Claudé Levi-Strauss on History and Historians
Something which struck me from Claudé Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (pp. 257-8) which I came across this summer.
For, ex hypothesi, a historical fact is what really took place, but where did anything take place? Each episode in a revolution or war resolves itself into a multitude of individual psychic movements. Each of these movements is the translation of unconscious development, and these resolve themselves into cerebral, hormonal or nervous phenomena, which themselves have reference to the physical or chemical order. Consequently, historical fact are no more given than any other. It is the historian, or the agent of history, who constitutes them by abstraction and as though under the threat of an infinite regress.
What is true of the constitution of historical facts is no less so of their selection. From this point of view, the historian and the agent of history choose, sever and carve them up, for a truly total history would confront them with chaos…Even history which claims to be universal is still only a juxtaposition of a few local histories within which (and between which) very much more is left out than is put in.
What makes history possible is that a sub-set of events is found, for a given period, to have approximately the same significance for a contingent of individuals who have not necessarily experienced the events and may even consider them at an interval of several centuries. History is therefore never history, but history-for. It is partial in the sense of being biased even when it claims not to be, for it inevitably remains partial-that is, incomplete-and this is itself a form of partiality.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Gee- I thought he died a long time ago. I tried reading him in college about 40 years ago- he was unreadable than and from your excerpt he is still is. Something about history not being fully objective. What a shock. HarryP
November 4th, 2009 at 7:00 am
I am not sure if in 1962 when he first wrote these words it was so common to claim that historical writing is not objective and that historical facts are subject to interpretation and “picking and choosing.” I was only in 1961 that Edward Hallett Carr wrote his influential book What is History in which he spoke about the subjective side of historical writing and the bias of historians.
I think that his last paragraph is significant, that there is “a sub-set of events” that “have approximately the same significance for a contingent of individuals who have not necessarily experienced the events and may even consider them at an interval of several centuries.” For Levi-Strauss history, at least according to his section, is the uncovering of what the human experience shares over time.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:15 am
I agree that Claude Levi-Strauss had some profound ideas about anthropology and history. Your quote about the impact on an individual of historical events is extremely intersting. You can see it everywhere. Just look at the impact history ( for good and evil ) have on nations and individuals.. As an example, one can see that in Jewish history with the destruction of the SEcond Temple, or even a recent event such as the Shaoah, still reverberates today on Jews. I just wish he wrote more clearly Are you sure he did die awhile ago? HarryP