“History” is one of those everyday terms that is a lot
harder to analyze than it is to use. Does it refer, for instance, to what
happened in the past or to the means—in fact, to only one of the
means—developed for recounting what has happened in the past? How related is
“history” to writing? What is the relation of the person to the past? What is
the value of the past for the present? Can there be a history of the present?
On the one hand, the present is, precisely, not yet past and, on the other,
between the beginning of this sentence and its end the present has, in fact,
become the past. These are big questions, though usually not questions that
scholars of the past spend much time on, assuming as they do that they are all
solved.
The research theme for 2019–20, “Whose story?”
focuses on another of these basic questions (following upon distance and
period). Who makes history? Who writes history? Who are—or who should be—the subjects of history? Who, if anyone, owns the history that
is made or the history that is written? If distance makes history possible, it
also suggests that history is somehow the realm of the objective and
dispassionate. In fact, history is a fiercely contested battlefield; sometimes
it seems like a peaceful landscape strewn with minefields that detonate each in
their own time, and sometimes it is a landscape shaped by contentiousness and
gouged by wounds from the very start.
And then there is the question of
“story.” This might be another one of the aspects of history that is more assumed
than understood. For students of things, story stands in a particularly complex
position. Right at the very beginning of a formalization of historical
scholarship that actually made space for things, Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning distinguished
history written from written sources from history written from things, and
“from passages of books that concern not story.” Lists, inventories, fragments,
genealogies, inscriptions—none of these things were stories, but they made it
possible to write stories about the past. The very recent “material turn” has
been marked by efforts to imagine the “biographies of objects” as if things had
stories.
If we put the “whose” and the “story”
together we stand in a place that faces towards some of the most interesting
questions of method, and questions that have been asked from the beginning of
writing about the past. Equally, when we put the “whose” and the “story”
together we stand in a place that enables us to ask some of the most pressing
political questions of our day. How scholars deal with the present affects how
they deal with the past. Our research question for 2019–20 aims to stir new
thinking about how to study the past through things.
