Volume 52
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
David L. Marshall, “The Implications of Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism for Intellectual History," History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 1-31.
Quentin Skinner’s appropriation of speech act theory for intellectual history has been extremely influential. Even as the model continues to be important for historians, however, philosophers now regard the original speech act theory paradigm as dated. Are there more recent initiatives that might reignite theoretical work in this area? This article argues that the inferentialism of Robert Brandom is one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical projects with historical implications. It shows how Brandom’s work emerged out of the broad shift in the philosophy of language from semantics to pragmatics that also informed speech act theory. The article then goes on to unpack the rich implications of Brandom’s inferentialism for the theory and practice of intellectual history. It contends that inferentialism clarifies, legitimizes, and informs intellectual historical practice, and it concludes with a consideration of the challenges faced by inferentialist intellectual history, together with an argument for the broader implications of Brandom’s work.
FIFTH ANNUAL HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE
Martin Jay, “Intention and Irony: The Missed Encounter between Hayden White and Quentin Skinner," History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 32-48.
No contemporary intellectual historian has produced more influential reflections on the historian’s craft than Hayden White and Quentin Skinner, yet their legacy has never been meaningfully compared. Doing so reveals a surprising complementarity in their approach, at least to the extent that Skinner’s stress on recovering the intentionality of authors fits well with White’s observation that irony is the dominant rhetorical mode of historical narrative in our day. Irony itself, to be sure, has to be divided broadly speaking into its dramatic or Socratic variants and the unstable and paradoxical alternative defended by poststructuralist critics. The latter produced in White an anxiety about the anarchistic implications of an allegedly inherent undecidability in historical interpretation and narration, which threatened to conflate history entirely with fiction. By recovering the necessary role of intentionality as a prerequisite for a more moderate version of Socratic and dramatic irony—in which hindsight provides some purchase on a truth denied actors at the time history is made—it is possible to rescue an ironic attitude that can register the frequency of unintended consequences without surrendering to the conclusion that no explanation or interpretation is superior to another. Against yet a third alternative, which tries to reconstruct the past rationally as a prelude to the present, acknowledging the ironic undermining of intentions avoids giving all the power to the contemporary historian and restores a dialogic balance between actors in the past and their present-day interpreters.
BOOK FORUM: PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN’S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE
Brian Gratton, “Introduction," History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 49-53.
Why were mid-nineteenth-century Hispanic populations so small in what is now the American Southwest, after centuries of colonization? A brilliant new literature provides a model of explanation in the authority of formidable indigenous polities, especially that great power that Pekka Hämäläinen reveals to us in his book The Comanche Empire. Employing an exercise in cartographic history, centered on the Pecos River Valley, we can confirm a hypothesis drawn from that theoretical model: Comanche sway was so great that European mapmakers appear to have lost knowledge about that geographical region. This new historical model deserves close attention from scholars. In this forum, four leading historians, drawn from different fields, assess the contribution of The Comanche Empire.
Josh Reid, “Indigenous Power in The Comanche Empire, “ History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 54-59.
Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four-part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hämäläinen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche and of Native North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past.
Karl Jacoby, “Indigenous Empires and Native Nations: Beyond History and Ethnohistory in Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, “ History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 60-66.
How should historians write Native history? To what extent should one privilege Native terms, sources, chronologies, and epistemologies? And to what extent should historians align Native history with concepts developed for other peoples and places? These crucial questions about emic (insider) and etic (outsider) approaches to the past are cast into sharp relief in Pekka Hämäläinen’s award-winning The Comanche Empire. This essay charts the perils and possibilities of each position. It then explores possible ways to move beyond the emic/etic division that has dominated many of the recent debates about Native history through a rereading of an episode in which Comanche history collides with US and Mexican history.
John Tutino, “Globalizing the Comanche Empire," History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 67-74.
The Comanche rose by adapting to the technological and trade opportunities brought to New Mexico by the eighteenth-century expansion of New Spain’s globally linked silver economy. They built an empire that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century, dominating vast areas of the high plains and controlling complex trades, just as a social revolution within Mexico’s wars of independence undermined the silver economy and ended its northward dynamism. Comanche power flourished between a struggling Mexico and an expanding US, until the military and industrial power of the latter combined with the ecological vulnerabilities of the Comanche economy to enable the Anglo-American triumph in what should be called the War for North America of 1846–1848. The US claimed a continental West from an uncertain Mexican sovereignty and an assertive Comanche empire of war and trade. The expansion and collapse of New Spain, the rise and fall of the Comanche empire, and the rise of the United States all occurred within an evolving globalization. Spanish North America expanded to 1810; Comanche power rose in the eighteenth century and soared after 1810 as Mexico struggled with the challenges of nation-making; then the United States defeated both to claim continental hegemony in the 1840s. These expansions, conflicts, and changes—all tied to larger processes of globalization—reshaped North America between 1700 and 1850.
Rachel St. John, “Imperial Spaces in Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, “ History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 75-80.
This review focuses on Pekka Hämäläinen’s characterization and analysis of the Comanche empire as a spatial category in The Comanche Empire and discusses how this work relates to broader discussions about space and power in borderlands and imperial histories. Although empires have long been central actors in borderlands histories, “empire” has not necessarily been a category of spatial organization and analysis and certainly not one used to describe spaces controlled by Native peoples. By contrast, while Hämäläinen emphasizes the imperial characteristics of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Comanche history (as other contributors to this forum discuss), he also uses “empire” to characterize Comanche dominance spatially. Hämäläinen helps us to rethink the spatial dynamics that both shaped and were produced by the encounters between Comanches and Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Americans, and other Native peoples in the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analyzing how Comanches came to control vast stretches of the southern plains, The Comanche Empire challenges our assumptions about how Native polities and imperial powers (and groups like the Comanches that Hämäläinen argues were both) thought about territorial claims and how they employed more nuanced spatial strategies to assert their authority, extend their cultural influence, and control trade and resources.
Pekka Hämäläinen, “What’s in a Concept? The Kinetic Empire of the Comanches," History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 81-90.
This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro-colonial power regimes; balancing of culture-specific frameworks with broad-gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Brian Fay on Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory by Espen Hammer, History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 91-109.
Allan Megill on History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence by Dominick LaCapra, History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 110-129.
Paul A. Roth on The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007 by Hayden White and Robert Doran, History and Theory 52, no. 1 (2013), 130-143.
ARTICLES
Dariusz Gafijczuk, "Dwelling Within: The Inhabited Ruins of History," History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 149-170.
Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings. To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel’s philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness. Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation.
Rank Ankersmit, "Representation as a Cognitive Instrument," History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 149-170.
This essay discusses the role of the notions of reference, truth, and meaning in historical representation. Four major claims will be argued. First, conditional for all meaningful discussion of historical representation is that one radically discards from one’s mind the paradigm of the true statement and all the epistemological and ontological problems occasioned by it. Second, representation is not a two-place, but a three-place operator: in representation a represented reality (1) is represented by a representation (2) focusing on certain aspects of represented reality (3). Third, applying the notions of reference, truth, and meaning to historical representations compels us to give them a content basically different from the ones they have in contemporary philosophy of language and science. Fourth, it will be shown that in (historical) representation, meaning precedes truth—and not the other way around as in most of contemporary philosophy of language.
Murat Dağlı, "The Limits of Ottoman Pragmatism," History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 149-170.
In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical-philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations.
Timo Pankakoski, "Reoccupying Secularization: Schmitt and Koselleck on Blumenberg’s Challenge," History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 214-245.
This article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy to Carl Schmitt’s political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political-theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension-ridden elements at play in Koselleck’s theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg’s criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg’s concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,” “reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt’s famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck’s understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg’s criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion’s initial critical function in Blumenberg’s theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck’s reserved attitude toward Blumenberg’s metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Ronald Aronson on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 246-264.
David D. Roberts on Hayden White: The Historical Imagination by Herman Paul, History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 265-277.
Eileen Ka-May Cheng on The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History by Richard S. Kirkendall, History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 278-289.
Yuval Laor and Eva Jablonka on Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences by Alex Mesoudi, History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013), 290-299.
ARTICLES
FORUM: AT HOME AND IN THE WORKPLACE: DOMESTIC AND OCCUPATIONAL SPACE IN WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE MIDDLE AGES
Bear Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, "At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the ‘Spatial Turn,’” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 305-318.
This introduction places the forum contributions in the wider context of the “spatial turn” within the humanities and social sciences. Following a survey of the historical trajectories of the field, a review of impulses from different disciplines, and a sketch of general developments over the last few decades, the editors exemplify key approaches, methods, and conceptual advances with reference to gender studies. The focus then turns to the structure, main themes, and specific contents of this collection, which features both case studies and theoretical reflections. In conclusion, the essay underlines the significance and further potential of the “spatial turn.”
Krisztine Robert, "Constructions of “Home,” “Front,” and Women’s Military Employment in First World War Britain: A Spatial Interpretation,” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 319-343.
In First World War Britain, women’s ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women’s Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics’ arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers’ efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.
Amanda J. Flather, "Space, Place, and Gender: The Sexual and Spatial Division of Labor in the Early Modern Household,” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 344-360.
Much has been written about the history of the work of men and women in the premodern past. It is now generally acknowledged that early modern ideological assumptions about a strict division of work and space between men and productive work outside the house on the one hand, and women and reproduction and consumption inside the house, on the other, bore little relation to reality. Household work strategies, out of necessity, were diverse. Yet what this spatial complexity meant in particular households on a day-to-day basis and its consequences for gender relationships is less clear and has received relatively little historical attention. The aim of this paper is to add to our knowledge through a case study of the way that men and women used and organized space for work in the county of Essex during the “long seventeenth century.” Drawing on critiques of the concept of “separate spheres” and the models of economic change to which it relates, together with local/micro historical methods, it places evidence within an appropriate regional context to argue that spatial patterns were enormously varied in early modern England and a number of factors—time, place, occupation, and status, as well as gender—determined them. Understanding of the dynamic, complex, uneven purchase of patriarchy upon the organization, imagination, and experience of space has important implications for approaches to gender relations in early modern England. It raises additional doubts about the utility of the separate spheres analogy, and particularly the use of binary oppositions of male/female and public/private, to describe gender relations and their changes in this period and shows that a deeper understanding demands more research into the local contexts in which the gendered division and meaning of work was negotiated.
Willem de Blécourt, "’Keep That Woman Out!’ Notions of Space in Twentieth-Century Flemish Witchcraft Discourse,” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 361-379.
This article considers the importance of a spatial dimension for witchcraft research, which has so far been largely neglected. In twentieth-century Europe people in certain regions still considered their world in terms of witchcraft; they attributed misfortune to bewitchments and usually blamed their neighbors. Here a part of Flemish-speaking Belgium is investigated with the help of legend texts collected in the 1960s. The witchcraft discourse that informed these texts did not just contain formulations of space; sometimes it also determined how people negotiated space. In this part of Flanders, witchcraft was embedded in Roman Catholicism; monasteries were the favored destinations of all those who considered themselves or their family members bewitched. In order to find cures for bewitchments people undertook hazardous journeys of considerable distance and found their efforts hindered by the witch they sought to counteract. The measures against evil influences that they were given were meant to consolidate the boundaries between their own (private) space and the (outside) space where witches roamed. Bewitchments were generally blamed on women. In the contemporary patriarchal social order, both public and domestic spaces were nearly always under men’s control. This is why bewitchment was caused less by transgressions of male-defined boundaries than by infringements of bodily spaces such as by eying or touching somebody else’s children. This suggests a different approach to female space based on notions of proximity.
Matthew H. Johnson, "What Do Medieval Buildings Mean?” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 380-399.
The aim of this article is to review and reconsider what scholars, including historians, archaeologists, and those in other disciplines, are trying to get at when they attempt a “social interpretation” of English late medieval domestic buildings. I focus on the definition and interpretation of “meaning,” and I examine critically a series of concepts routinely deployed in social interpretations in the past, including my own work, such as type, zeitgeist, and intention. I argue that some of these concepts and interpretive moves are problematic and rather than aiding in our understanding, raise further questions in their turn about how buildings were lived in and understood by their medieval inhabitants. I argue for a shift in language and jargon away from “planning” and “meaning” to that of “lived experience.” I explore such a possible shift with reference to different understandings of and debates over the late medieval castle of Bodiam in southeastern England. Such a shift from meaning to lived experience raises fresh challenges for the development and empirical evaluation of interdisciplinary research on medieval buildings, but it also raises fresh possibilities and insights.
Leif Jerram, "Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 400-419.
Much fuss has been made of the “spatial turn” in recent years, across a range of disciplines. It is hard to know if the attention has been warranted. A confusion of terms has been used—such as space, place, spatiality, location—and each has signified a cluster of often contradictory and confusing meanings. This phenomenon is common to a range of disciplines in the humanities. This means, first, that it is not always easy to recognize what (if anything) is being discussed under the rubric of space, and second, that over-extended uses of the cultural turn have stymied meaningful engagement with (or even a language of) materiality in discussions of space. This article shows how materiality has been marginalized both by a casual vocabulary and a vigorous a priori epistemological holism on the part of scholars, and how the spatial turn has been too closely linked to the cultural turn to allow it to develop its fullest explanatory potential. It demonstrates how historians might profitably theorize the significance of place and space in their work (borrowing techniques from geographers and anthropologists, and referring to the phenomenological tradition), and sets out some challenges for using space more effectively in explanatory systems. Inspired by environmental history, sociology, and science and technology studies, I propose a way of establishing space as different from conventional historical handling of materiality, and end by identifying some methodological problems that need to be solved if we are to proceed on a surer footing.
Gerd Schwerhoff, "Spaces, Places, and the Historians: A Comment from a German Perspective,” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 420-432.
This article discusses from a specifically German point of view the “spatial turn” in history and the approaches of this forum. Many recent interventions have suggested that “space” (as opposed to “time”) was for many years a marginalized category in the German historiographical debate because of the ideological contamination of the category “space” by the Nazis. In the context of the vivid lively “local” or “regional” history practiced in Germany, however, “space” has always played an important role. The debates around the spatial turn nevertheless provide the opportunity for deliberate reconceptualization. This comment proposes a relational understanding of “space” as the core of the new approach and identifies some central elements and terms for it: the differentiation of “spaces,” “places,” and “locations”; movement in space; the division of space in the form of boundaries; finally, the ordering and classification of space in the form of written or visual representations.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Theodore Koditschek on How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm, History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 433-450.
Alexandra Lianeri on The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE by Jonas Grethlein, History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 451-461.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson on Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 462-472.
Does History Need Animals?
David Gary Shaw, “A Way with Animals," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 1-12.
Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 13-28.
This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also—and inseparably—asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so frequently goes without comment in historical (as in other humanities) scholarship. Using work from historiography, sensory history, social history, anthropology, and contemporary animal science, the article proposes that introducing animals as actors and not just as objects into historical work will not only broaden and deepen what we might know about the past, it will also challenge some assumptions as to what the focus of our discipline might be.
Vinciane Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 29-44.
Some scientists who study animals have emphasized the need to focus on the “point of view” of the animals they are studying. This methodological shift has led to animals being credited with much more agency than is warranted. However, as critics suggest, on the one hand, the “perspective” of another being rests mostly upon “sympathetic projection,” and may be difficult to apply to unfamiliar beings, such as bees or even flowers. On the other hand, the very notion of agency still conveys its classic understanding as intentional, rational, and premeditated, and is still embedded in humanist and Christian conceptions of human exceptionalism. This paper seeks, in the first part, to investigate the practical link between these two notions and the problems they raise. In the second part, following the work of two historians of science who have revisited Darwin’s studies of orchids and their pollinators, it will observe a shift in the meaning of the concept of agency. Indeed, creatures may appear as “secret agents” as long as we adopt a conventional definition of agency based on subjective experience and autonomous intention. However, when reframed in the terms of “agencement”—an assemblage that produces “agentivity”—agency seems to be much more extensively shared in the living world. We will then explore some of the concrete situations in which these agencements are manifested, and through which creatures of different species become, one for another and one with another, companion-agents.
Brett L. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 45-67.
This article surveys recent historical writings on animals. Its principal concerns are the manner in which historians grant agency to animals and how that agency functions in historical narration. The article examines the histories of animals in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and North America in order to tease out the similarities and differences of human experiences with other animals. The foundational premise of the article is that humans are animals, sometimes even a meaty prey species, and that, as such, they are not external to nature or, ultimately, different from other animals in this regard. Humans can have violently intimate relationships with other creatures, an intimacy that defines much of global human history. Animals permeate our history and we theirs: tug at the threads and our stories, woven as they are into the same tightly knit tapestry, will not disentwine. The debate regarding whether humans are anomalous and outside nature or separate from other animals is complicated when the stomach enzymes from an animal, whether wolf or crocodile, digest a human being. Therefore, the cultural-constructionist arguments regarding “the animal”—that our understanding of nonhuman animals is entirely culturally generated—need to be viewed as overly simplistic. My contention is that our reluctance to join the rest of the animal kingdom on its terms, on more natural terms, exposes a lingering devotion to human “exceptionalism,” one that is inherent in the humanities and social sciences.
Thierry Hoquet, “Animal Individuals: A Plea for a Nominalistic Turn in Animal Studies?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 68-90.
This paper focuses on the concept of “animal individuals” and puts forward a nominalistic approach. Nominalism is an ontological thesis (only individuals exist), but also an epistemological claim: that our “nouns” are practical tools for a quick dispatch of things, but do not correspond to anything real. Hence for a consistent nominalist, “animals” do not exist, except as a powerful fiction. First, we show that the word “animal” commits what we call (after Plato) the “fallacy of the crane”: it encompasses a huge range of living entities that have only one thing in common: they are not humans. Differences between our term “animal” and the ancient Greek “zoon” also show the fluctuating boundaries of “animality.” Besides, our ways of speaking systematically deny individuality to nonhuman animals. The philosophical meaning of the term “individual” implies a genuine dimension of artistic singularity and a political claim for emancipation. Portraits of apes are striking instances of such individuality, captured by photography, as is art produced by particular animals. Methodologically, this leads also to the collection of anecdotes and a focus on animal biographies. The eighteenth-century controversy between Buffon and Condillac helps us understand what is at stake in the tension between species and individuals. Buffon claims that each nonhuman animal species can be represented by a “specimen,” whereas Condillac shows that animal individuals feel like us and that their nature is impenetrable to us. Finally, a focus on individuals is not only a way to renew or extend historical methods. Biologists are also increasingly concerned with individuals. They develop tools to distinguish individuals from one another: “animal bertillonage” for morphology. They question standard norms of behavior and preferences. This emphasis on animal individuality has not only theoretical but also ethical and legal consequences.
Susan Pearson, “Speaking Bodies, Speaking Minds: Animals, Language, History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 91-108.
This essay explores a nineteenth-century debate over the linguistic capacity of animals in order to consider the links among language, reason, and history. Taking the American animal-protection movement as a point of departure, I show how protectionists, linguists, anthropologists, and advocates of deaf education were divided about the origins and nature of language. Was language a product of the soul and thus unique to humans, or was it a function of the body, a complex form of the corporeal expressions that humans and animals shared? Was language divine or natural? The answers that different activists and intellectuals gave to such questions shaped their view of the relationship of humans to animals and the inclusion of the latter in the moral and political community. I suggest that such debates are helpful to historians since the possession of language—and its traces in the written word—has traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history from history proper. If we are to include animals in “history,” we must rethink the relationship of the discipline to language.
Mahesh Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 109-127.
This article explores how far animals are or are not endowed with a sense of history. The century-long history of lion–human interaction in the lions’ last habitat in Asia—in India’s Gir Forest, Gujarat State—is the focal point of analysis. In turn, there have been longer-term shifts since ancient and medieval times. Aside from two specific phases of breakdown, Gir’s lions rarely attack people. To comprehend why this is so, both the lions and humans need to be seen as products of history. Although it is going too far to endow the lions with historical consciousness, Gir’s lions clearly do have memory of memories. Over a half-century since hunting ceased, living on a mix of domestic livestock and wild prey, they now co-inhabit not only the forest but a much larger territory in close proximity to resident people. Their case calls for rethinking both animal and human histories to allow for associate species that adapt to human presence, and are capable of memory.
Chris Pearson, “Dogs, History, and Agency," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 128-145.
Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS), this article argues that agency is shared unevenly between humans and nonhumans. It proposes that conceptualizing animals as agents allows them to enter history as active beings rather than static objects. Agency has become a key concept within history, especially since the rise of the “new” social history. But many historians treat agency as a uniquely human attribute, arguing that animals lack the cognitive abilities, self-awareness, and intentionality to be agents. This article argues that human levels of intentionality are not a precondition of agency. Furthermore, it draws on research into canine psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intentionality and self-directed action. The aim is not to turn dogs, or any other animals, into human-style agents nor to suggest that they display the same levels of skill, intentionality, and intelligence as humans. Instead, the objective is to show how dogs are purposeful and capable agents in their own way and to explore how they interact with human agents. The article particularly considers the agency of militarized dogs, especially those on the Western Front (1914–1918), to suggest how historians can use primary sources to uncover how individuals in the past have treated dogs as capable creatures and to capture some sense of dogs’ embodied and purposeful agency.
David Gary Shaw, “The Torturer’s Horse: Agency and Animals in History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (2013), 146-167.
Historians need to understand the nature of historical agency and how animals relate to this central if contested historiographical concern. Focusing on the specific context of the Napoleonic Wars and in particular the Duke of Wellington and his horse Copenhagen, I show why agency is a continuum, not limited to the complex and intentional acts of a rational man, for instance a field marshal, but extending to basic actions, group actions, and less self-conscious actors, for instance a horse. Therefore, agency can include animals. Any action, however, must be placed into a context of reasons or understandings, the “pertinent context.” The place of animals as agents will naturally vary across historical time in great part depending on prevalent contemporary cultural assumptions. In some periods animals have operated as difficult-to-discern “secret agents.” I stress the variable and fluid notions of agency that have emerged in posthumanistic and actor network theoretical contexts. And I develop the idea of special associations—what I call unities—in which especially close, disciplined actors are produced, such as the skilled horse-and-rider of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, historical agency is likely always to involve human beings, but there is also space for animals to act with people.
Cover image: Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party, by Dimitry Anikin (6 May 2020)
