E H Everest Research Blog

Global Microhistory - Medieval Eurasia 

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Bone Music

Soviet bootleg bone music - vinyls made of repurposed Xrays

https://www.x-rayaudio.com/

Interesting issues regarding their conservation in digital form which would totally miss the materiality that is so fundamental to their being

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Digital tools created for and by humanists

From Johanna Drucker, 'Humanistic Theory and Scholarship'

A tension between the explicit and quantitative nature of computational methods that underlie digital modes of humanistic inquiry and the traditional ‘spirit’ of the humanities that embraces ambiguity and relativity is explored especially by the authors of Digital_Humanities and Johanna Drucker. A crucial point, yet the humanities have never been quite so divorced from the ‘scientific’, and historians have continuously sought to resolve positivist/relativistic viewpoints: the qualitative and quantitative analyses of past human experience (including the micro/macro - global/local- structural/individual) to create a more balanced picture of human condition.

Is DH then in this historical context:

(1) As a mode of thinking/researching, really that different in intention from ‘traditional’, other than the fact that digital tools are now available to crunch the macro data on an even more macro scale ?

(2) A Potential for creating a utopian synergy within historical thought between micro/macro, structural/individual, global/local - a chance to transcend these traditional limitations with the new affordances created by a collaboration of humanistic and digital ? But what would this look like? Probabilities? Might we envision something like the dystopian discipline of psychohistory imagined by Asimov?

(3) The challenge put forth for the creation of new humanities-values driven visualisations and digital tools in D_H and echoed by Drucker is captivating: What would a cutting edge digital humanities project, truly imbued a humanistic idea of heterogeneous geo-spatial representations, that allows the user to experience say, relativistic historical spaces actually look like? Where will the visual/other sensual languages come from?

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Braudel’s Longue Durée

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NYTimes Magazine 1619 Project

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/beyond-the-end-of-history

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Chronicle of Higher Education, 14.08.2020

D S-J explains the anathema of presentism ingrained in largely conservative Anglo-American historical academic institutions and practice. Proposes that the goal should be to “jettison crude versions of presentism without abandoning presentism altogether”

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Thoughts on this: 

However subconsciously, each generation of historians brings the concerns of its own time. Even in the case of ancient history, scholars seek and frame issues of the past in ways that hold relevance to them. Why not lean into this, and while avoiding e.g. drawing anachronistic parallels to the present, take seriously the undeniable fact that current forces will always shape our thinking? Perhaps not only acknowledging but harnessing the concerns of our time may prove fruitful for shedding light on issues sidelined by past generations, who were led by their own agendas, different to our own.

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Victoria Smolkin on ‘historical literacy’ 

Priya Satia’s upcoming book: Time’s Monster: How History Makes History 

“I know people say, ‘the past is another country,’” Satia says. “But the present is another country too — that is, it is a totally contingent outcome of the past.”

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Thoughts from Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilisation (2011)

Connective Structure - binds people together by providing a 'symbolic universe' (Berger and Luckmann) - 'a common area of experience, expectation and action whose connecting force provides them with trust and orientation' - links yesterday with today by giving form and presence to influential experiences and memories, incorporating images and tales from another time into the background of the onward moving presence, bringing with it hope and continuity. Aspect of culture that underlies MYTHS and HISTORIES, in which the normative and narrative elements create a basis of belonging and identity.

Ritual Coherence - the repetition that is the basic principle behind all connective structures. Repetition serves to re-presentify tradition and memory.

Ritual - all contain these 2 elements of repetition and re-presentification: if the rituals are more rigid, they are more repetitive. If there is more freedom of individual expression then they allow greater re-presentification in present context - these are the two poles between which the dynamic process that gives WRITING its all important function in the connective structure of culture.

Writing - it is through this that the dominance of repetition gradually gives way to that of re-presentification -- ritual gives way to coherence. A New connective structure emerges out of this - one which consists not of imitation and preservation but of interpretation and memory. 

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On three ways to be alien

Sanjay Subrahnahmanyam's depiction of the premodern transgressor of cultural boundaries is far from celebratory. They are a complex individual with multifaceted and performative identity. Their lives are beset with the difficulties of wearing of different masks and playing different roles in order to navigate specific social and political contexts. Facility of imposture is an important question. He makes the salient point that such persons were not always valued in past societies - and indeed the peril of navigating various groups identities appears to be that they can all turn against you as an alien/outsider in many forms. (Perhaps we can relate to persecution of Manichaeism, rattles everyones cages by claiming origins everywhere and ultimately seen as a 'foreign' religion by all?)

How does the historian deal with such figures? They are unique evidence, standing at the juncture of many soc-pol-cult structures but with agency made visible by the tensions with which they are not subsumed into them. A critical method for a biographically oriented global microhistory.

He makes a very interesting point regarding ethnography, how it can often fuel a self-fulfilling ethnogenesis (c.f. colonial india and caste system), the process that is also often termed 'the invention of tradition'. But how do we relate this formation of perceived group identities through ethnographic thinking to diasporic groups that are ethnically constituted? Another point on DIASPORA: dual definition (1) Modern, usually c19-20, (2) Medieval/early modern: usually dealing with merchants and entrepreneurs (surely this is too limiting?)

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Medieval Japanese Buddhist sculptures at the Ueno Museum, Tokyo (November 2019)

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Eye diagrams from 9th and 10th century manuscripts of Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s “Ten Treatises on the Eye”. Unique style of imagery develops that conflates multiple perspectives, showing divergence from Greek medical tradition post translation movement

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https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment

Jeremy Adelman on Global History today

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Yasur-Landau's (2010) paradigm of an 'interregional interaction range' for identifying instances of historical migrations