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.9One of the most controversial theoretical approaches is postmodernism.Postmodern theory was largely a French creation most closely identified withthe philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.Emerging in post-WorldWar II (and soon to be postcolonial) France, it challenged widely held assumptionsabout the ability to reason.Amorphous in nature and difficult to characterize, post-modernists often reject historians’ ability to produce accurate truth claims aboutthe past.For postmodernists, fragmentary evidence and the inability of an observerto escape his or her point of view makes the past unknowable.Instead, they believethat history is little more than an artistic representation of the past that reveals moreabout the author than the period discussed.At face value, such claims appear toquestion the very legitimacy of historical inquiry as traditionally practiced, andimplies that the doctrine of rational inquiry rooted in the Enlightenment is some-thing of a dead letter.One of the most common applications of the postmodernapproach is seen in the linguistic turn.First emerging with the new literary histor-ians during the 1980s, proponents of the linguistic turn argue that the instabilityand fluidity of language hides more about the past than it reveals, and that inter-pretation of narratives reveals more about the author than the narrative in question.Proponents of this approach ultimately deem the past unknowable from the per-spective of scientific truth and instead deconstruct texts to recover multiple,often obscure meanings.From their perspective, there is no historical truth.Although extreme applications of such ideas might seem ahistorical and evenillogical, the implications of postmodern theory have actually been important tohistorians.For example, postmodernists have pointed out the elasticity of meaningfor categories of analysis such as gender, race, class, and ethnicity.Many historiansinfluenced by postmodern ideas have begun to more carefully examine the mean-ing of these culturally defined concepts and the context that defines them, greatlyenriching historical understanding.Postmodern theory has contributed to theemergence of cultural history, which also grew out of the Annales school.109Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,’’ ‘‘DeepPlay: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,’’ The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, comp.Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973).10Jacques Derrida is often called the ‘‘father of postmodernism.’’ His major works includeJacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1976); Writing and Difference, trans.Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1978); Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,trans.David B.Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); MichelFoucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970); The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trans.A.M.Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); HaydenWhite, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts onan Old Discipline (London: Routledge, 2003).W H A T I S H I S T O R Y ?13T H E V A R I E T I E S O F H I S T O R YBecause educated people believe that history provides a sense of perspective tounderstand the present and how society arrived at a particular point in time,there are many different types of history.Traditionally, the dominant area of his-torical inquiry has been political history.Believing that important questionsin a society were ultimately determined in the political arena, political histor-ians tended to examine the great statesmen and their impact in shaping eventsor to look at the rise of political parties or ideologies.Political history practicedin such a way relied on readily available forms of evidence such as state papers,autobiographies, memoirs, and newspapers chronicling the leading figures of aparticular period.Military history, diplomatic history, and the history ofempire and colonialism were in many ways derived from political history,with a focus shifted from great political leaders to generals, foreign policy lead-ers, or colonial officials.Another traditional approach employed by historianswas to examine the great ideas that influenced a culture or nation.Intellectualhistory examined the great philosophers to understand the ideas that they con-tributed.In some ways, the early study of religious history fused theseapproaches in the examination of leading clerical figures, religious institutions,and beliefs.Each of these approaches offered important insights into the topics theyexamined, but they suffered from what some would later refer to as a ‘‘top railbias.’’ The problem with focusing on leading figures of society is that oftenmany groups are left out of the story [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]