The use of history and why historians should mind the gap
Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes.
My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history is structured as a carrier of meaning, but often empirical studies falls short.
The way these empirical studies often falls short is that they focus on labelling a use of history, but does not explain how these representation of history comes about. Thereby, these studies often becomes rather descriptive instead of asking the question why. By this is a mean that a proper follow-up question should be “which trope or narrative does the movie gladiator contain and why?” and the emphasis should be on the last part of the question.
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19th century statue as an examples example of the use of history |
Another serious aspect in these forms of inquiry also deals with methods. As my old supervisor said historians are much like magpies, if we see any method or theory that shines we will let it tag along. To some extent this works with for instance texts , movies or songs. But to a large degree the studies carried out often takes the form of including artefacts or studying people in group, often with a sociological or psychological method. These forms are perhaps possible to study within history and I imagine that oral historians met with similar criticism as the one raise now, but there is a need to ask this question: when does something stop being history and instead becomes other disciplines?
This is not a criticism aimed at the study of how the past is represented in contemporary society. Rather it is a criticism mainly aimed at how we as educators describes this tricky field. Should we really stop at teaching students to label history? Or should we emphasis on the dynamics of uses of history? These are all question worthy of earnest consideration during an era when history is becoming more and more prominent in society.
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