What is History - in Theory and Practice?

 

In these recent years of history as a discipline, historians and philosophers - who have been interested in history - have been engaged in a reflective task; they have been introspecting about the real object of their involvement, which is history. What is history, what is the nature of historical knowledge, what is the nature of the historical practice, what makes history distinct as a discipline, etc., are some of the questions that have been philosophically addressed and contested not only by philosophers but also by historians? In this response, I outline and synthesize how history has been understood as a theory and a practice by prominent thinkers who inquired about history. 

I would like to begin with what Keith Jenkins had to say about history, for he discusses both the theoretical and the practical definitions of the same in the first chapter of his book Rethinking History. According to Keith Jenkins, history is “a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recognizable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically positioned and whose products, once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abuses that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally what history correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum” (31-32). In theory, he describes history as a discourse or an account of the past. By discourse, he means it is an account of the world - that is ever-interpretive and ever-contrasting - which does not create the world but rather appropriate it by assigning all the meanings it has. Here, Jenkins suggests that history (a discourse) and past (that which it discourses) are two different things yet inter-twined. Alun Munslow affirms Jenkins' idea of history when he refers to history as “the narratives about the past” (157). In Munslow’s definition, narratives are nothing but discourses of their kind, which discourse about the past in a narrative form. Since the discourse highlighted here is about the past, it is closely related to and, to some extent; also the discourse about the phenomena called time. Paul Ricoeur’s idea of history as “[a] creative…refiguration of time through…instruments such as the calendar; the idea of the succession of generations—and, connected to this, the idea of the threefold realm of contemporaries, predecessors, and successors'' (104) makes a piece of evidence for the previous point. To summarize, history, in theory, is well understood as a discourse (an account or narrative) about the past where history is distinct from the past but related. Here, the past is the object of inquiry for history, suggesting history’s involvement in the phenomena of time. 

Now, let’s look at how history is understood as a practice. Going back to Jenkins’s definition, he suggests that history is produced by salaried historians, whom he terms ‘workers,’ suggesting that history is the labor performed by the historians. Explaining this labor, he says that historians are involved in the task of reproducing the past or, instead, the traces of the past into their discourses with the toolkit of their personal ideologies (values, position), epistemological presuppositions (socio-economic, political, cultural) and routines and procedures called methods. This reproduction has to be written to become products, as Jenkins suggests. For the historian, the process of writing it all up is confronted with various constraints such as pressures from family and friends, pressures from the politics at the workplace, and the pressures from the publisher, which, according to Jenkins, leads to a series of uses and abuses (27-28). The practice of history does not end here. It also considers how the production - in this case, the produced history - is consumed by the audience. 

Having explored history in theory and practice, I wonder about the overlap between the two. To what extent does history in theory influence history in practice? My initial response to that question would be as follows. History as theory deals with epistemological issues. History as a discourse can only make an account of the past and not recreate the past in its original state. In other words, it cannot present the past as it was but rather represent it as it could have been. Such a challenge requires acknowledgment among historians about their epistemological presuppositions and the limitations of their representation of the past. This is where I think history in theory influences history in practice.

Bibliography 

1. Jenkins, Keith. "What History is." Rethinking History, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 27-32. 

2. Munslow, Alun. "History is Historiography." The New History, Pearson Education Limited, Great Britain, 2003, p. 157. 

3. Ricoeur, Paul. "Between Lived Time and Universal Time: Historical Time." Time and Narrative, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1984, p. 104.