Comments on: “Core Truths” https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:23:40 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1764 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:23:40 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1764 I’ve thought about this a lot over the course of my career, and changed my basic position on the problem.

I think first that it’s key to have an extremely polymorphous answer to the question, “What is history”, to take a keen interest in all the ways that knowledge of the past is produced and situated. I think you can both study the production of historical knowledge in its diversity and be humble in the face of it. E.g., we can recognize that scholarly history has limited uses, that it isn’t the be-all and end-all of knowing and using the past.

I think that in the Africanist context, this also has to lead at some point to recognizing the limits of one’s ability to know some African frameworks for understanding history, especially how time and experience were understood in the past. That’s both evidentiary (how are we ever to know about something as nuanced as subjectivity in the past, or ways of understanding and representing social experience, given the lack of access we have to African history in general) and experiential.

What I object to now is something of the abasement that you note in Peires, which is echoed across much of the field. Summarized crudely, it amounts to two linked propositions: that the account of African history which African subjects can produce is necessarily always preferable to that which foreign (or even local, sometimes) scholars can produce, and therefore, that the goal of the Africanist historian is to become as transparent to local knowledge as possible. A lot of that has to do with the otherwise fertile interrelationship between Africanist anthropology and history, because something of the same proposition appears in a good deal of anthropology as well.

Sometimes this is accompanied by another propostion: that the project of African history is a restorationist project, a “giving back” of history to African audiences, a restitution for colonial violence. This is especially wrong-headed, I think. An American scholar working on African history, teaching in an American institution, is interpreting African history for his/her students, colleagues, and local audiences first and foremost. It’s not that what we do isn’t ultimately useful to Africans, but it’s not for them that we do it. They don’t need us to give them back their history: that’s just more White Man’s Burden stuff.

So I’d say this: an end to abasement, to apologia, to the idea that somehow subjects always and inevitably understand their own past better than scholars or outsides, to the notion of history as restitutive gift. Scholarly history is only one kind of historical knowledge, and doesn’t serve all or most purposes well. But what it does serve is a kind of tightly constrained interest in a form of truth that is based on a common craft approach to working with evidence. This is not a “truth regime”, an arbitrary power/knowledge practice that merely reinforces an institutional monopoly of some kind. I really believe that scholars can come to know a kind of truth that stands apart from their institutions, that is real and powerful in its reality. It may be a small-t truth that stands alongside other kinds of knowing that are rooted in experience, in emotions, in imagination, in politics and so on, but it’s a worthy and useful output all the same. To produce it requires a kind of faith and trust in scholarship as an enterprise, a non-cynical regard for the standards that scholars live by, and a notion that the goods which scholarship delivers are potentially universal in their utility.

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By: jpool https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1763 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:41:04 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1763 d be interested in your thoughts about engaging with non-academic historical sensibilities or narratives in relation to cases from African history. I think of E. J. Alagoa essay in the African Words, African Voices collection about doing community history, or the coda in T. C. McCaskie’s most recent book in which he meets as a historian of Asante with local Asante Christians who are trying to make sense of their own indigenous traditions in relation to biblical narratives. I think of these two, because, while Alagoa offers what worked for him, they are more open engagements with such issues than programmatic solutions or the shunting off of such issues into the different-kind-of-source-material category. Of course the more immediate parallel to the problem that you were describing is something like J. B. Peires questioning the usefulness or relevance of his own work compared to the narrative that Xhosa people had constructed for themselves. While questions like this (or the similar ones raised by Ashis Nandy about the ways that academic history can get in the way of conflict resolution) are interesting politically and ethically, it’s hard to know what to do with them, short of to stop being historians. ]]> Setting aside the Churchill case itself, I’d be interested in your thoughts about engaging with non-academic historical sensibilities or narratives in relation to cases from African history. I think of E. J. Alagoa essay in the African Words, African Voices collection about doing community history, or the coda in T. C. McCaskie’s most recent book in which he meets as a historian of Asante with local Asante Christians who are trying to make sense of their own indigenous traditions in relation to biblical narratives. I think of these two, because, while Alagoa offers what worked for him, they are more open engagements with such issues than programmatic solutions or the shunting off of such issues into the different-kind-of-source-material category.

Of course the more immediate parallel to the problem that you were describing is something like J. B. Peires questioning the usefulness or relevance of his own work compared to the narrative that Xhosa people had constructed for themselves. While questions like this (or the similar ones raised by Ashis Nandy about the ways that academic history can get in the way of conflict resolution) are interesting politically and ethically, it’s hard to know what to do with them, short of to stop being historians.

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By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1752 Wed, 02 Aug 2006 12:01:23 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1752 I agree, yes, that some of the criticisms of Churchill in the report seem to verge on demanding that “good history” be a narrowly positivistic kind of history. Or that the criticisms of Churchill are evaluative. I’ve been very clear here about saying that I think he’s a hack, meaning that his work is not at all thoughtful or reflective, that it is about a procrustean fitting of history to fit a bill of polemical particulars, and so on. But you know, there are other tenured hacks out there, and even if you gave me ultimate power to toss out anybody I deemed a hack, I wouldn’t do it for a great many reasons.

But I do think some of the charges stick no matter what epistemology you’re operating in–for example, the circular creation of your own source material for authoritative citation, or the plain misstatements of fact.

On the gap between official, vernacular and critical accounts of the world, my favorite book is Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, which I think has a lot of great things to say about the meaning of that gap without demanding that we somehow efface ourselves in the face of it. I think that’s my main message: the existence of a gap is not a revelation of our own inadequacies, or something that we need to correct. It’s a design feature, not a bug.

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By: dsaitta https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1748 Wed, 02 Aug 2006 03:33:54 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1748 ve been taking on Pirate Ballerina this week for simply trying to engage in a civil conversation about the Churchill case and the side issues (which I agree are much more interesting) it raises. And I thank Sherman for directing me to this site for your very intelligent commentary. I actually agree with a whole lot, and perhaps even everything, that you say. In my day job I don't simply make a case that native epistemologies have to be "ethnocentrically" isolated and respected for what they are. I’m not into "separate but equal". I’m interested in, and have written about, convergences between native and western epistemologies, specifically American pragmatism. As you point out, many trees have given their lives so that scholars can engage indigenous epistemologies. My issue is whether these engagements are having any useful, practical effect on how we do business in dealing with issues that affect native peoples "on the ground", as in the context of cultural repatriation efforts. I don't think they are. And I was struck by how the CU investigative committee's insensitivity to not only indigenous epistemologies but also alternatives within the western, modern tradition (apparent in the language used, the criteria privileged for evaluating competing knowledge-claims, the kinds of sources that were deemed legitimate for scholarly work, etc.) paralleled the kind of insensitivity that I see in my own discipline (for example, I recall Churchill being hammered for citing novels—fiction—in his work, when you and I seem to agree that fiction can "represent history in ways that scholarly history never can", and that such citations have a place in academic work). I think we need some new thinking about these epistemological issues, especially in my field now that the post-colonial critique has opened things up not only to native peoples but all sorts of other historically-disenfranchised folk. As I try to narrow the gulf between the academic world and that of my living subjects, I'm routinely faced with having to navigate and negotiate between what I call official, vernacular, and critical accounts of how the world is and works. I don't think there's anything in the suggestions I made over on Sherman's blog that necessarily invites epistemological anarchy or implies that we're better off just living and not knowing. But I'm always open to constructive criticism, and I'm grateful to you and Sherman for prodding my thinking along. Very best to you, Dean. ]]> Hi Tim—your commentary is a breath of fresh air given the beating I’ve been taking on Pirate Ballerina this week for simply trying to engage in a civil conversation about the Churchill case and the side issues (which I agree are much more interesting) it raises. And I thank Sherman for directing me to this site for your very intelligent commentary.

I actually agree with a whole lot, and perhaps even everything, that you say. In my day job I don’t simply make a case that native epistemologies have to be “ethnocentrically” isolated and respected for what they are. I’m not into “separate but equal”. I’m interested in, and have written about, convergences between native and western epistemologies, specifically American pragmatism. As you point out, many trees have given their lives so that scholars can engage indigenous epistemologies. My issue is whether these engagements are having any useful, practical effect on how we do business in dealing with issues that affect native peoples “on the ground”, as in the context of cultural repatriation efforts. I don’t think they are. And I was struck by how the CU investigative committee’s insensitivity to not only indigenous epistemologies but also alternatives within the western, modern tradition (apparent in the language used, the criteria privileged for evaluating competing knowledge-claims, the kinds of sources that were deemed legitimate for scholarly work, etc.) paralleled the kind of insensitivity that I see in my own discipline (for example, I recall Churchill being hammered for citing novels—fiction—in his work, when you and I seem to agree that fiction can “represent history in ways that scholarly history never can”, and that such citations have a place in academic work).

I think we need some new thinking about these epistemological issues, especially in my field now that the post-colonial critique has opened things up not only to native peoples but all sorts of other historically-disenfranchised folk. As I try to narrow the gulf between the academic world and that of my living subjects, I’m routinely faced with having to navigate and negotiate between what I call official, vernacular, and critical accounts of how the world is and works. I don’t think there’s anything in the suggestions I made over on Sherman’s blog that necessarily invites epistemological anarchy or implies that we’re better off just living and not knowing. But I’m always open to constructive criticism, and I’m grateful to you and Sherman for prodding my thinking along. Very best to you, Dean.

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By: Bill McNeill https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1742 Tue, 01 Aug 2006 18:16:34 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1742 Everone–Republicans, academics, Native Americans, everyone–is going to have their core truths, their ineffable emotional certainties that they privately think the whole rest of the world is crazy for not sharing. The problem is that at some point we all have to deal with people who don’t share those certainties, and short of giving up and letting everything devolve into a state of permanent tribal war, we’re going to have to find a way of talking to each other. This requires some shared epistomology that is good enough to capture the significant overlap between many disparate worldviews while not being perfectly faithful to any one. I’d nominate what you’re calling Enlightenment epistomological modernity (which to me means a good faith effort to find empirical grounds for truth, adhering to a particular style of rational argument, avoiding a well-known list of logical fallacies–I’m guessing you have roughly the same thing in mind) as that worldview, primarily because it possesses a rich reserve of self-correcting mechanisms (e.g. blogs like this one) for addressing inevitable conflicts. If you feel there’s some core part of yourself that can’t be expressed in modern enlightenment terms, that’s not surprising, because modernity is a lingua franca, not a native language.

There are all the familiar hidden traps of power in this construct–people whose native epistomology just happens to be more congruent with the shared one are going to have an edge, etc.–but there are going to power traps in any worldview, and we have to pick one, so we might as well opt for something that aspires to universiality.

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By: Sdorn https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/01/234/comment-page-1/#comment-1741 Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:00:27 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=234#comment-1741 Great comment!

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