“History from below”: Controversies about New Perspectives in Historiography from the 1960s to the 1990s
Abstract
Since the 1960s, voices were raised in support of writing histories ‚from below’ in Western Europe, in the Eastern Bloc and the Global South: a perspectival move away from elites and big structures towards the cultural, the everyday, and the experiences of ordinary people, women, and the colonised. The best known of these approaches could be attributed to the British historian EP Thompson, whose ‚history from below’ focused on working class cultures and people’s movements. In France and Italy too, historiographical initiatives, such as historical anthropology, or microhistory, came into being. Of the countries of the global South, India was the most important centre of the new historiography, closely followed by historians in South Africa and Latin America. This movement of historiographical renewal was from the very beginning a conflictual field, under attack from representatives of the established conservative positions in the discipline, but also from the left, as it was suspected of substituting a politicisation of history with a depoliticisation and ‚culturalisation’ of history. The traces of this struggle for meaning can still be read today, as these directions in historiography are said to have been the occasion and impulse for the ‚cultural turn’ in historiographical production. The panel seeks to historicise the struggle for meaning and significance around this historiographical point of departure. More concretely, the panel asks: 1. What social, political and cultural problems and commitments motivated the different kinds of ‚history from below’? 2. What traditions and structures specific to the historical cultures of particular countries or areas and nation-state-centred historical writing contributed to their emergence? 3. What were the ways of circulation and translations which saw to it that these movements quickly found an international audience and became a global phenomenon beyond the western metropoles far quicker than older strains of historiography such as the Annales? 4. How did these movements change the public role of historians as political intellectuals in the countries or regions concerned?
In ihrem Beitrag untersucht Brigitta Bernet die Entstehungszusammenhänge und Diskussionsthemen der Mikrogeschichte. Sie fragt erstens nach den politisch-gesellschaftlichen Kontexten und Motivationen, die in den 1960er und 70er Jahren für das Aufkommen der italienischen Microstoria prägend waren. Zweitens beleuchtet sie die kontroversen Um- und Neudeutungen des Ansatzes im Verlauf seiner internationalen Rezeption seit den 1980er Jahren. Die mannigfachen Deutungskämpfe, zu denen die Mikrogeschichte seit ihren Anfängen immer wieder Anlass gegeben hat, werden im Spannungsfeld von Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik untersucht.
Dr Zachariah examines, in connection with the intensive debates and specific ways of reading the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci among Indian intellectuals and historians, how a European and very specifically Italian set of debates was transferred to India in the service of an emancipatory attempt to write history ‘from below’. The Indian historiography of the ‘subaltern studies’ group, similar to and broadly contemporaneous with the Italian ‘microstoria’, became an important export article, and its representatives became internationally important and recognised representatives of the ‘cultural turn’ and of ‘postcolonial studies’. This was in contrast to other trends in ‘history from below’ that continued to work with a Marxian understanding of history, even as the divergent strains all claimed to be working with Gramscian concepts.
Jenseits der universitären Geschichtsforschung und auch in bewusster Abgrenzung zu dieser entstanden in den 1970er und 80er Jahren in der Bundesrepublik zahlreiche Geschichtsinitiativen: regionalgeschichtliche Arbeitskreise, Stadtteilarchive, Geschichtswerkstätten. Diese lose vernetzten Gruppen stimmten vor allem in ihrem Anspruch überein, Geschichtsschreibung mit Blick auf und Sympathie für die von der Geschichtsforschung bislang vernachlässigten Gruppen zu unternehmen. Alle Interessierten sollten an der Geschichtsdeutung teilhaben und sich ihre Geschichte selbst aneignen. Ihrem Ansatz widersprachen insbesondere Vertreter der universitär etablierten Sozialgeschichtsforschung, die Kritik am erkenntnistheoretischen Ausgangspunkt der als „Barfußhistoriker“ (H.-U. Wehler) geschmähten Laienforscher übten bzw. ihnen das Fehlen eines solchen theoretischen Ausgangspunktes vorwarfen.