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A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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It is possible to assert that the present crisis in history on which there has been so much discussion is more specifically a problem affecting the historical sciences in the West rather than in the Afro-Asian countries. In the Afro-Asian countries, particularly those which have either become independent recently or have been able to assert their independence recently, history is considered important in forming a national self-image, help in the processes of national unity, and in the processes of modernization or social change within the nation. The role of history in providing an ideological-cultural framework for national unity and growth is important, for in many of these countries the concept of a nation has not grown out of a long historical process by which people belonging to different race, religion and regions have become emotionally welded together. Rather, nationalism in these countries is a means for bringing about such a unity. The interpretation of the past therefore becomes a matter of wider public concern. In this context, history can hardly be regarded by anyone as irrelevant: it remains a prestigious subject in most universities (not only because it offers a better opportunity for entering into a civil service career), and national historians command a measure of public esteem which is becoming rare elsewhere. On the other hand, history has been displaced from its pre-eminent position in the West. The profession no longer enjoys the prestige which it enjoyed among nineteenth-century intellectuals: many social scientists consider that “the destruction of the conventional historian's conception of history is a necessary stage in the construction of a true science of society”; “a significant number of philosophers seem to have decided that history is either a third-order form of science, related to the social sciences as natural history was once related to the physical sciences, or that it is a second-order form of art, the epistemological value of which is questionable, the aesthetic worth of which is uncertain.”
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- Copyright © 1972 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Hayden A. White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory, V (1966) pp. 111-134. There is a vast literature on the subject. Most of the significant works are listed seriatim in History and Theory.
2 The literature on this theme is too vast to be even listed here. Some of the recent works on the subject are A. J. Toynbee, "A Study of History" (1933-61); Civilization on Trial (New York, 1948); The World and the West (New York, 1953); Grace E. Cairns, Philosophies of History, Meeting of East & West in Cycle Pattern Theories of History (New York, 1962); H. P. R. Finberg, (ed.), Approaches to History (Toronto, 1962); Philip P. Weiner, and Aaron Noland, Ideas in Cultural Perspective (New York, 1962); H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago, 1963). For an Asian view, see D. P. Mukerjee, On Indian History; K. M. Panikkar, Asia and the Rise of Western Dominance; S. Radhakrishnan, Philosophies of East and West.
3 William S. Haas, The Destiny of the Mind: East and West (London, 1956).
4 The effects of this thinking on the western interpretation of non-European civilizations have been deeper than have been generally accepted. For a view on the western interpretations of Islam, see Albert Hourani, "Islam and the Philosophies of History," Middle Eastern Studies, III (1967), pp. 206-268. It is true that every civilization has produced its own myth of being the chosen people. But no previous civilization has been as successful in imposing this belief on the rest of the world as the western civilization. This lends a sense of sharpness to the reaction against it.
5 G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore, 1947) vol. 3, part 1, reprinted Sarton on the History of Science, ed. Dorothy Stimson, (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 17.
6 J. Needham, Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, (Cambridge, 1970); idem., The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West, (Cambridge, 1969). For fuller details, reference must, of course, be made to the author's larger work, Science and Civilization in China.
7 G. Sarton, Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 24, p. 413 (1956).
8 A number of universities have, in recent years, sponsored programmes dealings with the pre-British period in South Asia. Such programmes existed already for the Middle East, whereas there has been a tradition of Sinology in a number of U.S. universities. The U.S.S.R. has also an old tradition of Oriental studies, and has published a number of monographs on the ancient and medieval periods in India. The above remarks have, therefore, more relevance to the state of area studies in Britain and Europe.
9 For the views of Indian historians such as K. M. Ashraf, D. D. Kausambi, D. R. Chananna, R. S. Sharma etc., see note on "Main Trends in Historical Sciences in India, 1900-1970" prepared for UNESCO by a commitee of Indian historians. Reference may be made to Daniel Thorner, Marx on India and the Asiatic mode of production," Contributions IX, pp. 36-66.
10 Marc Bloch, "A Contribution towards a comparative history of European Societes," (reprinted in Land and Work in Medieval Europe) London, 1967, (English trans. of selections from his Mélanges historiques, Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1963), p. 45.
11 Feudalism in History, ed. Rushton Coulborn (Princeton, 1956), Introduction, p. 4.
12 Professor Needham has observed that "the science of Asia has a dividing line running north and south through Bactria and the opening of the Persian Gulf." Professor Needham calls this a barrier of filter across which East Asian science did not filter through to the Franks or Latins. He goes on to say: "The science of Arab culture… was focal; it gathered in East Asian science, pure and applied, just as it built upon the work of Mediterranean antiquity. But… while on one hand East Asian applied science penetrated to Europe in a continuous flow for the first fourteen centuries of the Christian era, East Asian pure science was filtered out; it came into Arabic culture but no further west. Obviously this is a historical phenomenon of much interest and importance." (J. Needham, UNESCO Month Lecture, Beirut, 1948, reprinted in Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 14-29.)
13 J. H. Parry, "Transport and Trade Routes" in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson (Cambridge, 1967), IV: The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. 155-200.
14 This is not the place to expatiate on the basis of Indian unity, this being a favourite theme for Indian historians, litterateurs, politicians for a long time. Difference of approach on this issue continues to be a cause for sharp differences of opinion between Indian and western scholars. For an approach to Indian sociology, making the unity of India functionally vital to the study, see Louis Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India (Paris - The Hague, 1970), pp. 4-6.
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