A third approach to history E-Book

FRANCESCO CESARE CASULA

• Herausgeber: Logus
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The narration of humankind’s past, that is to say its history, has up to now been done using the extrinsic method of geographic territorial reference and temporal chronological and local topical reference, sometimes together, sometimes separately, almost to form a single expression or two different expressions: two approaches in which to insert the list (quantitative or selective or explicative or annotated) of human events. And it is to this that I address myself at first, before going on to examine the possibility of using A third approach to history, with the choice of intrinsic historical values to highlight.

Leseprobe

A THIRD APPROACH TO HISTORY

Electronic version,  I edition, 2013 © Logus mondi interattivi 2013 ISBN: 9788898062171

Author: Francesco Cesare Casùla Publisher: Logus mondi interattiviTranslation: David C. Nilson

Design: Pier Luigi Lai - Logus mondi interattivi Contact: [email protected] - 

SERIES HISTORY

Francesco Cesare Casùla

A THIRD APPROACH TO HISTORY

This work is an English synthesis of: La terza via della storia.Il caso Italia, by F. C. Casula, Edizioni Ets, Pisa 1997, 454 pp.

Franceso Cesare Casùla is a full professor of Medieval History at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Cagliari (Italy). For ten years he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Society of Italian Historians. He is the director of the   Istituto sui rapporti italo-iberici

FIRST INTERVIEW

PROFESSOR CASULA, AS A PROFESSIONAL HISTORIAN, JUST HOW DO YOU CONSIDER HISTORY?

History, considered in its entirety, is perhaps the most important subject for an individual, an organism and a people. It is referred to in studying the development of science, art and humanity. Encyclopaedias, the summa of scientific knowledge, open their entries with history: a personage (e.g. Dante, Napoleon, Picasso) is described starting with his or her biography, or history; a city is described beginning with its origins; a state or nation is presented first of all from the historical viewpoint.

History, when referring to human life is basically a calling card that illustrating mankind’s past and places it on a certain level of social consideration, with all the advantages - or disadvantages - that this entails. A people without a history counts for very little, and is not worthy of a better future; it is not by chance that when the intention is to annihilate and subjugate a people, the first thing that is removed is its history (rivers of ink have flowed over the cultural subjugation of peoples, on the damnatio memoriae of governments, on colonialism and the intellectual self-imposed colonialism of the defeated).

COULD YOU GIVE US SOME EXAMPLES OF PAST OR PRESENT?

Concerning the most recent historical events, I recall that the Israelis founded their state in 1948, and one of the arguments they used was the historical one that they were the first inhabitants of Palestine; the war of the Malvinas-Falkland Islands fought between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Republic of Argentina in 1982 was based on a historical claim1; the same thing goes for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

On the subject of the destruction of a people’s historic memory, it is enough to recall what the Spanish conquistadores did to the Maya, Aztec and Inca civilisations in the New World in the now distant past.

To cite a case of damnatio memoriae within a state, we have an example right at home, with the destruction of all Fascist symbols following July 25, 1943.

On the colonialism and self-imposed cultural colonialism in our own day and age, we have the examples of Castile’s attitude towards rebellious Catalonia during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. In Italy, we see the national government’s policy towards the Sardinian Nation, the history of which has been eliminated from the syllabus, with the acquiescence of the Sardinian people themselves.

IF, AS YOU SAY, HISTORY IS SO IMPORTANT, JUST WHAT IS HISTORY?

Those who believe that history is the past are mistaken. The past, what has happened, the event (in Latin res gestae, in German Geschichte), is ascribable to everything that exists and has existed (or what no longer exists but what existed before, even if for just a fraction of a second). The universe, the stars, the Earth, the flora and fauna, man: in a word, all of creation has a past; but these constitute the subject of history, not history2 itself.

WE THEN COME BACK TO THE QUESTION OF JUST WHAT HISTORY IS.

History is the story of the past (in Latin historia rerum gestarum, in German Historie), meaning by this first and foremost the story of humanity’s past, the part of the past forged by humankind. (The story of the present is instead news)3.

SO HISTORY, WITHOUT A NARRATOR, WOULD NOT EXIST.

That’s exactly right. Just as art would not exist without the artist.

BUT IF HISTORY EXISTS ONLY BECAUSE THERE IS SOMEONE TO NARRATE IT, AND SINCE MAN IS SUBJECTIVE, IT FOLLOWS THAT HISTORY TOO IS SUBJECTIVE.

In reality, that is so. If it weren’t, if man’s past, the entire past, starting from the first humans on Earth were not the stuff of history, but history itself, it would be, in its immensity of time and variety of events, immutable and objective, for the very reason that since it is past no one could change it.

But since by history we mean first and foremost the tale of humankind’s past - created by a man and/or by a woman with their own time parameters: Prehistory, Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary - this history is necessarily mutable and subjective and, as such, can never be fixed inasmuch as it is produced by those who narrate it4.

THUS, IN A CERTAIN SENSE, ONLY HISTORIANS, THOSE WHO NARRATE, EXIST, WHILE HISTORY DOES NOT.

Yes, historians (whom I personally distinguish from historiographers) exist. If they are something more than just the scribblers and manual labourers of history (and unfortunately there are many of all kinds in this category) - they take from events of the past - which is to say from the raw material of history - the material of which history is made - those elements that they choose in demonstrating or illustrating, consciously or unconsciously, using different methods and methodologies, their personal viewpoint, a religious faith, a scientific theory, a political convenience or a national advantage. If this were not so, history would be told only once, always in the same, unchangeable way. Instead, history varies depending on whether the person writing it is a cleric or a lay historian, an innovator or a conservative, a northerner or a southerner, a young person or an elderly person, a patriot or an anarchist. Therefore, and properly so, it changes with the turnover of generations, with changes in political interests, with the shifting of economic weight.

BUT IF OBJECTIVE HISTORY DOES NOT EXIST, IF IT CHANGES WITH THE PERSON WRITING IT, THEN HISTORY IS FALSE OR, TO BE MORE PRECISE, FALSIFIED!

History, explained in such terms, is neither false nor falsified5. The historical datum is, and remains, real and incontrovertible. Historical dates are the ones we know, the battles, the treaties, the personages of history are always the same. What changes is the choice and interpretation of historical material on the part of the historian who, not being able to include everything or because he or she wishes to demonstrate a theorem of his or her own or, simply as homo fautor or sectator, a conscious or unconscious partisan, takes from the enormous amount of material accumulated along the paths of human history those dates, those personages, those wars or treaties, those arguments or those phenomena that he or she is interested in. And falsifies nothing in so doing: he or she is simply offering a point of view, a preference; he or she offers, willingly or unknowingly, his or her “whys” and “becauses”, which is to say his or her lesson of history, or if you like, his or her own history.

AND WHAT DO WE NEED ALL THIS FOR?

We need it to understand that if at a gathering I present - or others present - a novel vision of history, or a personal history or a new historical method, no matter how recurrent or different these may be with respect to traditional visions, they must still be considered and respected as points of view having a value equal to all other differing points of view. Of course they can be criticised using contrasting and convincing arguments, but they cannot be ignored or discarded a priori only because they do not conform to the normally accepted picture (it is worse still when a barrier of silence is erected around an innovator and the mediocre cover him or her with the most boorish, snide and ironical quips).

IT WOULD APPEAR THAT YOU HAVE A NEW VERSION OF HISTORY TO PROPOSE.

Certainly, and it is based on what I call the “doctrine of statehood” (dottrina della statualità in the original Italian)6.

I FIND THE UNUSUAL TERM “DOCTRINE” RATHER CURIOUS. WHY “DOCTRINE” AND NOT “THEORY”?

You see, theory, as it is commonly construed, is “the systematic elaboration and treatment of the general principles of a science, discipline or activity” and must be demonstrated and compared with practice. On the other hand, doctrine is “the whole of knowledge obtained through study” which does not need to be demonstrated because it has already been verified.

THEREFORE...?

By using the term doctrine instead of theory, I wish to state that I need not prove anything, that I have not invented anything: everything, before me, has already been analysed and said: I have done nothing more than gather and reorganise, to my own liking, what manuals and books on subjects relating to history have illustrated in different ways for different purposes. Briefly stated, I propose another scientific construction using the same elements, another kind of “game” (just as you can play many different games with the same deck of cards). Have I expressed myself clearly?

BUT NOW YOU’VE GOT TO TELL US WHAT THIS “DOCTRINE OF STATEHOOD” IS.

It is a third way of illustrating history, of narrating what has occurred by taking into consideration the containers before dealing with the contents. Some have made partial use of this, but no one has faced the question organically with all its implications. Substantially, it can be considered a third approach to the understanding and the teaching of the past (which is also a part of the value of the illustration and of the choice of what to illustrate).