Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction

Two: Historiographical Reflections

two Historiographical Reflections Inside an Historian’s Study: The “Micro-technology” of a “Bottom-up” Historicism Early in my career, while teaching History 101 at Berkeley, I was much affected by Marc Bloch’s comment, in The Historian’s Craft, about “the curious modesty which, as soon as we are outside the study, seems to forbid us to expose the honest groping of our methods before a profane public” (1953:87). In that spirit, I once imagined a case study in which, from the moment of conception of a project until the day of its realization in print, an historian might keep a systematic diary of its “honest groping”—a daily record of every new idea, every problem of method, every interpretive insight, every painful revision, as they occurred. I quickly realized, however, that such a methodological diary, even if correlated temporally with the more conventional components of the particular research project (the primary and secondary sources consulted , both published and archival), would be unlikely to illuminate all its generative or constraining influences—unless it were somehow also combined with a diary of other aspects of my life, thought, and emotions. And whatever the general historiographical utility such a unique and unlikely record might have, it would have been virtually impossible for me to create, given the sometimes unsystematic way I take my notes and my failure to date them. Even so, there is perhaps something to be gained, in understanding my output as an historian, from an attempt to “expose the honest groping ” of the methods that produced it. Written years later, rather than as a case study of the groping in process, this account will necessarily 143 144 Historiographical Reflections have a certain “presentist” aspect. Whereas in the preceding “Autobiographical Recollections” I tried to re-present my life in the way I experienced it at the time, these “Historiographical Reflections” may draw out certain implications of which I may not have been consciously aware and retrospectively formulate idealized principles that I did not in fact systematically practice. To begin with, it should be reemphasized that what happens in the “historian’s study” cannot be understood in isolation from an historian ’s relation to the world outside, or from the inner tendencies of his or her personality or character, inasmuch as it is those prior life experiences and psychological predispositions that may lead an historian to pursue one project rather than another, and to pursue it in a particular way. In my own case, it may be helpful to readers to review briefly some of the major themes of Part 1. These include a perfectionist achievement motivation ingrained by my parents; the inherited and renewable privileges of a middle-class academic liberal upbringing; the rejection of religious belief and subsequent embrace of a dogmatic political faith; seven years in the working class in Massachusetts (and other briefer episodes of cultural alterity); the painful experience of “self-criticism” in the Communist Party’s struggle against white chauvinism (an archetype , perhaps, of the present essay); the relativizing disillusion with Communism in the aftermath of the Kruschchev revelations; the attempt in a positivistic program in American Civilization to understand racial thought historically; the mixed success of my quasi-quantitative doctoral dissertation (as a methodological experiment and in effect an anti-paradigm for my later history of anthropology); the experience of a more conventional intellectual history and the development of an historicist scholarly persona at Berkeley, even as my personal marital life was falling apart in a context of political conflict and cultural turmoil; the establishment of a marginal academic identity as historian of anthropology in one of the country’s leading departments; the achievement of the status of disciplinary doyen across a widening generation gap in anthropology; and the turn to biography (and autobiography) in the face of impending mortality. It is against the background of these experiences that the generative and constraining contexts of my major projects , both published and abandoned, should be viewed. Grounded in these relativizing experiences there has also been a commitment to historicism as the governing principle of historical study (see above, footnote 16). First articulated in programmatic terms in 1965 in the editorial essay “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in 145 Inside an Historian’s Study the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences” (1965c), it has been qualified in various ways over the years, so that what was once a program is now...