As a historian, my goal is to establish and narrate the daily life of individuals who lived and acted in the past, as well as to identify the individuals, decisions and actions that influenced the daily hum of human activity in significant ways (as determined by me, the author of the work, and those I persuade to agree with me). This task requires limitless filling in of minute gaps that never make the historical records; a fiction, albeit a carefully constructed fiction based on material evidence that may be scrutinized and examined by others. The documented records a historian finds in the archives represent mere exclamation points in the daily, constant march of time, a habitus a scholar can only infer from his or her own distant vantage point of time and culture. Broad study into the time period of interest may allow one to predict with more confidence the daily existence, values and concerns of a personality in the past, yet the complicated intersections of the pressures of daily life can only be approximated. In the end the historian produces a narrative that verges as much on fiction as it does on demonstrable (often disputable) evidence.
Given the unavoidable subjectivity of the historian's work, the incompleteness of the record, and the impossibility of being able to create what might be called an "accurate representation of the past," one might simply give up on history altogether. Yet history holds power. It can be wielded to commemorate positive role models and to build strong communities, but also to justify ethnocide, genocide, the erection of walls between countries, and the erasure of entire communities of people from the record, undermining the legitimacy of their presence in the present. The controversy of Ken Burns documentary The War (2007) is an example of historical omission at one level, the re-writing of German national identity by the Third Reich is another with distinctly dire consequences. In cases like these, the field of history can underscore past wrongs, justify the need for reform, or even help heal traumatized communities. For these reasons, despite being technically doomed to failure by my inability to write an objective truth, I find myself drawn to history to try to write in the voices who have been unjustly forgotten, defending them from oversight and oblivion.
If writing accurate, objective, complete history is an impossible task, or if it is not even the task we are looking for, then how do we go about our work? Reflexivity plays a vital role. By voicing our own background, experience and assumptions, we give those who read our written work a key to the filter through which we analyzed the material. The paragraph immediately preceding this one provides a prime example of this need -- I speak of injustices, of righting past wrongs. Without a reflexive statement, the reader has no understanding of my definition of justice or what I might consider an inappropriate oversight. Providing the reader with a reflexive statement on my values and concerns, along with a more specific, clear writing style that avoids ambiguities and nonspecific statements would help clarify my goals, concerns, and the filter through which I view the materials and arrive at my conclusions. I agree with my colleague Natasha that reflexivity must be used carefully. Some historians have fallen off the reflexive end of the bandwagon, providing personal diaries in their work that practically supersede the material they meant to write about. Geoff Eley's A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2008) comes to mind -- this historiographical work reads like an autobiography with theoretical thought interspersed throughout. Eley more or less gets away with it -- but he walks a fine line. Used well, reflexivity provides the essential filter and vantage point necessary for the reader or observer to engage with you and your topic and determine their sense of the validity of your work. Overdone, reflexivity forgets to engage the reader and loses them along the way.
Kelley Merriam Castro
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