Hello everyone! This is the debut of a new weekly feature on the subreddit, so I should explain what we’re all doing here. Each week, on Monday Methods, there will be a different question for people to respond to regarding methodology, or historiography. A lot of people have expressed an interest in greater historiographical content in the subreddit, and this is part of how we intend to promote that sort of content. The idea is that people who choose to post in these threads will end up in discussions or being exposed to things they might not have considered before. Likewise, we aim to give the people reading the thread a better understanding of how we go about studying the human past, inclusive of history, anthropology, archaeology, and where possible other subjects with ties to the rest (like, say, historical linguistics).
So, to the sound of conches, we come to this week’s question in full; what methodological tools and ideas do you find the most useful in your own study of the human past? This can include formal concepts, the kind with an -ism at the end, but also less formally defined concepts and ideas. What would be most helpful is if you explain the methodology you’re talking about, then about how you utilise it and how it’s useful. If you use a term like Structuralism, or another term well known in academia but not to a layman audience, please give at least a brief definition!
Here is a link to the list of upcoming questions! And next week’s question will be: how do you integrate archaeological work into history, and vice versa?
Thomas Kuhn, the historian/philosopher of science, said that in his view the point of history was to find things in the past that made no sense and to render them sensible. In his case, his major methodological turning point was to realize that Aristotelean physics actually makes perfect sense as a world view in classical antiquity; it was "good philosophy" as opposed to "bad physics," and the work of the historian is finding out why someone as smart as Aristotle could believe something that was so out of whack with modern understandings of science.
I find this to be a good starting point for the historian, but I would also join with it the opposing philosophy that the goal of a historian is to take something that looks straightforward and obvious and to show that it is anything but. That is, we have so many things in our world that we accept as "the way things are" but they have all been historically constructed, some along very unusual routes. Showing the construction, and how not-straightforward it was, is a means of showing the contingency, showing that things are not the way they are because such is the way the universe was written, but that they are because of very particular contexts, perceptions, choices, and actions.
So which is it, then? How can it be that our jobs are to simultaneous render the past as both comprehensible and incomprehensible? Ah, that's where the judgment comes in, that thing that makes history explicitly not a science, but a structured humanistic endeavor. Historians use as much judgment, aesthetics, and care as the artist or novelist; we just try to adhere to a few (rough) rules to keep things honest, because our subject is non-fiction. Sometimes the past needs to be made comprehensible. Sometimes it needs to be emphasized how strange it is. It is our job to toggle back and forth between these modes, which both have the same overall goal: to realize that the people in the past were not morons, and the people in the present are not geniuses. We are all just people, for both better and worst.
Anthropology is a wonderful place to borrow theories from. For discussing eunuchs the anthropological concept of liminality is extremely useful. Once you get the idea of eunuchs in your head as liminal beings, most seemingly bizarre things about their social roles and attitudes about them start to slot into place in your mind.
For example, most people think of eunuchs as harem beings, guarding women's quarters, and then they mentally go for the "cheap" answer, eunuchs were used for this job because they couldn't impregnate women. But then, why were eunuchs invariably used to guard holy spaces as well, like the tomb of the Prophet, or to guard emperors and courts and heck, even to guard the seemingly pretty sex-free vestibules of the houses of marginally important people? Obviously controlling the means of reproduction is not the full story here.
Well, these are all liminal spaces. The space between men and women is liminal, the space between emperor and the common people is liminal, the space between God and man is of course highly liminal. Even the space between inside and outside is liminal. Liminal beings somewhat "naturally" gravitate towards liminal spaces, and function as go-betweens.
I try to approach history from the fact that people don't like history, so I've taken a route more useful for a writer or story teller where I try to give history not as dry analysis but as a story with living characters. Questionable, certainly but most people don't have an interest in the historiographical process and it's much easier to tell history as a story rather than the dry analysis. I know the tools and will use them for professional work but outside of University level history, it's not as necessary.
Speaking of methodological tools--how do you guys keep track of, access, and organize important or interesting bits of information that you come across in the texts you read?
With my ebooks I tend to just highlight relevant passages or bookmark pages, but that means I have to remember what book I read the information in, then load it, then search through my notes in the book.
Obviously this doesn't work for physical copies, nor for websites. I have way too many bookmarks already, which I added because of information on them, only now I don't remember what that information was.
I need some sort of third-party system that's free (or really cheap), that can help me organize quotes, statistics, and even my AskHistorian answers. It would be nice if I could create topics within this system and sort or tag the entries.
Is there such a thing?
Finishing my senior thesis, i have been ever more interested and invested in cultural sociology as an extremely useful tool of analysis for historians, especially those that work with art and artists. Pierre Bourdieu's outlook on the Symbolic Struggles is invaluable if i am to make a case that an artist and the reception/apropriation of his works are of any importance to the historical discipline.
I have certainly felt the symbolic weight of a whole Mural (i study mexican 1930's art) crashing down on me, and wondering "how do i even begin?". The concept of symbolic struggles usually allows me to make deeper questions about what am i looking at. Take for example this mural, made by Diego Rivera at about 1925. Beyond understanding he is picturing revolutionaries killing a capitalist (that's on the title, duh!) i am able to ask how the fuck did he, in a caudillist, conservative government was able to successfully represent the revolution as such, and (according do Bourdieu) be able to define the frontiers of what (and who) was a revolutionary?
How did he win the whole symbolic struggle present before the painting was even made? wich kind of social forces allowed him do draw the social landscape in such way? Bourdieu equips me to as k those questions, and i love it
My undergraduate degree is in psychology and I use quite a lot of the methodologies and theories related to the study of psychology in my historical research as a graduate student. Things like role theory (the idea that people's identities are comprised of multiple roles as defined by social context - i.e., the way in which a person can simultaneously exist as a daughter, a student, and a friend and they play whichever part is most relevant to their current social situation) and social identity theory (the idea that individual identity is influenced by the expectations and behaviors of the groups to which a person belongs), in particular, as well as sociolinguistics to a lesser extent. That is, I often approach the study of history with questions about historical patterns of behavior as well as the study of emotion and experience from an historical perspective. Thus when interpreting my primary sources, I tend to do so in relation to what social psychologists have to say about modern group behavior and the influence of society upon the individual.
I'm a biological anthropologist by training. My research questions revolve around the contact period in North America, and one of the tools I use quite a bit is ethnohistory.
Broadly, ethnohistory is the study of cultures based on historical records. For my interests, those records include first-hand European accounts of the New World, Spanish mission records of births, deaths, and marriages within the mission, maps with details of cultures and place names, letters from European Indian traders and missionaries operating in the interior of the continent, written depictions of ceremonies or religious events, and even languages. These sources, when combined with oral tradition and archaeology, help to flesh out our understanding of the past.
I don't know a lot about methods in historical research so I have a question. It might be unanswerable and if so, please delete. What are the current, most important methods used by historians? I understand that over the years methods change but are there one or more methods that are currently most influential?