlarge the latter to include that there are differences in authorial
intent and authorial
practice.
The writer of fiction, while he or she may provide elements
of verisimilitude, provides the story alone, usually adhering to an
accepted form or forms of narrative recognizable as one of the standard
fictional genres. The
historian also writes according to recognised formulas, and provides
footnotes. Footnotes are the historians bargain with the reader, asking
for the reader's trust and supplying reasons for that trust. Of course
(!) the author can also betray the reader's trust by subverting these
tools. (ex. Sokal/Social Text, as well as the classic "Felines and
Bearded Men" study)
3) It might be fun to plug Mechal Sobel's "The World
they made together : Black and white values in eighteenth-century
Virginia" into Burke's list of monographs, either between numbers 5 and
6, or as number 7. Sobel argues that the acculturation of African
slaves into 18th cent. Virginia society was not a "one-way street" and
goes on to explore the impact of African culture on Virginia and Anglo
culture, instead of the more traditional process of exploring the
impact of the "dominant" culture on the "subordinate" culture. (Also,
for acculturation, viewpoints and the history/fiction writing
discussion, Lee Miller's Roanoke Lost Colony book)
The question is, do these works represent one current (major or minor?)
thrust of historical study: the need to consider the "elephant in the
corner", i.e. to ask the question "what questions are we not asking?"
4) ...and because I must: Burke's idea of the possibilities of 'braided
narrative' makes me think (of course) of the possibilities of
hypertext, especially hypertext+other media forms. Problem: it's still
a form of linear reading/experiencing on the part of the reader. Pro
and con: it can certainly be more reader-driven, reader-centric (cons
have to do with readers' self-selection leading to limiting of
experience). Possibilities? Definitely. Also, what happens to notions
of history and research in a world where "all the answers are online"
(the quotes because of the dual difficulties of "all": if all is
assumed/perceived to be true because that's the only place people will
look, and the difficulties, political, technical, and cultural, of
getting things online...will continue to consider this one. Meanwhile
it might be good to re-check the
progress of Ed Ayers "Valley
of the Shadow". )
OK he's British so did he have ulterior, humorous, motives in choosing
Mar(ks)x and
Spencer ...
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/hst287/notes-9-23.html
hope.greenberg@uvm.edu,
created/updated: 23-Sept-2004
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