Is there a purpose to this blog? I guess I would say “sometimes.”
If there is a purpose to this blog it would be to counter the negative effects of nationalism on the writing of history. That is what the majority of entries in this blog that have a “purpose” are about.
If one is not familiar with the topic of the negative influence of nationalism on the writing of history, then a good place to start to familiarize oneself with this topic is this Wikipedia page on Historiography and Nationalism (I don’t always recommend Wikipedia, but this entry is ok).
It also has a list of suggested further readings, which I have pasted below, that give a sense of some of the work that has been done on this topic. In fact, the amount of articles and books that have been published on this topic in the past thirty years in the West probably numbers in the thousands by this point.
As such, for anyone who has studied at the postgraduate (UK system) or graduate (US system) level in Europe, North America or Australia, the concepts that this blog deals with should be very familiar. Indeed, there are entire courses at countless universities that are dedicated to the topic of nationalism and the various ways that it has influenced modern societies.
For people in the places that this blog covers, however, the issue is not so simple, as the topic of the negative influence of nationalism on historical scholarship has not received much attention (privately it has, perhaps, but not publically in print). In fact, nationalism still exerts a significant influence on scholarship (to varying degrees and in various ways) throughout not only much of Southeast Asia, but some other parts of Asia as well.
The “purpose” of many of the entries in this blog is to point this out.
And here is that reading list from the Wikipedia page mentioned above (whoever made the list appears to have an interest in archaeology, a field that has also been deeply influenced by nationalism):
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991 [2nd ed.]).
George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds., Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (Routledge, 1994).
Margarita Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism and the Past (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Tim Champion, eds., Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe (Westview Press, 1996).
Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children (Routledge, 2003).
Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 1983).
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Philip L. Kohl, “Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 223-246.
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Blackwell Publishers, 1988).
Ronald Grigor Suny, “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations,” The Journal of Modern History 73.4 (2001): 862-896.
Michael Bergunder, “Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu Nationalist Reconstructions of Indian Prehistory,” Historiographia Linguistica 31.1 (2004): 59-104.
Garrett G. Fagan, ed.), Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public (Routledge, 2006).
Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds., Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (University Of Chicago Press, 2000).
This Post Has 6 Comments
This book looks promising:
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/spread-good-news-past/
“…the book is a plea to be aware of these reductive and often very dangerous modes of thought so often contributed to by politicians, religious leaders, military figures and, in some cases, journalists and historians”
Yea, this looks like a good summer read. Thanks for pointing it out.
“The author of 14 books, Cannadine has taught. . .” Individuals cannot write 14 books. How does this happen?
Individuals have written 14 books and more. It has happened. Joyce Carol Oates wrote more than 100 novels, Issac Asimov in his life, wrote more than 500 books, not all fiction. And going back even further, Ibn Arabi wrote more than 300 works.
I wasn’t clear here. I was trying to say “academic” writers, and historians in particular, cannot write 14 books. The only way it is possible is if someone has research assistants who do a lot of work. That is the case with this author.
I have no idea about how people who produce works in other fields, but to research and write a work of historical scholarship on one’s own takes a long time, too long for someone to produce 14 works in a lifetime.
What is so surprizing about that? You become professor at a prestigious university, collect money for research projects, and then you accept let’s say a dozen of PhD students who would like to pursue a research project but lack the capability to raise the necessary funds by themselves. So, holding the most enjoyable positions of employer and thesis supervisor in personal union you can unload the more tedious tasks onto your serfs’ shoulders. You yourself don´t even consider this to be inappropriate, because it is the exact same sweatshop that you went through for years, – and why should the next generation have it easier than you had??? All your colleagues do it that way, and you won’t stay behind, because you decided to be a winner too. And after all, your payment and self-esteem as a specialist for e.g. inscriptions in old Mon depend on an apparently endless list of publications too. Et voilà…
Thanks for your comments. They resonate with something I was reading today. Standford University is at the cutting edge of doing research on “spacial history,” and there is an essay on the web site of their Spacial History Project which states that:
“Many of the things that visitors to our web site see involve collaborations between an historian, graduate students and undergraduates, geographers, GIS and visualization specialists, data base architects, and computer scientists.”
Hmmmm. , , do graduate students and undergraduates really “collaborate” with Stanford professors??
I don’t know the details of that relationship, so perhaps they do, but I certainly agree with you that at “prestigious universities” the relationship between graduate students and professors has been more one of serf-master than of “collaborators.”
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29