Anthropology And History Research Paper

On this general anthropological level, history is the totality of the cultural practices through which human beings interpret their past in order to understand the present and anticipate the future. In other words: history is the generation of sense out of the experience of time.

But not every interpretation of time is historical. What determines the historical quality of an interpretation is the fact that time confronts human beings in two ways: as real change within the world, in which contingent events occur and are experienced, and as an interior, temporal extension of consciousness (and of the unconscious). Here, intentions and objectives, guided by the elemental mental forces of fear, anxiety, desire, hope, and longing, play a central role. We interpret the ‘objective’ time of real change (the present) through the recollection of another time (the past); thus the ‘subjective’ time into which we project a future is bound to our approach to past experiences. This is human culture’s specifically historical procedure for experience and interpretation. What defines the historical interpretation of time is its implicitly meaningful and thus orientative conception of the course of time. The latter comprises the past, the present, and the future, and at the same time articulates experiences and intentions; it is thus empirical and normative at the same time. The philosophy of history explicates this conception of the course of time as a particular mental structure. Even without philosophical reflection or justification, such a conception of the course of time organizes historical thought, and shapes its content. History interprets the contingent events of the past and defines their significance for the present. It organizes historical narrative as a particular kind of explanation (Danto 1965). It is this ‘explanation through narration’ that defines the logic of historical thought in its academic form as well.

2. Conceptions Of Time

The different conceptions of the course of time important for historical interpretation employ various temporal categories in various constellations (e.g., cyclical time, linear time, the concept of the kairos), each encouraging particular expectations: decline, progress, permanence, recurrence, revolution, destruction, and so on. They relate real temporal processes to the active intentions and self-conceptions of the subjects that make use of them. In other words, history mediates the subjectivity of acting and suffering human beings with the objectivity of the temporal process of their world. In early societies, this was accomplished by an appeal to divine forces, which impel the transformation of the world and the human spirit at the same time; in other societies these divine forces are replaced by humankind as a spiritual and moral being, its ability to create symbolic worlds or to plan the conquest of the natural and social world through knowledge. Finally, nature, too, can be invoked as a sort of metaphysical instance for the continuity between the two temporal dimensions of human historicity. Nature can thus be understood as that which compels the human race, by means of social antagonisms, to create culture (as in Kant, for example), or as struggle of the races in Social Darwinist terms. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, posits an interior, psychological nature, in order to explain the historical movement of the human world by means of the dynamics of the unconscious.

The idea of a ‘history’ comprising all temporal change within the human world is of modern origin (Koselleck 1985). However, it has a premodern equivalent in older cosmogonies, theogonies, and anthropogonies, as well as in the concept of redemptive history.

3. History As Event And Narration

In every culture and epoch, ‘history’ has a double meaning. On the one hand, it designates temporally organized events in the past. At the same time, and inseparably from the first meaning, ‘history’ also means the account of these events that articulates their significance for our understanding of ourselves and of our world. The first meaning has to do with temporal succession and the second with its narrative representation.

Not everything that has happened can be called history, but rather only that which is somehow meaningful in the present; for example, the foundation of a city or a kingdom is significant to its inhabitants, a person’s birthday is significant to him or her, and so on. Usually, this event is described as a sequence of occurrences. These may often be the actions of human beings, heroes, or divine beings, as in myth or epic; however, they may also involve more complicated phenomena, such as the development of a manufacturing process, the evolution in the meaning of a concept, the epochal transformation of a mentality, an ‘axial time,’ and so on.

In its second meaning, history is the representation of the past in the culture of the present. Here, ‘history’ is the product of historical consciousness: through memory, the past has become present and meaningful in narrative form. In this way, the past ‘in itself,’ that is, everything that has happened, and persists only in the form of trace, relic, memorial, tradition, ethic, and so on, becomes history ‘for us.’ The basic mental procedures involved can be organized somewhat artificially into four:

(a) the perception of ‘another’ time as different: the fascination of the archaic, the obsolete, the mysterious trace, the insistent memorial, and so on;

(b) the interpretation of this time as temporal movement in the human world, according to some comprehensible aspect (e.g., as evidence of the permanence of certain values, as examples of a general rule, as progress, etc.);

(c) the orientation of human practice through interpretation—both ‘outwardly,’ as a perspective on action (e.g., as the increase of political legitimacy through political participation, as the restitution of the world before its destruction, as the institution of ‘true’ conditions against the decline of morals) and ‘inwardly,’ as identity conceptions (e.g., ‘we are the children of the sun,’ or ‘we as a nation stand for the universality and fulfillment of human rights,’ or ‘we belong to the communion of saints,’ or ‘we represent true spirituality as against others’ materialism’);

(d ) and finally, the Motivation for action that an orientation provides (e.g., a willingness to sacrifice, even die, for the sake of historical ideas of national greatness, the missionary spirit, etc.).

4. Memory, History, And Meta Narratives

The relationship between memory and historical consciousness continues to be debated. Memory in the everyday sense is directed toward the experiences of individuals in their own lives, whereas historical consciousness primarily thematizes a past that exceeds an individual life span. Both, however—the individual memory on which individuality and social affiliation are built as well as the expansion of ‘history’ beyond the limits of a single lifespan back into the past—are as inseparable as two sides of a coin: human beings tend to transform their own identity into temporally more inclusive structures, such as the communion of saints, the nation, the people, the culture, and so on. The basis of individual subjects’ self-esteem and of their practical temporal orientation tends to exceed their lifespan or to outlive them. It therefore usually extends far back into the past.

‘History’ generally performs its orientative function through a ‘master narrative’ or ‘metanarrative.’ This describes the conception and evolution of the addressee’s world in order to legitimate its normative framework. At the same time it provides an experiential inventory, which is available whenever problems of orientation require consensus. It legitimates not only systems of politics, economics, and the environment, but also the collective and individual subjectivity and identity of the people. Metanarratives represent social affiliation and differentiation internally and externally.

Metanarratives generally organize social inclusion and exclusion ethnocentrically, assigning one group a positive normative weight, and other different groups a negative weight. One’s own life world appears as culture or civilization, other worlds are looked upon as savagery and barbarism. This difference can be articulated in different ways: as an opposition, as deviation from a norm, as atavism on a progressive scale, etc. Just as history presents past experiences as a ‘mirror’ in which the present perceives itself, the image of others in the same historical mirror has a contrastive function: it defines a self-image. Under the special conditions of an orientation crisis, the ‘other’ can assume admirable features, as in the image of the ‘noble savage.’

5. Historical Culture

The interpretive work of historical consciousness and its product called ‘history’ is concretely manifested in a society’s historical culture. Historical culture is multidimensional, like every other culture. It has religious, moral, pedagogical, political, and rhetorical expressions; its cognitive substance is always the knowledge of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen,’ how it really was. We can distinguish three basic dimensions of historical cultures as an ideal type, each different in its logic and thus accountable to different criteria of meaning.

(a) The political dimension is concerned with the legitimation of a certain political order, primarily relations of power. Historical consciousness inscribes these, so to speak, into the identity concepts of political subjects, into the very construction and conception of the I and the We, by means of metanarratives that answer the question of identity. There is no political order that does not require historical legitimation. The classical example, applicable to every culture and every epoch, is genealogy. Even the pure rule of law that appeals only to the applicability of formal decision procedures must be historically based if these procedural rules are to be plausible to the participants. Charismatic leadership also cannot do without historical elements. Generally, the vehicle of political charisma will refer to the spiritual or natural forces that, within his culture, guarantee the world’s temporal coherence.

(b) The esthetic dimension is concerned with the psychological effectiveness of historical interpretations, or that part of its content that affects the human senses. A strong historical orientation must always engage the senses. Masquerades, dances, and music can all have historical content. Many older metanarratives are composed in poetic form and are celebrated ritually. A formal defect can destroy the effect of such a presentation, and even endanger the world’s continued coherence. Historical knowledge must employ literary models to become discursive. In many cultures, historical narrative occupies a secure place in the literary canon as a genre of its own. In modern societies, memorials, museums, and exhibitions are among the familiar repertoire of historical representation. In older kinds of social systems, objects such as relics, tombs, temples, and churches obligate the present to the legacy of the past, indeed make the present, in its relationship to the future, responsible for the vitality of historical memory.

(c) The cognitive dimension is concerned with the knowledge of past events significant for the present and its future. Without the element of knowledge, the recollection of the past cannot effectively be introduced into discourses concerned with the interpretation of current temporal experience. Mythical metanarratives, too, have a cognitive status, although science would eventually deprive them of it. They lose their orientative power when confronted with a science of the past that possesses a more elaborated relation to experience. Metanarratives then become prosaic, as they already did in antiquity, with Herodotus and others. In modern societies, the cognitive dimension of history has become an academic discipline.

6. Typologies Of The Historical

Synchronic and diachronic typologies of the historical can be generated out of the particulars of historical thought, and inquire into its carriers, functions, class and gender specificity, and other factors within the social context’s framework of determinations (Rusen 1996). They become historically specific, however, only when they differentiate the specific interpretative work of historical consciousness and of its product— ‘history’ as the cultural orientation system of temporal consciousness—according to the different possibilities of historical meaning construction. Such differentiation from a metacultural perspective has been little attempted. Previous efforts have usually focused on functional and formal aspects, and have thematized less the total domain of human temporal interpretation than simply the domain of historical writing, and if at all they only inspected the Western tradition. Nonetheless, such typologies can also be used as analytical tools for research in the wide areas of historical culture and for intercultural comparisons.

Nietzsche (1985), for example, differentiated the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical uses of history in terms of their advantages and disadvantages for life:

(a) the monumental approach inspires action by recalling the creative deeds and great moments by which the world was actively transformed, and emphasizes the greatness of man as the agent of historical change;

(b) the antiquarian approach serves the preservation of tradition and the affirmation of existing conditions by its reverence for and transfiguration of their origins;

(c) the critical approach, finally, defeats the power of memory, breaks the control of tradition, and liberates life for new orientations.

Hayden White (1973) presented a very influential model for the analysis of historical writing, and applied it to the nineteenth century’s most significant historians and philosophers of history. It consists of a complex system of emplotment, formal argument, ideological implication, and tropes of historical discourse.

(a) The narrative forms that connect a sequence of historical events can follow the patterns of romance, tragedy, comedy, or satire.

(b) Formal argument no longer concerns so much the narrative combination of events into a story or narrative, but rather the explicit explanations within these narratives. They can be formalist, emphasizing the uniqueness of an event; they can be organicist, integrating isolated phenomena into larger totalities for explanatory purposes; they can argue mechanistically, in terms of causal regularities; and they can operate contextualistically, in terms of functional relationships between events.

(c) Ideological implications relate to the standpoint within the present from which a history develops its perspective on time. Such a perspective ( White is most concerned with the nineteenth century) can be anarchistic, conservative, radical, or liberal.

(d ) What is decisive for the extensive and foundational meaning of a narrative is the verbal factor that brings the different elements of historical narrative into a coherent whole. White identifies and explains this factor in terms of rhetorical figures or tropes that underpin the four possibilities for historical meaning: the latter is generated out of metaphorical, metonymic, synecdochic, or ironic uses of language.

White developed this typology for the analysis of historiographical texts; nevertheless, it can be applied to other manifestations of history, such as historical museums (Bann 1984).

Rusen (1993) also developed a universally applicable typology of historical sense generation according to its most basic principles: its particular referents, its conception of temporal movement, its communicative form, and its identity concept. All these factors are communicated through and constituted by the principle of historical sense.

(a) The traditional type recalls the origins grounding present relations. Traditional history represents the course of events in terms of the persistence of these origins and their normative power, and represents identity by affirming prior interpretive models of human subjectivity (e.g., social roles). Past and present fuse into the permanence of currently effective social relations that are conveyed by time yet are above transience. Traditional narratives eternalize time as meaning. This type predominates in mythical thought.

(b) The exemplary type recalls past facts that concretize the rules of current conditions. Exemplary history represents a course of events in terms of the transtemporal applicability of these rules, and constructs identity by generalizing various temporal experience into rules for action (e.g., as rule-based competence). This narrative type is represented in Europe by the classical motto historia itae magistra, and in China by the metaphor of the mirror. This type predominates in the historical thought of great civilizations up to the modern period.

(c) The critical type recalls past circumstances in order to interrogate present conditions. Critical history represents a course of events as the transformation of prior and, in the orientative framework of life praxis, effective interpretive models (i.e., as rupture or as alternation). It constructs identity by negating pregiven identity-forming interpretive models; in other words as the power to say ‘no.’

(d ) The genetic type recalls qualitative changes in the past by which other, strange conditions become present familiar ones. The genetic construction of meaning presents a course of events as evolution, in which conditions change in order to become dynamically permanent. It constructs identity as the synthesis of permanence and change; in other words as a dynamic process. This type predominates in modern societies.

7. Media

The diverse manifestation of history, in its dual significance as fact and as interpretation, depends crucially on the medium through which temporal experience and interpretation are communicated. Language is always predominant, although there are other creative areas of historical perception and representation, such as the visual and musical arts, architecture, and dance. The modes by which language orders human communication are decisive for the expression of historical consciousness.

(a) History was originally communicated orally, as it is even now—at least in the private sphere. In preliterate cultures, history becomes oral history or oral tradition (Vansina 1985). Such a history is usually politically conservative: the traditional world order becomes obligatory; new experiences have to be integrated into it so as to confirm the collective’s basic norms and identity. Such representations are sensually immediate and concrete; they are communicated face to face and correspondingly have immediate effects. Cognitively, they contain the cumulative experience of many generations; experientially, they reach into a mythical time that genealogically connects the present to the all-determinative origin of the world and include the more recent generations’ memory which contain real events. Its criteria of significance are of a mythical nature; in other words, topical and in the narrow sense ‘historical’ events are not the vehicles of orientative normativity. Its validity claims are raised and made plausible through ritual and repetition. In modern historical research, oral history is the method for gaining historical knowledge from the recollections of acting and witnessing people. It provides an important source for research into the mechanisms of biographical memory as an element of historical culture in the intersection of the public sphere and individual biography. The memories of witnesses to historically significant events, communicated orally, acquire an important role in public historical culture—especially the testimony of survivors of great catastrophes such as the Holocaust (Langer 1991).

(b) The medium of writing has dominated for millennia and continues to dominate hegemonic historical culture (in which, of course, oral elements continue to be important and effective, even constitutive—at least in education). Written history frees participants from the immediacy of the communicative situation and creates a distance between history as content and history as a form of communication (Ong 1982). This distance increases considerably the experiential horizon of historical consciousness, and facilitates new methods for accumulating and managing experience. Literacy liberates memory, fixes facts, creates new communicative forms, disconnects the cosmos of temporal meaning from immediate practical relationships, and allows it to become a phenomenon sui generis. Along with new opportunities for objectivation in the approach to historical experience, it also discloses new opportunities for subjectivation through historical interpretation: the narrator can become an author, and readers can obtain expanded scope for critical readings. Validity claims either are raised through canonization, or become an opportunity for discursive justification. In either case, interpretation becomes a discrete practice of historical meaning construction, with its corresponding specializations and the attendant problems of mediation and popularization. The original relationship between poetry and truth dissolves; mythology is now subject to a fundamental critique. Explicit conceptualization becomes an essential cognitive element in historical interpretation, so that history can, at least in the long term, be an object of study and of theory.

Entirely new media have transformed the historical mode of thought. We cannot yet discern distinct lines of development and stable structures, but we can certainly indicate new developments from which we might expect transformations of the most basic kind.

In the historical culture of the public sphere, collective memory is being overpowered by the torrent of historical images. The forms of consciousness created by literacy—and above all the distancing effect of rationality—may quickly decrease in significance, and especially in political efficacy. The grammar of history is becoming an imagology of presentations in which every era is contemporaneous, and the fundamental idea of a single linear movement of time is disappearing. The constitutive difference of temporality can be suspended into a universal contemporaneity that can no longer be narratively put in order. Whether there can then be a specific ‘historical order’ within the orientative temporal continuity between past, present, and future has at least become a problem. The very term post-histoire, and the related discussion of a mode of life without genuinely historical interpretation (Niethammer 1992), suggest that these questions are now open. At the same time, there has been an immense increase in access to data. New storage media allow new modes of historical experience, and radically call into question previous criteria of significance. At the same time, new media of communication such as the Internet permit no single, politically sanctioned decision. The abundance of possibilities and the diversity of new voices require new strategies, new forms, and new contents of historically grounded participation and exclusion. In each case, fixed ideas of the permanence and substance of individual and collective identity are being outstripped by the diversity of global communication, in favor of more dynamic and more open differentiations. This process then provokes reactions, often expressed through these new media, that stubbornly insist on ethnocentric distinctions.

8. Developments

The transformation in the media of historical thought sketched above suggests a transcultural, macrohistorical transformation, that will ultimately leave no culture unaffected. This provides us with a support for a diachronic classification for historiographical variety. Such a classification could be organized in terms of epochal distinctions, yet still have a typological quality. For example, White’s or Rusen’s typologies could both be used to characterize historical processes. White’s sequence of tropes can be understood as cyclical, and Rusen’s distinction between traditional, exemplary, and genetic historical thought can describe the great transcultural epochs where the critical type of historical thought mediates the transition between the other types.

One of the most important distinctions concerns the relationship between myth and ‘history,’ where the latter is understood as mundane occurrence. Myth relates to a divine prehistory as the source of meaning (Eliade 1991). In contrast, ‘historical thought’ in the stricter sense discerns the meaning of history in the immanent dimension of a chain of events (res gestae). The Judeo-Christian sacred history mediates between these two modes of thought, and allows events in the world to appear as the manifestation of God’s power and God’s will. In other cultures, the divine and the mundane are mediated differently: mundane but somehow significant events have to be integrated into a comprehensive cosmic order. History becomes meaningful through nature, which is conceived as divinely ordered. With increasing complexity in human praxis, more and more mundane incidents are integrated into this order until it is finally ‘historicized’ and ‘denaturalized.’ Yet this process is often opposed by attempts to renaturalize it as biological racism.

Comprehensive large-scale developments of historical thought have often been conceptualized as leading to the current status of historical studies. That is often criticized as too one-sided and the diversity of new media and the different dimensions of the historical culture are emphasized instead; nevertheless plausible accounts of a developmental process can be articulated (in the form of typological hypotheses). These accounts can be used to discern and analyze transformations of historical thought in the diversity of different cultures.

Max Weber’s conception of a universal process of rationalization and disenchantment seems as relevant as ever ( Weber 1988). The classical philosophy of history of Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel had presented these criteria in the form of the actual course of events. To the extent that historical studies acquired increased competence in investigating and representing real events in the past, the question of meaning was investigated within the framework of a logic of historical thought (Dilthey, Max Weber, Rickert). This question is now perceived primarily as the concern of the central verbal procedure of historical thought, as historical narrative (Danto 1965). Issues of scholarly standards and truth claims (Appleby et al. 1994; Evans 1999) can be obscured by only focusing on the rhetorical and poetic strategies of historical writing (Rigney 1990).

Despite this formalization of historical understanding, the structures of real historical processes remain important points of reference. Here, the global and often conflictual transformations brought about by modern industrial societies are in the foreground. Their developmental dynamics can be understood only by a concept of time in which the horizon of experience and expectation structurally diverge, and can only be reconnected by a fundamental temporalization of the human world (Koselleck 1985).

Narratives of progressive rationalization and disenchantment must, of course, be complemented by an account of a critical and transcendent re-enchantment resistant to rationality, such as the endlessly renewed rationality of sense (value rationality); it refuses to dissolve in methodical rationality of the control of experience. Historical studies, the development of which in Europe from the eighteenth century has been the most effective factor in the modernization of historical culture, must employ sense criteria that methodical rationality alone cannot generate.

The rationalization of modern historical culture is constituted by a universalization of the norms and values that make the past significant for the present. The ethnocentric logic of identity formation always has a universalizing tendency, insofar as it describes its own world as both unique and normatively obligatory. ‘Humanity’ is a common frame of reference for historical identity. In the focus of historical experience, humanity is extended to the limits of the known world. This creates a fundamental, structural conflict of cultures in historical thought, which has repeatedly led to violence, to the legitimation of domination, and even to genocide.

This leads us to a fundamental problem in contemporary historical thought. It is shaped by the rationalism that culminates in historical scholarship and related human sciences (Bentley 1997). This rationalization of history as scholarship corresponds to the modern rationalization of all knowledge, without which the organization of modern societies would be inconceivable. Is historical thought inseparable from the value system of Western culture in its current form along with this methodological rationality? If so, how can it conceive of history in such a way as to account for the diversity in different cultures’ articulations of ‘history’ as the orientative framework of human praxis? Does this diversity, once it has been researched and analyzed by scholarship, not always appear in the light of a particular interpretation— namely the interpretation to which methodological reason essentially belongs?

Current tendencies in historical thought ( postmodernism, postcoloniality, the ‘cultural turn’) are determined to overcome modernity in this sense. They want to create a pluralism of ‘histories’ that can break the spell of uniformizing rationality and generalizing normativity. They thereby destroy the orientative power of modern historical thought with its notion of a unified direction of development, or ‘progress.’ At the same time they problematize the claims of the scholarship that describes the laws of such development along with the desire for mastering them, e.g., in Marxism.

In the age of globalization, in spite of the critique of the claim for hegemony inherent in Western historical thought, we cannot do without either methodological rationality or the universal regulative of communication. We need this regulative to understand the present by the interpretation of the past to define inclusion and exclusion, and to act in anticipation of the future. Yet, if the ethnocentric logic of such a universalization is to be broken or overcome, the truly universal regulative of historical thought and of the historical culture can only be a mutual and thereby universal recognition of difference and particularity. This idea is and will remain counterfactual, even utopian; nevertheless, it could disclose new dimensions of historical experience and lead to new and politically significant orientations.

Certainly the terrors and catastrophes of the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust, provide a new challenge to historical thought. Only with difficulty can they be integrated into older conceptions of historical meaning. They require new strategies of interpretation and representation. The question of human ‘nature’ must be radically reconsidered, and senselessness itself should be taken as a constituent of a meaningful conception of history (Friedlander 1998).

Bibliography:

1. Appleby J, Hunt L, Jacob M 1994 Telling the Truth about History. Norton, New York
2. Assmann J 1992 Das kulturelle Gedachtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen. Beck, Munich
3. Bann 1984 The Clothing of Clio. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
4. Bentley M (ed.) 1997 Companion to Historiography. Routledge, London
5. Danto A C 1965 Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
6. Eliade M 1991 Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
7. Evans R J 1999 In Defense of History. Norton, New York
8. Friedlander S 1998 Writing the history of the Shoa: some major dilemmas. In: Blanke H-W, Jaeger F, Sandkuhler T (eds.) Dimensionen der Historik: Geschichtstheorie, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Geschichtskultur heute. Bohlau, Cologne, Germany, pp. 407–14
9. Hutton P H 1993 History as an Art of Memory. University Press of New England, Hanover, NH
10. Koselleck R 1985 Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
11. Langer L L 1991 Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
12. Lowenthal D 1985 The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
13. Megill A 1998 History, memory, identity. History of the Human Sciences 11(3): 37–62
14. Muller K E, Rusen J (eds.) 1997 Historische Sinnbildung— Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany
15. Niethammer L 1992 Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? Verso, London
16. Nietzsche F 1985 The Use and Abuse of History. [Trans. Collins A]. MacMillan, New York
17. Nora P 1989 Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire. Representations. 26: 7–25
18. Ong W J 1982 Orality and Literacy. Methuen, London
19. Ricoeur P 1984–87 Time and Narrative, 3 vols. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
20. Ricoeur P 1998 Das Ratsel der Vergangenheit. Erinnern—Vergessen—Verzeihen. Essener Kulturwissenschaftliche Vortrage, Vol. 2. Wallstein, Gottingen, Germany
21. Rigney A 1990 The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrati e Histories of the French Revolution. Cambridge University Press, New York
22. Rusen J 1993 Studies in Metahistory. Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa
23. Rusen J 1996 Some theoretical approaches to intercultural comparative historiography. History and Theory. 35: 5–22
24. Vansina J 1985 Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI
25. Weber M 1988 Science as a variation. In: Lassman P, Velody I, Martins H (eds.) ‘Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation’. Unwin Hyman, London
26. White H 1973 Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore