Historical methodology: approaches and principles

¶ … discloses to the reader something of what happened during the era under discussion. But it also reveals at least as much about the era in which the history was written. What is considered significant enough to mention, what events are seen as causative rather than incidental, who are the true villains - all of these things may change from one generation's historical account to that of the next, and not because new facts have come to light.

The authors under consideration here ask us to reconsider the nature of history in general as well as to reexamine the particular places and times that they are writing about. They seek to use substitute key theoretical concepts for the traditional chronological structure of history, asking us to consider not what came after what but who had power over whom, and how these social relationships are the causative elements of (each) history.

Central to the work of the five historians examine here is the category of gender. Scott writes most analytically about it but each of the other four (even if more implicitly) incorporate and depend upon her definition of gender as something that is almost entirely - but not quite entirely - divorced from biological sex. Gender is for each of these authors a shorthand way that "natives" have of dividing the world into categories of power. And while in most cases the gendered category of woman is analogous to the category of powerless, the worlds investigated here demonstrate that history is not quite so neat. Certainly the gendered categories of male and female correlate with access to and denial of political power, but Caulfield and Guy especially demonstrate that women too have power.

While from our position in the postmodern West, we might be inclined to dismiss such traditional-within-a-patriarchal-culture female power as the guardianship of honor as being realistically related to any type of "real" power, Caulfield and Guy (and indeed all five historians) argue that this is too simplistic a reading of the ways in which gender and power interact.

What is most compelling about these narratives is their simultaneous ability to ask us to question the complex ways in which gender identity and power relations based on gender are continually renegotiated in these historical milieux while at the same time asking us to reexamine the entire enterprise of writing history.

Moreover, it is perhaps necessarily true that all history is teleological; after all, one is always writing it from what is at that moment the end-point of history. Thus historians, no matter how hard they may try not to be, are always in fact writing the same story, a story that begins at different points in the past certainly but that still and necessarily ends up with themselves, with us, with the here and now.

The entire practice of historiography would seem to argue that people seek to understand the past in some measure to shed light on the present, and as the needs and particularities of the present change so the historian looks at the past differently. This is not a question of political or other form of bias (although certainly different biases also shape the writing of history, as they do everything else). Rather, this is simply a truth about the practice of history.

Scott explores some of these issues vis-a-vis the subject of women in history, but her remarks have a far wider currency. She is here talking about "women's history," but her comments might be applied to any one area of history - Civil War history, for example, or the history of technology - as each subfield within history tries to come to terms with the challenges of postmodernism.

The production of this knowledge is marked by remarkable diversity in topic, method, and interpretations, so much so that it is impossible to reduce the field to a single interpretative or theoretical stance. Not only is there a vast array of topics to be studied, but in addition, on the one hand, many case studies, and on the other hand, large interpretive overviews, which neither address one another nor a similar set of questions.

The authors that we are studying here are certainly not afraid to plunge themselves into the complexities of different forms of discourse, to battle the intellectual dragons of postmodernism and feminism and deconstructionism with intelligence.

Even though in many ways they seem to have determined that there is no longer any legitimate way to create authoritative texts now that the Modernist age is over, they remain firm defenders of the practice of history because of what it has to teach us not only about the specifics of the past but also in general about the nature of power relationships among people and the ways in which lines of power so often mirror lines of gender and ethnicity.

Each of these authors too, however, in different ways argues for a new kind of history to be written, a form of history that is more local and specific, less inclined to attach every even that occurs to the Great Story. History, and the readers of history would be much be better served if historians were to be content simply to explore a particular time and place without trying to link what happens in that moment to the most important events in world history.

The most useful template to employ in reading the work of these authors is the investigation of the intersection of gender and history (which is to say, gender and power) in the work of Joan Wallach Scott, who forces us to examine the many ways in which woman have been written out of history.

This is not only the fact that women have been omitted from the formal historical record - we do not know what the (female) farmers or laborers or queens or nuns were doing in nearly the degree that we know about what their male analogues were doing - but as Scott argues that gender itself has in many ways been erased from the historical record. By assuming a neutrality and a normalcy for the actions of males, these actions/perspectives/philosophies and epistemologies have become subtly ungendered by many historians (and many readers of history) so that rather than any action being the result of what someone of a particular gender and age and race and historical moment has performed it has taken on a Jungian pan-human quality to it.

This is dangerous, all of these authors would argue, because such a de-gendering (along with all other forms of neutralizing of human agents) tends not only to erase many members of the human race from the historical record but it also has the effect of disguising the true nature of power relations among humans. And if history is about anything, surely it is about the nature of power relationships.

History has often been written in such a way that those who do not have power are silenced; such a silencing removes from the historian the necessity of writing about the often-less-than-savory ways the putative heroes of historical discourses have treated those with less structural power than themselves.

Another strategy associated with "her-story" takes evidence about women and uses it to challenge received interpretations of progress and regress. In this regard an impressive mass of evidence has been compiled to show that the Renaissance was not a renaissance for women, that technology did not lead to women's liberation either in the workplace or at home, that the "Age of Democratic Revolutions" excluded women from political participation, that the "affective nuclear family" constrained women's emotional and personal development, and that the rise of medical science deprived women of autonomy and a sense of feminine community.

One of the other important questions that Scott poses for us is how it is that history can be reformed; what is it that historiography can do to history to allow it to exist simultaneously as an essentially Modernist trope in which a single version of a story is considered authentic and authoritative and other versions wrong as well as a Postmodernist trope, in which various forms of a story are privileged?

Again, while Scott's remarks refer specifically to the inclusion of women in histories what she is saying has a much broader application, referring to all of those groups whose stories and perspectives have traditionally been excised from history.

How could women achieve the status of subjects in a field that subsumed or ignored them? Would making women visible suffice toe rectify past neglect? How could women be added to a history presented as a universal human story exemplified by the lives of men? Since the specificity or particularity of women already made them unfit representatives of humankind, how could attention to women undercut, rather than reinforce, that notion?

Caulfield, Guy and Seed each suggest ways that women as well as ideas of both gender and race can be added to history in a way that both honors the agency of women and rewrites history in a substantive way. They move beyond traditional that patriarchal distinction of virgin and whore in their analysis, demonstrating how gender is always more complicated than this, even when their subjects are themselves inclined to divide the world of women into such neatly opposing categories.

Guy, Caulfield and Seed remind us that the choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices that men have. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore.

Thus they help to limn for us a world in which for women gender has created a clear-cut set of choices while for men gender has allowed for a far greater degree of ambivalence. In other words, it is not simply that gender offers to women bad choices but that it offers fewer choices. Social relationships for women are forced into an artificial simplicity because of their gender, while the social relationships into which men can enter are far less keyed to gender and therefore more ambiguous, more "open."

Mexican, Brazilian and Argentine cultural systems are certainly not exempt from this tendency to place women on one side of this dichotomy or the other. Moreover, but in the case of these three nations this division of the female half of the population into the chaste, good woman and the terrible promiscuous one becomes complicated by issues of race (and racial purity), by the historical condition of colonization and post-colonization, by the partial displacement, partial incorporation of native belief systems by Catholicism.

These authors help us to understand that attempts at creating strictly separated divisions between the genders is in some way an attempt in each of these nations to compensate for the fact that race cannot be so clearly defined. Each of these nations contains a large mestizo population, a social category that has traditionally been seen as the negation of "whiteness" or European-ness.

In a world in which race cannot be used as a signpost in determining (both a priori and a posteriori) the nature and dynamics of social relationships, gender must step in to do double duty.

In fact across most of Latin America, it has long been the case that race has relatively little to do with genetics and less to do with skin color. While someone with red hair, very pale skin and green eyes would be unlikely to be called either "mestizo" or "negro," almost anyone else might be because the term is used as a way of designating power relationships between and among people more than it is as a way of saying anything about a person's ancestry.

Ironically, who are the most clearly non-negro in some sense - those who are most purely indigenous looking in appearance - are generally not considered to be "negro." This makes sense to an American, because Indian and black are not the same categories in the United States, but this adds an additional complex dimension to the use of identity in Latin America, where the term generally equates to non-white and poor. Indians are both non-white and poor, and yet do not usually possess mestizo-ness.

Constructed identity" is perhaps the most important phrase in coming to understand Latin America as these three authors present different aspects of it, for the complex world of Latin American cultural norms and personal identity that they reveal is one in which identity is immensely fluid, changing far more rapidly over time than Americans are used to having their own identities change. The most interesting aspect of these book is how the authors describes the ways in which people's sense of self - including their sense of their own race - are constantly shifting.

This quagmire of identity for the powerless especially tends to result in a hardening of gender barriers and ideal behaviors for gender that might well be invisible to us because they so closely conform to traditional ideas about gender identity. Scott's theoretical framework, tied to the historical and ethnographic detail of these three narratives, helps us to understand that gender is not a static category but one that is continually redefined over time - and in large measure in relationship to other categories of identity such as race.

While it is no doubt true that for people in every culture on earth their sense of identity shifts at least slightly given the social milieu that they are in (for identity is of course shaped by those that we are with), the shifts that occur in the three groups of people in these cultural histories seem to be strikingly great. It is difficult to understand from the outside how such constantly negotiated and renegotiated definitions of self can be maintained without psychological damage, and indeed the authors' descriptions of their subjects and their lives suggest that they do suffer from having, time and time again, define who it is that they are in terms of gender identity as well as race - two relatively fixed points of identity for Americans.

Gutierrez's history of the post-contact Southwest concentrates somewhat less on gender than the other three, but his work certainly does not ignore the importance of gender as a characteristic of history. However - and while this may in part reflect his own views it seems more likely that it is a reflection of the "real" conditions of the world that he is examining - gender seems more tightly bonded to either social categories in this world, including age. It seems less likely to be considered separately when assessing a person's role.

By his careful attention to gender and age along with race, Gutierrez is able to help us understand both the particular complexities of this moment in history and also allow us to see the ways in which they are linked to larger issues of power in human society. There are particular reasons why some have more power than others in the world that he is examining, and he is careful to let us see why this is. Essential to this task is his ability to let us see the relationships of power that existed before European contact; relationships that were of course disrupted by that contact. And with the rewriting of such power relationships (which were built on vectors of age and generation and ethnicity) the whole society had to change.