H

Summary

Historiography

Conventional approaches to the study of history, sometimes called historical method or traditional historiography, rely on using guidelines and techniques borrowed from archaeology to write histories of the past. These techniques include drawing on primary and secondary source material as well as employing ‘source criticism’ to determine the reliability of source material and acceptable oral traditions, often with a probabilistic approach to ‘drawing generalisations – inferring patterns – from individual studies to make more generalised claims about the world’ (Priem and Fendler, 2019, p 614). Combined, these techniques in writing history also provide the tools to ‘story’ history through accurate account-giving that builds up a reliable picture of the past events and their environments. Tamboukou (1999) warns, however, that historical methods of accounting for the past tend to operate within certain ontological and epistemological a prioris that include a naive Enlightenment view of past events that overestimates the rationality of history as ‘continuous development, progress and seriousness’ (p 208). In other words, historical methods can sometimes suffer from a strict teleological view of knowledge production as cumulative, linear, progressive and inevitably and unendingly striving for improvement and betterment of peoples: history moves through periods of time or stages of development (from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilised’, for example) in which ‘new’ knowledge builds on ‘old’ knowledge to correct inaccuracies, to overcome error, to combat bad information or ignorance, or to rewrite false accounts. For radical revisionists of history, this acceptance of liberal progress is not only naive but serves ‘as a rationalisation for the inequitable status quo’ (Kincheloe, 1991, p 234).

As du Gay (2003) reminds us, historical methods may suffer from the ‘logic of overdramatic dichotomisation’ (p 664) in which past events (and their relation to the present or some imagined future) are presented chronologically and sequentially through an epochalist reading of social change as discrete moments in the singularity of place and time. It is important to acknowledge that social change can be the result of ruptures and shifts made possible by unique historical agents and environments, thus equating elements of social change to situated happenings.