Subjecting History

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I’m reminded of the truism “the past is a foreign country” that historians (and anthropologists, and anyone in fact) struggle to understand. Honestly, though, I’m not sure that gender or race present special epistemological problems. Is it harder for me (an educated white male) to understand 17th-century Indonesian women (to take an example from my field) than it is 17th-century Dutch men? Neither is easy. I guess my fear is that seeing gender and class as insurmountable barriers means a strange kind of self-imposed limitation on only studying other educated white men. And that seems a sad and unnecessary fate.

When thinking about the question of how well or how accurately academic scholarship represents the past, I think about the paradigm of time; political or economic decisions have far reaching implications that will inevitably affect societies years after the fact.

As a student of borderlands history, I am reminded of the vast space between my research and myself; the people in my research are perhaps not privileged of having a pedigree, Western education. They are instead figures in a time, privileged of having lived certain experiences that I, as a researcher, try to articulate or possibly “understand” through sources and theoretical frameworks. Yet, I understand that my “understanding” of the history that I wish to construct is merely an educated collage of interpretations.

If a person were to write a biography of me or you, fifty years from now, how would you feel if they wrote in their introduction that given A, B and C, they can “understand” you? They are not you, and will never write like you because they are writing from a different time and location that has shaped their ways of thinking and analyzation.

Political, economic and social decisions made in the past are not decided under transparent conditions. Moreover, human beings and their lives are extremely open to subjective interpretation. As historians, we must try and analyze our research under multiple lenses to seek a better “understanding,” yet we can never conclude that our understanding is the “truth” or “truer” version of a history.

How well does academic scholarship represent the past? I cannot give a specific yes or no. But I can comment that the space between researchers and their investigations expands as the time and location grow.

At the same time, I can point out the fact that white, Western educated men have usually wrote histories up until the twentieth century. How can a white, Western educated male begin to understand the gender dynamics of forced Ghanaian women slaves in Latin America during the late eighteenth century?

To some degree, we try to answer these questions in the introductory chapter, which can be accessed via the contents tab.  However, these are also exactly the kinds of complex questions we are asking here.  How can we connect our work with the ways the public think about the past? How can we present our work to them, and also reflect on their own memories, traditions, heritage projects, and commemorations?  Does the digital workspace provide us with new resources for doing so?  What are the obstacles to this kind of communication – both logistical and perhaps epistemological?

I am very interested in this project and after many discussions with fellow graduate students about how to reach the public outside of academia this approach seems very worthwhile.

However, I have a few questions such as where do we find this public and how can we get them involved? Especially if the topics covered are more academic in nature?

And also, what is meant by “nonacademic ways of understanding the past”?