Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology Practice

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Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2007.Copyright © 2007 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana UniversityThis article was first published in German in the Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, published by Waxmann (Münster, Germany).

ABSTR ACT: In its current form of “European ethnology,” Volkskunde is increasingly conceptualized as a Europe-oriented study of the present. As a result, historical research is often limited to those periods consid-ered part of the European “modern,” and may be restricted to uses that illuminate the present. In contrast, this article advocates an open ap-proach to cultural anthropology, particularly with respect to historical research. It outlines ways in which the new focus perpetuates old fault lines within the discipline and ways in which they may be bridged. It discusses ways in which the themes of “micro,” “macro,” and “agency” have played out in the author’s own work, but it also highlights the real differences between works focused on the present and the past.

VOLKSKUNDE , which in its mutation over time has gone by many names, has renewed, if not recast, itself as European ethnology, at least in Ger-man-speaking Europe. This change has been influenced in particular by discussions in American cultural and social anthropology, as well as through debates with British cultural studies, and the discipline is now defined as the study of the present “with an extension into the past” (Lindner 2004:165). The historical horizon of that present en-compasses the “European modern” (Niedermüller 2004:96), which in effect means the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discipline distinguishes itself from non-European ethnology by continuing to see itself as the “study of the familiar [one’s own]” (Johler 2004:64), meaning its research concentrates on Europe itself.

Michaela Fenske

Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology PracticeTranslated by John Bendix

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In practice, much recent scholarship has focused on matters of current political relevance, including transnational Frankfurt (Berg-mann and Römhild 2003), migration (Becker 2001, Hellermann 2005), women who start businesses in Andalusia (Zöckler 2005), or everyday knowledge of human genetics (Beck 2005). Much of the empirical research currently done in the discipline can be character-ized as “micro, macro, agency.” Micro refers to the immediate, or small-scale, field of research, while macro refers to the embedding of such immediate fields within larger regional contexts as well as within overarching knowledge interests in cultural anthropology. Agency refers to cultural practices and actors (and their communication) that now stand at the center of disciplinary interest. Ethnography is a key scholarly research method, and refers to both the field of research itself and the subsequent “understanding depiction” (Verstehen) of cultural systems (Geertz 1987).

The newer profile given the field is implicitly or explicitly connected to the question of what place historical research has in it. Inasmuch as the discipline now defines itself in relation to the present, entire realms of scholarship thereby become relegated to the sidelines; in particular, research into the so-called pre-modern era seems dispens-able. Pragmatically, this understanding of the discipline may appear sensible in light of current changes being made to the scholarly land-scape: focusing on only one aspect of the research hitherto conducted in the discipline would seem to sharpen its profile, and that could be advantageous in the competition for scarce resources among humani-ties and social science departments.

Such a construction is far less convincing when seen from the internal perspective of the discipline, as the basic framework—the axes of time and space—constrains innovative scholarship focused on searching for new insights, new interpretations, and new readings to understand everyday life. Limiting the geographic scope only to Europe as a research region also means that the newer profile is de-rived from only one part of the discipline’s history, even though the discipline investigates culture in its many manifestations and the theo-ries and methods that have been developed to study it. In this newer understanding, what is now native or familiar and what foreign or alien remains to be clarified, and how one delineates what is modern—the ‘proper’ object of study in today’s understanding of the discipline—and what is pre-modern and hence, evidently, no longer relevant.

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In fact, precisely due to recent findings from scholarship on the pre-modern era, the former certainty of what distinguishes “the Euro-pean modern” has become less clear. Some of what is supposed to be unique (such as a capitalistic economic order) existed earlier—even if in somewhat altered form—or elsewhere (Carrier 1997, Brandt and Buchner 2004). Other aspects existed and continue to exist elsewhere, yet with the transformation of the modern in Europe they now take on more importance. Among them one can cite mass unemployment and chronic underemployment, the increasing precariousness in work relations and life circumstances (the responses include trying to ensure greater social security or engaging in multiple work relations), the singular importance of social capital in the distribution of economic resources, and so forth.

If, for example, one wanted to better understand the economic prac-tices of farmers at a local fair and cattle market in seventeenth-century Central Europe, then one can learn a great deal from cultural anthro-pology studies of Oriental bazaars of the 1970s and 1980s (Fenske 2006). To do so changes one’s perception of space and time, among other things, and the world, seen as a space of potential human experience(s), becomes in that way smaller. At the level of local everyday life, what is native and familiar is no longer so readily distinguishable from what is foreign or alien, and what is pre-modern begins to look a good deal like what is modern. There is never a complete disjuncture between what is pre-modern and what is modern: it seems more like degrees of difference, or aspects of native and foreign, past and present. This lack of a clear division is true not just in today’s era of globalization, but was also true for earlier epochs, if to a different extent. Precisely because culture is, at all times and in all places, multi-layered (Bhabha 1997, Marzolph 2004:13ff.), and because in temporal terms both the synchronous and the asynchronous mix, every gross separation or categorization of “culture,” as an object of research, undertaken along time and space axes, will necessarily be a disciplinary construct.

The differentiation noted above with respect to the discipline thus carries some dangers with it. One is a certain Eurocentrism, as well as a kind of “presentism.” Another, and here we are dealing with an aspect also conjured up in historical anthropology, is the danger of a “provincializing of Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000, Gerbig-Fabel 2005). The danger of taking the European experience as globally normative also risks falling into a teleological, evolutionary perspective.

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Boundary-drawing in the discipline has been critically addressed in recent years as well (Bendix and Eggeling 2004, Rolshoven 2004, Timm 1999), though it is not a new discussion. Since the 1960s there has been a debate about the name Volkskunde, which was discredited by the role it played in supporting National Socialism, and about the discipline and its place with respect to the social sciences and the humanities: both topics have been near-constants in the disciplinary discourse (see Bendix and Eggeling 2004 and the literature cited therein). Historical research and/or the range and scope given the historical perspective have been repeatedly addressed within this discourse: the central fo-cus of what follows here is formulated with reference to this lengthy discussion in the discipline. Abschied vom Volksleben (Geiger, Jeggle, and Korff [1970] 1986) or “Taking Leave of Folklife,” a key and self-critical work that emerged from the debates in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the discipline, meant, at least in some quarters, also taking leave of the pre-modern era.

Flashback

The early 1970s saw a path-breaking debate within Volkskunde be-tween Karl-Sigismund Kramer and Hermann Bausinger on the issue of researching the past as opposed to researching the present (Kramer 1971, Bausinger [1971] 1986). It has often been cited as a major marker, even called one of the “most fruitful” controversies in the discipline during those years (Göttsch 2001:17). To be sure, Kramer’s framework, which one can call the “Munich school of historical research,” and Bausinger’s framework, “the Tübingen school of empirical culture studies,” were contemporary answers to the particular challenges of those years, which included what Germans somewhat obliquely refer to as “working up the past,” a reference to coming to terms with the Nazi era but which also refers to student and worker protests of the late 1960s.

Many of the arguments raised by Kramer and Bausinger, highly respected representatives of the discipline, remain relevant today. They include the meaning if not transformation of present-day terms, concepts, and theories when applied to historical fields of research and vice versa—or in other words, the issue of anachronistic usage in both directions—as well as the similarities or differences in research practice used in investigating the past and present. Two of the issues


raised then continue to be especially relevant: whether one should take an open approach to reconstructing cultural systems and what time period should be specified as appropriate for the discipline to examine.

The major representatives of the Munich school, Kramer and Hans Moser, undertook a meticulous, if not exacting, historical description of folk life. They sifted through the archives where they worked and lived with great thoroughness, looking for what they could find about the folk life of past centuries. As Kramer himself noted much later, their interest, as well as emphasis, was to provide an exact “descrip-tion of folklife” (1989), and some of their work provided important subsequent impulses, such as Moser’s “second-hand folklore” or the evidence they found of changes in historical folklife. The motivation was to provide something more systematic, if not profound, than the “bricolage with respect to continuity” (Korff 1996:413) in the disci-pline that had made at least some parts of it ready fodder for Nazi ideology.

Bausinger, by contrast, took a deductive approach, arguing for more specific formulations of questions and issues as a precondition for a modern analysis of culture (1986a). Research had to begin with clearly formulated problem statements, as these would point to the selection of relevant sources for finding answers. Of necessity, however, that would mean evaluative and thereby also subjective perspectives. Value-neutral evidence or documentation—what Kramer and Moser strove to find—did not exist. With this, Bausinger pointed to one of the basic problems in reconstructing cultural systems, one equally valid for scholarship about the past and the present.

An open approach, along with the need to first acquire the knowl-edge of what one wishes to interpret, and then what one needs to reconstruct in its specificities, runs the risk of doing no more than “merely” documenting. Indeed, some of Kramer’s and Moser’s com-prehensive studies, with their many facts and proofs, seem at times little more than mountains of material with the ore not yet extracted from them. Documentation can become analytic work, inasmuch as the underlying principles guiding the selection of material and thus the subjective basis for the selection are made clear; Kramer and Moser followed this precept by stating both the principles for their selection and by articulating issues and problems to be addressed in their work. In practice, however, the scope that the Munich school employed was

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so all-encompassing that it was impossible for it to enter into conversa-tion with the type of modern analysis of culture that is oriented toward “deeply mining” the material.

The openness with which Kramer and Moser approached histori-cal documents was also evident in the temporal dimension of their research. At best, Kramer was willing to limit himself to examining evi-dence from the last half-millennium; he did not want to be constrained by “arbitrary time limits” (1971:61). Bausinger, who provided the field with a widely-respected entrée into the cultural analysis of the modern era with his Folk Culture in the Technical World ([1961] 1986), explicitly asserted instead that historical research should begin from the (respec-tive) present, and at best should take the “last two hundred . . . but in many cases, only the last fifty” years into account (p. 170). Bausinger positioned the discipline as present-focused but arguing backwards historically from that point. He thus laid the foundation for a research focus—if one follows the definition given above—that European eth-nology is supposed to pursue.

Not long ago, commenting on the inconsistency of names by which the discipline goes, Carola Lipp pointed out that in practice, disciplinary differences of opinion have been far easier to reconcile than the theoretical debates might lead one to believe (2004:136). To a more limited extent, the same can be said of reconciling research that is more historically oriented with that which is more oriented to the social sciences. In addition, ongoing theoretical debates about disciplinary direction have not prevented those engaged in research and teaching, at least in certain institutions, from bridging disciplin-ary differences, particularly with respect to more specialized areas of endeavor. Many areas in the discipline, from narrative scholarship to tourism research, utilize a perspective that is basically historical (see Brednich 2001).

Seen the other way around, there have also been many “purely historical” studies whose importance extends far beyond the discipline itself. Not a few of these had their origins in Tübingen: Kaspar Maase’s studies of popular entertainment (2001a, 2001b); Carola Lipp und Wolfgang Kaschuba’s historically-based community study of Kiebingen (1982); Lipp’s subsequent work in Göttingen on historical network analysis, using the example of Esslingen (Lipp 2005); Sabine Kienitz’s studies in the area of historical gender research (1995); Gudrun König’s analysis of taking walks as middle-class practice (1996); or Frie-


demann Schmoll’s examination of the history of nature preservation and protection in Germany (2004). At heart, such Tübingen-based scholarship maintains the historical parameters set by Bausinger in his dispute with Kramer, and investigates phenomena of the so-called European modern.

Elsewhere, the broader temporal view of the Munich school has been adopted, though without necessarily embracing its approach toward empirical materials. Wolfgang Brückner’s analysis of “Volks-kunde as a historical study of culture” (2000) and his research on piety and on narrative were key for research on the pre-modern era as well as for historical scholarship in the discipline more generally. Walter Hartinger’s research (esp. 1992) on law, religion, and belief is known beyond the discipline, and a broad historical understanding of material culture has helped expand the connection between the discipline per se and various museums (Mohrmann 1990).

Another series of studies has been dedicated to investigating pre-modern life worlds in Central Europe. While the studies often focus on microcosms, folklorists increasingly investigate cultural practices with an eye to the intersection of such smaller worlds with the macro-cosmos. Methodologically, this move was directly connected to the innovative potential inherent to the Munich school, which had con-ducted microstudies long before they became well known in studies of European history (Korff 1996, Göttsch 2001). There were thus micro-historical studies of peasant protests (Göttsch 1991a) and of women’s rebellion in south-western Germany (Allweier 2001); investigations of readiness to innovate in (what proved to be not merely) “traditional” handicrafts (Hartinger 2001); analyses of the nobility that opened new perspectives both in the discipline and in scholarship on elites (Spiegel 1997, Spies 2003), and analyses of the many forms of symbolic communication (Krug-Richter and Mohrmann 2004) or of the early modern culture of conflict (Krug-Richter 2004). These examples in-dicate that for Volkskunde, the period from 1500 to 1800 is not only multifaceted but also provides a field of research permitting linkages to adjacent historiographic disciplines in thematic, methodological, interdisciplinary, and international terms.

The theoretical debates, and the positions adopted subsequently, have had consequences. Retrospectively, it seems that empirical re-search about the pre-modern era and research into the (extended) present(s) have grown disciplinarily further apart from one another

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since the dispute between the Munich and Tübingen schools first began. The theses listed in the Mitteilungen der DGV (Newsletter of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde) show that (at least when compared with research about the present) relatively few historically oriented investigations are being conducted, especially about the so-called pre-modern era. Recent self-examinations of the discipline indicate lines of demarcation exist not just between scholarship about the present and the past, but also within historical research itself. In the “little” discipline of Volkskunde one also sees reflected, at least in part, the larger conflicts between social science and humanities perspectives (Giordano 2005). The possibility of achieving synergistic effects through a systematic rapprochement between these broader fields of endeavor has thereby been lost. The current “anthropologizing” of the discipline, however, along with the increasingly questioned boundary- drawing within the modern sciences in the wake of postmodern theory (e.g., between philological and empirical methods), provides an op-portunity to bring these endeavors closer together.

Let’s Exchange Ideas

Not long ago the British social anthropologist Sharon MacDonald ar-gued persuasively for a “multidirectional temporal practice” (2003:97). Ethnographic research should open itself, draw more on historical dimensions, and more fully investigate the many relationships and connections between past and present. That would mean, among other things, investigating past societies on their own terms and not doing so from a “presentist” perspective. MacDonald’s argument stands before the backdrop of a “historical turn” in Anglo-American social and cultural anthropology, one which has increasingly, at least in for-mal terms, though perhaps not in practice, overcome the separation between cultural analysis of the past and of the present (Axel 2002). In the wake of this turn toward historical research, the key points of reference in cultural history research are drawn on by those engaged in historical scholarship in European ethnology as well.

Historical ethnography has long been practiced in German- speaking Europe, and the convergence of ethnological and histori-cal perspectives has been discussed numerous times since the 1980s (for an overview, see Eibach and Lottes 2002 and the classic Medick 1984). It can be seen in the context of the “new cultural history,” a


collective designation for various sub-disciplines, including historical anthropology and micro-history. Inasmuch as this “new cultural his-tory” is a trans-disciplinary effort at least in its practices, then historical research conducted in European Ethnology should be seen in this context. In terms of expository modes, Geertz’s “thick description” (1987) is most often cited, and the analytic method tends toward the qualitative-hermeneutical. At least in the German-speaking world, the most thorough discussion of applying ethnographic methods to the discipline of history has been carried out in European ethnology (Maase 2001a, Keller-Drescher 2003).

Against the backdrop of these various discussions, I would like to reflect in what follows on the differences, though primarily on the similarities, between cultural analyses of present societies and cultural analyses of past societies. My considerations here are incomplete, pre-liminary, and subject to revision; my exposition is based on my own experiences as well as reflections on conducting historical archival research primarily on the so-called pre-modern era. I mean this as a contribution toward greater dialogue between those in the discipline who research the past and those who research the present: these fields of research are not only significantly closer to one another than usually assumed, but they can also profitably cross-fertilize one another.

Much of what I have to say here, however, applies more generally to historical scholarship undertaken from a cultural anthropology perspective. If one takes an open approach to conducting historical research into everyday life, and quits the present as the key (or sole) point of departure and point of reference, then the question of how to structure time periods in the research into the everyday remains unresolved (Mohrmann 1989/90). The common divisions into eras or temporal segments used by historians can at best provide only a general orientation. It was for this reason that Kramer and Moser only loosely adopted the epochs that historians provided and oriented their work instead to what they could find among the historical documents.

With increasing distance in time from the subjects of interest—which is to say the historical actors—one finds that they—either ap-parently or even in fact—present themselves and act differently from what we are used to today. In my opinion, this makes the examination of the pre-modern one of the most interesting and exciting research areas of all. Human action can be understood in time and space in a particular manner as a result, for it emerges out of this unique mix of

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familiar and alien, great distance in time and yet similarity or proxim-ity of cultural practice. In the end, this approach provides a deeper understanding of what makes culture, or the human experience, pos-sible—beyond what we can imagine if we start only from the European present with its modernities. Hence, a thematic and methodologically broad approach to historical scholarship in European ethnology thus helps to round out cultural anthropology as a discipline.

If historical ethnography means, among other things, that one regards the archive itself (understood here as a variety of possible locations in which historical documents are preserved) as a locus of research, then this locus can be approached at a variety of levels. It is a physical location in which to conduct research and a space in which what historical documents reveal to us can be discussed. Yet it is also a place with multiple tensions between the present and the past, where the researcher as person interacts with archive personnel, with other researchers and of course with the people who, to a greater or lesser extent, “speak” through the historical documents. The archive, in short, is a field research site that holds its actors captive, that binds them, that does not release them.

The Archive as Field Site: Subjective Experiences, Ethnographic Approaches

Archives are addictive. If I haven’t been in an archive for a long time, I miss it. I miss the dusty sheets and the inkblots of past epochs. I yearn for the smell of old paper and—a bit of deformation professionelle—even the smell of acrid preservation agents. I long as well for the pleasure of doing research and for the joy of discovery. I yearn to sit among others at little tables under reading lamps, poring over documents, extracting their forgotten gems. There is a quiet murmuring in the reading rooms, and despite the constant coming and going of users, a focus, a concentration. In short, I miss the encounter with the actors of the past and miss the encounters with those who are actors today, engaged in historical research.

That archival work can become a passion was impressively un-derscored by the French social historian Arlette Farge (1989). This passion for, as well as in, the archive has many sensory and emotional components that are relevant to the process of production, and even in some sense to the reception, of historical research. In my experi-


ence, though, those doing historical research admit this passion more in their private communication than when they present their research results—unlike the comparatively open manner in which such mat-ters are addressed by those who research the present (Bendix 2002, 2006).

My initiation into the world of the archive was not accompanied by horrors comparable to those the cultural anthropologist Nicholas Dirks experienced (2002), when he described the hurdles he had to vault to gain entry into the archive as a locus of research. In my case, it likely had to do with my cluelessness: I simply did not know what awaited me. Unfortunately, my introductory course in historical archive research that was intended to prepare me—and which, unlike what is prescribed for history students, is obligatory in Volkskunde—often did not meet due to the instructor’s illness. So, equipped with an exercise book and the desire to learn more about rural society in the pre-modern era, in the hopes of turning such closer acquaintance into a master’s thesis, I headed to Hanover and the main archives of the state of Lower Saxony. I was full of enthusiasm and acting on my own initiative.

After receiving thorough advice about finding aids, the relevant guides to the archive, and how to order the material itself from a mod-erately gruff, though not unfriendly, member of the archive staff, I was pretty much left to my own devices. Of course, this advice applied only to dealing with the historical documents and their contents, not with how I actually behaved in the archive. For the social system within an archive is extremely complex, in many ways organized so as to influ-ence the research process itself. Indeed, it would be an interesting exercise to investigate archives themselves more systematically with respect to how “micro, macro, agency” apply here, or to undertake an ethnography about ethnographic research in, as well as about, archives (Bendix in press). It would reveal much about differing definitions, forms of appropriation, and the ways of dealing with the high-flown word “history” or the more mundane term “the past,” not to speak of the process of conducting historical research itself.

Many unwritten rules govern the use of archives, rules that go beyond the often curt guidelines provided for a specific archive, the legal framework in which it exists, or the history of creating that particular archive. Some of these rules vary from location to loca-tion. Other aspects seem to exist everywhere in the same form. For

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example, every archive, at least in German-speaking Europe, seems to have three groups of actors.

First there are those who administer or run the archives; in Ger-man public archives, they are part of the higher civil service grades (höhere Dienstgrade). Generally, they are university graduates in history who later studied at an archive school in order to learn the secrets of organizing, preserving, and disposing of materials from the past. Their specialist advice can often be very helpful to users, but by the same token how they exercise their authority can sometimes be a little problematic, particularly when such archivists, based on their own experience and knowledge, think they can better judge a request or a desire for specific materials than archive users themselves can. Person-ally, I am still waiting, years later, for a microfilm of one particular set of materials, which technically would have been easy to provide, but in the opinion of the archivist, was unnecessary for—if not irrelevant to—the question I was asking. My having to completely transcribe hundreds of pages, in addition to the mountains of files already more cursorily examined, brought about not only an inflammation of the tendons in my hand but also the more profound insight that archivists exercise power, and not only over files and official records. Some col-leagues, to their dismay, have had to experience how their research projects have suffered under the dismissive attitude of archivists, or have had to drop projects because access to private archives was denied. The conditions found in a particular archive—the extent to which the holdings have been catalogued, the operating hours, the availability and cost of copying machines, the quality of the advice, the generosity with which documents are made available (or the lack of generosity in the sense of time-limited access to specific materials)—all have a considerable influence on the research process itself.

Second come those who actually physically bring the files or official records from the depths and then store them again. These are the bearers of the most wonderful treasures from the most distant lands, which is to say the basements or storage areas, and my wonder at these magicians is related to the fact that one never quite knows what exactly lies behind the call numbers of a particular holding. Modern archival record keeping, in fact, is often at odds with the interests of those who research everyday life, and the most boring cataloguing codes can hide the most thrilling contents. In that sense, each time it is exciting to await the treasures these archive staff members bear.


On my very first visit to the main state archives in Hanover, staff members ensured I would be a proper user. By calling me up repeat-edly to the desks where they handed out the materials, they instructed me in what it meant to correctly fill out a request slip for the various holdings, how to open a bundle of files properly, how to properly handle the various files when reading them, and how to tie the bundle up correctly when I was finished. They were also concerned with showing me where and how materials should be placed if I wished to work more closely with something I had read, as well as where I should put material I wished to return to its proper place in the file. They also let me know when it was inappropriate to order more files because the staff members wanted to call it a day. At least in some archives there are signs to this effect, but they are misleading because the formal time they give may not correspond to the informal—and more relevant—earlier time that staff members prefer. Despite the rather traditional didactic style in which this “introductory course” was taught, I remain grateful to my former “guides” for this basic course: it included everything an archive user needed to know. Following these various rules surely contributed to the fact that, in later work, staff members readily answered complicated questions or made an exception for me, and dove back into the storage areas—before the next full hour—to retrieve something I had meant to request, though the location information I had provided stated otherwise.

The third group, the archive users themselves, was one I was so-cialized into as well during my first project. In nearly every archive, one encounters two groups of users: those filled with impressive en-thusiasm but lacking a background in historical research and those who are trained and are engaged either in a research project or, if they are independent researchers, in contract work. Earlier, they could be distinguished by the fee that one group had to pay to use the archive while the other could pursue research free of charge. In the course of commercializing historical records, this practice has already changed in some places, and those who use archives for research purposes now also have to pay for the privilege. One can regret or complain about this change from a scholarly point of view, as I have, but it does create a feeling of equal treatment from the point of view of users. Why should one kind of research interest be superior to another, after all? From that point of view, archive use should in principle be free to all.

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Owing to our common socialization into the world of academic research and its methods, readers of my reflections here will probably feel closer to, or feel they know, the second group better, while the first group of enthusiasts will seem a little less familiar. They may be genealogical researchers engaged in filling in the blanks of a family tree, or they may be writing the local history of their particular com-munity or compiling a chronicle of its most significant events. Some are retired teachers or pastors; in the many city archives I later came to know, there were many such users and they were usually men.

They sometimes played “cock-o’-the-walk” with strangers too. While I was in Freiberg, Saxony, doing research on pre-modern markets, I remember (very clearly!) how one user told me with some embarrass-ment that he’d seen me the day before and had thought about running me over with his car. Behind this murderous impulse was his obser-vation that I—in his opinion, a well-paid academic researcher—was searching for information about potters, a topic he had been working on for a good long while in his free time after work. I thanked him as charmingly as I could for not actually running me over, whereupon he proceeded to give me many useful hints about the potters in question and their market visits. Like so much else I learned, this information proved important for obtaining a better understanding of my topic, though it was not reflected in my ultimate published description. In fact, it was precisely such “after-hours” or hobby researchers who were the most generous and helpful with advice, gleaned from what were at times long years of work with particular archival holdings. This kind of information was of immense importance to me, and its absence in-fluenced the research process, as indeed did constructive cooperation with other researchers (or the lack thereof) both in the archive and later at the writing desk. Only a fraction of this kind of information finds its way into print.

Back to my initiation. Learning how to properly handle the files was a simple matter compared to actually reading their contents. The most interesting cultural history reading came right at the beginning: legal record books. That they ought to be revealing I had learned from reading Kramer’s work, but his assertion they were comparatively easy to read (Kramer 1989:15) proved misleading. They were certainly won-derful to look at: 60 cm. long, 40 cm. wide, about 20 cm. thick, bound in spotted leather covers (note: bound, so they can’t be copied and need instead to be excerpted!), sweet-smelling, and still containing some of


the sand that had been used to soak up excess ink on the page. Each held several hundred closely written pages that stuck together from hav-ing long lain in humid archives; brittle at the edges, the pages rustled when you turned them. The turning broke off a little of each page: it is a sober thought that the simple act of reading these official records, even if one takes scrupulous care in handling them, also destroys a bit more of them each time. It makes the efforts by archives to film and digitize their holdings more understandable. In some places, if the archive is technically well equipped, it is now possible for a researcher never to physically touch any historical document. That has practical advantages, but the loss of such sense-based experiences means a loss of one of the attractions of doing this kind of research.

All those wonderfully densely written pages! Like a second-grader, I relearned how to read, deciphering letter for letter, word for word, the sentences of a court administrator’s protocol from the seventeenth century. Still, guides to standardized scripts used in the past or reading aids for working in archives have about as much to do with the written word one actually encounters as the blueprints of a house have to do with the life later actually lived in that house. It took several weeks before I could read these protocols with any fluency, and every change in scribe meant a change in handwriting and additional time spent deciphering the newly unfamiliar letters.

By now, I have examined many files and official records, but have not forgotten those first court records and what a hurdle they were to decipher. Behind the brief reference “Hann. 72 Göttingen Nr. 605–616,” for example, lay twelve thick folios that were, in every respect, a real challenge. Learning to read them fluently was only the first step. Stu-dents now can profit from clever introductions to doing research in historical archives, and already know in advance about the many aids for deciphering awaiting them in the archive, comparable to what is available to those who engage in field research on present-day topics (Maranhão and Streck 2003). Such aids exist in archives at various levels. First there is the matter of individual words that are unknown, though they can sometimes be guessed from the general context in which they appear. Other times, dictionaries can help, of which an impressive number can be found in nearly every archive; they usually answer one’s immediate question. But if an appropriate dictionary can’t be found, there is usually someone in the archive, at some point, who knows the word in question.

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Yet what about all those things that appear peculiar from today’s perspective? There is so much one does not understand at first reading, and though in some cases one can guess from one’s own present-day experience, the meaning becomes clear only much later—if at all. In the course of time I came to realize that not only every hesitation or puzzlement, but also every agreement and recognition, was an important key in evaluating the documents. Only much later did I come to understand my reactions to the documents, as a reader of the late modern era, in much the way those who examine present-day phenomena use the irritations they experience during fieldwork as a way to probe their knowledge (Maase 2001b). To begin with, though, my bewilderment itself was confusing, and reinforced my own fears of failure to a not small degree.

Also confusing was encountering a world in which everyday life differed considerably from the one lived today. Reading court records from the early eighteenth century for a detailed study about resistance in the small town of Waake (Fenske 1999) was like entering an alien world. Statements of excited, even incensed people sat on my read-ing table, but what was recorded gave only a partial picture, bits and pieces of what had actually happened. The record was colored by dif-ferent interests, always incomplete. At best, I had pieces of a mosaic in front of me.

Those pieces hid exciting information about a past life world. They told of intrigues, animosities, and betrayals, but also of support and care for the welfare of others; they told of everyday cares and everyday conflicts, spoke of political conspiracy and courageous decisions. And since all these records were from people in only one community, and individuals could be located otherwise quite precisely through tax rolls and lists of landholders, it was possible to follow individual fates over long periods of time. So I could trace how Maria Illien, the daughter of a family of small-hold farmers, fell further and further out of the village network with every illegitimate child she bore and had to turn increasingly to crime to ‘earn’ any resources at all. I read how the shoemaker Christoph Lutterbeck became increasingly incensed at the demands and attitude of the local squirearchy, and could follow, from the perspective of the court administrator, how protest against him grew in the village. In the evenings, when I left the archive and made my way through Hanover’s elegant business quarter to the train station, what I had just read stayed with me. I saw the shops with their


rich fittings and displays through the eyes of villagers, and suddenly the present seemed strange. Researchers who engage in fieldwork in poorer regions of the world far from Western industrialized nations must feel the same way or have the same sense of disorientation when they return to the rich West.

In some sense, I felt a dual alienation as I went about my own everyday life while immersed in the everyday life of villagers from this much earlier time. The Other, along with that other world they inhabited, was initially strange and alien, yet became more and more familiar, while that which was familiar in my present-day, everyday world seemed more and more alien and strange. It is not the case that while researching the past we only research the long ago: we begin with, and are situated in the present, as well as in its changes and the changes in ourselves. Yet the split between then and now is laden with tension, for we constantly scan and compare observations, analyze the unknown and the known at the same time, and look for patterns both to identify the unusual and to establish what is held in common or what is ordinary.

I wondered, too, whether the kin of others who engage in histori-cal scholarship have had to listen to the parallels as often as mine did, those connections I could see between what was long past and what was happening right now. Watching the nightly news, I might say: “These coalition negotiations! And those meals the politicians Merkel, Stoiber, and Münterfering put on; they’re just like those sumptuous meals the leading merchants of Hildesheim ate during market days! And look at how Westerwelle has been shut out; he’s behaving just like Mister N. did in Hildesheim 300 years ago!” Comparisons between then and now come up constantly during the active phase of fieldwork and they make one think about change and constancy with respect to political culture, or the manner in which the power of rulers is constituted and staged.

True, I may be accused of over-identifying with my research sub-jects, or of engaging in a little too much fantasy. After all, I wasn’t an immediate observer of life as it was lived back then but am only the reader of texts—texts that in addition also literally and figuratively fall apart. But in answer, I would say that life as lived in some manner always becomes a text when it comes to empirical research. It may be written down, as on a menu, in various courses, or captured as a transcript or as field notes (though only partially), or later in the form of an academic

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article. I felt this way about it even before I read Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, or George Marcus, and before the entire “hermeneutic turn” liberated me (Geertz 1987, Clifford and Marcus 1986).

A reviewer subsequently accused me of partiality in my portrayal of peasant resistance (Ansah 2001). I stuck with the peasants, barely depicted anything negative about the village and its inhabitants—the liveliness of my presentation (which the reviewer conceded, almost with regret) seemed to her to be too much like “popularization.” Yet in saying that, this reviewer raised fundamental questions about research practices, or better, the habitus of research. What is the “correct” form for depicting of research results? In the reviewer’s eyes, it had to be within a particular system, a particular form, a particular language of representation. I found this “accusation” of partiality, and thus also the question of my subjectivity as a researcher, of greater interest at the time. To what extent had it influenced my depiction? Was I being partial? The reviewer admitted there was nothing objectionable in what I had related: I had clearly thoroughly engrossed myself in the diverse vantage points, had analyzed them, and shown the resistance from various perspectives.

Nevertheless, in a certain sense I had taken the side of the resis-tors. I didn’t do so because it was opportune or because it was the broad trend in historical scholarship of this kind. I also didn’t do so because Volkskunde and other fields have concluded that subjectivity cannot be written out of scholarship, indeed that science cannot be thought about without it. I didn’t do so just because E. P. Thompson, the Marxist social historian, was particularly popular right then. I did so because I felt connected. I was writing about people who were my own forebears. “Holding with, holding to, the peasants” for me meant a particular manner of access. As the granddaughter of smallholders and agrarian workers, I understood the protests of the poor villag-ers all too well. I sensed the trouble they would make for the estate manager long before the local magistrate in the court records noted it, with shock and not a little irritation. Unlike the magistrate of the 1720s and 1730s, I recognized similar strategies from my own obser-vations. My grandfather worked for an estate owner, or rather for his estate manager, and though he counted himself among the “loyalists,” comments (especially from female relatives and neighbors) showed that one could see the world in quite a different way than my “quiet” grandfather did.


A number of years ago, Hermann Bausinger (1994) reflected on the significance of the social background of folklorists for their scholarship, as the majority of them seemed to come from lower socio- economic strata. In my case, my background meant, among other things, an intuitive understanding of many cultural practices among the so-called lower classes, practices that middle-class academics per-force must see from, and with, much greater distance. One’s social background dictates difficulties in how and what one perceives, and tacitly embracing prejudices and constraints that influence research both on the present as well as on the past. In my case, my comparatively young age, in addition to my gender and particular socio-economic background, resulted in a certain enthusiasm for certain persons and phenomena more than others. The “writing culture” debate (Clif-ford and Marcus 1986) has drawn attention to the subjectivity of the researcher engaged in historical and ethnographic studies, not only in their field interactions, but also in the manner in which they read the available historical documents.

That I sided with the cantankerous peasants in my analysis of vil-lage resistance raises not only questions of subjectivity in the research process, but also ethical questions about historical research. According to German archive law, people mentioned in historical documents generally have their privacy protected for about thirty years after their deaths. One can do just about anything one wants, however, with the dead of 300 years ago. They can’t protest, nor can their descendants, or at least not until they have been made aware, through publication, of what I have written about them. So the descendant of the squire of Waake had to deal with the consequences of my depiction just as much as the descendants of villager resistors did, though one should add the latter seemed less wedded to the village than the former. As an aside, newer residents who have moved in from former eastern German territories regard the history of peasant resistance with evi-dently greater distance than those who carry the family names of the historical actors Illien, Rosenplenter, or Magerhans.

The publication in 1999 of my book Ein Dorf in Unruhe (A Village in Agitation) created a stir in the village even 300 years after the events. The retiring Protestant pastor, in the last service he held, supposedly cited the 1707 words of a Waake administrator from his pulpit: “So schelmisch, diebisch Volk alß in Wake were, wer in gantz Deutschland nicht!” (Such a knavish, thieving folk as in Wake [sic] could not be

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found in all of Germany!”). Yet unlike ancestors who would have re-garded such an accusation as besmirching their honor, Waake’s current residents seemed exceptionally gleeful about their knavishness. The village, or at least some of its current residents, identifies itself with its history of resistance, to them something special or unusual, though I kept reiterating that it was not that unusual and that “resistance was the norm” (Trossbach 1985).

The Waake village hall was quite full when I gave a talk there on the topic, and afterwards the organizers noted with some pride that even the squire had come. Yet he did not subsequently permit me to use his private archive, although that could have been mere coincidence. I imagine, though, that he also found my depiction too one-sided. Seen in this light, such historico-cultural scholarship involves walk-ing a tightrope between the subjectivity of the researcher, the focus of research interest, the rights of the long-dead, and the needs of the currently living. Past and present stand in complex relation to one another, and those who engage in historical scholarship walk into this complexity. In acting within this complex they change not the past itself but instead our perception of it in the present, and thereby perhaps also the future. In this respect, the limitations and possibilities of ethnographic work in a historical field bear similarities to the kind of ethnography conducted in contemporary societies—though there are some aspects that are decidedly different.

The Ethnography of Present and Past Societies: Many Commonalties and Some Significant Differences

The American cultural anthropologist Frederich Gleach (2005:12) has yet again raised the issue whether historical scholarship is easier to undertake than empirical research conducted in the present, and the answer is quite clear: it depends. That is, it depends on the questions being asked, on the respective field conditions, and on the financing of a project, as well as the time frame available for it. The last point is important because it is not at all the case, as some would have you believe, that someone engaged in historical scholarship can accurately estimate what awaits them in an archive. It also isn’t at all clear what is held where, or what has been kept or preserved. Pre-modern evidence does not correspond to current expectations. I worked on “market protocols,” a very interesting source for research


on everyday behavior, since they document infractions against the market by-laws as well as misdemeanors and conflicts between those who came to markets on market days. Yet in German-speaking Europe, many archives do not regard these sources as worthy of preservation (Fenske 2006:14ff.), and as a type of source they are only sporadically available, a problem worsened by the fact that different archives file them under different names, making the few examples that do exist practically impossible to find.

Calling them a type of source is also accurate, because they take entirely different forms in Schleswig than they do in Lower Saxony or in Thuringia. In some places, they are long, explicit accounts, while in other places one finds only succinct summaries; some protocols deal with weekly markets and others document incidents at the annual fairs. From the researcher’s point of view, what is preserved is often a mat-ter of accident. Due to a lengthy controversy about jurisdiction over the marketplace in Hildesheim, protocols over a seventy-year period were preserved in the archives. By contrast, Mühlhausen, which once had an immense holding, preserved only the 1739 protocols from the shredder.

Sometimes it is a matter of the sense of order a later archivist has; other times it turns on how useful contemporaries find the material. Wars and floods have also done their part to reduce holdings.

Ultimately, what is left behind is a conglomerate of “remains,” which is itself a term from the historian’s trade that emphasizes the chance character of what one finds. The term source evokes romantic associa-tions instead, as though the material happily bubbles forth like clear, pure water (Rathmann and Wegmann 2004), which is unfortunately not the case. Historical research turns into an adventure because one never knows what is actually held in public and private archives. Though there has been greater systematization in the modern era, even those who do research focused on more recent centuries face similar problems or have similar experiences. The process of archival research can been steered or predicted just as much, or rather just as little, as research on present-day topics. In both cases one has to deal with what one encounters.

Researchers working on historical topics can of course pose the same questions as those who research the present. The interest is in similar aspects of everyday life: how, or in what manner, people accommodate themselves to their socio-economic and political environments, what

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conditions they face there, what the rules and forms are for living to-gether, what norms or values prevail, and so forth. Those working on historical topics—as much as those working on present-day topics—are no less interested in gaining a basic understanding of the functioning of cultural systems and processes than they are in understanding specific phenomena or problems.

Still, historical scholarship is much more dependent on its “field,” the working conditions in a specific archive and on what can be found by way of historical accounts than is research on present-day topics. One can undertake research on this or that, draw up fantastic catalogues of problems to address or questions to pose, draw on im-portant theories, or want to check such theories against the evidence, but without appropriate historical documentation, all such plans and questions are futile. As a result, and probably more so than in research on current topics, it is necessary to react to what one finds and to try to incorporate it into the scholarly paradigm one has adopted—or is still working on formulating. There is a productive tension that results from the interplay of problems, questions, and the possibility of an-swering them. Those who engage in historical ethnography research of necessity enter into an open dialogue with what has been preserved by way of evidence or records (Keller-Drescher 2003, Maase 2001b). This open discussion begins with the research itself, but continues in the selection, reading, and evaluation of the documents.

An oft-repeated objection raised against historical scholarship is the one-sided nature of what has been preserved, or to put it another way, that so much of the documentation comes from the authorities. Historical scholarship thus seems to be at odds with an open depic-tion of lived practice (Kramer 1989:18). However, in many ways this is not actually true. For one thing, it is by no means the case that all documents come only from the authorities. For another, one does not investigate only a single type of document. Instead, one combines and contrasts different kinds of documents, and it is only once they are all taken together that one can illuminate a particular subject matter; micro-studies, in fact, are often based on a combination of different local sources. Even documents that originate with the authorities can be quite revealing and by no means reflect only their views. A relatively recent study of the interrogation of witnesses in the early modern era came to the conclusion that judges and administrators at the time had extensive instruments, sources, and methods available to them


that were not dissimilar to those employed today (Fuchs and Schulze 2002). These decision-makers could then illuminate specific events and write content-rich protocols that provided accounts that by no means reflected only their particular interests. Instead, even in the case of accounts nominally focused on specific actors, the narrative was influenced by numerous interests and the events and perception of the events in an interactive process. Various researchers (see Göttsch 1991a and 1991b, Kienitz 1995) have shown in what manner differing narrative levels in these accounts can be analyzed and laid bare.

The researcher working with historical materials learns—along with the classical methods of historical source critique and the inter-pretation of texts in a qualitative hermeneutic manner—a kind of painstaking deconstructive work that is, explicitly or implicitly, also a technique of self-observation. Thus in court protocols the examining judge or the executive himself becomes an informant. However, such informants are only to some extent interested in the same things as a researcher; witnesses being questioned also have their own ideas, and could care less about the later interests of researchers who want to know about everyday life in past eras.

All this seems quite different for those working on modern-day top-ics. The fullness of everyday life seems more accessible and researchers are in some sense engaged in the production of their own “sources.” Participant observation in that lived life is possible, interview guidelines can be drawn up by the researchers themselves, and they can search out those they wish to interview as well as the appropriate settings. They have the post-interview luxury of being able to return to an in-terviewee and clarify this or that point, or may even have mastered the “art of letting [the interviewee] talk” (Schmidt-Lauber 2001). Ideally, their research is an interaction of equal partners, where researcher and informant construct images of one another.

Those who work on modern-day topics, rather than with texts that have been preserved in historical court records, have far more infor-mation available to them than just the texts of their interviews: the voice and the smell, the body language and the social interaction, the observations of the actors’ scope of action. True, historical documents contain such information as well, although to a lesser extent and filtered through the interests of the scribes. I may have a thousand questions I would like to ask my sources, but have no one I can put them to. There is no possibility for participant observation, and addressing what I have

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found remains a conversation with myself, though that dialogue can be enhanced or re-interpreted through conversations with colleagues. Still, one can only “listen” to the written sources and be open to what appears to be going on in the heads of those one learns about. In addition one often has to read a rather large number of diverse texts, work through mountains of documents, and try to construct a coherent picture out of many bits and pieces and divergent voices.

So it is likely that the greatest difference between scholarship about the past and about the present is that directly confronting the subject of interest is not interactive and occurs entirely inside the researcher herself: access to the past is through an intermediary filter (Kaser 2003:82ff.). Still, the differences strike me less as fundamental than as a matter of degree. The apparently greater freedom of those research-ing the present is limited in practice: by no means do all field research projects run optimally, not all informants are attuned to or interested in the questions and interests of researchers, and some informants may even use the attention interviewers direct their way to address their personal issues and concerns instead (see Jeggle 1984, Eisch and Hamm 2001). Margaret Mills (1991) has provided an impressive ac-count of the complexities inherent to those who research the present —as well as the pitfalls they face. “Lived life” is only to some extent accessible to cultural analysis, whether it is the life of the past or of the present, and as it is made manifest in complex relations between researcher and researched. It is also always only partially reflected in historical documents or excerpts from them, only partially captured through interviews and their transcripts, and inadequately captured by either written or visual evidence.

The limitations noted above may make the historical field appear even more incomplete or “incorrect,” its interpretation less readily “objectifiable.” It may seem to stand at a further distance from meet-ing the criterion of a comprehensive Verstehen (understanding, in a Weberian sense) than can be provided through modern fieldwork methods. But as Konrad Köstlin (2003) mockingly, if gently, noted, there is a certain yearning to reconstruct complete and complex little worlds—and the desire to find and hold fast to a comprehensive miniature cosmos may be one thing researchers fascinated by the past have in common with those who study the present.

There is certainly a commonalty in the subjectivity of the researcher, even if the specific circumstances of the research itself differ. Still, the


possibilities for interpretation and understanding of the scholarly pro-cess based on this commonalty could be exploited further than they now are: the wonder, the stumbling, the incomprehension could be more frequently drawn on in describing the archival research process. Hardly anyone talks about the open questions, the possible mistakes and actual errors, even though they are all indicators of ways to fruit-fully address the past.

Why historical ethnographic research is often accused of being atheoretical remains a puzzle (see, e.g., Schindler 2002, Gleach 2005, and Medick 2001). This accusation is related to a similar and more general charge levied against the work of historians (Struck 2006), and it has been raised as well with respect to work in reflexive anthropology (Cole, Paynter, and Reid 1993). To this, one can note that the turn to various theories can be found in work based on historical materials no less than in work on present-day issues. Theory in both cases aids in formulating questions, or makes them more precise, as well as aids in the analysis of the empirical material. Nevertheless, it appears that researchers engaged in historical ethnography are particularly cautious about communicating their theoretical models. One can argue that there is a contrast, if not an incompatibility, between the formulation of abstract and theoretical constructs on the one hand, and the “tra-ditional knowledge” and realities reflected in archival holdings on the other (Farge 1989:116ff.), and that this gap burdens an already difficult relationship between theory and research practice. What recommends itself then, is to respect this “traditional knowledge” and its reality and to openly address what one finds. Here too, I think, we find more a difference in degree between research about the past and the present than a fundamental difference.

There is also the matter of narrative: those who do historical ethnography like to present their findings in the form of tales. Aside from the pleasure in the telling—and the pleasure to be gained from knowing one will be read—it is also true that this is the only manner in which the life world in question can both be reconstructed and ex-plained. The narrative of understanding, the sketching out of a story, one of many possible sketches, is in that sense close to what cultural anthropological history research tries to do, because in the end this is the only way the internal cultural “sense-making” can be transmitted and the voices of the historical actors reproduced and reflected. In that respect, both how theory is dealt with and the use of narrative

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as a means to depict it are expressions of, and the results of, an open dedication to the field of research and those who act within it.

True, these may be over-elaborate considerations about the role narrative plays in historical ethnography. By the same token, the possibilities of writing and experimentation seem to not have been fully exploited. The problems appear similar whether one concerns oneself with the present or with the past. In the ethnological context, the debate about “writing culture” in some sense triply affects those who work with historical materials: there is knowledge of the subjec-tive principles involved in the past construction of the documents that are under investigation, there is the subjective manner of reading these documents, and then there is the subjective manner in which the information about the documents is subsequently presented. To some degree, historical texts follow rules similar to those of literary works, thereby blurring the lines between an objective narration and literary fiction, and the drawing on literary roots can fertilize histori-cal narration, as has been discussed intensively in the field of history itself (Stone 1979, White 1973 and 1994). We have also learned from de Certeau (1975) that though historical depictions are subjectively constructed, this is not a random process: our constructions follow the rules and conventions of scientific communication of the day. And if what results read well—that is not really objectionable, is it?

For an Open Cultural Anthropology Practice

So what speaks against having European ethnology regard past and present equally? As a discipline, it sees its practice as largely akin to that used in cultural anthropology, and it poses questions about people and the nature or manner in which they live in both native and foreign cul-tures. The cultural analysis of what seems more alien has been limited, perhaps, by the experience in the field as well as by the language profi-ciency of its scholars (and actors); research on the past has been limited in particular due to what has been historically transmitted or preserved. The key terms nowadays are micro, macro, and agency, and empirical research, beyond being conducted using a more open approach, could address a variety of other topics and subjects of discussion such as: ethical and methodological questions raised by research practices; the range (and limitations) of theories; the negotiation to include more everyday life material in history books or in historical interpretations


in (and of) past and present; the conditions under which congruence and divergence occur; the interaction and opposition of ideals, norms, and values as well as practices; the mechanisms and functions in the construction of what seems alien to both local and supra-local life worlds; the construction of power and in particular its implementation and limitation; the rules for exchange of and the participation in economic resources; the conditions and forms of violence; the production and stag-ing of inequality; the creation and dissolution of national “units;” the conditions and organization of work relations; the social organization of people in partnerships and “small groups” with or without reproductive goals and/or possibilities; and much more.

Under an open perspective of this kind, one might also accept that in the practice of everyday life, no progress exists in the sense of modern utopias, and that the present is not the endpoint—for now—of the European modern project. Representatives of the discipline could find in this view a starting point for their societal and political respon-sibilities and see in it an impetus for their research into culture. In this manner, the discipline—even if incompletely—could successfully understand culture in its multiplicity and its depth. An openness of this kind could be an advantage as well in the difficult fight over resources being conducted in today’s scholarly world. Those who conduct re-search into the seemingly self-evident, everyday world of the present and of the past, those who practice methodological pluralism, drawing in material culture, cultural practices, or the apparently fleeting words and gestures, need not worry about their profile within the disciplines that study culture and need not worry about being unique.

Institut für Kulturanthropologie/Europäische EthnologieUniversity of Göttingen

AcknowledgmentThe author expresses her gratitude to John Bendix for his translation. The text has benefitted considerably from his sophisticated and gentle interpretation.

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Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology Practice

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