Nationalist historiography
The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (September 2021) |
Historiography is the study of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about political legitimacy and cultural identity. Nationalism has provided a significant framework for historical writing in Europe and in those former colonies influenced by Europe since the nineteenth century. Typically official school textbooks are based on the nationalist model and focus on the emergence, trials and successes of the forces of nationalism.[1]
Origins
The eighteenth and nineteenth century saw the emergence of nationalist ideologies.[2][3][4] John Breuilly notes how the "historical grounding of nationalism was reinforced by its close ties with the emergence of professional academic historical writing".[5] During the French Revolution a national identity was crafted, identifying the common people with the Gauls. In Germany historians and humanists, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, identified a linguistic and cultural identity of the German nation, which became the basis of a political movement to unite the fragmented states of this German nation.[6]
A significant historiographical outcome of this movement of German nationalism was the formation of a "Society for Older German Historical Knowledge", which sponsored the editing of a massive collection of documents of German history, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The sponsors of the MGH, as it is commonly known, defined German history very broadly; they edited documents concerning all territories where German-speaking people had once lived or ruled. Thus, documents from Italy to France to the Baltic were grist for the mill of the MGH's editors.[7]
This model of scholarship focusing on detailed historical and linguistic investigations of the origins of a nation, set by the founders of the MGH, was imitated throughout Europe. In this framework, historical phenomena were interpreted as they related to the development of the nation-state; the state was projected into the past. National histories are thus expanded to cover everything that has ever happened within the largest extent of the expansion of a nation, turning Mousterian hunter-gatherers into incipient Frenchmen. Conversely, historical developments spanning many current countries may be ignored, or analysed from narrow parochial viewpoints[citation needed].
As Georg Iggers notes, nineteenth-century historians were often highly partisan and "went into the archives to find evidence that would support their nationalistic and class preconceptions and thus give them the aura of scientific authority".[8] Paul Lawrence concurs, noting how - even with nationalisms still without states - historians "often sought to provide a historical basis for the claims to nationhood and political independence of states that did not yet exist".[9]
Time depth and ethnicity
The difficulty faced by any national history is the changeable nature of
In ancient times, ethnicities often derived their or their rulers' origin from divine or semi-divine founders of a mythical past (for example, the
Nationalism and ancient history
Nationalist ideologies frequently employ results of
Examples include
Historically, various hypotheses regarding the
- Albanian nationalism: The descent from the Illyrians and Pelasgians
- Romanian nationalism: Dacianism or Dacomania
- Greek nationalism: The supposedly Greek origins of the ancient Thracians, Illyrians and of the Minoan civilization.
- Nazi mysticism, Ahnenerbe)
- Lithuanian Sarmatism: The Lithuanian origins of the Goths, Sarmatians and other Eastern European peoples.
- Neo-Eurasianism postulate mythical origins of humanity or culture in Central Asia, (Sun Language Theory, Arkaim)
- Armenia, Subartu and Sumer
- Antiquization: claims continuity between ancient Macedonia and modern North Macedonia
- Indian Indigenous Aryanism: believes that the Indo-European peoples originated in South Asia instead of Eastern Europe
Study
Nationalism was so much taken for granted as the "proper" way to organize states and view history that nationalization of history was essentially invisible to historians until fairly recently.[dubious ] Then scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith made attempts to step back from nationalism and view it critically. Historians began to ask themselves how this ideology had affected the writing of history.
Smith, for instance, develops the concept of 'historicism' to describe an emerging belief in the birth, growth, and decay of specific peoples and cultures, which - in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - became "increasingly attractive as a framework for inquiry into the past and present and [...] an explanatory principle in elucidating the meaning of events, past and present".[15]
Speaking to an audience of anthropologists, the historian E. J. Hobsbawm pointed out the central role of the historical profession in the development of nationalism:
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism.[16]
Martin Bernal's much debated book Black Athena (1987) argues that the historiography on ancient Greece has been in part influenced by nationalism and ethnocentrism.[17] He also claimed that influences by non-Greek or non-Indo-European cultures on Ancient Greek were marginalized.[17]
According to the medieval historian Patrick J. Geary:
[The] modern [study of] history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe's nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness.[18]
By country
Nationalist historiographies have emerged in a number of countries and some have been subject to in-depth scholarly analysis.
Cuba
In 2007, Kate Quinn presented an analysis of the Cuban nationalist historiography.[19]
Indonesia
In 2003, Rommel Curaming analyzed the Indonesian nationalistic historiography.[20]
South Korea
Nationalist historiography in South Korea has been the subject of 2001 study by Kenneth M. Wells.[21]
Thailand
In 2003, Patrick Jory analyzed the Thai nationalistic historiography.[22]
Zimbabwe
In 2004, Terence Ranger noted that "Over the past two or three years there has emerged in Zimbabwe a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime to propagate what is called ‘patriotic history’."[23]
See also
- Afrocentrism
- Gothicism
- Historical revisionism
- Historical negationism
- Irredentism
- Nationalisms Across the Globe
- National myth
- Nationalism and archaeology
- Nazi archaeology
- Primordialism
- Romantic nationalism
- Politics of archaeology in Israel and Palestine
References
- ^ Umut Özkirimli, Umut. (2005). Contemporary Debates on Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p.180.
- ISBN 0-8014-9263-7.
- ISBN 0-86091-546-8.
- ISBN 0-521-43961-2.
- ISBN 978-0-19-876820-3.
- ^ Geary 2002, p. 21-25.
- ^ Geary 2002, p. 26-29.
- ISBN 978-0-19-876820-3.
- ISBN 978-0-19-876820-3.
- UMass. 27 February 2004. Archived from the originalon 29 May 2007. Retrieved 29 September 2007.
- Universiteit Utrecht. pp. 1–11. Archived from the original(PDF) on 19 October 2017.
- ISBN 9781850655725.
- ISSN 1022-8136. Archived from the original(PDF) on 29 October 2005. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
- ^ Todorović, Miloš (2019). "Nationalistic Pseudohistory in the Balkans". Skeptic Magazine. 24 (4). Retrieved 26 January 2020.
- ^ Smith, A.D. (1991). National Identity. Penguin. p.87.
- ^ Hobsbawm, E. J. 1992. "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today" Anthropology Today 8(1): 3–8.
- ^ ISBN 0-226-02860-7.
- ^ Geary 2002, p. 15.
- ISSN 1470-9856.
- ^ "Towards Reinventing Indonesian Nationalist Historiography | Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia". kyotoreview.org. 20 March 2003. Retrieved 1 April 2021.
- JSTOR 23718902.
- ^ "Problems in Contemporary Thai Nationalist Historiography | Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia". kyotoreview.org. 17 March 2003. Retrieved 1 April 2021.
- S2CID 143874509.
Further reading
Nationalism in general
- ISBN 0-86091-546-8
- Bond, George C. and Angela Gilliam (eds.) Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. London: Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-15224-0
- Díaz-Andreu, Margarita. A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology. Nationalism, Colonialism and the Past. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-921717-5
- Díaz-Andreu, Margarita and Champion, Tim (eds.) Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. London: UCL Press; Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8133-3051-3(hb) & 978-0813330518 (pb) (Westview)
- ISBN 0-415-28592-5
- ISBN 0-691-11481-1.
- ISBN 0-8014-9263-7
- ISBN 0-521-43961-2
- Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Terence Ranger, ed.. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ISBN 0-521-43773-3
- Kohl, Philip L. "Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote past", Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, (1998): 223–246.
- Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1988. ISBN 0-631-16169-4
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. "Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations", The Journal of Modern History, 73, 4 (Dec, 2001): 862–896.
- Bergunder, Michael Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist reconstructions of Indian prehistory, Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 31, Number 1, 2004, 59–104.
- G. Fagan (ed.), Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0-415-30593-4.
- Kohl, Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology, Cambridge University Press (1996), ISBN 0-521-55839-5
- Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, University of Chicago Press (2000), ISBN 0-226-48202-2.
Specific nationalisms
- Baltic
- Krapauskas, Virgil. Nationalism and Historiography: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Historicism. Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 2000. ISBN 0-88033-457-6
- Celtic
- Chapman, Malcolm. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-07938-9
- Dietler, Michael. "'Our Ancestors the Gauls': Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe". American Anthropologist, N.S. 96 (1994): 584–605.
- James, Simon. The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? London: British Museum Press, 1999. ISBN 0-7141-2165-7
- Chinese
- Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ISBN 0-226-16722-4
- Israeli
- Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0226001951
- Uri Ram, The Future of the Past in Israel – A Sociology of Knowledge Approach, in Benny Morris, Making Israel, the University of Michigan Press, 2007.
- Pakistan
- ISBN 978-0-19-547811-2
- Spanish
- Díaz-Andreu, Margarita 2010. "Nationalism and Archaeology. Spanish Archaeology in the Europe of Nationalities". In Preucel, R. and Mrozowksi, S. (eds.), Contemporary Archaeology in Theory and Practice. London, Blackwell: 432–444.
Recent conferences
- Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)construction of the Past, University of Birmingham, 10–12 September 2004
External links
- "Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions", comprehensive collection of new articles by modern scholars