This is an un-refereed author version of an article published in [Journal of Social History 36:3 (Spring 2003), pp. 701-735.] All rights reserved

The Singularization of History:

Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon The Reykjavik Academy Yankee doodle dandy In 1996 the Journal of Social History devoted a supplementary special issue to the various problems facing the discipline of history, and social history in particular, in the United States. This supplement came in the wake of a fierce debate conducted in the pages of prominent newspapers and on talk shows and discussion panels on television.

There were two main reasons for this flurry of discussion and debate. The immediate spark was the publication of new guidelines or standards for future curricula in history in high schools, junior colleges, colleges and universities.1 The second was a significant change in American politics, heralded by the Republican Party’s gaining a majority in Congress. Following their election victory the Republicans were determined to make their presence felt, not least in the domains of culture and education, and initiated a number of reforms. They criticized certain allocations from research funds and even made sure that “undesirable projects” were refused funding. One of the disciplines hit by this revisionist action was social history. During this period the subject came under close scrutiny and had to endure severe criticism.2

To be sure, a number of interesting points were thrown up during the debate instigated by the right-wing critics; most, however, lie beyond the scope of the present paper. I prefer instead to consider the reactions of historians to these attacks, mainly as expressed in the Journal of Social History. The aforementioned special issue bore the title “Social History and the American Political Climate – Problems and Strategies” and contained thirteen articles of varying length. The articles were divided into two groups: those in the first group analyzing the problem in hand, those in the second attempting to put the problem into a wider context and suggest possible solutions.3

One object of the present paper is to attempt to analyze the failure of social history to achieve its main purpose, namely, to make ordinary people the subject of history on their own terms.4 A striking feature of the articles in JSH is that the historians present themselves as if the subject were a single, united whole in which scholars think the same and behave the same. The overriding sentiment in JSH is similar to that found in historical discussions at large, with one and all in favor of solidarity within the discipline and calling on social historians to stand their ground. Perhaps Roy Rosenzweig best captures this spirit in the following exhortation: “In urging historians to be more active in making our case publicly, I am calling for a kind of craft unionism for historians – a more self-conscious effort to defend our craft.”5 The focus is on the ostensible enemy; there is

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nowhere any call for the discipline as such to act as a source of new ideas about how history can connect with the world it is supposed to study. There is also no apparent recognition of the fact that within the subject there has been fierce debate and disagreement over its nature, aims and status, particularly at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. However, the final outcome of this debate, it seems to me, has been that those who at that time made the most noise and demanded the greatest changes in the end drew in their horns and now trail along behind those who chose to view the ultimate aim of social history as being that of bringing out the past by whatever means possible. I will go into this in greater detail later in this essay, but it may perhaps be said here that it is hardly to be wondered at if the authors in JSH saw nothing a bit “fishy” about their subject, since from their perspective all opposition appeared to have utterly run out of steam.

I wish to repeat that it is my view that social history has, to a great extent, failed in its proclaimed and relatively simple task of writing history “from the bottom up.” More than this, social historians throughout the world have in fact refused to face up to this fact and rejected all scholarly experiments that foreground the ideological problem of the discipline. To some extent I feel that many scholars who have recently completed their PhDs or other formal studies at universities thoughout the world have a similar perception: today, in the world of science, there is a general dissatisfaction with the status of theory. It is this perception that I will try to articulate in the present paper, as well as suggesting a possible solution to the evident conundrum posed by the practice of history. What is social history? It is not my intention here to go into precise attempts to explain the meaning behind the composite concept “social history”. Most people involved in the field have a pretty clear idea of what social history is all about and I shall let it suffice to cite a single definition that it is then possible to work with. In his article in the special issue of JSH the German social historian Jürgen Kocka discusses his own definition of the subject, a definition that deserves special attention:

By social history I mean, on the one hand, a sub-field of historical studies which mainly deals with social structures, processes and experiences, for example, with classes and strata, ethnic and religious groups, migrations and families, business structures and entrepreneurship, mobility, gender relations, urbanization, or patterns of rural life... On the other hand, social history means an approach to general history from a social-historical point of view. Social history in this sense deals with all domains of historical reality, by relating them to social structures, processes and experiences in different ways.6

Kocka’s definition, which is one I am sure many social historians would concur

with, is worthy of note not least in that it gives an indication of the problem facing the discipline. By this I mean the primary emphasis that Kocka, and quite a few other social historians, place on linking their subject up with general history, i.e. on the kinds of synthesis which great numbers of social historians have place heavy emphasis on in recent years. This emphasis is, for obvious reasons, related to the powerful links which

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have grown up between the social sciences and social history in the latter part of the twentieth century. The course of events here is complex, for a number of reasons. For one, the original aim of social history to act as a counter to history with a single focus and scholars stressed the fact that the past was more varied than the picture drawn up by conventional history. On the other hand, it can be said that with the rise of social history there was a fragmentation of the “storyline” (which tended to follow the grand narrative), and this led to renewed calls for synthesis. Gary B. Nash highlights this in his paper in the special issue of JSH:

The attention to social history over recent decades has no doubt raised new questions, not the least of which is the problem of developing master narratives to take the place of the narrowly constructed and distorted megastories of the past. Critics see the new history of women, laboring people, religious and racial minorities producing a hopelessly chaotic version of the past in which no grand synthesis, overarching themes, or coherent structure is visible. This is the lamented triumph of pluribus without unum. But it needs to be remembered that the old coherence and the old overarching themes were those derived from studying mostly the experiences of much less than the whole of the American people and from grounding the megahistorical constructs nearly exclusively in the Western experience. The contribution of social history is to show that the overarching themes and grand syntheses promulgated by past historians will not hold up when we broaden our perspectives to include the history of all the people who constituted American society.7

All of this is familiar, but hardly convincing or conclusive. Most striking is the

similarity between Nash’s description of the methods of social history as it has developed today and the demands of those whom Nash is criticizing, i.e. the advocates of “the old history”. He neglects to mention that social historians have make urgent calls for a new version to replace the old grand narrative. Thus one might say that the content may be different but the methods and aims are the same: namely, to provide people with a general overview of a grand chain of events. This overview may be complicated, but never to the extent that it precludes the possibility of a providing a continuous and coherent account of it. Social historians have made calls for synthesis on many occasions and put much effort into getting social history to play its part in this area. In fact, this considerable interest in synthesis has led a great many social historians to provide definitions of history based directly on the extent to which it is possible to find some common thread.8 In this connection one might point to structural research on the “big structures” intended to provide a unifying framework for more detailed social history. Part of this desire to provide social history with a satisfactory synthesis sprang from an analysis of social patterns and social changes.9 In other words, when the subject matter of social history disintegrated into disparate pieces, there was felt to be a need for a framework which might organize it neatly into logical patterns and structures and thus provide the discipline with a scientific foundation.10

As will be discussed later, the reaction of many practicing social historians against the approach to social history described by Nash and in favor of one based on a new concept of society as a causal foundation presented a much more serious threat to the fabric of the discipline than the complaints of the right-wing fanatics and their political

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agenda. Miguel A. Cabrera argues that the underlying view behind “these historians’ research and theoretical work is that reality does not possess intrinsic meaning and, therefore, consciousness is not its reflection (either non-mediated or symbolic), nor are individuals’ social positions the causal foundation of their actions.”11 In other words, according to Cabrera the model which provides the foundation for most of the practice of social history is useless. This is something which seems to have entirely escaped the attention of the contributors to the special issue of JSH.12

In this connection, and before going further, I wish to consider a few central concepts relating to the size of the relevant research fields and the general scope of the discipline. Many scholars speak of metanarratives or grand narratives, general history and macrohistory, in the same breath; in fact, there are considerable differences between these concepts. As briefly as possible, a metanarrative can be described as a continuous argumentation about a long-term social development, made up of arguments that are so tightly knit that they integrate events and phenomena into predefined molds designed to place them within a specified social context.13 Modernization theory provides a clear example of a metanarrative that has had a profound effect on the way historians think and behave.14 Conventional social history relies, almost without exception, on metanarratives, and these in turn bear the marks of macrohistory, which deals with restricted fields while simultaneously depicting them as continua with broad bases or extending over long periods of time. To be able to do this, a scholar conducting macrohistorical research is forced to rely on metanarratives.

This interplay between metanarratives and the macrohistorical approach often results eventually in “general history”. General history is, however, a summary of a particular historical development, country or territory over an extended period. It often disintegrates into a mass of information that scholars are quick to start treating as self-evident and unshakeable. The struggle for historians, whether studying social history, gender history, women’s history, gay history, microhistory, or anything else, is in fitting their own research into this particular frame of general history, finding a place for their research within this context. If they fail to do this, their research is likely to be considered flawed and disqualified from a place in general history.

The main point in all this is that social history has gone full circle over the last decades. As I see it, it has fallen into the same trap as traditional political history, namely of presenting simplistic versions of historical developments by its unremitting insistence that research be placed within a broad and overriding context provided by the metanarratives. In what follows I intend to discuss the reasons why this course has been selected and how social historians throughout the world have chosen to reject adventurous and progressive approaches to scholarship for “business as usual”. Whistling past the graveyard We need to look a little closer at the development of social history over the last 15 to 20 years in order to gain some idea of how the contributors to the special issue of JSH, and in fact just about the whole discipline, came to the conclusion that it would be best largely to ignore scholarly endeavors which had promised to revolutionize our conception of history and the past.

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As a doctoral student in the USA in the eighties and early nineties I had the opportunity to work on my thesis in a very progressive history department with a heavy emphasis on quantitative methods. As things then appeared, the key to future research in history was systematic research in the vein of the social sciences, with the emphasis on economics and historical demography, often in the spirit of classical political and economic studies. Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the French school, the Annales, exerted an enormous influence on the dominant ideas in the study of history. Their ideology was built around an “emphasis on the study of the largest possible aggregates; the priority granted to measurement in the analysis of social phenomena; the choice of a time frame long enough to make large-scale transformations visible (and, as a corollary, the need to situate analyses within different time frames),” as the French historian Jacques Revel described the defining features of social history then current in France and many other countries.15 Revel notes that nearly all of the Annales, the first, second and third generations of historians belonging to the school, “also took a sort of scientific voluntarism: the only objects that one can study scientifically are those constructed according to explicit procedures in light of an initial hypothesis which is then subjected to empirical validation.”16 The French school of thought became highly influential throughout the world, not least in the USA.

American social historians were heavily influenced not only by their French counterparts but also by the social sciences as practiced in the USA.17 In a number of European countries, too, historical studies looked increasingly to the social sciences in their search for a methodology. A whole host of such areas of research came to the fore and had a major impact on students of history: research in the areas of protoindustry and social mobility are good examples of the innovative spirit that dominated the discipline at the time.18 In both these fields, researchers sought to utilize demographic information to reach definitive results; for example, large amounts of raw numerical data were collected and converted into electronic form, enabling vast amounts of information to be processed by computer at unheard-of speeds. Such computer-based research involved the collation and processing of a huge range of sources such as property inventories at marriage and death, trial records, information on literacy and book possession, and material from church registers, to mention just a few examples. As a rule, the material covered extended periods of time and seemed inexhaustible. All this research was linked up with the great political, economic and social changes characterizing the transition from a pre-modern to a modern society, often within the framework of modernization theory, whether scholars acknowledged their adherence to this theory or not. History was increasingly reaching further and further into the realms of the social sciences and, in the eyes of many, something on the scale of a revolution was taking place.

By such means a generation of scholars introduced new questions and approaches that impressed many young historians, myself included. Historical practice was changing, and in such an atmosphere it is no wonder that optimism ran high, even to the extent of convincing more than a few that history was on the point of becoming “a real science”.19

Still, this optimism and the rhetoric used in connection with it started to trouble me quite early on in my doctoral studies. I began to feel a distinct unease, and an unwillingness to accept quantitative methods as the ultimate tool in the search to make history part of the natural sciences. This feeling began to take hold at the end of the eighties and grew stronger with each passing day. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to

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have sympathetic teachers who understood my dilemma and encouraged me to work it into my thesis as I judged necessary.20

Most of my exposure was to quantitative methods and the history of mentalities during my time in graduate school. During this period, i.e. the eighties, a growing body of historians developed in a forcefull reaction against this attempt to turn history into science. As was mentioned earlier in the footnotes, The American Historical Review devoted a special issue to these new challenges in 1989 where historians of many persuasions discussed it from all possible angles. That very same year, the historical journal Central European History also dealt extensively with the postmodern condition and what it meant for history.21 These scholarly debates, and others about new disciplinary promises and expectations, never really came up on the horizon in my graduate work. I sensed that there was a body of scholars who strongly opposed the quantitative approach, but I did not realize what those challenges would mean for working historians. Traditional social history with its strong connections with social demography was still the way to go in my neck of the woods.

Jacques Revel has this to say about the atmosphere I found prevailing in the United States at the end of the eighties:

This model of social history [that is, French-style social history] entered a period of crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that is, by a strange irony, just at the moment when it seemed to be at the height of its triumph, when its results were taken as authoritative well beyond the boundaries of the profession and the “territory of the historian” seemed capable of indefinite enlargement. Clearly, the sense of a crisis was slow to make itself felt, and it is by no means certain that majority of historians even today would agree that we are in the midst of one.22

Revel points out that the problem he saw surrounding social history at the time was exacerbated by various factors: re-evaluation of the status of many older works in the face of the new use of computer technology in research; increased specialization within the discipline; and a general change in attitude within society at large which resulted in a reduced interest in attaining a global understanding of the social.

My dissatisfaction with the prevailing practices of social history increased steadily, and after I defended my doctoral thesis at the end of 1993 I came to the view that I had failed to attain the goals that I thought social history should be setting itself.23 Over the next years I began to realize that I had to a large extent been missing out on scholarly endeavors that had then been going on for some time within the field of humanities but which among most historians had fallen on deaf ears. Scholars throughout the world had been conducting experiments which took a quite different direction from the one I had encountered at the start of my doctoral research. These were mostly literary historians, philosophers and anthropologists who were starting to consider in a more structured and directed manner than hitherto the influence of culture on the phenomena they were investigating. The areas of research within history that had earlier blossomed under the umbrella of computer technology were not left untouched by these changes, and little by little they too changed course and took on a new direction.

From whatever the starting point, in fact, the subjects undertaken by history everywhere began to turn more in the direction of cultural analysis.24 In the wake of these

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first changes one group of historians went further and began to look for ideas to people like the French historian Michel Foucault and philosopher Jacques Derrida, thereby coming under strong influence from poststructuralist thinking; thus, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, many began to apply the methods of deconstruction in their analyses.25 Poststructuralism became a catalyst in the so-called “linguistic turn” in history and historical thought; the central idea here is that language, as a cultural and intellectual form, is the means by which authority communicates, and that the best way of seeking explanations for phenomena in human interactions lies through investigation of this discourse.26 Such ideas influenced how many historians used their sources; more generally, one can say that postmodernist thinking (or whatever one chooses to call it) has had a marked influence on the way historians think, especially those of the younger generation.27 However, as will be described later, the great majority of social historians appear to have been almost completely oblivious to these ideological upheavals, while many others set about picking holes in the new ideas and turned vehemently against them.28

It cannot be denied that a sizeable group of influential social historians made these scholarly experiments their own and exerted an appreciable influence on how social history was practiced. This applied equally in various fields, whether political social history, gender history or cultural history: a group of historians applied the new ideas and provided a thoroughgoing shakeup to how people came to grips with current areas of debate.29 More than this, these ideas also had wide-ranging influence on how the social sciences were practiced and created considerable tensions and antipathy between those who wanted to employ them and those who wished them to hell. This comes out clearlyin the introductory chapter written by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt to a book under their joint editorship entitled Beyond the Cultural Turn.30 Bonnell and Hunt present an explicit discussion of the methodological and epistemological dilemmas forced upon many social historians by “the cultural turn”; they state that “the cultural turn threatened to efface all reference to social context or causes and offered no particular standard of judgement to replace the seemingly more rigorous and systematic approaches that had predominated during the 1960s and 1970s.”31 They draw attention to the part played by the ideas of Hayden White and Clifford Geertz in laying the foundations for the changes in the humanities and social sciences that collectively comprised “the cultural turn”.32 Other significant influences within the discipline in this move away from research aimed at achieving objective explanations of social life, in the manner of the social sciences and social history, and towards treating culture as an interpretive category in scholars’ search for meaning were provided by the work of the Frenchmen Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.33

In their introductory chapter, Bonnell and Hunt list the following as probably the most significant features characterizing the ideas coming under the cultural turn in the work of social historians and social scientists influenced by these changes:

(1) questions about the status of “the social”; (2) concerns raised by the depiction of culture as a symbolic, linguistic, and representational system; (3) seemingly inevitable methodological and epistemological dilemmas; (4) a resulting or perhaps precipitating collapse of explanatory paradigms; and (5) a consequent realignment of the disciplines (including the rise of cultural studies).34

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This analysis of the directions taken in research of this kind provides an excellent

breakdown of the chief characteristics of the ideology behind the cultural turn.35 It would, however, be going too far to echo Bonnell and Hunt in claiming that these methods have been accepted by historians with open arms (though they do concede that few historians have gone as far as anthropologists and literary scholars in this direction).36 Bonnell and Hunt do in fact give some thought as to which came first, the chicken or the egg – whether the cultural turn was “either the cause or the effect of the collapse of explanatory paradigms.”37 To this question they offer a fairly unqualified answer which calls for further attention:

The cultural turn only reinforced the sense of breakdown. To some extent research inspired by positivism and Marxism collapsed of its own weight; the more that has been learned, the more difficult it has become to integrate that knowledge into existing categories and theories. The expansion of knowledge itself has ineluctably fostered fragmentation rather than unity in and between the disciplines.38

Bonnell and Hunt thus choose to minimize the significance of this new way of thinking by maintaining that it is not in reality a challenge to the basis of the discipline but rather a stage in its natural course of development and change; not a sea change, rather a normal scholarly continuation. In the light of this, the discussion about the chicken and the egg reaches a simple resolution, and their conclusion is that there is no real need for despair in the face of this ideology – a view which shines out of the articles of nearly all the authors in the special issue of JSH from around the mid 1990s. “All is well in our camp; all we need do is marshal our forces and keep forward with heads held high” is, as noted above, a pervasive tone emanating from their articles.

This becomes all the more remarkable when one bears in mind that, in spite of the challenging ideas of postmodernism, the majority of social historians have carried on along the same paths as before as if nothing has happened in just about all areas of history. I am not in any way suggesting that these ideas have had no influence on the ideology of social history; it is perhaps truer to say that their influence has been indirect, as in work classed under the general headings of “social mobility” or “protoindustrialization”. Taking the case of research into protoindustrialization as an example, the Göttingen school in Germany shifted the emphases without ever completely throwing off the influence of the social sciences.39 Scholars like the German historian Hans Medick continued to adhere to the social sciences, even though he and others began to turn for ideas more and more to cultural anthropology in the spirit of Clifford Geertz. This accent in the humanities took on a particular aspect in Germany which was given the name “everyday life history”, or Alltagsgeschichte, and became associated, among other things, with microhistory and its accompanying ideology.40 It is important to bear in mind that even research conducted under the influence of the cultural turn, like that mentioned above, and which had a better chance of exerting influence on the subject as a whole, failed really to get airborne. This, for instance, comes out clearly when we turn to microhistory: in the final analysis, so far as I am aware, the ideology of microhistory has as yet failed to make any deep and lasting impression upon the discipline at large.

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In other words, what I am maintaining here is that the central idea of the cultural turn has withered on the vine and little by little perished without trace, even in the hands of those historians who appeared best placed to make them a real force in their research. It was as if social historians at large were whistling past the grave yard, rather than facing up to the fact that research in this area had not succeeded in turning the spotlight on groups of people who it had originally been the intention to bring within the ambit of history, namely those whom public sources saw no reason to take into consideration other than as mere statistics. To make clear exactly what I mean, it is important to trace this course of events in a little more depth. The microhistorical approach I wish to focus specifically on microhistory because it represents, to my mind, the most effective reaction from within the field of history to the dilemma facing social history. The response of microhistory was both groundbreaking and unconventional: it turned the attention away from the unremitting concentration on the “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons” (as Charles Tilly put it) and towards the small units in society.

Microhistory came about, according to the German-US historian Georg G. Iggers in his excellent summary of the development of modern historical practice Historiography in the Twentieth Century, not because the microhistorians considered that the traditional methodology of the social sciences “is not possible or desirable but that social scientists have made generalizations that do not hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain.”41 In the light of this perception, monographs and journals began to appear focusing specifically on microhistorical research, and these became a forum for criticism of the kind of social history produced under the influence of the social sciences. Perhaps foremost of the contributors to the debate was Carlo Ginzburg, who delivered incisive criticisms of the prevailing methods in numerous articles in the Italian journal Quaderni Storici, the German journal Historische Anthropologie, in English in Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere.42

The pioneers of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg and his Italian colleagues, went on the offensive. They attacked large-scale quantitative studies on the grounds that they distorted reality on the individual level. The microhistorians placed their emphasis on small units and how people conducted their lives within them. By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norm. Micohistorians tend to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual as found by the application of quantitative research methods. Instead, they scrutinize those individuals who did not follow the paths of their average fellow countryman, thus making them their focal point. In microhistory, the term “normal exception” is used to penetrate the importance of this perspective, meaning that each and every one of us do not show our full hand of cards. Seeing what is usually kept hidden from the outside world, we realize that our focus has only been on the “normal exception”; those who in one segment of the society are considered obscure, strange, and even dangerous. They might be, in other circles, at the center of attention and fully accepted in their daily affairs.

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Microhistorians use these cases to reflect on the workings of the society at large. Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence. They illustrate the function of the formal institutions in power and how they handle people’s affairs. In other words, each has much wider aplication, going well beyond the specific case under examination by the microhistorian. The Italian microhistorian Giovanni Levi put it this way in an article on the methods of microhistory: “[M]icrohistorians have concentrated on the contradictions of normative systems and therefore on the fragmentation, contradictions and plurality of viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.”43 To be able to illustrate this point, microhistorians have turned to the narrative as an analytical tool or a research method where they get the opportunity to present their findings, show the process by which the conclusions are reach, and demonstrate the holes in our understanding and the subjective nature of the discourse.44

These are only a few of the ingredients that made up the recipe for microhistory as practiced worldwide in the past few decades. The microhistorical approach was, for these reasons, a dramatic methodological change from, for example, the emphases of the Annales. It is probably fair to say that many of the matters that now came to the fore shed considerable light on the diverse approaches used by historians in the last decades of the twentieth century: as Iggers points out, these studies articulated significant criticisms of the prevailing methodology in the social sciences and of those historians who employed them:

They [Ginzburg and Poni] pointed to the crisis of macrohistory as part of an increasing disillusionment in the 1970s with grand narratives. Large-scale social scientific studies based on massive quantitative computerized data were questioned, not because a social scientific approach was inapplicable but because the large-scale generalizations distorted the actual reality at the base. A basic commitment of microstoria, according to its practitioners, is “to open history to peoples who would be left out by other methods” and “to elucidate historical causation on the level of small groups where most of life takes place.”45

Microhistory was thus first and foremost an attempt to overturn the received model of social history, which had from the outset been cast in the mold of macrohistory and had placed ever more emphasis in that direction as the discipline achieved fuller maturity.46 Jacques Revel comments that microhistory was in reality a “symptom of this crisis of confidence as well as a source of ideas for formulating objections and making them concrete.”47

Despite the indisputable change of direction inherent in the ideology of microhistory – as I see it, a change for the better – the problem with this new mode of thinking has lain particularly in the inability of scholars to break loose from the older methods of social history, viewing microhistory rather as an adjunct to them. One might say that this feature of the status of microhistory within social history is absolutely in line with that of the other movements within the discipline discussed above, movements which perhaps seemed more likely to change the status of social history. These movements have been accorded unequal welcomes, but the outcome has, it seems to me, been the same in all cases, that sooner or later the sting has been taken out of them and

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they have been smothered within the embrace of the discipline. To be sure, the discovery of culture and the individual as historical phenomena had a huge influence on the ideology of the microhistorians, but they seemed to lack the self-confidence to take the final step and declare that their researches could stand on their own two feet, free from connections to the greater whole. There are always, according to the great majority of microhistorians, distinct limits as to how far it is possible to use such research in explanations of the development of a community. On the basis of current practice, Iggers puts it this way: “The charge that microhistorians examine small communities with little or no reference to a broader context is not justified.”48 Towards the end of his book, he goes further in concluding:

We have seen how the microhistorians in Italy and Germany, despite their concentration on the local, never lost sight of broader historical and political contexts. In fact they believed that the concentration on the local, which always differed from the “normal”, made it possible to test generalizations. No matter how hard microhistorians challenged Marxist, Weberian, or Rostowan conceptions of the transformation of the modern world, they failed to escape from a notion of modernization, now seen mostly as a destructive force that impinges on the microscale of local history.49

All things considered, the influence of the microhistorians and those associated

with the cultural turn on the traditional research methods used by historians has been conspicuously small. This comes out quite clearly from a cursory glance at the subjects represented in journals like the Journal of Social History and American Historical Review, where the same categories appear year after year, or even decade after decade: class, race, ethnicity and gender in macrohistorical contexts.50 Beyond this, the use of statistical records continues to develop as if nothing had happened and such research bears witness to the conviction of its practitioners that it is feasible to produce coherent social explanations in which discrete and limited research projects act merely as pieces in the overall jigsaw puzzle. One clear example will suffice: research into family history, which is strongly colored in this way.51

My personal disappointment is not directed solely at this general line of development within social history, including the experiments conducted in the spirit of the cultural turn, but also at the fact that microhistory has as yet failed to make any significant impression on contemporary historiography, owing, perhaps, to a lack of conviction or initiative among microhistorians themselves. This is highly regrettable, since I believe that the ideology of microhistory has much to offer if taken at face value.

In order to understand the movements touched upon here I need to consider microhistory and its links with the academic world in a little more detail. I wish, in particular, to look at the Italian school of microhistory, and at a particular struggle within that school that reflects the tug-of-war among microhistorians throughout the world, as well as exposing a general weakness in the microhistorical approach and social history in general. The Italian school is of special interest because, I believe, the reaction of at least some of its proponents to the problems facing social history at the time was to a large degree well founded. At the same time, it could be said that the microhistorians of the Italian school failed to follow through their own revolution. I intend to go into this more

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closely in the final section of this paper and present my own ideas on how one might react to the problem of microhistory and, in fact, social history in general. Two distinct methods of microhistory: social and cultural 52 Microhistorians differ in their methods and ideologies.53 In the United States, in Britain and in France one finds mainly a weak form of microhistory that can perhaps be associated with the cultural turn; in Germany, there is a stronger form, perhaps related to “everyday-life history” (Alltagsgeschichte); and finally in Italy, the birthplace of the ideology, we find microhistory in it pristine form.54 The Italian school, and a particular difference of opinions within that school, are worth closer inspection. It is also instructive to examine points of similarity between the dispute among the Italian microhistorians and discussions on related matters among certain prominent American scholars; this allows us to bring clearly into focus the suffocating influence of the metanarratives on the research of social historians, microhistorians included.

The Italian microhistorians, as said, have themselves applied the ideology of microhistory in somewhat different ways.55 Their internal divisions have, to some extent, been marked by differing attitudes towards how they view themselves in relation to the theory of history, or even to science. We can take Giovanni Levi and Gianna Pomata as representatives of the different factions. Both are well-known in microhistorical circles: Levi is without doubt, along with Carlo Ginzburg, held up as one of microhistory’s foremost original proponents; Pomata, on the other hand, belongs to a younger generation of Italian historians. Pomata has developed a position quite distinct from that of Levi, possibly as a result of the freedom and the opportunity gained during her time as a college professor in Minnesota in the USA.

At the risk of oversimplification, Levi and his followers might be said to adhere to a rather traditional form of social history, with strong leanings towards the social sciences; the other group, including Pomata, might be said to represent “the new cultural history”. Both these groups have similar foundations and their ideologies are not all that dissimilar; the differences lie more in how they express their ideologies and in their relations with other academic disciplines. Levi has expressed the common foundation of microhistory and its genesis as follows:

Historians sought to understand reality better by constructing more complex descriptions, which were close to reality. Thus, attention was shifted from general answers to general questions in order to understand the differences which lie beneath the apparent similarities of distinct situations.56

Both groups were looking for connections with larger units, but on somewhat different grounds.

Gianna Pomata described the differences between the groups succinctly in a lecture I had the pleasure to attend, delivered in Odense in Denmark in 1999 as part of a seminar entitled “Microhistory – Towards a New Theory of History”. The lecture, part autobiographical and part theoretical, was a kind of personal settling of accounts with microhistory.57 Pomata drew the audience’s attention to significant differences between groups within the Italian school of microhistory. As she saw it, the microhistory that

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came into being and developed around the journal Quaderni Storici had freed many historians from the fetters of academic and ideological rituals. As a result, an unusual atmosphere built up around microhistory which extended to all facets of social history. Theoreticians who viewed themselves as outcasts within history flocked to the journal to attack the very foundations of the discipline as regards both its methodology and ideology. They questioned and frequently rejected the accepted conventions of academia and aspired to overturn values and ideas that in their opinion were suffocating historical research. Pomata went on to describe how vitally important this settling of accounts had been for her as a scholar; she mentioned in particular how her whole perspective had been changed by the idea of exposing and downgrading the importance accorded to concepts such as the state, the market and social mobility.58 The heart of the new ideology consisted in scaling down the research focus and turning the gaze upon the multiplicity of factors in order to show how complicated the reality behind them really was.

Pomata spoke of her disappointment when Levi and Edoardo Grendi, another of the giants of microhistory, went public with their shared vision for microhistorical research: namely, that of compeling history to reform itself and of turning it into a social science. This agenda among the microhistorians may come as a surprise to many people, but there are explanations. The aim behind these theoretical experiments was to create a more fully developed social science and thus show Italian theory and academic initiative in a new and positive light. To Pomata, unsurprisingly, this seemed a rather paltry attitude, the more so as she had herself sensed and hoped for something bigger and more invigorating from the ideology of microhistory. When first introduced to the work of Carlo Ginzburg she had felt that in him she had discovered a true original: here was a man not simply trying to find ways of improving the methods of social science, but rather developing an ideology of his own, an ideology that had similar goals to the novel – to grasp life and make it intelligible, as it were.59 This made a deep impression on Pomata, who was an admirer of literature and enthusiastic about tackling similar questions to those tackled by poets and novelists, and she became a disciple on the spot.

Pomata characterizes the differences between the two poles of microhistory in this way: on the one hand, there were those who wanted microhistory to implement the methods of the social sciences in order to increase understanding of the world – that is, to investigate historical development with the help of theories and master narratives; and on the other, those who believed that “there was the dazzling prospect of a history that would be thoroughly up to the most rigorous standards of the craft while also matching, in terms of vitality and intensity of vision, the work of art.”60 This difference of emphasis, in Pomata’s opinion, led to a conflict between the two factions involved in Quaderni Storici, a conflict which ended with victory for the social-historical approach. The victors poured their energies into a relentless criticism of “cultural microhistory”. According to Pomata, in this they displayed a certain insensitivity to the views of the other side,

nor did they take into account the specific problems of historians who work with meanings. Like the behavioral scientists of the 60’s, the social micro-historians seemed uncomfortable around meanings and had to turn them into something harder, like “practices” for instance, before they would deal with them. I certainly didn’t share their point-blank rejection of symbolic anthropology, and I found their tendency to

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equate the new cultural history with [an] old-fashioned history of ideas shortsighted at the very least.61

The microhistorians with a social-historical bias focused first and foremost on big

systems, though with different emphases from those of traditional social history. Levi illustrates his position by positing a hypothetical model made up not only of binary oppositions, i.e. individual and state, and the tension between them within society, but also, between the two, a common forum along the lines of what Max Weber calls “the civil society”. This is the theater where the actual struggle between the different forces in society takes place; this is where, as it were, the wages and living conditions are determined.62 How developed this theater is depends on the conditions in individual countries; in some cases it overshadows the state and public institutions, while in others the converse is true. Levi maintains that microhistorical research has exposed the dynamics of the big systems: “Where macrohistory, by assuming a unique model of the modern state, makes it impossible to understand the real development of Italy and other countries, only microanalysis can really help.”63 To achieve this, one must look into “the civil society” and analyze in great detail how individuals and the representatives of public institutions dispute concepts and definitions in order to exploit them in everyday life; this is where the real settlements, agreements and compromises are made.

These emphases among Levi and his colleagues are, as I see it, important above all for research directed at the structures of society. I have made my own attempt to work with a similar ideology in my book Menntun, ást og sorg (“Education, Love and Grief”), though I would consider my own views in these matters closer to those of Ginzburg and Pomata. From my point of view, the problem with the approach applied by Levi and his colleagues lies above all in their tendency to direct their research and conclusions solely towards the metanarratives, as will be discussed below.

In many respects, Giovanni Levi’s ideas concur with the traditional approaches of many American historians who place great reliance on the methods of the social sciences. A good example is Charles Tilly. Tilly draws attention to the many-sided nature of the problems facing those whose research takes on the interplay of the great and the small. He points out that, by their nature, the research tools used by those who deal with the big systems are unable to handle thinking and ideas that arise in closed groups or internally within individuals.64 And, he continues, “Within such a world view, the micro-macro incompatibility makes any history beyond the experiences of exemplary individuals seem either impossible or trivial.”65 Tilly then attempts to bring in various categories which distinguish social changes in the twentieth century and explain their academic status and the nature of the interplay between the microhistorical and macrohistorical approaches. These categories work out either from the central position of the individual as dynamic agent in his or her own life, which he calls “phenomenological individualism”, or from the perspective of “holism”, in which the big systems are all-powerful.66 Tilly’s own view is that “relational realism” provides the binary opposition best suited to covering the aspects offered by the micro and macro approaches, because “relational realism concentrates on connections that concatenate, aggregate and disaggregate readily, form organizational structures at the same time as they shape individual behavior.”67 He sees here a possible way of approaching both large and small units at the same time, by means of investigating human interaction of various types. But the chief emphasis must always

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lie on the big units, since these are the only dimensions the researcher can comprehend. Examples include the connections and formal bonds that develop between people in different situations (patron-client networks), working networks and other power variables which Tilly views as affecting every area of life.

For all Tilly’s advocacy of concepts related to “relational realism”, he points out that other strands of research offer distinct possibilities. The problem is, however, that we believe as individuals that we can view ourselves as the midpoint of everything and use ourselves as a workable benchmark; that is, interpret all research in the light of our own experience. This, Tilly considers, is inadmissible, since we are in reality inextricably bound within the structure of society and the freedom of movement we think we have is always limited by the frame of this structure and the scope it affords each individual.68 Tilly’s conclusion is that, as a result, the experience of an individual can never be explained alone and for itself; it becomes comprehensible only when put into the context of the big systems. His writings therefore endorse the views of those who place a overriding emphasis on approaching the metanarratives rather than limiting themselves to the individual and his phenomenology. “Recognize,” says Tilly, “that a substantial part of social reality consists of transactions among social units, that those transactions crystallize into ties, that they shape the social units involved, that they concatenate into variable structures.”69 The logical outcome of these ideas is that a macrohistorical approach is the essential raw material for so-called general history.

Once again, Giovanni Levi’s ideas to some extent parallel those of Charles Tilly. But there are also considerable differences, evident in Tilly’s lukewarm attitude towards the possibility of gaining useful knowledge from research into the small. What Levi and Tilly do have in common is their belief in the meaning of the structure of society and their acceptance of metanarratives as the true “glue” for the development of history and therefore the key to our understanding of sociological development in general.

Tilly’s position comes as no surprise: his work has been conducted in this spirit for several decades. But where his arguments make reference to the strength of the metanarratives, I will attempt to point out their weaknesses. Tilly and Levi are by no means the only historians to endorse ideas of metanarratives and macrohistorical perspectives; a whole generation of scholars has dedicated its working life to structural research in this spirit.70 Of course, attitudes within this group vary significantly, but it is worth noting the outlook of scholars like Lynn Hunt, whom I referred to above in connection with the cultural turn. In the eighties Hunt promulgated the “new cultural history”, paying special attention in her research to culture, language, manners and various signs and significant events in society.71 One of her fields of interest was the French Revolution and in her research in this area she spoke of the necessity of taking a wider perspective than can be gained merely from looking for the relationships between the big systems and economic and political factors: according to Hunt, revolutionary society was shaped by the culture of everyday life, with its multiplicity of signs and distinguishing features, including everyday politics.72 Hunt’s underlying ideology was, in a way, opposed to the methods of the social scientists, and as a result the importance of statistical analysis decreased. But since then, as I see it, Hunt has stepped back from her criticisms of the traditional methods of social history; her ideas today, as will become evident in what follows, are much closer to the conventional wisdom within social history.73 She can be taken as in a sense typical of how social historians responded to the

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cultural turn; the most progressive, like Lynn Hunt, began by welcoming such scholarly experiments with interest, as the examples demonstrate, but have since shown a reluctance to follow this through and put into practice the ideological consequences that these ideas would have had for the subject. And this must be considered a very sad end to what had been an exceptionally exciting period in the study of history. Modernization – singularization Lynn Hunt presents her latest ideas on gender history in her article “The Challenge of Gender”. 74 Here, among other things, she explains what she sees as the importance of metanarratives in the writing of gender history. She stresses the fact that a considerable number of scholars working in the area of gender studies have in fact rejected the relationship to metanarratives, considering them to be based exclusively on male terms. This, says Hunt, is untenable and only serves to isolate gender studies as marginal within the discipline: “The power to reshape general history depends on active engagement with its premises.”75 For this reason gender theorists need to revise their attitudes to metanarratives, or so Hunt suggests.

Hunt’s ideas probably agree with those of most practitioners and students of social history over the last decades. At least, scholars in the field of gender studies, or in any other branch of theory, appear to be under no pressure to provide new metanarratives. Nor is there any strong demand for our understanding of metanarratives to be radically changed or removed from the agenda of the modern scholarship. On the contrary, scholars like Hunt and Pomata insist that historians, of all persuasions, need to rely on metanarratives. In this regard they suggest that modernization theory can and should be the corrective model for scholarly research.76 This, then, is how they see the way to influence the writing of general history, which should be the main aim of all historiography; that is, to influence the way people view the progress of history.77 In the opinion of the great majority of historians, no reconstruction of past time can be carried out without the assistance of metanarratives.

This is a logical conclusion of the ideology of scholars like those discussed above. Even those who have wished to reduce the scale, that is to say the microhistorians, have never gone the whole way and rejected the central position of metanarratives in historical research. The historian Georg G. Iggers, writing on the status of the microhistorians within the field of history, says:

While this book has argued for the legitimacy of microhistory, it has also shown how the latter has never been able to escape the framework of larger structures and transformations in which this history takes place. As we saw, almost all microhistorians have had to confront processes of modernization through their impact on the small social groupings to which they dedicated themselves.78

Lynn Hunt also discusses what it means to pursue scholarship within the

“legitimate” bounds of its disciplines, and perhaps this conceals a desire for solid ground under her feet, a desire to feel secure about where the next step is leading. As mentioned above, Hunt introduces into the discussion the concept of modernization, which has been a common denominator in the traditional approach of many social historians and provides

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a clear example of a metanarrative used in explanations of the development of western culture over the last centuries. It is, however, only right to point out that this concept has come in for criticism from many scholars from various directions; this applies especially to the type of modernization theory that has sprung up around the basic concept. Hunt does not hesitate to take modernization theory, which goes back to the Enlightenment and its ideology, as an example of a metanarrative that scholars ought to be employing in constructing a new understanding of societies in former times.79 I cannot conceal my admiration for Hunt’s unqualified asseveration, even if I disagree with her entirely. As for the motives behind her exhortation, Hunt answers this herself by pointing out that “reason, democracy, and legal equality are values worth celebrating”, and that these have been the concomitants of western societies.80 Such concepts are so built into our thinking that we cannot escape them.

Hunt points out that those who cast doubt on, for example, modern progress always sound perforce slightly off-key – like, for example, those who speak of feminist studies when any comparison between the position of women today and in previous times is so unequal. Even here it is hardly possible to overlook a positive development in gender status over the last hundred years. In other words, the concept of modernization is still fully valid and scholars should attempt to conduct their research within its parameters. “Modern is better,” according to Hunt, and what is more, “what precedes the modern is, by definition, worse.”81 This is all there is to it. Hunt considers where we go next once scholars have recognized that the metanarratives in the form of modernization theory have in fact withstood all criticism. Her conclusion, as stated above, is that it is necessary for people to work within the framework of modernization theory and thus be able to influence the form of the metanarrative.

Personally, I find this a highly anomalous position, for the simple reason that metanarratives, whether going under the name modernization theory or anything else, are “constructs” which have reference only to traditions of research that are integrally bound up with the academic network, “constructs” which have taken on the form of phenomena with independent lives unconnected to the past and the events related to it. More than this, these frameworks or constructs into which scholars cast their subject matter, and which we have named the metanarratives, are created in such a way that they provide the scholar with the means to manipulate the subject matter and shape it to an outcome that is always conceived in advance. Hunt’s final word on metanarratives and their connections with different academic disciplines is as follows:

Micro-history has provided the most successful challenge to date of traditional event-oriented history, even while (or because) it fully endorsed the concept of event; it shifts the focus to ordinary people (usually including women as central characters) and ties their stories into much more general narratives of long-term social changes but still remains focused on the analytical level of events. Micro-history has also proved to be a very successful teaching technique, and it is popular with the public, but it has not yet altered the metanarratives in direct fashion.82

Hunt is not the only person to make comments along these lines. In a recent

interview with the Icelandic historian Páll Björnsson published in the historical journal Ný Saga, Georg G. Iggers expressed his opinion that microhistory has never managed to

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cut itself loose from the modernization concept nor “entirely break its links with general history.”83 There can be no doubt that his assertion is fully justified. I do not know of a single microhistorian who has chosen to reject microhistory’s links with larger wholes, with what has here been called metanarratives. Jacques Revel, without doubt one of microhistory’s more enthusiastic disciples, cannot contain similar sentiments when discussing the characteristics of microhistory:

Clearly, the microhistorical approach set out to enrich social analysis by introducing new, more complex, and more flexible variables. There are, however, limits to such methodological individualism, since we are always trying to discover the rules governing the formation and functioning of a social entity or, rather, a collective experience.84

This is in full accord with Gianna Pomata when she points out that these links are inevitable and unavoidable, that it is impossible to conceive of a historiography without these connections to metanarratives. There would in fact be no point in all the effort if historiography was not to be connected with greater wholes.85

Pomata points out that many feminists propose that general history should be rejected and in its place countless histories be constructed. This proposal is based on the simple idea that it is not possible to construct a general history with any reference to the past as such; if there is to be any chance of attaining a picture of former time, that picture must be built upon precise research into events and phenomena, with the intention of gaining an understanding of how they operate. I wish to emphasize that such a history will, even in the best instance, be only a mentally constructed likeness of the mechanisms of societies in former times, and general history something quite different and in itself totally unrelated to the past. The way of working which demands that scholars operate with connections to larger wholes, and which academia chooses to designate as scientific and which is inherent in the idea that “human action always occurs within institutional and cultural structures – powerful, pervasive, and invisible” (as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob express it), carries with it major limitations.86 If the desire of the historian is to attain a new understanding of the past, then the one way open is to look beyond the metanarratives, since they impose such strong limitations on all possibilities to understand the past as a forum for knowledge. The nature of the metanarrative is to compel the acceptance of an all-encompassing image or chain of events, with a beginning and an end and clear connections between the individual parts. But each and every one of us need only look inside himself or herself to see that life is characterized by endless contradictions and arbitrary accidents. Such things cannot be accounted for within the frame of reference provided by metanarratives.

Pomata argues that by a macrohistorical approach we miss the opportunity to handle information which might be important, something which microhistorians never tire of pointing out. But then she adds an extremely interesting further observation: “But so does microhistory, because macroscopic realities do not entirely correspond to the sum of microrealities that make them up.”87 Pomata is here referring to the connections that historians draw up between incidents and events and that follow specially constructed rules of scientific working procedure. Under the cover of metanarratives, historians train a general view upon the history that is supposed to provide us with a deeper

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understanding of the development of society over extended periods.88 Pomata explains this as follows:

No conclusion reached at the microlevel can be transferred whole to the macrolevel. So even the integration of all possible microhistories – Tolstoj’s dream of “a history of everybody” – would not allow us to capture the whole of historical reality. The historical record includes connections that are visible only at the macrolevel. Therefore, general history is useful, and indeed necessary.89

It is necessary to pause here and consider the thinking behind Pomata’s words “to

capture the whole of historical reality.” In her view, the application of the microhistorical method alone would deny us the opportunity to grasp connections that operate on a level other than the small sphere of microhistory. She implies that on this level it is possible to capture historical “facts”, but that the context and complex connections which are part of the greater field of history are only to be found in macrohistory.90

Pomata is clearly not arguing that these two perspectives, micro- and macro-, could blend together in historical research; i.e., that the latter could be build from the former. Rather, she claims that both have their own separate frame of reference as two different but important approaches to history, each needing to be drawn out and established within the realm of general history. Pomata does not, though, acknowledge that the macro perspective is only possible when it is matched up with meganarratives. In other words, she does not take into account that its unavoidable associations with the metanarratives automatically weaken the macrohistorical approach. Hence, as has been established earlier in this paper, the metanarrative, by definition, rules out any original way of thinking about the subject at hand and history at large. Macrohistory, when connected with microhistorical findings, dominates the outcome and minimizes the importance of the microhistorical approach, as historians like Georg G. Iggers have pointed out.

This emphasis among scholars on the connections between micro- or macrohistorical research and the metanarratives is interesting. I have to point out that these scholars seem to take the view that it is not possible to reach meaningful conclusions in their research except where there are very definite links with metanarratives to guide the way. The competition then comes down to getting these conclusions from micro- and macrohistorical research accepted into general history, into syntheses which bring together innumerable threads in their attempt to explain the mechanisms of society.91

It is my view that it is worth taking a quite different direction in the general practice of scholarship, a direction which I call “the singularization of history”. In this, I emphasize that the linkings between units of research and metanarratives are not only undesirable but downright dangerous, since the latter tend to monopolize the scholar’s attention. Macrohistorical research is particularly susceptible to such dangers, since it is precisely the linkings between different subjects that bring out its macrohistorical nature, i.e. the drawing of wide-ranging conclusions over long periods and variable areas of research. The subjects themselves, by whatever name they are known, are liable to disappear. Even microhistorians have their work cut out to remain faithful to their subject matter in the face of academic demands, and so put heavy emphasis on presenting links

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between their research and larger wholes. All this tends to produce a final form that is a distortion of general history.

This position is marked in the writings of just about all those discussed above. There remain principally two crucial questions that Pomata leaves unanswered: first, what is there in the metanarratives that renders them indispensable? and, second, is it really impossible to work with small units in such a way that they provide us with more knowledge about former times than is possible with the metanarratives? The answers to these questions provide the basis for what I am calling the singularization of history. The method looks inward and studies all aspects in close detail, bringing out the nuances of the events and phenomena we choose to investigate. The idea is that the focus will always be fixed on the matter in hand and on that alone.

This of course is easier said than done, since scholars generally find it difficult to discern the main lines in the development of knowledge. The ideology consists in investigating with great precision each and every fragment connected with the matter in hand and for which there are sources and in bringing up for consideration all possible means of interpretation that bear directly upon the material. This most certainly does not preclude the possibility that one possible means of interpretation is through the metanarratives; on the contrary, one must assume that they are tied in with material of all kinds in one way or another. Each piece of microresearch builds upon an intellectual frame of reference that takes account of the scholarly context. This is unavoidable. I am merely urging that the metanarratives be examined in the terms of and according to the conditions of the subject matter itself rather than from some preconceived perspective. Even if the scale is reduced in the way envisioned here one must still expect some structural orientation within the frame of reference. But this structure must always be subject to laws other than those imposed by the traditional metanarratives and, because of their scope, must be much more malleable – that is, the frames must be more limited and more easily controled. In this way there is the opportunity to give the full range of voices within society easy access to historical research.

The singularization of history in this sense provides the researcher with a means of bringing out the oppositions that exist between the different “discourses” of individual groups, and this is a precondition to our being able to approach ideas and points of view that in the general run do not come to the fore. In addition, this ideology brings into prominence the contradictions and inconsistencies in the mind of each and every individual and heightens the oppositions that move within each living person. To allow the contradictions and paradoxes freedom of expression, the emphasis must always be kept on squarely the subject matter itself and on nothing else. The key word here is singularization; the singularization of history is first and foremost a search for a way in which history can research its proper subjects in their proper logical and cultural context and thus disassociate itself from the “manmade” ideological package of the metanarratives.92

However determinedly I would urge scholars to turn away from the metanarratives and their stifling presence within the traditional research community, I am well aware that it is no easy matter to discard the scientific paradigms of academia – the discipline’s rules of play – and start afresh with the slate wiped clean.93 The political and structural organization of university institutions has, it seems to me, played a large part in determining the direction studies have taken in the face of scholarly experiments like the

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cultural turn; by this I am referring particularly to changes in the ways university institutions throughout the world operate, changes that have without doubt made it harder than it used to be for progressive ideas to make headway.94 But singularization is not supposed to prevent us from looking around us and comparing research conducted in the spirit of singularization with other academic research. The metanarratives can obviously not be avoided because they are part of the existing rules of the sciences. Still, as I see it, it is of the utmost importance that scholars impose strict limits on such comparisons. I call this procedure “historicalization”95: this involves, one, judging the merit of a piece of research on its own terms; two, comparing it with other research within the same field; and, three, placing it within a larger context made up from general ideas on the development of societies, constructed through metanarratives (with the least emphasis on this third stage). Historicalization is therefore a prescription for how singularization should be applied in practice and how best to promote its aims within the academic world. As a method it is designed to permit the categorization of research, an essential task in view of the undoubted tendency of scholars to continue to look to the big context, the big picture. In all cases, it is the singularity – the unit itself – that has by far the greatest epistemological value of all the possibilities available.

In other words, the singularization of history does not require historians to reject earlier scholarship, nor to believe that previous ideological systems are to be cast aside without regard. Quite the contrary; it is vital to initiate a debate on metanarratives and to recognize that this debate has a place in the society in which we live. But the limitations of such paradigms must be faced, and the paradigms themselves should not be the direct subject of research. This is the heart of the singularization of history.

Turning from the abstract discussion of the singularization of history and in an attempt to explain what I mean by this idea, I shall take an example from my own research, a book that appeared in Icelandic in 1997, referred to above and called Education, Love and Grief.96 In this book I attempted to explain the unusually high level of cultural and intellectual interest in Iceland in the nineteenth century, in spite of the restricted scope of schools and the primitive nature of the educational system. Through the use of personal sources, particularly the diaries of two brothers who grew up in rural Iceland at the time, I became increasingly aware of very powerful links between death and the desire for education. The high death rate among infants and the constant fear engendered by friends and family dying in the bloom of their lives created a situation in which children and young people looked to book learning and immersed themselves in an imagined world of stories and poetry in order to find ways of forgetting the drudgery of their daily lives and obtain guidance on how best to struggle with their besetting difficulties. The medieval Icelandic sagas, in particular, were looked upon as founts of moral guidance.97

What made this research special was the excellence of the material I had to work with, i.e. the diaries and many other personal writings of these brothers, and these, I feel, I failed to utilize in the interpretation in any way as they deserved because I was so taken up with writing the argument into the metanarrative. Instead of fixing my gaze on the subject matter itself and the sources at my disposal I concentrated on setting them within wider contexts – the contexts of laws and regulations on the education of children in Iceland and of general debate about such matters in newspapers and journals in the country – and ended by linking this debate in with scholarly discussion of education and

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the emotions on a worldwide level. In other words, I carried out this research in the way I had been taught and nowhere deviated from the conventional frames of reference in social history, i.e. to connect the material with a greater whole and allow the metanarrative in large part to dictate the outcome. Meanwhile I passed over the opportunity to use the material in such a way that it might come into its own and speak for itself, and the extraordinary sources I had at my disposal were straitjacketed and distorted by the frames of reference I had shaped myself or learned long before under quite different circumstances.

I have presented this little example in order to attempt to explain what I mean by the singularization of history. I am not promoting some magic solution which might open up to us previously unknown worlds of the past. Quite the opposite. This method will leave untouched large gaps and insoluble riddles, but that is only one part of the past. We will never be able to recreate the past as it was, we will never have the opportunity of knowing the past for itself, but we might be able to create a better way of thinking about the past if we adopt the singularization of history. The problem with social history as it has been conducted hitherto is precisely that it has claimed to have answers to all the questions, to far more questions than we really have any chance of coming to terms with.

It is precisely the complex interrelationship between human beings and their environment that makes it necessary to reduce the scale; only in this way can we avoid the temptation to simplify the relations between people, phenomena and events.98 Thus we can continue in our research to assume a structure to society, but must take pains to treat it like any other social phenomenon, constantly changing and indeterminable, while also, above all, insulating it from any links to predetermined conclusions imposed by the metanarratives.99 Thus, singularization consists in avoiding the metanarratives which direct the course of research and, instead, giving research the freedom to find its own course within the subject material with the support of the ideology of microhistory.

I wish to emphasize that I am not advocating a kind of reconstructionism in the spirit of Arthur Marwick, which sees history as a non-theoretical exercise.100 My approach might perhaps be positioned somewhere between constructionism and deconstructionism; for one thing, I am not in the least proposing that the theoretical framework of research be rejected and dedicated research queries employed in the spirit of constructionism. I am strongly urging scholars to read into the sources meaning that is for the most part hidden to us.101 The main thing, however, is that this is done within manageable units, as the microhistorians have done. I propose this because even the most original attempts of scholars, those who seek out new paths and apply original methods to achieve some desired aim, in the vast majority of cases fall back in the end on having call to the same old recourses – connections between their work and the metanarratives.102

Without doubt the argument will be forwarded that I am reducing history to anecdotal antiquarianism.103 But such criticisms are missing the point. I am keen to see historians make use of all the methodological tools at their disposal as they seek solutions to what they see as important questions; but I am also urging them to abandon their attempts to put their conclusions into some kind of ad hoc context. Thus singularization places its emphasis on the small units and is conceived as a counter to research that no longer serves to throw light on the enigma of life and tries to cast all life, in whatever form it manifests itself, in one and the same mold. The aim of singularization is to turn scholars’ attention onto the precise features of the events or phenomena they are dealing

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with, features which it might be possible to go into in far greater detail if scholars would only recognize the potential benefits.

It is not unreasonable to ask how this fragmentation – crumbs fallen from the table of life – can have any value and afford a different insight from that provided by a general survey of history. These so-called fragments, testimony of times past, provide an opportunity to tackle restricted areas of life that can, in spite of their limited scope, be complex and colorful and so offer ways of highlighting the diversity of life and promoting an understanding of all the extant threads relating to a restricted area of knowledge.104

I see this approach as a logical continuation of the cultural turn. Instead of pretending that there is nothing wrong with the discipline of social history and that people’s ideas about change are just some temporary and irritating buzzing in the ear, I believe that we should try to get as much as we can out of the ideas which, when first propounded, were counted a direct challenge to conventional historical research. Left standing are the fragments of the past, waiting for us to investigate them using all the precision that historical methods have to offer. By such means we can gain an epistemological foothold that will help us toward a greater understanding of the past.

The benefit that singularization has to offer is, above all, the opportunity it gives us to deconstruct the “myth of the workings of the metanarratives,” pointing to new trajectories of historical reality that will eventually turn our gaze away from the centralized nature of ideologies. I would like to thank friends and colleague at the Reykjavik Academy, including Davíð Ólafsson (historian), Ólafur Rastrick (historian and anthropologist), Valdimar Tr. Hafstein (ethnologist and cultural theorist) and Geir Svansson (literary historian), for their constructive criticism and support during the course of my research. I would also like to thank Nicholas Jones (linguist/grammarian) for helping me with the translation and a splendid editorial job. Anonymous readers and the editor of the Journal of Social History Peter N. Stearns deserve particular thanks for their excellent suggestions. Lastly, I am thankful for the grant I recieved from the University of Iceland that gave me time to complete this paper. Any remaining faults or misrepresentations are solely my responsibility. The Reykjavik Academy Hringbraut 121, 107 Reykjavik, Iceland www.akademia.is/sigm 1 National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards: United States History and National Standards: World History (Los Angeles, CA, 1994); National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards: United States History and National Standards: Exploring the American Experience (Los Angeles, CA, 1994).

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2 See Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20, 1994). See also John Leo, “It’s the Culture, Stupid,” U.S. News and World Report (Nov. 21, 1994); “Red, White and Blue,” Newsweek (Nov. 7, 1994), p. 54; Charles Krauthammer, “History Hijacked,” (editorial) Washington Post (Nov. 4, 1994); Congressional Record: Senate, Jan. 18, 1995, S.1025–1040; John Leo, “History Standards are Bunk,” U.S. News and World Report (Jan. 18, 1995). 3 See the following articles published in the volume cited: Peter N. Stearns, “Introduction,” Journal of Social History, Special Issue: Social History and the American Political Climate—Problems and Strategies, 29 (1996 supplement), p. 3; Peter N. Stearns, “Uncivil War: Current American Conservatives and Social History,” ibid., pp. 7–15; Richard Jensen, “The Culture Wars, 1965–1995: a Historian’s Map,” ibid., pp. 17-25; Gary B. Nash, “The History Standards Controversy and Social History,” ibid., pp. 39–49; Jan Lewis, “The Double-Consciousness of the Academic Historian,” ibid., pp. 67-71; Barry W. Bienstock, “Everything Old is New Again: Social History, the National History Standards and the Crisis in the Teaching of High School American History,” ibid., pp. 59–63; Jürgen Kocka, “What is Leftist About Social History Today?” ibid., pp. 67–71; John K. Walton, “The Lion and the Newt: a British View of American Conservatives’ Fear of Social History,” ibid., pp. 73–84; Joe W. Trotter, “Reflections on the African American Experience, Social History, and the Resurgence of Conservatism in American Society,” ibid., pp. 85–90; Judith P. Zinsser, “Real History, Real Education, Real Merit – or, Why is ‘Forest Gump’ so Popular?” ibid., pp. 91-97; Roy Rosenzweig, “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times,” ibid., pp. 99–107; George Reid Andrews, “Social History and the Populist Movement: Contesting the Political Terrain,” ibid., pp. 109-113; Louise A. Tilly, “History as Exploration and Discovery,” ibid., pp. 115–118. 4 For an excellent discussion of the original aims of social history, see Miguel A. Cabrera, “The Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History,” trans. Marie McMahon, Social History, 24 (January 1999), p. 75. 5 Roy Rosenzweig, “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times,” p. 105. Similar sentiments are also to be found in George Reid Andrews’ article (p. 111), where he exhorts social historians and historians in general to unite and initiate a campaign against the enemy, and suggests enlisting the support of the American Historical Association for this purpose. 6 Jürgen Kocka, “What is Leftist About Social History Today?" p. 67. 7 Gary B. Nash, “The History Standards Controversy,” p. 44. 8 Nevertheless, at the close of his article Nash offers a more positive view of social history: “It is precisely the multi-layered, multi-faceted social history of the last generation that has transcended semi-official versions of this country’s development.” Gary B. Nash, “The History Standards Controversy,” p. 47. 9 As an example of the trend towards greater synthesis in social history, see Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984). Peter N. Stearns has also made calls in many of his writings for more synthesis in social historical research and attempted to show the importance of this for the discipline as a whole; see for example Peter N. Stearns, “Social History and History: a Progress Report,” Journal of Social History, 19 (Winter 1985), pp. 319–334. The question of synthesis in history has generated a lively debate in recent years. Among the important contributions is Thomas A. Bender, “Wholes and Parts: the Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 73 (June 1986), pp. 120–135. For reactions to Bender’s paper, see David Thelen, Nell Irvin Painter, Richard Wightman Fox, Roy Rosenzweig and Thomas Bender, “A Round Table: Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), pp. 107–130; and Eric H. Monkkonen, “The Dangers of Synthesis,” American Historical Review, 91 (December 1986), pp. 1146–1157. See also Thomas Bender, “‘Venturesome and Cautious’: American History in the 1990s,” Journal of American History, 81 (December 1994), pp. 992–1003; and George M. Fredrickson, “Commentary on Thomas Bender’s Call for Synthesis in American History,” in Günther Lenz, Harmut Keil, and Sabine Bröck-Sallah, eds., Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies (New York, 1990), pp. 74–81. 10 Alice Kessier-Harris, Social History, The New American History (Temple University, 1990). 11 Miguel A. Cabrera, “The Linguistic Approach,” p. 79. 12 For more detailed discussion of the new, challenging approaches to traditional social history, see Jürgen Pieters, “New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography between Narrativism and Heterology,” History and Theory, 39 (February 2000), pp. 21–38; C. Behan McCullagh, “Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation,” History and Theory, 39 (February 2000), pp. 39–66; and Ignacio Olábarri, “‘New’ New History: a Longue Durée Structure,” History and Theory, 34 (1995), pp. 1–29. In 1989 the

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American Historical Review devoted an entire issue to these new challenges in history in their AHR Forum; notable contributions included David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review, 94 (June 1989), pp. 581–609; David Hollinger, “The Return of the Prodigal: the Persistence of Historical Knowing,” ibid., pp. 610–621; David Harlan, “Reply to David Hollinger,” ibid., pp. 622–626; Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: Description, Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,” ibid., pp. 627–653; Theodore S. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” ibid., pp. 654–660; Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Some Reflections on the New History,” ibid., pp. 661–670; Lawrence W. Levine, “The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography,” ibid., pp. 671–679; Joan Wallach Scott, “History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story,” ibid., pp. 680–692; John E. Toews, “Perspectives on ‘The Old History and the New’: a Comment,” ibid., pp. 693–698. 13 For an excellent collection of essays dealing with the concept of metanarrative, see Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, edited by Jeffrey Fox and Shelton Stromquist (Iowa City, 1998). Allan Megill makes a distinction between “master narrative” and “grand narrative”. A master narrative he sees as a “big story” overshadowing all the small stories; it is often hidden and waiting for the historian to discover it. In other words, his “master narrative” is what I call in this paper macrohistory, i.e. historical studies which extend over large geographical areas and time frames. Thus, to Megill (and me), “master narrative” is more limited than “grand narrative” (also named metanarrative), and it is the latter which is likely to give the reader “the big picture”. See Allan Megill, “Grand Narrative and the Discipline of History,” in Frank Ankersmith and Hans Kellner, eds., A New Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1995), pp. 151–173. Other scholars use these words and concepts in different ways: see for example Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: from Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review, 100 (1995), pp. 651–677; and Kerwin Lee Klein, “In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and the People Without History,” History and Theory, 34 (1995), pp. 275–298. 14 Marion J. Levey, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton, NJ, 1966). 15 Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York, 1996), p. 493. 16 Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” pp. 493–494. 17 This immensely strong influence of the social sciences finds clear reflection in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., with an introduction, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Los Angeles, 1999); and Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historical Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996). 18 See for instance Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds., Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. Translated by Beate Schempp (New York, 1981); Hartmut Kaelble, Historical Research on Social Mobility: Western Europe and the USA in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, trans. Ingrid Noakes (New York, 1981). For protoindustry, see also Richard L. Rudolph, ed. The European Peasant Family and Society, Historical Studies (Liverpool, 1995). 19 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, trans. Siân and Ben Reynolds (Chicago, 1979), p. 15. 20 Peter N. Stearns was the primary supervisor of my doctoral dissertation (PhD). I got the feeling that he himself had never been overly enthusiastic about the statistical approach used by many historians, even though he played a key role in the creation of a department with such an emphasis. Stearns’s field of interests was vast and he had the ability to delve into research in new areas and make telling contributions. My other supervisor, John Modell, had much deeper roots in historical demography. In spite of their differing emphases, both of these scholars treated me with great patience and gave my research enthusiastic support, and I thank them for it. 21 Central European History, 22 (September/December 1989): Special Issue: German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique. See for example the following articles: Isabel V. Hull, “Feminist and Gender History Through the Literary Looking Glass: German Historiography in Postmodern Times,“ Central European History, 22 (September/December 1989), pp. 279–300; David F. Crew, “Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From Below?”, ibid., pp. 394–407; Eric A. Johnson, “Reflections on an Old “New History”: Quantitative Social Science History in Postmodern Middle Age,“ ibid., pp. 408–426; Konrad H. Jarausch, “Towards a Social History of Experience: Postmodern Predicaments in Theory and Interdisciplinarity,” ibid., pp. 427–443. 22 Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” p. 494.

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23 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “The Continuity of Everyday Life: Popular Culture in Iceland, 1850–1940,” (PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 1993). 24 As an example I may cite research into social mobility, which for a period became almost an obsession in the academic world, with heavy emphasis on statistical analysis. This research later altered course when the emphasis moved more in the direction of cultural analysis. Many notable works of scholarship might be cited, but a couple that were highly influential in their time can suffice: Tomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York, 1977); and John Bodnar, Roger Simon and Michael Weber, Lives of their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Chicago, 1983). See also R. Erickson and J. H. Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: a Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (Oxford, 1992). 25 Clear evidence of this is seen in historians’ increased use of personal sources, which in the last ten or so years historians have looked to in ever greater measure. Early research followed demographic research models, as, for example, in my own doctoral thesis (Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “The Continuity of Everyday Life”) and my later article “From Children’s Point of View: Childhood in Nineteenth Century Iceland,” Journal of Social History, 29 (Winter 1995), pp. 295–323. Here I used a “life-course analysis” to categorize narrative sources. The same applies to Mary Jo Maynes and Harvey J. Graff, whose researches also bear clear signs of the influence of demographic methods: see Mary Jo Maynes, “The Contours of Childhood: Demography, Strategy, and Mythology of Childhood in French and German Lower-Class Autobiographies,” in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly and David Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: the Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 101–124; Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Graff’s book is among the most interesting yet produced in which personal sources take center stage: see my review in Journal of Social History, 30 (Spring 1997), pp. 733–735. I have myself gone on to use a varied selection of personal sources, applying the conceptual framework of microhistory in their processing. The outcome of this work appears in my book (in Icelandic) Menntun, ást og sorg: Einsögurannsókn á íslensku sveitarsamfélagi 19. og 20. alda (“Education, Love and Grief: Microhistorical Research into Icelandic Rural Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries”), Sagnfræðirannsóknir, 13 (Reykjavík: Sagnfræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands og Háskólaútgáfan, 1997). A further product of this work is my general editorship of a collection of personal sources under the title Sýnisbók íslenskrar alþýðumenningar (“Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture”), of which five volumes have appeared to date and several more are in preparation. Similar publishing projects have been instigated in several countries, for instance Royden Loewen, ed. with an introduction, From the Inside Out: the Rural Worlds of Mennonite Diarists, 1863 to 1929 (Manitoba, Canada, 1999). 26 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London, 1997), pp. 25–35. 27 Out of the many postmodernist writings that have influenced the work of historians, see for example Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London, Routledge, 1997); Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London, 1991); Keith Jenkins, On “What is History?” (Routledge, 1995); Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern (Routledge, 1995); Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: an Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd edn. Blackwell, 1997); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1990); Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 28 See for example Arthur Marwick, “Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (Including Postmodernism) and the Historical,” Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (January 1995), pp. 5–36. See also Hayden White’s response in the following issue of the journal: Hayden White “Response to Arthur Marwick,” Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (April 1995), pp. 233–246. 29 Many examples might be cited but I shall restrict myself to just a few well-known cases. Joan W. Scott was enormously influential, notably in her book Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988). Scott’s writings pointed new directions in many areas of women’s studies along lines pioneered in gender research. The central idea in Scott’s work is that images of gender, and gender roles, are social constructs. This called on historians to modify their attitudes towards the sources and towards the categories in which they are conventionally cast. Similar observations apply to research in political and working-class history and its significance within social history, which has changed people’s ideas about the relationships between language and politics. To give a brief idea of this development, I refer to a dispute carried on in the journal Social History: see David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, “Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language,” Social History, 17 (May 1992), pp. 165–188; Jon Lawrence and Miles

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Taylor, “The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language – a Reply,” Social History, 18 (January 1993), pp. 1–15; and Patrick Joyce, “The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: a Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne, and Lawrence and Taylor,” Social History, 18 (1993), pp. 82–83. Joyce’s article was in turn answered by Mayfield and Thorne in “Reply to ‘The Poverty of Protest’ and ‘The Imaginary Discontents’,” Social History, 18 (May 1993), pp. 219–233. Further contributions can be found in Patrick Joyce, “The End of Social History?” Social History, 20 (January 1995), pp. 73–91; and Geoffrey Eley and Keith Nield, “Starting Over: the Present, the Post-modern and the Moment of Social History,” Social History, 20 (October 1995), pp. 355–364. Much of this debate centered around the work of the British social historian Gareth Stedman Jones, whose book Language of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (New York, 1983) exerted great influence in developments in this direction. 30 Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 1–32. This volume contains a large number of essays addressing the concept of “the cultural turn” in interesting ways; several of them will be referred to later in this article. 31 Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction,” p. 9. 32 See Hayden White, Metahistory; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973). 33 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). 34 Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction,” p. 6. 35 For a thought-provoking discussion of the concept “culture” and the meanings attributed to it by scholars in historical research, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., with an introduction, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 35–61. 36 Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction,” p. 4-5. 37 Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction,” p. 10. 38 Bonnell and Hunt, “Introduction,” p. 10. 39 See Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization. It would perhaps be closer to the mark to say that social history and the social sciences have moved closer together and that the new ideas behind the cultural turn have exerted a certain influence on the social sciences, as mentioned earlier. For a discussion of this, see Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historical Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996), which contains several interesting articles on this coalescence. 40 See Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and Politics to the Everyday – a New Direction in German Social History?” Journal of Modern History, 61 (June 1989), pp. 297–343. 41 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997), p. 108. 42 Ginzburg’s ideas are put forward in a large number of books and articles, notably “Just One Witness,” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980); “Proofs and Possibilities: in the Margins of Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 37 (1988), pp. 114–127; “Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about it,“ Critical Inquiry, 20 (Autumn 1993), pp. 10–35; “Checking the Evidence: the Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (Autumn 1991), pp. 79–92; Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historical Marketplace,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 1–10; Carlo Ginzburg, “The Philosopher and the Witches: an Experiment in Cultural History,” Acta-Ethnographica-Academiae-Scientarum-Hungaricae, 37 (1991–92), pp. 283–292; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989). This last contains several important essays, of which perhaps the best known is “Clues: Roots of a Evidential Paradigm,” pp. 96–125.

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43 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Pa.., 1991), p. 107. See also footnote 53 for further reference in terms of the methods of microhistory. 44 For good discussions of the importance of storytelling in connection with the methods of microhistory see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993), pp. 18-20. 45 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, p. 109. 46 Evidence for this claim comes from two directions. On the one hand, one can look at writings published in the 1980s such as Michael Kammen, ed. for the American Historical Association, The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY, 1980); and Oliver Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985). On the other, the tasks and preoccupations of social historians are clearly reflected in general reference works on social history, such as Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History (New York, 1994). 47 Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” p. 495. 48 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, p. 112. 49 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, p. 139. 50 See also Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History, which contains a good summary of the kinds of subjects worked on within the realms of social history. As an example, one can consider Steven C. Hause’s discussion of the development of social history in France since the Annales lost their undisputed leadership: see Steven C. Hause, “The Evolution of Social History,” French Historical Studies, 19 (Fall 1996), p. 1214. The research work that he takes for consideration consists of recently published doctoral theses dealing with the Third Republic in France. What stands out is the extent to which most of these theses align themselves loosely with the old social history, however much Hause senses signs of change or development in a positive direction. In his conclusions he words it thus: “Where is postannaliste social history going? The apparent trends noted in this essay are relatively clear. Class analysis remains central to social history, but it is no longer deemed sufficient. Gendered analysis is being combined with class analysis and perhaps supplanting it at the center of the social question. The study of gender reaches far beyond ‘women’s history’ and is revising political history, military history, and business history.” This is all well and good, but hardly tidings of great moment; perhaps a slight change of emphasis, but not much more than that. 51 See for example Tamara K. Hareven and Andrejs Plakans, eds., Family History at the Crossroads (Princeton, NJ, 1988). The attitudes discussed here were readily apparent at many of the sessions of the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the Social Science Historical Association, held under the title “Looking Backward, and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History,” Pittsburgh, October 26–29, 2000. A very large number of the contributors at this valuable conference seemed tarred with this particular brush. See the conference program at www.flossie.hist.umn.edu/cgi-bin/ssha/ssha.pl. 52 The following builds largely on a number of recent papers published by the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in the series Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft in 1998. For my purposes, the most significant of these papers are those by Gianna Pomata, Lynn Hunt, Charles Tilly and Giovanni Levi. 53 At this point it may be helpful to specify various writings that fall under the heading of microhistory, though clearly one might argue endlessly about what qualifies or does not qualify to be on such a list. Not all of the works listed here can necessarily be classified directly as microhistory, but all employ its methods in one way or another: Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (California, 1992); Edward Berenson, “The Politics of Divorce in France of the Belle Epoque: the Case of Joseph and Henrietta Caillaux,” American Historical Review, 93 (1988), pp. 31–55; Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: the Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1986). Brown’s book spawned an interesting discussion within the academic world: see Rudolph M. Bell and Judith C. Brown, “Renaissance Sexuality and the Florentine Archives: an Exchange,” Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), pp. 485–511; Gene Bucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 1986); Thomas Kuehn, “Reading Microhistory: the Example of Giovanni and Lusanna,” Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), pp. 512–534; and Anthony Molho’s review of Brucker’s Giovanni and Lusanna in Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), pp. 96–100. Anna Clark, “Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820,” Representations, 31 (Summer 1990), pp. 47–68; Patricia Cline Cohen, “The Mystery of Helen Jewett: Romantic Fiction and the Eroticization of Violence,” Legal Studies Forum, 17 (1993), pp. 133–145;

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Patricia Cline Cohen, “The Helen Jewett Murder: Violence, Gender, and Sexual Licentiousness in Antebellum America,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 374–389; Patricia Cline Cohen, “Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City,” Radical History Review, 52 (Winter 1992), pp. 33–52; Patricia Cline Cohen, “Ministerial Misdeeds: the Onderdonk Trial and Sexual Harassment in the 1840s,” Journal of Women’s History, 7 (Fall 1995), pp. 34–57; Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Race and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Harold J. Cook, The Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Croenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore, 1994); Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs, 18 (Summer 1993), pp. 791–814; Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore, 1997); Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., History from Crime, trans. Corrada Biazzo Curry, Margaret A. Gallucci and Mary M. Gallucci (Baltimore, 1994); Margaret L. King, The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (Chicago, 1994); Robert M. Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); John Martin, “Journeys to the World of the Dead: the Work of Carlo Ginzburg,” Review essay, Journal of Social History, 25 (Spring 1992), pp. 613–626; Angus McLaren, A Prescription for Murder: the Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (Chicago, 1993); Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore, 1991), pp. vii–xxviii; Edward Muir, “Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method: by Carlo Ginzburg,” Review, Journal of Social History, 25 (Fall 1991), pp. 123–125; Steven Ozment, Magdalena and Balthasar: an Intimate Portrait of Life in 16th-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife (New Haven, 1989); Steven Ozment, The Bürgermeister’s Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town (New York, 1996); Idanna Pucci, The Trials of Maria Barbella: the True Story of a 19th-Century Crime of Passion (New York, 1997); Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, trans. Margaret A. Gallucci with Mary M. Gallucci and Carole C. Gallucci (Baltimore, 1990); Richard Sherr, “A Canon, a Choirboy, and Homosexuality in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy: a Case Study,” Journal of Homosexuality, 21 (1991), pp. 1–22; Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1995); Larry Wolff, Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna: Postcards from the End of the World (New York, 1988). Here should also be mentioned a number of other well-known and outstanding works of scholarship which show affinities of one sort or another to the methods of microhistory: Carlo M. Cipolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (New York, 1979); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: the Promised Land of Error, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York, 1979). 54 Variations within the ideology of microhistory are treated in greater detail in an article of mine in Icelandic: Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “Félagssagan fyrr og nú,” in Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, eds., Einsagan – ólíkar leiðir: Átta ritgerðir og eitt myndlistarverk (“Social History Past and Present,” Microhistory – Different Approaches: Eight Essays and One Painting) (Reykjavík, 1998), pp. 17–45. See also Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday – a New Direction for German Social History?” Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), pp. 297–343; Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” pp. 93–113; Jim Sharpe, “History from Below,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Pa., 1991), pp. 24–41; Alf Lüdtke, “Introduction: What is the History of Everyday Life and Who are its Practitioners?”, in Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 3–40. 55 I wish to draw attention to the fact that, in general, I refer to microhistory as an ideology rather than a method. I take the view that microhistory is first and foremost an ideology combining both a methodological and a conceptual framework. The word “method” fails to cover the mode of thinking behind microhistory since it suggests that the phenomenon is of a purely technical nature. See the excellent discussion of these terms and their use in Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (New York, 1999), pp. 4–5.

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56 Giovanni Levi, “The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective,” in Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed. and introduction, Mikrogeschichte – Makrogeschichte: Komplementär oder Inkommensurable? (Göttingen, 1998), p. 69. 57 Gianna Pomata, “Telling the Truth about Micro-History: a Memoir (and a Few Reflections),” Netværk for historieteori og historiografi, Working paper no. 3, April 2000 (Copenhagen, 2000), pp. 28–40. 58 Gianna Pomata, “Telling the Truth about Micro-History,” p. 31. 59 Gianna Pomata, “Telling the Truth about Micro-History,” p. 32. 60 Gianna Pomata, “Telling the Truth about Micro-History,” p. 34. 61 Gianna Pomata, “Telling the Truth about Micro-History,” p. 34. 62 Giovanni Levi, “The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective,” pp. 75–78. 63 Giovanni Levi, “The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective,” p. 80. 64 Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?”in Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed. and introduction, Mikrogeschichte – Makrogeschichte: Komplementär oder Inkommensurable? (Göttingen, 1998), p. 38. 65 Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?” p. 38. 66 Tilly’s categories are, in full, “phenomenological individualism”, “methodological individualism”, “holism” and “relational realism”: see Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?” p.Ý38. 67 Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?” p. 41. 68 Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?” pp. 44–45. 69 Charles Tilly, “Micro, Macro, or Megrim?“ p. 47. 70 See Christopher Lloyd, “The Methodologies of Social History: a Critical Survey and Defense of Structurism,” History and Theory, 30 (1991), pp. 180–219. 71 See, for example, Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1986). See also Lynn Hunt, ed., New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989). 72 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. 73 Hunt explains her position with great clarity in a book discussing recent developments in history: see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994). For a lively discussion of this book and the approaches of its authors, viewed from a variety of perspectives, see “Forum: Raymond Martin, Joan W. Scott, and Cushing Strout on Telling the Truth About History,” History and Theory, 34 (1995), pp. 320–339. 74 Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender: Deconstruction of Categories and Reconstruction of Narratives in Gender History,” in Hans Medick and Anne-Charlott Trepp, eds., Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektiven (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 57–97. 75 Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender,” p. 81. 76 See for example Gianna Pomata, “Close-Ups and Long Shots: Combining Particular and General in Writing the Histories of Women and Men,” in Hans Medick and Anne-Charlott Trepp, eds., Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte:Herausforderungen und Perspektiven (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 99–124. 77 On this function of history and on what would become of the discipline if stripped of its traditional aims, see Perez Zagorin, “Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsideration,” History and Theory 29, (1990), pp. 263–274. Zagorin’s article was written as a reply to an article by the Dutch historian F. R. Ankersmith, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory, 28 (1989), pp. 137–153. In his article, Ankersmith maintains that in postmodernist times the focus is not directed upon the past as such, so much as on the great divide that lies between it and the present, and particularly on those who are speaking about the past; this divide can never be bridged, any more than can the one that lies between past time and the tool we employ to speak about it, i.e. language. 78 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (London, 1997), p. 143. 79 For the use of modernization theory in its most radical form, see Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, 9 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18. 80 Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender,” p. 82. 81 Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender,” p. 83. 82 Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender,” pp. 91–92. 83 Páll Björnsson, “‘Hlutlægni er ekki lengur í tísku.’ Viðtal við þýsk-bandaríska fræðimanninn Georg G. Iggers um sagnaritun á Vesturlöndum,” (“‘Objectivity is out of fashion.’ Interview with the German-

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American scholar Georg G. Iggers on historiography in western countries”), Ný saga, 11 (1999), p. 59. See also Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, pp. 101–117. 84 Jacques Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” p. 498. 85 Gianna Pomata, “Close-Ups and Long Shots,” pp. 99–124. 86 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, p. 306. 87 Gianna Pomata, “Close-Ups and Long Shots,” p. 115. 88 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, pp. 302–306. 89 Gianna Pomata, “Close-Ups and Long Shots,” p. 115. 90 Gianna Pomata, “Close-Ups and Long Shots,” p. 117. 91 As an example, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1997). A recent issue of American Historical Review carried three review essays on Crosby’s book under the heading “Counting and Power” which discuss his ideas and consider the validity of general history of this type: see Roger Hart, “The Great Explanandum,” American Historical Review, 105 (April 2000), pp. 486–493; Margaret C. Jacob, “Thinking Unfashionable Thoughts, Asking Unfashionable Questions,” American Historical Review, 105 (April 2000), pp. 494–500; Jack A. Goldstone, “Whose Measure of Reality?” American Historical Review, 105 (April 2000), pp. 501–508. 92 This is related to, though perhaps less radical than, the use of the term singularization by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari in their “schizoanalysis”; here the “process of singularization” questions the regular hierarchy – the order of values – and actually calls for the inversion of the system of values. See, for example, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1983). 93 This, of course, leaves unanswered the question of whether and how scholars can free themselves from the metanarratives and their macrohistorical upbringing and begin their research untrammeled by their influence. This is something that requires further time and thought. 94 See Robert Darnton’s valedictory comments in the January 2000 issue of Perspectives, pp. 2 and 15. Darnton discusses recent structural changes in university institutions throughout the world that have created difficulties for young scholars in obtaining permanent employment. The influences of this and similar measures on the intellectual shake-up within academic disciplines like history are all too apparent. See also Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism. Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, 1997); Universities and Globalization: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Jan Currie and Janice Newson (London, 1998). 95 Icelandic sagnrýni. 96 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Menntun, ást og sorg: Einsögurannsókn á íslensku sveitasamfélagi 19. og 20. aldar, Sagnfræðirannsóknir 13 (Reykjavík, 1997). This was the first purposive work of microhistorical research conducted in Iceland and became the forerunner of much other subsequent research. 97 See a ten page English summary of the book on my home page: www.akademia.is/sigm 98 See Jacques Revel’s excellent discussion in his article on microresearch, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” p. 499. 99 See Alf Lüdtke, “Introduction: What is the History of Everyday Life and Who are its Practitioners?” in Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 3–40. 100 Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, 3rd edn. (London, 1989). 101 For an excellent summary of the varying positions of this ideology, see Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London, 1997). 102 See the very interesting May 2000 issue of Perspectives, entitled Historians and the Public(s): in particular, Roy Rosenzweig, “Popular Uses of History in the United States: Professional Historians and Popular Historymakers,” pp. 19–21; David Thelen, “Popular Uses of History in the United States: Individuals in History,” pp. 22–25; and Craig A. Lockard, “World History and the Public: the National Standards Debate,” pp. 32–35. 103 Perez Zagorin, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” p. 273. 104 When historians use the terms “fragment” or “fragmentation”, what they are usually referring to are developments within the discipline of history that have led to the formation of multiple subdisciplines focusing on limited areas of everyday life. I use the terms in a rather different sense: to me, they denote the fragments preserved from the past, glimpses of memories that we think we have managed to recover. I

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believe that these fragments should be the main subject for historians of the future. On the traditional understanding of the terms, see a recent article by the editor of the American Historical Review (AHR), Michael Grossberg, “Taking Stock: Five Years of Editing the AHR,” Perspectives, 38 (September 2000), pp. 17–18; 36–38. Another highly influential paper on the subject is Thomas A. Bender, “Wholes and Parts: the Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 73 (June 1986), pp. 120–135. Even those scholars who reject synthesis and embrace fragmentation do so, it seems to me, without any proposal that the metanarratives be rejected: see for example Ruth Crocker, “Unsettling Perspectives: the Settlement Movement, the Rhetoric of Social History, and the Search for Synthesis,” in Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, ed., Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History (Iowa City, 1998), pp. 175–209. See also the excellent review of this book by Thomas Bender in Journal of Social History, 34 (Fall 2000), pp. 187–189. Also of interest here are Gerald Early, “American Education and the Postmodernist Impulse,” American Quarterly, 45 (June 1995), p. 221; and Nell Irvin Painter, “Bias and Synthesis in History,” Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), pp. 109–112.