10. Historical Research

This chapter focuses on the distinctions between historical research and social scientific research, and how these are being challenged by scholars in pursuit of a genuinely ‘historical social science’. It begins with a discussion of historical approaches in Politics and International Relations, including historical events research, historical process research, and cross-sectional comparative research. It then examines three approaches for addressing temporality as the sequential active unfolding of social action and events: historical institutionalism, process tracing, and event structure analysis. It also explains how to locate essential historical information and evaluate various types of sources, and what special considerations need to be made in using documents, archival sources, and historical writing as data in historical research.

Archaeology and Museums

If archaeology is a historical social science concerned with study of past societies and cultures through material traces, called the archaeological record, then museum archaeology can be understood as the institutional documentation, study, and preservation of those physical traces, and their representation and interpretation to the public. Increasingly diverse archaeological approaches expand the range of forms those material traces may take, presenting challenges to traditional forms of curation and care. Competing epistemologies and theoretical approaches view the ontological significance of these traces in very different ways—some as material correlates of behavior allowing systematic, scientific study of past cultures (including providing the wherewithal for confirmatory reanalyses); others as objets d’art celebrating and expressing the development of human creativity, from diagnostic markers of reconstructed temporocultural periods (e.g., Clovis or Mousterian) to continuingly reconstrued and manipulated instantiations of memories and identities having their own agency and power. As a result extant collections may be understood as everything from scientific voucher specimens on par with biological holotypes to kidnapped relatives requiring return as elements of restorative justice. Through exhibitions and public programs—and through the implicit logics of what is valued and accepted into permanent collections—museums also create and reify conceptions and appreciations of the archaeological past. Interpretive choices and tropes in representation and display are critical in both translating archaeological scholarship into public knowledge, on the one hand, and inadvertently feeding popular stereotypes on the other. Recent critical approaches examine the ways in which museums appropriate other peoples’ pasts, and attention has increasingly turned to incorporating more diverse and culturally sensitive viewpoints into curatorial practice. These and related concerns have also led to a shift from a primary emphasis on building and preserving synoptic teaching or systematic research collections to issues of collaborative curating, community engagement, and of service to the groups represented in the exhibition galleries and storage cabinets. Concomitant with those changes has been a shift in the role of curator from expert interpreter and connoisseur to interlocutor, with attendant additions to necessary skill sets and training. While largely beyond the immediate scope of this work, there is now a broad and growing critical literature on the implication of museums—of all kinds, not just archaeological—in the shaping of knowledge, formation of academic disciplines, role in nation building and transformation of cultural identities, and the perpetuation of stereotypes and preservation of existing systems of power and privilege.

Why has Analytic Philosophy Almost Completely Failed to Exert any Influence on German Historical Writing and Reflections on Methodology? / ¿Por qué la filosofía analítica ha fracasado casi por completo en la historiografía alemana y en las reflexiones metodológicas?

The paper is a response to the question why analytic philosophy, which dominated philosophical Faculties in the English-speaking world, exerted virtually no influence on historical thought and writing in Germany. It examines major historiographical trends in Germany from the beginnings of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century to the present: the anti-democratic, nationalist tradition with its focus on politics and diplomacy associated with Historismus, which dominated German historical writing until after World War II, the democratically and socially oriented “historical social science” (Historische Sozialwissennschaft) of the 1960s and 1970s, committed to the analysis of social structures and historical processes, and the “history of everyday life” (Alltagsgeschichte) which aimed at a “history from below”. Yet what made analytic philosophy unacceptable to all these trends was that it proceeded in an abstract logical manner which neglected the concrete context in which historical explanation takes place.Key WordsRanke, Droysen, Meinecke, Abusch, Wehler, Historismus, Historische Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte.ResumenEste artículo es una respuesta a la pregunta de por qué la filosofía analítica, que ha dominado las Facultades de Filosofía en el mundo angloparlante, no ha ejercido practicamente ninguna influencia en el pensamiento histórico y en la historiografía alemanas. Se examinan las principales corrientes historiográficas alemanas desde los comienzos de la Historia como disciplina académica en el siglo XIX hasta la actualidad: la tradición antidemocrática y nacionalista, centrada en la política y la diplomacia, asociada al Historicismo (Historismus), que dominó la historiografía germana hasta después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial; la “historia-ciencia social”, orientada social y democráticamente (Historische Sozialwissennschaft), de las décadas de los sesenta y setenta del siglo XX, comprometida con el análisis de las estructuras sociales y los procesos históricos; y la “historia de los cotidiano” (Alltagsgeschichte) dirigida a la “historia desde abajo”. Sin embargo, lo que hizo inaceptable la filosofía analítica a todas estas corrientes fue el hecho de que aquella procedía de uno modo lógico-abstracto, desatendiendo el contexto concreto en el que tienen lugar las explicaciones históricas.Palabras claveRanke, Droysen, Meinecke, Abusch, Wehler, Historicismo, Historia-ciencia social, historia de lo cotidiano.