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So now we have a fairly detailed statement on Robert Bracey's post-modernism and an extensive response from Michael Fitzhugh's anti-post-modernism (and I guess implicitly modernism). Michael Fitzhugh argues that we cannot have our cake and eat it too with post-modernism (that we must either reject it or accept it or be self-contradictory). I would have thought at the beginning of all this that I would have been on Robert Bracey's side of the fence, since it is so rare, at least for me, to run into a "real" or "radical" post-modernist. Instead it I would offer this response from the valley between their fences; my version of what I guess would be neo-modernism. The first element that Robert Bracey highlights is the mediated nature of all sources and all source evaluations. On this point I would agree entirely. Whether one embraces the metaphor of "texts" or simply recognizes the constructed nature of human knowledge is perhaps an aesthetic choice. Michael Fitzhugh is right to argue that this kind of critical examination of sources is by no means entirely novel. (Whether this is besides the point or not depends I guess on what one thought the point was.) What Foucault in particular has done to my mind, however, is to encourage historians to turn a set of critical questions on power and knowledge on to fields that might previously have been given a pass under narratives of human progress and humanitarian interest. (For the sake of clarity, let me say that to say that knowledge is conditioned and produced by power is not to say that knowledge is nothing but an effect of power or that is can have only negative/oppressive consequences. The recent review response by Jan Pedersen on this list makes this point well.) This pursuit of structuring conditions or the texts behind texts can become a pursuit of discourse-land or of deconstruction as an end in itself, but it doesn't need to be and can offer another source of evidence for describing and analyzing the past. The second element that Robert Bracey presents is the blurry or contextual distinction(s) between "true" and "false". I tend to think that Bracey and Fitzhugh are talking at cross-purposes here. True for who; for what; true in what sense? Michael Fitzhugh would seem to argue that truth is at least about accuracy and that the principal of accuracy has a universal (cross-cultural, transhistoric, and one would assume cross-linguistic) character. Thus we can use our understanding of truth to evaluate the claims of people from other places/times/languages. Any variation is superficial. Robert Bracey's point, if I understand his Washington's speech analogy correctly, would seem to be more about the way that truth claims would be made and evaluated in a particular context, and thus the amount of salt with which we must take them today. Whether the historical writers of the Ancient Mediterranean were operating under something close (enough) to contemporary rules of evidence is a substantive point about which I know very little (I study modern Africa), though I have found the case presented here that they were not more persuasive. Accuracy may be a core element of truth, but it is never the only one. Naomi Standen makes the useful point that questions of omission or limiting perspective can have implications for truth in the broader, and I would argue more meaningful, sense. To exclude the historical experience of women may be accurate within the imagined separate world of men, but may also be fundamentally distorting as a description of that society - the equivalent of claiming that the sky is blue on a mostly cloudy day. The description of barbarians/nomads is only true in a continuous way to the extent that we read ourselves into the position of the agriculturalists. From the nomads' perspective the damn farmers were limiting their access to stock and messing up perfectly good open fields. Finally, while physically accurate may be a near universal quality of truth, a great many other things are often held to fall in this same category of the true that we might want to exclude or insist are otherwise. I've mentioned it on this list before, but Luise White's recent _Speaking with Vampires_ is a good recent example of trying to engage with things like people telling you that they personally were chased by vampires. There is no reason to assume that this is untrue or inaccurate - it is certainly confirmed by enough people - except that one holds the non-existence of vampires to be fact. (This is not in any way a question of the supposed unreliabity of oral sources. Note to Daniel Teodoru: Though we may be a minority among diplomatic historians, many historians do in fact take oral sources seriously, and would argue that written sources are only unreliable/mediated in different ways requiring somewhat different methods of critical examination.) In this way truth claims really can be both universal and contextual/relative. I make universal truth claims all the time. Whether someone else would make them or evaluate them in a different way than I would is another matter. This brings us back to the question of whether all truths, or truth-systems, are equally valid, and there again it has to be valid for what. Valid to an individual in a particular system of shared values and rhetorical strategies; valid in a pragmatic sense of getting the job done; valid when placed against a contemporary secular rationalist schema? All truth-systems have their own internal coherence and they are not all the same in their form or in the fullness of their contents. Some however are in fact much more useful for constructing a suspension bridge and less useful for protecting oneself from magical attacks by one's enemies. Finally I come to the question of whether this ought to change the way we do history: renunciation of goals versus reaffirmation of universal history. To take the renunciation side first, I don't think that the impossibility of truly or completely understanding the past in its own terms means that it isn't useful to try. Robert Bracey's parable of the blacksmiths and the plastic eggs is flawed because for one thing the plastic-egg figure assumes a non-useful/frivolous character for history, and because it posits the impossibility of the task itself rather than simply its perfect attainment. Yes history needs a better justification than "because it's fun" but that justification for me parallels that for the study of literature or philosophy or religion, in that they deepen our thinking expand our perspective. For me history offers a possible understanding of how we, in our various component parts, have gotten to this place, the different ways that we have responded to given challenges, and the radical possibility of recognizing the novelty of contemporary conditions and imagining them otherwise. Accurate description and good faith is necessary in all this if not sufficient. We may indeed want to reconsider this whole plastic egg making business in terms of how we approach the making, whether eggs are really the kind of vessel that we ought to be producing, or whether it is in fact ok that some smiths produce eggs and others produce boxes. I would agree with Michael Fitzhugh that I don't really see the place in Robert Bracey's response where we switch to making nails. I seems more like he wants to spend more time teaching his customers about egg-making than handing them eggs. I do, however stand with Robert Bracey in his rejection of the pursuit of the one true egg. Universal history is not only unattainable, it is not particularly useful as an ideal. The categories that Michael Fitzhugh offers up are not as discrete nor objective as he would like them to be. Period and geographical regions are highly malleable if not wholly arbitrary. Who decides what get lumped inside politics, economics, religion, and what gets pushed out? Who decides significance and on what basis? And this is after the hard work of accumulating and attempting to make sense of historical evidence. Lincoln's having been shot is the least of our worries. I would then completely disagree with Michael Fitzhugh's take it or leave it stance. Post-modernism at its best makes us better, more critical, more cautious, but also more perceptive modernists. I can thus reject objectivism, even as an ideal, but still commit myself to honesty and fairness. I can grapple with my own subjectivity and that of my sources, without seeing the differences between them as irrelevant or impenetrable. I have not pushed my way through all the dense post-modern classics, but I trust my ability to sort through my own chains of reasoning and to accept and evaluate the criticism of others. Jeremy Pool Graduate Student Emory University
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