Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories (review)

In the summer of 1998, I had the good fortune to attend a small conference held on the Greek island of Syros (Hermoupolis), devoted to heterodoxies inherent in the construction of identities of "self" and "other" in early modern Europe, issues of long-standing concern to both anthropologists and historians. The forum not only featured two leading historians in this field (Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg), but also provided opportunities for a large number of Greek historians to present their views. Convened to honor Davis on the eve of her retirement, the seminar offered an excellent occasion to listen to, discuss and exchange ideas, particularly concerns about the historical specificity of the early modern period in Europe, as well as general issues pertaining to identity construction and "otherness" in Europe. The papers presented have been brought together by Gaganakis and Benveniste in the second volume of Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories (2000). This new journal, published in Greece by an international editorial board of scholars, has been noteworthy for its international and interdisciplinary character, and this particular volume devoted to the Syros symposium is of outstanding academic quality. Produced during a period of resurgent nationalisms, especially in the Balkans, the close critical scrutiny of identity construction (and the inherent truism embedded within such historical processes) was a very timely project.

Natalie Davis's article, "Cannibalism and Knowledge," addresses the subject of western knowledge of cannibalism, often assumed to be practiced solely by "naked savages." Artistic representations of the "beautiful" bodies of naked savages notwithstanding, the medieval Church condemned their alleged cannibalism, contributing to constructed stereotypes of the polluted "other." Yet, as Davis argues, identities are formed in relation to not one but several "others." The double identification of eaters of flesh with eaten flesh contributes to the creation of terror. European religious ferocity created a deep disgust for "savage" customs, but the madness of hunger—particularly in times of famine such as Europeans experienced regularly between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries—gave such imagery its visceral power. The ability of Davis to elicit the hybridity and multiplicity of social relations has influenced a generation of scholars, prompting historians to look at the fluidity of identities, even when they appear strongly consolidated and preserved.

In his essay, "Selfhood as Otherness," Carlo Ginsburg explicitly discusses that which Davis left implicit: selfhood and otherness as two faces of the same coin. Ginsburg examines two discourses on poetry in sixteenth century Elizabethan England which reveal the influences of two types of literary text on the construction of English identity: on the one hand, ancient poetic texts (particularly Greek and Latin), considered natural but barbarous, savage, universal, ignorant, and naked; on the other hand, recent modern literature, considered artificial but civil, particular, and learned. Ginsburg argues that quarrels over what is ancient and what is modern began in England, and that the constructed British "self" was very much a product of confronting the "otherness" of the ancient world.

Antonis Liakos's "The Transformation of Historical Writing from Syntagmatic to Paradigmatic" is a theoretically sophisticated essay that illuminates our understanding of the modern writing of history. Liakos maintains that the syntagmatic writing of history occurs within both a pre-existing time order and a socio-cultural structure which selects the material that the historian reconstructs and represents. But the structure of politics, and the historian's dialogue with the existing social reality are also important in the writing of paradigmatic history, which does not reveal a temporal sequence as it decomposes the syntagmatic genre. The French Annales school, for example, introduced the "histoire problème" that oscillates between theory and data. The history of "otherness" however, is by definition a history of normality, a syntagmatic syntax...