We are frequently asking ourselves today about the role of the historian in a rapidly changing world. Some expect the past provide them with an explanation or a justification of the present. Others search in history for the basic roots of identity or even for keys to the future. More than ever we are being faced with what Lucien Febvre perceived to be the social function of the historian: “to organize the past as a function of the present.” From this arises a responsibility toward society, as the knowledge that is being produced gains its authenticity through being stamped as officially “scientific.” Faced with the expectations of society and the attention of the public, the historian has been called upon to disentangle events and to furnish a guiding thread, frequently by blending his role as a critic with a civic and an ethical one. Even when we are not dealing with the attempt to set up the historian, through an appeal to his great expertise, as the licensed sage in town, it must be stressed that assuming the rostrum in response to the questions of the time is-provided that the rules of the discipline are strictly adhered to-perfectly legitimate in that it provides history with signifiant depth.

Forbidden areas, i.e. areas (sites, cities, countries) that are inaccessible for topographical reasons or especially because of decisions based on political, religious, or other motivations are usually surrounded by an aura of mystery and almost necessarily arouse curiosity. The dream of generations of explorers was to reach Lhasa. An area can be closed not only to outsiders but also to “insiders:” nobody is allowed to leave for the “outside.” The isolation imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa regime was such a two-way seclusion aided, of course, by geographical conditions and hence easily enforceable. It has been suggested, perhaps not quite seriously, that the famous Chinese wall was meant not only to keep out barbarian invaders, but also to prevent Chinese from leaving. That there was some kind of border control is also suggested by the leger, according to which Lao-tse, before disappearing into the west, committed his teaching, the Tao-te-kinq, to writing at the request of the “gatekeeper.” One may well wonder whether there exists another equally influential text written at the behest of a border policeman!

When I began to reflect on the ways of how I might begin this article, I remembered that, a little while ago, I had annotated a small book that I had found all the more interesting because it did not have the slightest scholarly pretensions. I had opened it more or less mechanically and found in it a passage, already underlined in pencil by myself, that seemed to me to offer an almost perfect approach for developing what was in my mind: “ … i Veneziani, sopra i pali di larice, hanno edificato chiese e palazzi.” In fact, I could hardly have dreamed up a better metaphor, and in any case a more than adequate one, than that of those larches. They were produced in an Alpine environment and now, sunken into the lagoon, they served as the foundation of one of the most astonishing urban cultures that men ever conceived and built.

To mention what is called the “Silk Routes” today is to evoke more than two thousand years of history on two continents, Europe and Asia. Naturally, over such a long period and such vast territories, hundreds of products were transported, exchanged, stolen, conquered, transferred, in short, from one country to another. For some of these products, the very source of the raw materials and the techniques of production themselves were transferred.

Everyone knows that the Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass—great technological advances; as for the last three, their transmission throughout the world goes back only to the Crusades, which is quite recent. Here we are interested in transfers that are less known and more ancient, the most ancient for which precise records exist, starting from the time of the “opening” of the silk routes, which, according to Chinese classical history, was during the second century B.C. We shall stop around the eleventh century A.D., at the time of the Sung dynasty. This period includes the two most interesting epochs, in our opinion, in the history of the exchanges on these routes: the Han dynasty (from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) and the Tang dynasty (618-907), epochs whose time frames encompass the Western Roman empire, the Eastern Roman empire, the kou-chau empire, Sassanid Persia, and the first centuries of Islam.

For some thirty years, a handful of architects has been trying to call into question the primacy that the history of architecture has given to monumental buildings. The representatives of this trend want to get away from the short chronology, common since the Italian Renaissance, and react against the dominant international functionalism that has too little respect for the local cultural contexts. It is under the influence of this “vernacular” approach that the small traditional structure became as legitimate an object of research as the well-known buildings. This approach, innovative and audacious as it was, broke with a Utopian vision of a large part of modern architecture. It led the architects concerned to turn toward non-European countries and to focus their attention on the connections between indigenous housing patterns and cultures. From this decentralization ethno-architecture was born by which we understand the study of preindustrial, “traditional” habitats and housing. Inspired by Panofsky, Eliade, and Lévi-Strauss and familiar with the social sciences, these researchers appropriated the conceptual tools of anthropology. They opened up important fields of research in Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, and Africa and reaped a rich harvest of ethnographic materials. It quickly became clear to them that the so-called “traditional” house developed, in imitation of palaces and temples, from the culture of a given population and that it was informed by the religious images of the inhabitants as much as by its most sacred buildings.

In the Name of the One who has no Name,
He who appears before you, how ever you call Him!

How does Islamic theology and Koran exegesis, some of whose representatives set out to find the most modern developments, such as the atomic bomb, in the Koran, deal with the latest interpretations of quantum physics, of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, and with the question of whether the sub-atomic world is made up of waves or particles? How does a theologian react to the notion that parts of the atom influence each other and that the observer himself plays a role in the shaping of future events? Are these discoveries compatible with the traditional idea of a God who knows all; are they compatible with the various terms for fate: qadar, qada, or qismat?

An inquiry into the rhetorical aspects of history may seem paradoxical, given that historical discourse is not typically included among those types which, since Aristotle, have been understood to be governed by rhetoric; these types being the deliberative council, the tribunal and the commemorative assembly. It was to these specific audiences that the three kinds of discourse—the deliberative, judiciary, and panegyric—were addressed. However, are the boundaries of the historian's audience sufficiently delineated in order to allow us to identify it as a specific addressee? This first objection, which regards the very legitimacy of the subject of these remarks, can be met by noting a common trait that links history to the above-mentioned three types of discourse; that is, competition between opposed discourses requiring a choice. In each case the aim is to structure a debate that calls for a clear-cut decision. Yet a major problem of the discipline of history is that it allows both for widely varying descriptions of the same series of events, and sanctions the use of a variety of equally acceptable rules or preferences for interpreting a given slice of the past.

Transcending all ideological differences, the Book of Metamorphoses (Yijing, I-Ging) has been viewed in traditional Chinese culture as a basic work not only of the art of sooth-saying, but of an understanding of the world as a whole. Among the 64 situations described therein, the 56th deals with the constellation of ‘the wanderer’ (Lü). It is symbolized by the ‘fire’ above the ‘mountain’, i.e., a fleeting phenomenon whose ephemeral character is highlighted by the fact that it appears above something as solid and immovable as a mountain.

Quand tu es seul, debout au milieu de la haute plaine d'Asie,
sous la coupole insondable où parfois un pilote
ou un ange sème dans l'azur une coulée d'amidon;
quand tu tressailles sentant ta petitesse,
apprends-le: l'espace auquel semble-t-il il ne faut
rien, a grandement besoin en réalité
d'un regard extérieur, de distance, de vide.
Tu es seid à pouvoir lui rendre ce service.
Joseph Brodsky

In the course of this century, a number of authors have asserted that geographic knowledge is useful for the development of programs to parcel out land. Hoping to foster this link between insight and action, applied geography saw the light of day. In order to be genuinely effective, the practice of this kind of planning, so it was thought, needed to rely on the expertise of the geographer who studied forms of human settlement. More fundamentally, the utilitarian claim of applied geography rested on the conviction according to which the spatial organization of human societies brought into play the question of justice and commonweal. As Jean Gottmann wrote, our epoch is particularly sensitive to the fact that everyone, whoever or from wherever they may be, consider themselves “to be entitled to live just as well as all others.” In this way a “popular will” was affirmed “that the necessary measures be taken to envisage, prepare, and provide for an improvement of life's comforts …, for a better life.” Inspired by the “modern idea of planning,” applied geography set itself the goal of “establishing justice […] by a more even distribution of people, of their means of subsistence, [and] of their living standard.”

Sappho, Xenophon: these two juxtaposed texts, chosen for their dissonant tones, well introduce the Greek representation of weaving as a privileged metaphoric terrain defining the presence and the essence of an imaginary feminine, often expressed in antithetical terms, as a polarized place, with an ever precarious equilibrium. As discourse, weaving is no longer a naturalistic depiction of an edifying occupation of the gynaeceum, an answer to the day-to-day realty of household tasks. As a literary object or ritualized activity, the loom appears as a “gendered” space, a place symbolic of feminine activity.

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first if they wanted to gain continued attention.

To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history.

“The first thing discovered in the excavation begun on the Tower of the Annunciation was a painting eleven hands wide and four and a half hands high. It depicts two large festoons of fruits and flowers, a man's head, which is very large and jovial, a ram, an owl, various birds and other things. It seemed to me to be one of the greatest paintings found to date. Having stopped in with me to see it this morning, the sculptor ordered it removed on Tuesday …

“April 10: Detached from the wall and placed on a cart this morning, the great painting arrived at the royal palace in excellent condition.”

Unlike the scientist, who in the nineteenth century was anointed with the aura of the solitary genius, the historian has, since ancient times, been thought of as a creator conditioned by his social group. The historian knows his profession thanks to routine apprenticeship under his professors. He trains in the discipline by reading the models inherited from his predecessors. He discovers the secrets of the art by analyzing the work of his colleagues. His richest sources of inspiration are the masterpieces of all times from the most diverse cultures.

Many systems of thoughts have migrated to Japan from abroad - Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, natural science, Marxism; all were transmitted to Japan and stopped there. It is said that Japan has been the terminus for imported thoughts. However, during the process of taking root in Japan almost every idea has been transformed within the Japanese mind. I would like to discuss a typical example of how Christianity has been changed within the Japanese mind.

God — as we well know since Nietzsche — is dead. However, it is necessary to correct this sentence that was a sacrilege yesterday and has become common place today. We should be talking of the death of the “gods,” rather than of God; for what has been disappearing from the social space of modernity (I do not speak of the inner conscience of the faithful here), is not just the God who sits enthroned atop altar and dogma. What has disappeared are the “gods” more generally; by this we understand the link with the world that, certainly rooted in religion but transcending it, surrounds things and beings with an aura of wonderful significances; that places them outside of those structures that modern man understands to be the utilitarian, the rational and the functional.

It might be best to begin this discussion of the historian's predicament with a concrete experience. In the early summer of 1944, as the German army retreated northwards in Italy to establish a more defensible front against the advancing Allied forces along the so-called “Gothic Line” in the Appenines, its units carried out a number of massacres, usually justified as reprisals against local “bandit” (i.e., partisan) activity. Fifty years later some of these village massacres in the province of Arezzo, hitherto left to the memories of the villages’ own survivors and the local historians of the Resistance, provided the occasion for an international conference on the memory of German massacres in World War II.

La diversité des témoignages historiques est presque infinie. Tout ce que l'homme dit ou écrit, tout ce qu'il fabrique, tout ce qu'il touche peut et doit renseigner sur lui.
Marc Bloch

Judging from all the evidence we have, it appears that History must start again to look at aspects of the human existence in their time and must open up to the realm of imagination, of affectivity, and of mental attitudes; to put it differently, it must work from a new basis of sensibility and with different questions, with novel sources and themes that permit us to learn more about what happens in the public and private spheres, about the exceptional and the common, about the real and the symbolic, about social practices and about the dominant ideology, as well as the links that connect those divergent fields. Such an approach presupposes a particular attitude toward historical evidence.

In the chapter “Fit for Emperors and Kings,” the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu relates the myth of Hun-tun, the emperor of chaos, who died when the seven sense openings were bored into him. The story goes: