Tales from the Dark Side: Confessions of a Social Scientist

April 2002 * Historically Speaking Peggy G. Hargis Tales from the Dark Side: Confessions of a Social Scientist I first learned that I had been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship when a dear friend sent me a congratulatorye-mail. Iwas astounded— in part because I had not yet received official notification, in part because I was not trained in history or the humanities, and in part because I am a Southerner, and we never expect to win. You see, I am a sociologist by training, a social scientist bychoice, but I have become a historian bythe grace ofmyhumanist friends. Aldiough I never considered myselfa vulgar empiricist, I was weaned on statistical methods, and my initial research on AfricanAmerican land ownership at the turn of the 20th century was highly quantitative. It described the trends and geographic patterns ofAfrican-American land ownership and identified the characteristics of counties where blackswere most(or least) successful in acquiring acreage. I found diat blacks encountered fewer barriers to ownership in some types of commodity cultures dian in odiers, and that die temporal shift from land gain to land loss was not as uniform or as straightforward as historians had implied. I suspected that African-Americans devised strategies for buyingand keepingtheirland based on their local surroundings, but I could not squeeze information aboutpotential landowners, their families , or their local communities from countylevel statistics. If I was to understand how community-based social, political, and economic relations affected African-Americans' opportunities forland ownership, Iwould have to look at other kinds ofinformation. I wish I could say that I knew then exacdy where to go to find my answers, that I understood precisely what the humanities had to offer, and that everyone—sociologists and historians alike—enthusiastically encouraged my interdisciplinaryinterests, butalas, thatwould be a gross misrepresentation. I quicklylearned that some historians suffer from what I call the definitive-work syndrome. "Have you not read so and so's book? The topic has been done." In otherwords, die trend ofblack land gain to land loss had already been adequately accounted for. No need for a sociologist to poke her nose into it. Some ofmyfellowsociologists were equally unimpressed and perplexed by my interest in history. I was once introduced bya formerprofessortoa potential new-faculty hire. She quipped, "Peggy's dissertation was historical, but I'm sure she is beyond that, now." She made history sound Crossing disciplinary and intellectual borders strengthens our methodologicalarsenal and broadens our understanding ofthe social world. like a bad head coki—somediing to be rid ofas quickly as possible. ThoughI came to diehumanitiesself-consciously , my progress was uneven. When I began I had onlydie vaguest idea what a manuscriptcollectionwas , Ihad neverstepped foot in an archive, and the acronym, NUCMC sounded like something mat would stain my clothes. Irelied on diekindnessofmyhistorian friends to guide me as I learned a new vocabulary , discovered different types ofsources, and practicedunfamiliarmethods. Ino longeranalyzed data; I interpreted sources. I no longer tested hypotheses; I assessed competing arguments . Words replaced tabular summaries of regression coefficients, and I struggled towrite clearnarrative prose, a style alien to mostsociologists . And I asked lots ofpeskyquestions. For a longwhile I feltschizophrenic. Iwas convinced diatatsome point, Iwould lookup from reading a dustymanuscript to discover a stern-lookingarchivistpointingher fingerand whispering in a raspy tone, "Impostor! Cast herout!"Yet, nowthatI amcomfortable in my new skin, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to recognize the old battle lines diat once seemed so formidable. The rigid boundarybetween die socialsciences and humanities has become an elusive threshold diat shifts in die sand. How did diis heresy happen? What common ground could die social sciences and die humanities possibly share? An importantvenue for mycrossingintellectual and disciplinaryboundaries camewhen a group ofus organized a research networkthat included women from andiropology, history, and sociology. We met every odier week for two hours to discuss our research and die challenges ofproducingscholarship thatwe feltwe, aswomen, encountered. Aldioughwe expected to support and nurture each other in our research endeavors, I do not think any ofus could have predicted how much substantive helpwe would give one another. Ourresearch interests, which span intellectual, urban, and women's history, European cultural anthropology , 19th-centurySouthernarcheology, and race inequality, seemed too disparate...