Sign, signifier, signified

In my second year of university a took a Folklore course about Material Culture. It was taught by a flamer with awful shoes. He was a proud owner of two Billy dolls ("Billy is sculpted in a very realistic sense, anatomically correct in every big way! So real, in fact, you'll probably be jealous!"...here's another link. I suspect that they don't make some of them anymore. I couldn't find an official website). I met some friends in that class, didn't often go to that class, and received a B in that class. Most of the readings were incredibly dull to me at the time. I had a difficult time drawing the information I was supposed to from them and from the lectures. I had it in my head that this was a strange other academic field that I just wasn't going to "get" at the moment.

There were two very important things that I took away from that class, though, which have very much fuelled my academic interests and shaped my theoretical framework and methodology for doing history. One: I was introduced to Roland Barthes and semiotics. I haven't done much reading on it at all even though it completely fascinates me. It's had a part in this whole deconstructionist, postmodern intellectual trend. It's a very big thing to explain at the moment, maybe I'll get into it another time. It deals a lot with language theory; how words are arbitrary and stuff like that, among other things. This stuff isn't new. Again, it's a big thing to talk about it so I offer you a cop-out: Wiki'd.

But the most important thing I took away from that course (aside from the knowledge of the beautiful existence of well-endowed, gay, male Barbie dolls) was the simple idea that a non-textual object can be a text. Once you learn how to "read" such a text as a chair, an arrowhead, or a stained glass window, it can act very much like a map, a ledger, or a medieval chronicle. In fact you also have to learn how to read textual sources, I mean really read them beyond the explicit content, in order for them to tell you anything.

Since that realisation, "it" has all made sense. There need not be such a clear division between archaeology, paleography, anthropology, philology, history... I've been a little preoccupied with the idea of studying "texts" and "stuff" instead of merely piecing together a story. I like to take one text, or a group of texts and see what I can glean from it or them instead of seeing if it fits into a theory. When I was studying in Harlow one summer I chose my primary source and then wrote a paper around it. I began with stained glass windows and ended with some insight into the medieval pilgrim's experince and education in Becket's cult. For my honours paper I started with histories written in around 12th century England and am coming out with contemporary perceptions of the past and of ethnicity. I've spent very little time in archives. I've never had to read microfiche. I don't do stats or demography or economic theory or political theory or even social theory. It is my chosen subject area, Medieval England, that makes me an aspiring historian mostly, rather than a uh...Historical anthropologist maybe. But really, what's the difference? The distinction is made for a reason, but it's not a very strong one.

Leave it to me to be the odd duck. I wasn't trying to be! I blame it on that Material Culture course and on starting out doing archaeology and on Jerry Pocius for encouraging this style of research in me in Harlow. The rest of my Historiography class seem to be proper regular historians who can relate a lot more to the more traditional conceptions of what history is and what history does and how history is done. I'm pretty sure no one else in the History department is a cultural historian, really. Jennifer Connor maybe. Maybe that's why we got on so well. However no one's ever told me I'm wrong, and they've had plenty of opportunity to. I know Dr. Bryan, my honours supervisor, is completely supportive of my looking at mentalités. She says it's so interesting because we can never truly know. I might, and many others have, argue that we can never truly know anything about the past regardless of your approach. I enjoy the way I do history and I think that this kind of history is worthwhile. I'm only now beginning to be able to find the language to explain my own work and ideas, taking this Historiography course. I can't help but feel intimidated by all these "proper" historians though. I wonder if grad schools will be as welcoming of this flakey cultural history stuff as MUN has apparently been.

Something different:
Can the past truly be reconstructed? Is it really like a jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be put together in spite of how many pieces are missing? Is the past real? Really, the past no longer exists. It's like a spoken word and exists only in the moment it is uttered and heard. You could write down that spoken word but that bit of writing is not the spoken word. Think about Pompeii for a second. People used to live in Pompeii; things happened there. Vesuvius erupted, killed and covered it. People, food, furniture, everything was trapped in the ash. When archaeologists excavated the place some things had been preserved but the human bodies had rotted away. Even though we praise this site formation miracle for "freezing" a moment in time, it is not that moment in time. The bodies have rotted away and we cannot have them back. The spoken words are long since gone. There is nothing, no reality, to reconstruct. The only reality is the present and it is fleeting.

It doesn't mean the information carried in a given document (textual or not) is not useful or meaningful. It's just a subtle difference in perception of the past. It still remains a matter of habit I suppose to talk about the past as if it's still going on, just in the past; a sort of parallel universe. We still use the imperfect tense as if the action is still happening: "I was going" is an incomplete action, but when the person is telling the story it had been completed. What I'm saying is all very precise and theoretical and not very practical. It's just interesting to consider. It's like sleeping the oppostie way in your bed than you were used to.

Ramblings about historical theory and method

On the first day of class my Historiography professor told us to get angry with the material we read throughout the course. He said this rather forcefully. I interpreted it as his way of telling us to not be passive about reading the stuff, to interact with it, to have opinions about it.

We've only had to prepare two readings for tomorrow's class. The first article I was fairly content with. It had to do with one social historian's journey towards writing cultural history, and explaining how one must approach the sources and the research in general. In my own research I tend toward this cultural history or history of mentalités, so the article was easy enough to swallow, and I agreed with most of what she had to say.

The second article had me scribbling furiously. This may have had to do with the large coffee that had finally kicked in, but mostly I was interacting with the thing. This one emphasised the discipline of History as a social science where conclusions can be more or less "proven" through statistical tests. History as explanatory rather than descriptive. History as empirical rather than conjectural or inductive. For the author unverifiable conclusions or conjectures are a part of an "abyss." Historians must learn to begin with a fairly firm theory or hypothesis, framed in such a way that it can be empirically tested. "Out there--beyond the individual--there are mechanisms that ensure stable and predictable results on the average" and it is the historian's job to find these mechanisms which essentially explain what has happened in the past.

She does not ignore the human aspect of the past. She claims that through the primary sources she "becomes" an eighteenth century farmer (he studies New English economic history). She, rather dramatically, writes history "from the tear drop next to a young girl's signature when she was forced to surrender the keepsake her dead young lover left her in a will his parents contested." She calls this "authenticity" and insists that it is elusive. It is not "authenticity" it is "humanity" and it most certainly is not elusive! History is created by human beings. History IS human beings. Even when something seems essentially out of the control of the specific group in question, with the arguable exception of physiological and environmental/meteorological happenings, humans are still the primary agents on the macro and micro level. This is somehow lost in the author's descriptions even though she says that "prices are not a phenomenon of individual decision-making, but are themselves a collective 'fact,' the resultant of a social process" (my italics). But even this statement suggests that the social process has some empirically provable universal "law." Economics, here described as a social process, is not a separate entity independent of human agency. There is no universal or eternal "law" of economics, and certainly not of history, independent of human agency.

So History as a discipline can be, and in some cases must be, approached as a social science. There is no doubt that in fields such as demographic and economic history the historian must try as he/she might to come to an empirically, statistically irrefutable explanation for the given problem. This is not the only way of doing History, and I say again that there is no universal or eternal "law" which can explain the entirety of the past.

This is my understanding anyway. I'm probably way out in left field, missing something, or misinterpreting something. Any "colleagues" of mine, fellow students, wise elders and whatnot who feel that I should be put in my place, please speak up. From what I'm told I'll probably get an ear full from Dr. Curtis tomorrow if this is all bullshit.

Historians I find are often sneaky. They cover all their bases and rarely say anything definitive or radical. There is often some very precise rhetoric to this end. Rarely will you see an historian say "always" or "never" (see, I'm doing it too!). Even if they believe there is an ultimate Truth to be found, these days they usually will not presume to have found it. This is an important aspect of the love-hate relationship of historians, classicists, archaeologists, et cetera with their sources.

See, I'm terrified that I haven't covered all my bases here...

It's like moving out on my own...

So I've decided to set up my own blog thing for family and friends to check up on me. I wanted one separate from Blue Kaffee because I figure the people I know who don't use that site likely feel strange poking around it. It is a strange place. It's more of a sort of gathering place than a journal. My intention for this site is to give updates (don't worry family, it doesn't mean I'm going to stop calling!) and to go on rants which I hope might generate discussion. I may go on about an interesting discussion I had in class or about a news article I read. I hope NOT for this to become a place where I whine about things or gush about ever-mutable emotions.

I can't say how often I will able able to or will wish to update.

Cheers.