Bauer's History

 When I studied ethnology as an undergrad at Lund university one of the instructors claimed that the great thing with being an ethnologist is that their research field as all around them all the time. From a perspective of general history, the same could be said about historians. Humans are always the product of history, consumers of history and producers of history at the same time. Still, this is not something that we possibly can feel in our day to day business. But as I ventured to the UK for the holidays, this became rather evident as much of the tourist attractions often circulates around history, from the rather obvious British museum to more difficult to grasp things as Harrods, where the latter is very aware of its historical heritage in its advertising. Still what really struck me was my visit to the imperial war museum, which came as rather much as a surprise for me. Given Britain’s long colonial history and its strong nationalistic tendencies I was surprised that it di...

Over the holiday my wife and I were travelling Great Britain. As a swede I am sometimes not super fond of the idea that UK is a very nice tourist destination and so forth, but this time I gave it an honest chance. I also actually visited a museum whilst on holiday for the first time in years, the imperial war museum. This visit actually worked very thought triggering for me and I especially liked the exhibition about caricatures of Winston Churchill as well as the other on the psychology of war. But what I came to think about, and returning to a previous entry I have made in Klas-Göran Karlssons history as a weapon, it became evident that this is a usage of history in which several aspects of powers is at play. And perhaps this more or less loose reflections, but here we go. According to Karlssons historians use a very specific approach the history, the so called scientific approach. Thereby, we acknowledge this form of history as a more truthful claim than others. In the case of the c...

 During the last two years I have come to think a lot about method, and how method sometimes blurs what is important in a text. I have, for reasons unknown to me, mostly worked with complex text and context bound methods such as different modes of discourse analysis. However, the texts I am most satisfied with are those I have written based on thematic content analysis, which I during recent years have started to think about as the most underestimated methods. Let’s start with why I think it is underestimated: it is basically because it does not hold an onthology of its own. For instance Foucaldian based discourse analysis, which is the method I have most experience with, comes with a heavy theoretical luggage. To know how a discourse operates is an achievement in itself. The same can not be said about thematic content analysis. Instead it is very straight forward, were the material guides it’s operation. It is seldom you go into a material without a hunch of what you will encounte...