Is it not ill-advised that historians often identify ourselves by method as well as, or even rather than, by subject of interest? I.e., we often say “I’m a social historian” or “I’m a cultural historian” as well as or rather than, “I’m a historian of the US South.”
I think this way of talking and thinking is based on a faulty analogy to shop labor. It’s a bit like saying, “I am a lathe operator.” Except, the thing is, it’s fine to be a lathe operator if you’re a good lathe operator; there’s plenty of objects that need lathing and there will be for the foreseeable future.
The same is not true for history. In history, people are seized by methodological enthusiasms; it may suddenly seem like the lathe is the way to go, and there are projects that demand expertise in the lathe. So you train up on the lathe, and you lathe away, and your project’s done, and then you look around for another lathe-worthy project.
But in history, unlike in shop labor, it turns out there often isn’t another such project—they’ve dried up. The interesting lathe-answerable questions got answered.
At which point you either moan about how the AHA doesn’t want to put on panels about lathing anymore, or you try to use a lathe for a project that really, you ought to be using a jigsaw for, and make a complete mess of it, or—and this is of course the ideal choice—you train up on the jigsaw and you use it for the next project.
There’s actually a fancy French phrase for approaching history as a series of problems requiring solution: histoire problème.
Why don’t we all just say we practice histoire problème—I mean, Michael Kammen says it’s pervasive, right? or at least we could say that we’re problem solvers using whatever tools are useful—instead of getting in a lather about lathers?
Related: where is the American histoire totale?
41 comments
October 28, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Chris
So you train up on the lathe, and you lathe away, and your project’s done, and then you look around for another lathe-worthy project.
When all you’re experienced with is a lathe, doesn’t *everything* look like a lathe-worthy project? Including things that other people have already lathed?
If there isn’t a fancy phrase for looking at a situation through the lens of your own skillset and concluding that the skills you know best are precisely what this situation requires, there ought to be. It certainly isn’t a phenomenon limited to historians.
October 28, 2009 at 12:26 pm
serofriend
http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty.php
I see you’re one of the only faculty members not to list your area(s) of emphasis, except for the forthcoming book. The entry previously listed you as economic, cultural, intellectual history, which runs the gamut.
I think “skillsets” such as “social historian” and “cultural historian” limit research methodology. However, I’m unsure about fields such as “comparative history” or “ethnohistorical theory and method” or even “African-American history.” Or even periodization? Those contain unique features, which scholars dedicate their lives to for different (and perhaps important) reason. On the other hand, categorization inherently imposes methodological borders on history…which perhaps is not very historical.
October 28, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Ben Alpers
My adviser, Dan Rodgers, used to recommend characterizing your project(s) (“I’m currently lathing the Sixties”) rather than yourself (“I’m a lathe operator”). Good advise which is, I suppose, a version of histoire problème.
As for the American histoire totale….the closest we’ve come to an attempt at it is probably David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, especially when one remembers that Fischer had originally conceived of that doorstopper of a book as only the first in a five-volume history of American culture.
October 28, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Davis X. Machina
Is it not ill-advised that historians often identify ourselves by method as well as, or even rather than, by subject of interest?
Was it always thus, or is this habit-cum-twitch of historians a (relatively) recent reaction to periodization? When I was an undergrad thirty years ago all the old profs gave you a history, and all the young profs gave you a methodology when one asked them what they were.
I am put in mind of the comedian Steve Wright: “I saw that Denny’s was advertising ‘Breakfast any time!'”, so I ordered french toast in the Renaissance”.
As Braudel probably would have…
October 28, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Texas in Africa
Isn’t histoire problème more-or-less political science?
Sorry. This historical-institutionalist/Africanist couldn’t resist.
October 28, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Ahistoricality
From my perspective, the problem is the other way around: too many historians identify themselves by nation and period and ignore the methodological and topical connections across those highly artificial boundaries. (In many ways it’s a job market/teaching fields issue, I know, but that doesn’t mean that we have to embrace it!)
October 28, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Sifu Tweety
So you’ll be fine as long as you aren’t lathe-y?
October 28, 2009 at 1:55 pm
JPool
It’s interesting, because historians, much more than anthropologists, for example, define themselves first by region and period, then by type o’ history, and only finally by thematic interests (I’m sure there are a few out there still, but at this point it’s hard to imagine a historian definig themsevels by meta-narrative or theoretical orientation, other than as one of their “interests”). This has a lot to do with what we understand to be the end products of our work: situated narratives rather than comparative findings. (Or what Ahist said while I was writinig this.) The extent that methodology get primacy over thematic interests, is I think because it’s treated almost as a matter of temperament. Most cultural historians couldn’t imagine being economic historians and vice versa (he wrote having started this gig expecting to be a social historian and having ended up writing a dissertaion that’s primarily political and cultural history and putting together a second project that would be a combination of cultural and economic history).
I think the problem comes not so much from any of these orientations themselves, but from the failure or disinclination to see across them. We had a job candidate once who presented an hour long talk on a particular trope in 18th century Latin American writing. The talk was fine, but he never addressed and was unable to explain in the question period why this was more than just a curiousity. There was some interesting reflection among the faculty afterwards on whether this particular “so what” question was fair or not; if we expected intellectual history to justify itself in term of other thematic interests, while other fields get a pass or are presumed to be significant in their own terms. While we might not normally ask a cultural historian to justify their project in terms of economic history, however, the better that a historian can articulate its connections to wider concerns, thematic, theoretical or historiographical, the more other people can be convinced to care about it.
October 28, 2009 at 1:56 pm
JPool
Sifu, puns are lathe-y writing.
October 28, 2009 at 2:25 pm
serofriend
too many historians identify themselves by nation and period and ignore the methodological and topical connections across those highly artificial boundaries
I agree, insofar that method/topic as a *professional* identity transcends those boundaries. I variously identify myself by period, topic, method, social sciences, humanities, etc., depending on the person I’m talking to. For a friend or student inquiring for specifics (which usually includes a digression into approach), I usually explain by period or method. For general social situations, if someone asks me what I do, I just respond with *history graduate student* rather than *historian.*
The talk was fine, but he never addressed and was unable to explain in the question period why this was more than just a curiousity
So history for history’s sake is not enough, I suppose.
October 28, 2009 at 2:27 pm
JPool
Since I’m already already writing a bunch, I’ll note that the linked article is quite interesting. I don’t think that histoire problème is neccessarily separate from methodology, because one’s methodological orientations will shape the kind of questions one takes on for investigation in the first place. Still, I think one of the biggest problems in our disciplinary culture, and probably particularly a problem in approaches to graduate training, is the inability of many historians to distinguish having a topic from having a project. This is why historians are so much worse at grant applications: we often can’t distinguish between “This is the time and place and maybe thing I’m interested in learning everything about; I’ll be over here fishing around in these particular archives” and “This is the question I’m trying to answer; let me tell you how.”
October 28, 2009 at 2:42 pm
JPool
So history for history’s sake is not enough, I suppose.
No, and it never has been. Honestly, I’ve no idea what that would mean. History doesn’t have a “sake.” “Art for art’s sake” is generally used to mean art for aesthetic joy, rather than political or moral persuasion, but it still has to convince you that it’s worth looking at.
October 28, 2009 at 2:48 pm
serofriend
art for aesthetic joy, rather than political or moral persuasion, but it still has to convince you that it’s worth looking at
Then at least I know I’m on the right track.
October 28, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Erik Lund
Good ol’ lathe. Nothing beats lathe.
October 28, 2009 at 3:30 pm
dana
eric, couldn’t one generate a similar question about period? Periods of history surely go in and out of fashion (I’ve heard that some people suddenly found the Great Depression interesting….), and a scholar who specializes in one time and place surely will have to branch out in order to stay interesting and relevant and tenurable. Why is method different than period?
[/”could you say a little more?”]
October 28, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Charlieford
I’m presently inter-viewing historical problems to see whether any are lathe-worthy.
October 28, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Ben Alpers
This is why historians are so much worse at grant applications: we often can’t distinguish between “This is the time and place and maybe thing I’m interested in learning everything about; I’ll be over here fishing around in these particular archives” and “This is the question I’m trying to answer; let me tell you how.”
Actually, JPool, sociologist Michele Lamont’s recent study of interdisciplinary grant applications, How Professors Think, suggests that historians are if anything unusually good at securing grants relatively to other disciplines.
And she attributes historians’ success to the fact that, despite our internal methodological divisions, historians share a common sense of what constitutes excellent work that’s built around a notion of craftsmanship. And this makes history unlike a lot of other disciplines in which internal methodological differences created sharp divisions over what constitutes good work.
October 28, 2009 at 6:03 pm
JPool
Ben Alpers, I believe you’ve mentioned Lamont’s book here before. It does look interesting. Do you know in which chapter she lays out the numbers on relative success in obtaining grants? I admit my sense of historians poverty of grant writing is almost entirely annecdotal. Many, though not all, of the historians who I’ve worked with, including successful grant-writers, seemed to have figured out grant writing as a series of hacks and seem to think of methodology as a show that you put on for the disciplines that care about that sort of thing. Certainly this can work, but I’m not convinced that it works well. Again, this might just be the peculiarities of my experience.
I don’t think I follow the arugment on why historians’ notions of craftmanship would make them better or more successful grant writers. It might keep them from running aground on hostilities by proposal reviewers to some particular methodology, but wouldn’t neccessarily make them any more compelling or persuasive.
October 28, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Ben Alpers
As far as I remember doesn’t run numbers on how different disciplines do at attaining grants; her primary interest is in how decisions are made by grant-giving panels and how people from different disciplines function on them (this is why I said she “suggests,” rather than shows, historians’ success). But in her chapter on disciplinary cultures (Chapter 3), she discusses not only how different disciplines understand excellent within their fields, but how their proposals are viewed by other panelists.
For a variety of reasons, philosophy is a “problem discipline,” the members of which tend to assume the greater rigor of their work and have a reputation among other panelists for doing a poor job of explaining the significance of their proposals to non-philosophers. Philosophy seems unconnected to the other humanities and social sciences and this often makes proposals from philosophers a difficult sell.
English, Lamont argues, is deeply internal divided over how to measure excellence, with some English faculty members even questioning the idea of objectively excellent scholarship. Panelists from other fields perceive this difference and often feel that English scholars are “divided, or perhaps even confused, about issues of quality” (p. 78) As a result “literature proposals are less competitive than they once were, particularly as compared to those submitted by historians (the latter garner and are perceived as garnering the lion’s share of humanities fellowships)” (p. 73).
To make a long story short, historians have the advantage of being “strongly committed to excellence as a general principle” (p 85). This means both a shared sense of common values (if not methods) within the field and a language in which we feel comfortable articulating the quality of our projects.
Lamont also has sections devoted to anthropology, economics, and political science, but I’ll stop my summary with the humanities.
There are also other relevant chapters, such as Chapter 5 in which Lamont explores the ways in which panelists from disciplinary clusters–humanities, social sciences, and history (we’re are own cluster)–judge the quality of others’ work. There’s a lot of interest in this chapter, though Lamont concludes that, at the level of cluster rather than discipline, the differences are not that stark.
October 28, 2009 at 7:14 pm
eric
Why is method different than period?
Because what historians are supposed to have that makes them different from other social scientists is a rich store of information, which to be deep enough usually has to be specific to a time and place.
October 28, 2009 at 7:51 pm
andrew
Related: where is the American histoire totale?
Somewhere in the Atlantic, isn’t it? Although I thought Ayers seemed to be approaching it in Promise of the New South.
October 28, 2009 at 8:34 pm
andrew
Lamont did a guest post on history’s evaluative culture at Crooked Timber a couple of months ago.
October 28, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Carl
I believe the relevant folk wisdom is “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
JPool and Ben, I wonder if the difference between historians and philosophers is as much that the latter have decisively lost touch with their venerable go-to marketing cliches. The socratic patter started taking hits around Kant, took on some serious water from Nietzsche and was sunk altogether by Wittgenstein. Whereas most historians still have no trouble saying with a straight face that we can discover truths and teach people stuff about how to live their lives.
October 28, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Ben Alpers
Carl,
The grant system Lamont studied is a specifically American thing. But I wonder if continental philosophers in Europe face the same problem? My (purely anecdotal) sense is that philosophers in Germany and France are much more plugged into both public intellectual life and larger interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities and qualitative social sciences than they are in this country. If so, perhaps this isn’t a story about modern philosophy tout court (so I can have my requisite two-word French phrase), but rather about Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
And, indeed, England would be another interesting test case. Maybe this isn’t even about analytic philosophy, but rather about philosophy in America…though my still purely anecdotal sense is that the relationship of philosophy in the UK to other humanities is more like that of philosophy in the US than that of philosophy on the European continent.
October 28, 2009 at 9:32 pm
teofilo
Somewhere in the Atlantic, isn’t it?
Bermuda?
October 28, 2009 at 9:40 pm
andrew
Come to think of it, are historians of the U.S., where there are fewer periods than in some other geographical fields, more likely to distinguish between themselves by method?
October 28, 2009 at 10:29 pm
ben
Culture (some culture) and society (some society) will never go away—at least not as long as there are historians—but the American South might.
October 29, 2009 at 1:00 am
J. Otto Pohl
My institution has no history department. So the historians are split into other departments by methodology. I am in the political science department and do political history. Most of the rest of the historians here are in the anthropology department and do cultural history.
October 29, 2009 at 6:50 am
docdave
Where is the histoire totale? In community colleges and survey courses taught by TAs who haven’t the luxury of holding out for offering courses in their specializations.
October 29, 2009 at 7:42 am
George Tirebiter
“there’s plenty of objects that need lathing….”
Does your institution have an English department? Should that not be “there are plenty of objects…”?
October 29, 2009 at 7:52 am
silbey
survey courses taught by TAs who haven’t the luxury of holding out for offering courses in their specializations
Hey, now. Don’t assume R1s are the way the world works. I teach a western civ course (working on making it a world history) *every* semester.
October 29, 2009 at 8:59 am
eric
Culture (some culture) and society (some society) will never go away—at least not as long as there are historians—but the American South might.
Historians can specialize in defunct societies.
October 29, 2009 at 9:02 am
eric
Does your institution have an English department?
Commenters add so much value. It’s really wonderful.
October 29, 2009 at 11:41 am
Chris Johnson
As a couple others have mentioned, there are interesting parallels here to other research fields. In the biomedical sciences, at least, folks are both in a category defined by whatever they are studying (say, the lung) but are also very much defined by the method they use to study it. There are people who learn the latest hot method and apply it to anything, whether it makes sense or not. Like a historian who invests a huge effort in learning a particular analytical technique, the method-based biomed researcher needs to find something to use it on. If you’ve invested years learning how to do something, it’s hard not to behave that way.
And fads certainly come and go, leaving their residual marks on who is or isn’t on review committees — God help the grant-writer who is out of step.
October 29, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Michael H Schneider
there’s plenty of objects that need lathing …
Doesn’t your institution have a manual arts department? The machine is called a lathe, but the operation it performs is called turning. As in “I put the brake rotors in the lathe and turned them, so the runout is within spec”
The person operating the lathe may have a job description that identifies her as “lathe operator” but the employee wanted ad will say machinist. Of course, with the coming of CNC machines, operating a lathe is now a lot more like programming than it is like being a framing hammer operator.
October 29, 2009 at 1:26 pm
ben
Historians can specialize in defunct societies.
Yes, but we might someday come to realize/decide that there was never really any such thing as “the American South” in any but a geographical sense (the way “Italy” was once merely a geographical expression). A historian might specialize in the understanding one era had about what it (mistakenly) thought was the American South in a more robust sense, or the self-understanding of the inhabitants of some particular geographical region as something more than just that, I suppose. But that wouldn’t be specializing in the American South.
October 29, 2009 at 1:27 pm
ben
Should that not be “there are plenty of objects…”?
“Plenty” is singular.
October 30, 2009 at 8:35 am
shoes
Today’s present is your future’s history!
October 31, 2009 at 6:39 pm
TF Smith
So when finals are over, I can get lathed and plastered?
October 31, 2009 at 7:59 pm
teofilo
Who says you have to wait until finals are over?
November 1, 2009 at 8:51 am
TF Smith
Students, professors, department chair, dean, president, spouse… no one important.