Bevernage / Raphael Professional Historians in Public

Old and New Roles Revisited
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-118605-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 400 Seiten

Reihe: The Politics of Historical Thinking

The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope.

Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining their professional activities with an explicit political partisanship or social engagement. The second section focusses on the challenges historians are confronted with when entering the court room or more generally exposing their expertise to legal frameworks. The third section focuses on the effects of policy driven demands as well as direct political interventions and regulations on the historical profession. A fourth section looks at the challenges and opportunities related to the rise of new digital media. Finally several authors offer their view on normative standards that may help to better respond to new demands and to define role models for publicly engaged historians.

This book aims at historians and other academics interested in public uses of history.

Zielgruppe

Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, memory studies schol

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bevernage, Berber

Raphael, Lutz

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Pädagogik Pädagogik Geschichte der Pädagogik, Richtungen in der Pädagogik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie

Leseproben

Introduction

1 New Roles for Professional Historians and New Public Uses of the Past

Berber Bevernage

Lutz Raphael

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, historians’ biggest fear concerning the public relevance of their profession was that of a society increasingly lacking interest in the past or in the historical dimensions of life. Whether or not this fear was exaggerated, it was not baseless. During the high days of modernization from the 1960s to the 1990s, in many parts of the world, historians were confronted with, and even felt marginalized by an ever-growing futurism or presentism in their societies. Other social sciences tended to dominate public visions of the future and the definition of present problems and challenges. This kind of presentism was also fuelled by a kind of collective amnesia after the violent conflicts of the recent past. Think, for instance, of the pact of silence in Spain’s transition to democracy, or the silence about the recent past relating to the Nazi period in Germany, but also in other European countries under Nazi occupation, or allied to the German Empire during the Second World War.1 Amnesia, or at least a loss of historical consciousness was the main tendency in societies striving to liberate themselves from their traditions and their past.2

Professional historians were generally sceptical about this presentism, and they tried to defend their established positions in education and culture, with different outcomes worldwide. In Europe, for example, they were generally successful, as university teaching in history was needed to train the growing number of school teachers in secondary education.3 Historians used different strategies to defend the continuing public relevance of their discipline. Some tried to cast off the suspicion of conservatism and defend the relevance of their discipline by showing that historical expertise remained relevant even in societies that were oriented toward the present or future. Historical expertise could facilitate the emancipation from the dead weight of the past, either by drawing lessons from it, or by contesting the authority of tradition and revealing its socially constructed or ‘invented’ nature.4 Others embraced the alleged practical irrelevance of their discipline by turning to anti-utilitarianism or to aesthetic enjoyment (jouissance) as their trademark or source of pride. Showing interest in the past as past and out of pure curiosity for its otherness could be seen as the sign of an intellectually mature, cultured society, in pursuance of the artistic motto of l’art pour l’art.5

Whether due to the success of this double strategy or not, it seems that the discipline managed quite well to cope with and adapt to this context of decreased societal and political interest in certain parts of the world during the high days of modernization. Many of the epistemic turns that academic history as a discipline underwent in the western world took place during these decades, and they can be interpreted as responses to changing public demands in times of the shrinking public relevance of history as past politics. The academic discovery of ‘world[s] we have lost’, and the ‘otherness’ of a past6 seemingly no longer of direct relevance for the legitimation of today’s world, its social and political order, for example, opened the academic world to new cultural demands linked to the rise of the heritage industry.7 It may thus be that several of the historiographical innovations and turns were facilitated by the conditions of relative freedom and relative absence of political pressure that were created by the decreased or at least changed public historical interest.8

In the past couple of decades, since roughly the 1990s, the social context in which professional historians find themselves has radically changed in large parts of the world. It would be misleading to claim that the modernization-style dislike of history has died out everywhere. Generally, however, public interest in the past is clearly blooming. ‘Dealing with the past’ is high on the agenda of governments and policy-makers all over the world, and at all kinds of levels.9 International organisations (such as the UN) urge countries to deal with their colonial pasts and set up reparation and memorial programmes,10 or to enter into dialogue over their divergent historical narratives. In January 2014, for example, the role of historical narratives in conflict and peace building was chosen as a central theme for a debate in the UN Security Council under the presidency of Jordan. Jordan even asked the Security Council to “consider mandating a small United Nations historical advisory team” which could assist states to recover archives or set up historical commissions once the guns fall silent.11 National governments set up historical commissions, create memory laws, or offer formal apologies to deal with the dark pages of their past, whether related to colonialism, slavery, genocide, or political repression.12 City councils worry about politically embarrassing street-names or monuments and set up their own local initiatives to inquire into historical injustices (sometimes going back as far as to medieval or early modern trials against alleged witches) and to publicly state their changed moral values and political allegiances.13 Policy-makers of course do no turn to the past entirely on their own initiative. They are being urged on by activists and ‘memory entrepreneurs’,14 who mobilize all kinds of strategies of public pressure, including the use of legal actions in national as well as international courts and tribunals.15

The (renewed) interest in the past is of course not limited to the spheres of politics, collective action, and jurisdiction. It can also be noticed in many other societal spheres. Reflecting on memory, archives, and the presence of the past is a major topic in contemporary art.16 Historical topics are omnipresent in films and TV series, in literary fiction, or, economically more importantly, in games.17 ‘Points of historical interest’ are also a crucial element in the many variants of vintage or heritage culture that often serve as the stage and inspiration for the fashion industry, forming an important motor for the rise of international tourism. While heritage tourism was, in the nineteenth and for large part of the twentieth century, still a phenomenon directed at a small and highly educated elite, it has become a mass phenomenon and a key asset of a global tourism industry, often essential for the national economy of a country (examples becoming negatively visible with dramatic economic consequences when the pandemic situations in 2020 and 2021 virtually wiped out the tourist traffic, striking examples of this effect being felt in Egypt or Sri Lanka).18

To sum up, history (or rather all kinds of relations with the past) is in high demand, and historians no longer need to fear a society devoid of interest in the past. Yet, despite the opportunities for publicly engaged history that it offers, and contrary to what historians may have hoped for, this widespread societal interest in the past does not seem to have translated into an increased interest in, or prestige of, the academic discipline of history, or of the expertise of professional historians outside of the academic sphere. Paradoxically, an increased societal interest in the past seems to coincide with a situation in which conventional academic historical expertise has come under severe pressure. More than ever, it seems that historians have lost their hegemony in what Paul Ricoeur called “the space of retrospection”.19 A key thesis of this book is that this situation is merely a paradox, not a contradiction, because the pressure on professional historians seems to be directly related to the increased and more variegated demands for history.

Professional historians are struggling with this public demand, often feeling badly prepared for the jobs offered and the tasks to be fulfilled. Old routines seem not to fit today’s demands. Highly specialized, historians must recognize that their explanations and their knowledge are often seen as useless, their speech boring, their utterances non-communicable or irrelevant. An extreme illustration of this trend is the immense popularity of the television series ‘Drunk History’, which ran in the US between 2013 and 2019, and in the meanwhile has had adaptations in several countries including the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, Poland and Australia. The concept of the series is that a celebrity person is asked to narrate a ‘real’ historical event while being (very) drunk; actors then re-enact this story. Interestingly the makers of the series stress that their show is historically accurate in terms of dates, names and main “story elements”,...

Über Autor(innen)

Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium; Lutz Raphael, University of Trier, Germany.