Between history and histories: the making of silences and commemorations

325 Pages·1997·17.557 MB·English

by  Smith, Gavin;Sider, Gerald

BETWEEN HISTORY AND HISTORIES:
THE MAKING OF SILENCES AND COMMEMORATIONS
Since the 19805 historians have been influenced by two anthropological
concepts: cultural distance and awareness of small-scale interactions. Recent
work, however, has shifted away from these notions. We now see that cultures
cannot be studied as units with internal coherence and that the microcosm
does not represent a cultural whole.
This book proposes an alternative. Differentiation is the keyword that lets
us focus on ruptures, contradiction, and change within a society. It drives us to
recognize many different histories both along with and opposed to history.
The case studies in Between History and Histories use this new approach in
historical anthropology to examine how certain events are silenced in the
shadow of others that are commemorated by monuments, ceremonies, docu-
ments, and storytelling. The first set of studies explores cases around the
world where the official construction of the past has been contested. The
second set describes the silences that emerge in the midst of such disputes.
For students, this collection provides a useful overview of interaction
between two disciplines. For historians and anthropologists, it offers an
alternative vision of the production of history.
(Anthropological Horizons)
GERALD SIDER is professor of anthropology at the City University of New York.
GAVIN SMITH is professor of anthropology at University College, University of
Toronto.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS
Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethnographic
works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality
and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its
perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic
disciplines: women's studies, history, philosophy, psychology, political
science, and sociology.
Published to date:
1 The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of
the Senses. Edited by David Howes
2 Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community, and Development in Northwest
Greenland. Mark Nuttall
3 Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery,
and Spirit Possession. Michael Lambek
4 Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class
Formation in an Andean Town. Peter Gose
5 Paradise: Class, Commuters, and Ethnicity in Rural Ontario. Stanley R.
Barrett
6 The Cultural World in Beowulf. John M. Hill
7 Making It Their Own: Severn Ojibwe Communicative Practices. Lisa
Philips Valentine
8 Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market
Town, 1200-1991. Philip Gulliver and Marilyn Silverman
9 Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town.
Ann Meneley
10 Mal'uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress.
Sam Migliore
11 Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemora-
tions. Edited by Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith
EDITED BY GERALD SIDER AND GAVIN SMITH
Between History and Histories:
The Making of Silences and
Commemorations
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1997
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-0901-8 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-7883-4 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Between history and histories : the making of silences
and commemorations
(Anthropological horizons)
ISBN 0-8020-0901-8 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7883-4 (pbk.)
i. Memorials. 2. History. 3. Public history.
4. Historiography. I. Sider, Gerald M. II. Smith, Gavin A.
III. Series.
021.3.348 1997 909 097-931421-6
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Contents
PREFACE Vll
Introduction
GERALD SIDER and GAVIN SMITH 3
Part I History and Histories
Silencing the Past: Layers of Meaning in the Haitian Revolution
MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT 3 I
Against Experience: The Struggles for History, Tradition, and Hope among a
Native American People
GERALD SIDE R 62
Pandora's History: Central Peruvian Peasants and the Re-covering of the Past
GAVIN SMITH 80
Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth, and History in Colonial Bengal
SUMIT SARKAR 98
The 'Day of National Mourning' in Germany
KARIN HAUSEN 127
vi Contents
Part II Silences and Commemorations
Histories of Mourning: Flowers and Stones for the War Dead, Confusion for
the Living - Vignettes from East and West Germany
ALF LtlDTKE 149
Silences of the Living, Orations of the Dead: The Struggle in Kenya for
S.M. Otieno's Body, 20 December 1986 to 23 May 1987
DAVID WILLIAM COHEN and E.S. ATIENO ODHIAMBO I 80
Lords Ask, Peasants Answer: Making Traditions in Late-Medieval Village
Assemblies
GADI ALGAZI 199
From Peasant Wars to Urban 'Wars': The Anti-Mafia Movement in Palermo
JANE SCHNEIDER and PETER SCHNEIDER 230
Work and the Production of Silence
LOUISE LAMPHERE 2263
The So-Called Laichingen Hunger Chronicle: An Example of the Fiction of
the Factual, the Traps of Evidence, and the Possibilities of Proof in the
Writing of History
HANS MEDICK 284
Further Thoughts on the Production of History
DAVID WILLIAM COHEN 3300
CONTRIBUTORS 3 11
Preface
The papers in this volume were presented, in early draft form, at a conference
called 'The Production of History: Silences and Commemorations.' This was
one of a series of round-table conferences organized by the working group in
anthrolopogy and history at the Max-Planck-Institut filr Geschichte in Gottingen
and co-sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme in Paris, the fourth
conference series of the working group. The first two were single conferences;
the latter two were series of meetings on a specific topic. In these series we
first met as a small group to formulate some of the issues in our topic and to
invite a number of papers that would explore possibilities for research and
discussion. During and after this exploratory conference we narrowed the focus
of our topic and invited papers for the final conference. At the final conference
extensive protocols of the discussions were made by the participants, and the
protocols of the entire conference discussions, together with the editors' com-
ments, were circulated to all the participants for use in revising their papers -
the labour theory of value applied, to the extent that it is applicable to this kind
of work.
From the first conference on work processes, in 1978, we have sought to
develop grounded analytical tools. Our first conference focused on 'work pro-
cesses' rather than production: how canoes were built by villagers on a Pacific
island, how trees were cut down in early-twentieth-century England. The point
of this emphasis was not a retreat into microscopic, descriptive 'history.' In-
deed, in that perspective what we were doing was not even as large-scale as the
usual 'microhistory'; it was more like historical electron microscopy. The point
of this project was to reconsider some familiar larger issues, particularly how
social reproduction is organized and how reproduction becomes transforma-
tion. The papers from this conference developed into a volume on class and
viii Preface
culture - Klassen and Kulture: Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der
Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Robert Berdahl et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat,
1982).
The second conference (1980) used the framework 'material interest and
emotion' to explore kinship in history and anthropology (Hans Medick and
David Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and
Kinship [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984]). In this project the
study of the microspecificity and concrete materiality of social relations be-
came a way of taking culture seriously - not as the thickly describable quaint
and curious customs of strange and different peoples, but as a domain of
socially tranformative tensions and struggles.
Our third project was a series of conferences in 1982-4 on the subject
'Herrschaft als soziale Praxis.' This title is almost impossible to translate di-
rectly: in essence, it means 'lordship and authority and/as the range of usual,
expected, and unexpected responses of its subjects.' (The resulting book, ed-
ited by Alf Liidtke, is Herrschaft als soziale Praxis: historische und sozial-
anthropologische Studien [Gb'ttingen: Vandehoeck und Ruprecht, 1991]). The
conferences addressed the interweaving of domination and legitimation, in
order to understand circumstances and processes where the ^legitimation of
domination becomes part of its reproduction, and to understand situations where
accommodation, collusion, and resistances are so intermingled that even to
give them separate names is to misunderstand how power works. If power, like
electricity, flows through resistance, then the contestability of its legitimacy
can become crucial to both the reproduction and the transformation of the
relationships that domination engenders. The following series of meetings,
between 1985 and 1989, on 'the production of history: silences and commemo-
rations,' were very densely interwoven with the conferences on Herrschaft,
and are taken up in the Introduction.
No endeavour is concluded without debts, and an edited book comes with an
especially heavy burden. Because we have been the editors of a collection of
work that has arisen from interchanges of greater or lesser formality - from
round tables to hallway conversations to notes passed hither and thither - our
debts are especially widespread; indeed, they are not debts as much as the
bricks and mortar that have built this book on a noisy and conversational
building site. Alberta Arthurs of the Rockefeller Foundation and the staff at the
Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy were generous in their hospitality when
they hosted the conference from which these papers emerged. Generous too
were Maurice Aymard, Director of the Maison des Sciences deTHomme, and
Rudolph Vierhaus, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, who
Preface ix
co-sponsored the conference as well as the several preparatory meetings. Johns
Hopkins University and the College of Staten Island provided release time for
David William Cohen and Gerald Sider to organize the conference.
We are all grateful to David William Cohen, who wrote the conference-call
paper that helped to set our initial agenda. Each of the papers published here
has been enhanced by the significant contributions of those participants in the
conference and the pre-conference meetings who are not directly represented
in this collection: Robert Berdahl, Utz Jeggle, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Orvar
Lofgren, Shula Marks, David Sabean, and Katherine Verdery.
Several of the themes discussed in the Introduction were developed in the
Cultural Pluralism Seminar at Columbia University, and we are very grateful
to the Columbia University Seminars program for a grant in aid of the prepara-
tory work for publication. We would also like to thank Michael Lambek for his
encouragement in carrying this project to fruition, and Glynis George for her
careful work - against all odds - in bringing it to closure.