Historiography and nationalism
From Freepedia
Historiography is the study of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about political legitimacy and "cultural identity". Nationalism has been the dominant ideology in the West for centuries and has deeply influenced the writing of history. As a call for papers at a 2004 conference expresses it:
- The teleological nature of history encourages historians to retroactively imagine or construct past communities in accordance with contemporary cartographies. Today these cartographies are dominated by the nation-state and its territorially oriented mapping of geo-political space. [1]
That is, historical phenomena are interpreted as they relate to the nation-state; the state is projected into the past. National histories cover everything that has ever happened within the current borders of a country, turning Mousterian hunter-gatherers into incipient Frenchmen. Ruins are proudly displayed as relics of a glorious national past, and the achievements of peoples who never imagined themselves as being Chinese, Persian, Russian, etc., are annexed as Chinese, Persian, Russian achievements. Conversely, historical developments spanning many current countries may be ignored, or analyzed from narrow parochial viewpoints.
Nationalism was so much taken for granted as the "proper" way to organize states and view history that it was essentially invisible to historians until fairly recently. Then political scientists such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony Smith made attempts to step back from nationalism and view it dispassionately. Historians could then ask themselves how this ideology had affected the writing of history.
Recent publications:
- The Invention of Tradition, Eric J. Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, Cambridge University Press 1992 ISBN 0521437733
- Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago Press, 1997 ISBN 0226167224
Recent conferences:
- Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)construction of the Past
- University of Birmingham, 10-12 September 2004
See also:
