I read with interest Zouhair Ghazzal's comment on Carlo Ginzburg and
Italian Microhistory. Muir and Ruggierio have two edited collections
translated into English as well, and Ruggierio has a monograph in
translation.
Ghazzal wrote:
> 2. It might be helpful to look at the German "Alltagsgeschichte" (history
> of everyday life) in writing history. Even though the inspiration here
> seems to be more Geertz's anthropology than the Italian micro-history
> group, the overlap with micro-history is more than obvious (interest in the
> "Lebenswelt," the quotidian, and popular culture). See Carola Lipp,
> "Writing History as Political Culture: Social History Versus
> "Alltagsgeschichte" --A German Debate," _Storia della storiographia_,
> 17(1990), 61-94.
My understanding is that Alltagsgeschichte owes more to Rhys Isaac's book
_The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790_ (New York, Norton: 1982) than
to Geertz. Certainly history based on the tools of archaeologists,
reading architecture and artifacts as texts, got a push in Germany from
this book, though how it made it across the Atlantic I have no idea.
Frankly, I don't think Geertz's notions of "thick description" and of
religion as a cultural system have been readily useful to historians,
except as important grist for the mill. Anthropologically influenced
history runs into the same methodological problem as psychoanalytic
history: there is no ethnographer-informant / therapist-patient
relationship to draw on, oral history excepted. (And in fact, I don't
think Geertz's own ethnographic work bears a close relationship to his
theories about it.)
American scholars, drawing more on Foucault (for inspiration, not method)
than Geertz, and following Ginzberg's example, have accomplished quite a
bit of interesting microhistory in the last decade. Take Spain as an
example. Kagan's book _Lucretia's Dreams_ tells the story of a woman's
dreams of disaster for Phillip II and how the Inquisition handled them.
Mary Elizabeth Perry's books on crime and on gender in early modern
Seville resemble Ruggierio's work at least in subject matter.
Other historians have found their own paths from the methods of
anthropology to European history: The British historian Alan MacFarlane's
edited diary of Ralph Josselin is one example; Judith Bennett's history of
alewives in rural 14th C Britain is another. Even Isabel Hull's work on
the relationships among William II's courtiers in late 19thC Germany takes
as its starting point something small that could almost be called kinship.
Other examples abound: Robert Dalton, Lutz Niethammer, David Sabean, and
the many histories that reconstruct customs from limited examples:
marriage (Stone and Hanawalt in Britain), kinship networks (Chonjaki for
Renaissance Florence, Brettell for rural Portugal over a 500-year period),
and the wax and wane of religious beliefs (the names escape me here, but
there's been work done on the decline of Christian belief in the early
19th by various historians drawing on the reports of priests, for
example.)
This is what many American and British, and a few German, historians do
now. The belated recognition of the Italian origins of this practice
shouldn't blind us to how far its influence reaches.
- Pat Inman
[Patrick Inman, History, UNC-CH, CB# 3195, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195 USA]
[pat_inman@unc.edu | (919)489-1158 | "Wir sind VIELE Volker, nicht wahr?"]
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