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10| Etienne Benson between the tracking of animals and the writing of history would seem to open the way toward including animals as historical actors or agents, neither of these authors took that leap. Bloch was quite explicit that only traces of human life should be of interest to the historian—that it was, in fact, the unique complexity of human behavior that required the historian to draw on a wide range of textual and nontextual sources. Those traces might well include the traces left by animals, but they were only properly “historical” to the extent that they shed light on human lives (much as russell’s “evolutionary history” is distinguished from the evolutionary history of biologists by its focus on anthropogenic evolution).47 ginzburg’s argument, which relies on an implicit historical progression from hunting to history, is equally anthropocentric. Though animals are clearly vital actors in the narratives told by primitive hunters, they vanish from the analogous modern-day practices of physicians, art critics, historians, and so forth, which are ginzburg’s true subject. animals and hunting play an originary role, providing the stuff of stories in the dawn of time; today, his account implies, they have been superseded by more civilized concerns linked to the extension of modern apparatuses of social control.48 animals were, in a sense, the training ground on which humans learned the techniques and ways of thought that would allow them to track and control other humans. Still, the tropes of traces and tracking are amenable to less anthropocentric interpretations than these. They provide a way of thinking about historical sources that does not depend on the assumption that the producer of a trace was, in a particular instance or in general, intending to leave a record or to convey a specific meaning. The vast majority of historical sources produced by humans are not, of course, intended for the eyes of historians; in many cases their authors would be surprised at the uses to which they have been put. That they are useful for a particular historical study is a by-product or accident of the fact that they were once useful for other purposes and have since been preserved and made accessible. indeed, as ginzburg suggests, the most valuable clues to the past are often exactly those traces that their producers did not intend to leave.49 Moreover, as Derrida has argued, there is much that is automatic in even the most conscious linguistic act of a self-aware human. The distinction between an automatic, unintentional, meaningless animal “reaction” and a willed, intentional, meaningful human “response,” which has been a core tenet of philosophical humanism since at least the time of rené Descartes, rests on shaky empirical and philosophical ground.50 if intentionality were to serve as a litmus test for the legitimacy of historical sources or agents, much of human history would have to be thrown out. in the same way, the traces left by other kinds of animals besides the human need not have been left intentionally to be useful for the historian. Whether the traces make it possible to tell an interesting or meaningful story about nonhuman animals as historical actors is another question—as suggested above, an empirical one, the answer to which is likely to vary, just as it does for the history of humans, depending on the available sources, the historical situation, and the historian’s interests and capacities. as ginzburg suggests, there is a sense in which the historian’s method resembles that of the hunter. it seeks to imaginatively reconstruct a sequence of past events on the basis of often fragmentary evidence. While the successful hunter returns home with the body of the prey, the successful historian returns with a plausible and interesting explanation of change over time—or, in its minimal form, the bare demonstration that a particular past time was different in some nontrivial way from the present. Success depends not just on the talents and resources of the hunter or historian but also on the conditions under which he or she works. The most skilled tracker may lose the trail on bare rock; the most diligent and perceptive historian will have little to say when time has effaced the traces of the past. Historiography, Disciplinarity, and Trace| 11 The current paucity of traces for the hunter-historian to follow is neither accidental nor innocent. it is a product of the very history we want to tell. The production, preservation, and availability...

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