The Ambiguities of History: The Problem of Ethnocentrism in Historical Writing (review)

Fuglestad's essay tackles a pivotal question confronting historians who study non-Western parts of the world—how to write histories of peoples who are not Westerners. He contends that "westernized" non-Western histories pose a critical epistemological problem since history is a singularly inappropriate science with which to understand how other peoples understand and interpret their own pasts. The reason, he argues, is that history is a "linear-evolutionary philosophy that incorporates an ideology of linear progress" (11) and is fundamentally intertwined with "Western civilization." Whereas people of other civilizations have conceived of themselves and their pasts without history (if they are interested at all in their pasts), "[o]ne of the peculiarities of Western civilization," according to Fugelstad, "is that it is built in part on the transmission of historical experience, and . . . one of the foundations of that civilization was and is to believe in the lessons of the past" (16). Fugelstad is careful to distinguish his argument from Trevor-Roper's (in)famously dismissive claim that Africa had no history, only the "'unrewarding gyrations of barbarian tribes'" (10).¹ In arguing that Africa and other non-Western civilizations did not understand their pasts as history, Fugelstad assiduously avoids the conclusion that Africa and other non-Western civilizations are lacking. Rather, he contends, something is deeply wrong with history itself.

Fugelstad begins his argument by tracing the emergence of historical thinking in the West, or what he characterizes as the development of "a progress-seeking view of the world . . . [that] does not allow for religion-centered peoples" (50). He then focuses on the origins of "westernized" non-Western history, arguing that its very premise was a form of cultural and ontological imperialism, closely linked with notions of "modernization" (60); he elaborates the non-linear, sacred character of precolonial non-Western societies. Fugelstad saves special censure for Africanists who, though they stubbornly resist Trevor-Roper's claims, have unwittingly accepted his understanding of the past, thus forcing African pasts into "the conceptual framework and paradigms . . . devised for the comprehension of the past in the West" (70). Africanists have not done the necessary theoretical labor to extract themselves from this epistemological mess.

This work is not precisely interdisciplinary in its methodology, although its sources and methodological implications are. As a theoretical essay that excavates and critiques history's project, Ambiguities draws from a wide range of regional subfields of history (including African, Asian, South Asian, Pacific, European), engages with philosophies of history, and mines historical and ethnographic works by anthropologists and other social scientists. It presents crucial methodological implications about how historians and other social scientists can engage with the past worlds of diverse peoples. Fugelstad demands that we approach these worlds ethnographically, "to perceive each and every period and each and every culture/civilization in its own light, to unearth . . . both the worlds we have lost and those we have not" (139).

Fugelstad presents a compelling case for arguing that many precolonial, pre-contact non-Western societies embraced nonlinear, circular notions of time, which differed substantially from history's linearity. But he might have spent some time exploring the processes by which non-Western peoples' understandings of time and past became historicized. In his focus on history as an imperialist imposition, Fugelstad does not explore how or why some non-Western people might appropriate (wholesale or selectively) history and its notions of linear time and improvement. Nevertheless, his essay opens up the possibility of further comparative research about such processes.

The Ambiguities of History is a provocative and valuable essay that merits wide readership, although it will surely raise the hackles of some historians. It challenges historians of diverse subfields to explore, re-think, and re-theorize how to write about other people's pasts.