Recapturing the past
Recapturing the past
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重拾过去
DOI：
10.1007/bf01124176
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发表时间：
1987
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
D. Levine
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Levine
克里奥是一位要求严格的缪斯女神。那些很少注意她的背景纪律的人，那些很少关注背景的偶然性的人，或者那些试图以所罗门式的方式将她的继子——结构和过程——分开的人，会在她展开翅膀时发现自己处于黑暗之中。社会历史学家在这个有争议的领域谨慎行事，最成功的历史学家一直密切关注时间顺序组织的严格性。事实上，说历史学家本质上是保守的，对概括持谨慎态度可能并不正确，因为她的训练和经验一再表明，总体公式和原则在解释那些在时间和空间的严酷考验中结合在一起的无数事件和情节的特殊性时没有什么具体价值。然而，这是一个非常大的限制，许多最有趣和最刺激的社会历史有时不加区别地借用社会科学。以前社会学疯狂经济学是被掠夺的领域，但现在在我看来，借鉴社会人类学正在流行。历史学家从这些知识探索中获得的并不是其他学科的学科，而是理论方法（而不是绝对的经验方法）提供的看待问题的新方式。这种趋势在早期现代欧洲历史研究中表现得最为明显——我认为卡洛·金兹堡的《奶酪与蠕虫》和伊曼纽尔·勒罗伊·拉杜里的《奥克地区的爱情、金钱和死亡》是特别典型的文本。然而，在我看来，尽管这两位作者以及许多其他作者在阐释亚文学话语时表现出了天才和洞察力，但这部《精神事物的历史》却是一条死胡同。它聚焦于非凡但迄今为止被忽视的平民，并将他们提升到与更杰出的同时代人同等的地位；但是，正如传记不足以指导一个时代的历史一样，出于同样的原因，平民知识分子传记的这种新时尚也是如此。那么，我们就被英国人所说的“裂口棍子”所支撑：我们如何开始给予离心力和向心力相对的权重，同时仍然保留某种经验的代表性？我不确定这个问题除了那些陈词滥调的答案之外还有其他答案，即证据就在布丁中/让我们看看洗涤后会出现什么结果。因此这是极其不同的
Clio is a demanding muse. Those who pay scant heed to her discipline of context, who pay little attention to the contingency of that context, or who seek to Solomonically separate her s tep-chi ldren--structure and process--f ind themselves in the dark when she spreads her wings. Social historians step warily in this contested terrain, and the most successful have kept a clear eye on the rigours of chronological organization. Indeed, it is probably not tmtrue to say that the historian is inherently conservative and wary of generalization precisely because her /h is training and experience have repeatedly shown overarching formulae and principles to be of little concrete value in explaining the specificity of those innumerable events and episodes that are joined together in the crucible of time and space. Yet, and it is an enormously large qualification, much of the most interesting and stimulating social history borr o w s s o m e t i m e s indiscriminately--from the social sciences. It used to be that sociology mad economics were the fields to be plundered, but now it appears to me that borrowing from social anthropology is in vogue. What historians have gained from these intellectual forays has not been the discipline of other disciplines but rather the new ways of seeing that a theoretical, as opposed to a resolutely empirical, method provides. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than the study of early modern European h is tory-I think here of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Love, M o n e y and Death in the Pays d'Oc as particularly exemplary texts. However, it seems to me that, for all the genius and insight that these two authors, and many others, have displayed in their illumination of sub-literate discourse, this histoire des mental i tes is something of a dead-end. It spotlights extraordinary but hitherto neglected plebeians and raises them to the stature of their more illustrious contemporaries; but, just as biography is an inadequate guide to the history of a time, so, too, and for much the same reasons, is this new vogue of plebeian intellectual biography. We are left, then, propped on what the English would call a "cleft stick": how do we begin to accord comparative weights to the centrifugal and centripetal forces and still retain some sense of the representativeness of that experience? I am not sure that there is an answer to this question other than the hackneyed ones that the proof is in the pudding/let 's see what comes out in the wash. It is thus extremely dif-