The Predicament of Writing Political History: The Challenge of the Tacit

Political histories composed by contemporaries (or near contemporaries) are affected by the predicament of confronting the tacit in a past. Three case studies of famous writers of histories of politics in their own times are used to suggest an additional epistemology for political history which relies rather less on representations than has been common since the “Linguistic Turn” privileged the propositional thrall of discourses. My extra element attends to the tacit in human lives: affects and effects in context of the lived‐in and lived‐around of politics. My three case studies suggest that histories of politics and policies by contemporaries and near‐contemporaries do not simply amount to a re‐representation (broadly defined) of past representations (broadly defined). A wide angle is adopted; three case studies treat renowned political historians, ancient, mediæval and modern: Procopius in the mid‐sixth, Commynes in the late‐fifteenth, and A.J.P. Taylor in the mid‐twentieth centuries. Each of these “great” historians of politics was driven to discount the lived‐out‐loud of politics they narrated in, or close to, their own times. The predicament and the response is more general, I believe: all historians of politics have to try to situate and narrate things once taken‐for‐granted. That predicament prompted each of my three — and still prompts historians — to have to transcend “representationalism”. The three cases show how and why history writing about politics also needs to attend to the habitual and tacit in a past, the ubiquitous things seldom represented. A controversial foundation for such an “extra” epistemology is then suggested: Dasein, the being‐of‐being, a key concept of Martin Heidegger's. The writing of political history by contemporaries (or near‐contemporaries) is then conceived as also a (ethnography‐like) study of past life‐worlds‐in‐being. This extra foundation for (very‐old and still current!) writing practices about power and politics emphasises metonyms over metaphors. Surprises discerned from contexts are emphasised over propositions peddled in representations. The metonyms disclosed by my three case studies, which I think apply in most writing about politics by contemporaries or near contemporaries, had to be inferred from contexts, rather than read as discourses. The tacit is elicited by contemporaries from (1) records and recollects of predicaments and situations, and from (2) reading actions as texts. Histories of politics are really about things people once felt and did, more than what they said, in their there‐and‐then.     

Making History: the Australian history curriculum and national identity

History is a key site for the negotiation of national identity, with the ability to define the past shaping the national narrative on who “we” were, who “we” are, and, crucially, who “we” should be. As such, the teaching of history is a site of intense political debate. This paper examines the history module of the Australian Curriculum to understand the extent to which the history curriculum moves beyond Eurocentric, colonial imaginings of Australia's history towards a more inclusive, multi-cultural, globally-oriented, cosmopolitan vision of society. Both the curriculum and teaching resources were examined to ascertain the identities and orientations these materials could provide. The research finds that — despite improvements in presenting a diversity of representations, in particular a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Australia and some orientation to diverse migrant histories, the environment, and Asia — the main thrust of the curriculum is a focus on the nation-state at the expense of global engagement. The funnel structure which deals with broader world history in earlier years, relegates the rest of the world to a temporal and spatial distance, leaving a somewhat myopic narrative that perpetuates traditional, Anglo-centric narratives, maintaining the perspectives of “Others” as peripheral.     

Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars*

The “History Wars” have paralysed the scholarly discussion on genocide in Australian history, because genocide is regarded as a politicized concept that distorts historical understanding. Both the public sphere and much historiography continue to regard genocide as a synonym for the Holocaust, framing public discussion of genocide in Australia as well as discouraging historians from engaging with the international comparative literature on colonial genocides. This article aims to stimulate reflection on these issues by explaining the origin and meaning of the term in intellectual and legal history. It suggests that thinking of genocide as a form of extreme counter‐insurgency helps us comprehend how colonial violence unfolds. Finally, it highlights some potential limitations of the concept in understanding the Indigenous experience of colonial genocide, before suggesting how historians can deploy it in the service of scholarship rather than “History Wars”.     

Why Weren’t We Taught? Exploring Frontier Conflict Through the Lens of Anzac

This article examines public understandings of two key strands of Australian history that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of remembrance: frontier conflict and Anzac. The former, W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1968, was subsumed in a vacuum of silence, lost to popular consciousness in a wilful act of forgetting. Despite a wealth of subsequent scholarship documenting the violence and dispossession that characterised European colonisation, considerable gaps in public awareness about these foundational events remain. Anzac, in contrast, has become a defining narrative of Australian history for large segments of the general population and the political class. Recent scholarship suggests that this prominence has served to mask other, important histories of the continent, including frontier conflict. In this article, we argue that this is neither a necessary nor essential binary, and further, that one can inform the other. The written reflections of 320 tertiary students enrolled in a course about Australian military history provide insights into the ways that frontier conflict is popularly understood and how the fascination with Anzac can be leveraged to raise awareness of the violent historical dimensions of colonisation.     

“I Fought. I Screamed. I Bit”: The Assertion of Rights Within Historic Abuse Inquiry Transcripts

ABSTRACT

This article examines how treating historic abuse inquiry testimonies as retrospective assertions of rights can help to shed light on how this abuse was able to occur and how memories are recalled in an inquiry environment. It presents its approach as a possible framework for other historians seeking to analyse testimonies with sensitivity. It uses, as an example, a case study from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concerning two interrelated “homes” for girls, showing the ways in which abuse survivors can use their testimonies to assert rights denied them in the past and further the goals of public inquiries.     

MONUMENTALIZING THE EVERYDAY: The Edo-Tokyo Museum

The Edo-Tokyo Museum is both the crowning achievement of the populist historiography of Edo-Tokyo studies and the monumental embodiment of an era of cultural nationalism in Japan. It embodies the perennial tension between the city as home to a unique local culture and the city as a site of state power. The historians who oversaw the design of the exhibits envisioned a celebration of local everyday life, and focused their efforts on narrating the history of a mythic urban folk. A critical walk through the museum reveals three fundamental modes of mythic projection that underwrote this folk narrative: the city of the past as a “world we have lost,” commonplace tools as icons of an essential native culture resisting modernization, and the modern century as a march of progress in everyday life, indexed by ever-improving commodities. Throughout this narrative, the protagonists are the “ordinary people” (shomin) of Edo-Tokyo. In contrast, the building's architect saw the city solely in terms of its national significance and sought to project an image of grandeur suited to the position of Japan as triumphant superpower. No conflict was recognized between the two seemingly contradictory impulses, however, since myths of the everyday, exploited by government as well as academics in these years, promoted the easy fusion of local and national narratives.     

“Export or Die”; Foreign Trade in the Third Reich

In recent years, a substantial number of publications has enriched our understanding of the economic history of the Third Reich. In particular the history of German companies during the 1930s and 1940s has been examined in much greater detail. Major companies (among others VW, Allianz, Deutsche Bank, Bertelsmann) have opened up their archives to historians — not for the production of self‐glorifying company histories, but for critical analyses of the experience, attitude and policies of the particular company in the Third Reich. It is now possible to draw more detailed and clearer conclusions on the relationship between the Nazi regime and the business community than only twenty years ago. As part of a wider research project on “Foreign Trade in the Third Reich” I draw upon these recent research outcomes and earlier publications, along with my own research on a particularly important sector of the German economy, engineering, to provide an outline analysis of three significant areas: The economic views and policies of leading members of the Nazi regime in general and towards Germany's industrial export sector in particular, the experience (relations to regime, policies, responses) of German companies in the Third Reich in general and of exporters of manufactured products in particular, and, as a case study, the experience of producers and exporters of machinery.     

“The Chinese Dream” and Chinese Foreign and Security Policies—Rosy Rhetoric versus Harsh Realities

The “China Dream” announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping’ in 2012 paints a very rosy picture of China under his seemingly undisputed leadership: China's economic and political rise will be beneficial to China and indeed the international community putting Beijing on top of the list of “peace-loving” countries. Reality, however, as it turned out over the last four years, is distinctively different as a number of countries in China's neighborhood and beyond can surely confirm. Indeed, Beijing unilaterally claiming and building civilian and military facilities on disputed islands in the South China Sea are arguably the very opposite of a peaceful contribution to world politics and security facilitated by the rhetorical hype of Xi's “Chinese Dream.” While outside observers can be excused for concluding that the “Chinese Dream” mantra is directed at the Chinese domestic audience to distract from the very many economic, environment and social problems within China, the consequences of Beijing's “dreaming” of re-gaining its former undisputed “Middle Kingdom” status in Asia are very much felt abroad. This, it is argued, could be the time when “dreams” turn into “nightmares” for those at the receiving end of Beijing's dream.     

Rome and its Histories: a View from Australia

In this paper I trace the many debates about the past, and its relationship with the present and the future, that have eddied around Rome over the last two centuries. I spend quite a bit of time illustrating the Catholic line on the “eternal city” and on its contestation from, first, Italian nationalist and then more imperialist and Fascist expositions of “sites of memory” there. After “liberation” in 1944, there were new approaches to elucidating the city's meaning, headed by the “myth of Anti‐Fascism” and extending to a left terrorist reading by the Red Brigades. In recent years, “post‐fascism” has grown in importance in Italy's capital, especially as embodied by the mayor since 2008, Gianni Alemanno. These ideological and politically inspired reckonings of history have squared uneasily with the more popular comprehension of the place of the past, all the more given that Rome has been in rapid growth, first from within Italy and nowadays from across the globe. Specific urban groups, notably the city's Jews, have also read history in their own manner. In sum, Rome has not been a venue for a simple, two sided, “culture war”, as cliché assures us is our fate in Australia. Rather, as is also true here, Rome has proved a site of constant and multi‐fronted arguments about the meaning of history, as should be true of any serious democracy.     

How should the Past be Treated in Estonian Schools? Constructions of History Teaching in an Estonian Teachers’ Newspaper

In the context of pluralization, globalization, and developments in pedagogy and academic history, ideas about the functions and objectives of history teaching (HT) have significantly diversified. Though traditional conceptions still prevail among the broader public, in professional circles traditional ideas about HT are accompanied by deconstructionist and multi-perspective approaches, deriving from the notion that history should not be regarded as true and unambiguous. The objective of this study is to discern the variety of representations of HT in Estonia, as reflected in an Estonian teachers’ weekly newspaper, an “interface” between the broader public and narrower professional spheres and discussions.     

A response to Steven Feierman’s ‘writing history: flow and blockage in the circulation of knowledge’

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to Steven Feierman’s ‘Writing history: flow and blockage in the circulation of knowledge.’ Feierman has noted that most of the publications produced in Tanzania, and in Africa more generally, do not circulate to America. As a result, American scholars do not have access to such publications. The consequence of this phenomenon is that American scholars have difficulty producing African historical knowledge that is rich in context. While agreeing with Feierman’s thought-provoking intervention, this paper makes three main propositions. First, while acknowledging the problem of knowledge circulation between Africa and America, the paper renders visible an equally serious and disturbing reality: that the circulation of knowledge between African institutions is far more limited than it is between Africa and America or Europe. Many Africans consume knowledge that is largely produced in America and Europe. Secondly, while agreeing with Feierman that many scholars in America have difficulty producing historical knowledge about Africa that is rich in context, the paper argues that it is still possible for historians to produce contextually-rich knowledge. To do so, it is proposed, such historians need to craft locally-based methodological strategies that are sensitive to Africans’ perspectives on their changing cultural and physical world. Finally, while recognising that the limited circulation of knowledge is an important reason for some American scholars to produce historical knowledge about Africa which is rich in context, the paper offers four additional explanations on this problem, namely the failure of some scholars to conduct sustained primary field research in Africa; lack of personal sacrifice, a proper attitude and commitment to do long-term research in Africa; the tendency of some scholars from America to make no effort to find works produced in African institutions of higher learning when they visit Africa; and the growing over-reliance on digitised sources of information for producing histories, sources which can hardly capture such things as emotions, feelings, thoughts, silences, or cosmologies that are inevitable in the production of contextually-rich historical knowledge.     

Sms,Communication, And Citizenship In China's Information Society

ABSTRACT

China has entered a new information age that calls for a reconsideration of some key presuppositions about the relationship between Chinese media, communication, society, and culture. These include stereotypes that dominate representations and understandings of China such as the appealing, though too simple, model of propaganda versus free speech and political repression versus democracy or those anticipating the emergence of a more or less Habermasian “public sphere.” Taking the example of mobile phone short messaging services (SMS), this article investigates the transforming relationships between Chinese media, power, political subjectivity, and citizenship. SMS now constitutes an important new set of communication practices in China. It is more widely used than the Internet and by a more diverse section of the population. In early 2005 per person, fifteen times more SMS messages than emails were being sent in China. Putting forward the idea of “orderly” and “disorderly” media it is suggested that while the Party voices its own rhetorics from the past, many people, particularly in the large metropolitan centres, are driving their own alternative visions of the future and forcing the authorities to engage with entirely new kinds of media practices that pose quite different challenges to those of the past.     

Hirohito Redux-- Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

ABSTRACT

The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics does not sufficiently acknowledge the challenges posed for anthropologists who “study up” and “across” rather than “down” the partly imagined power hierarchy within which the researcher and her host members position themselves. The Code proves inadequate for the ethical dilemmas that emerged from the four projects presented in this volume on the worlds of urban feminists and right-wing conservatives, activists and policy-makers of a local community revitalization project, an indigenous minority in the process of reclaiming its present, and corporate soccer functionaries. Several features distinguish these articles from previous work on the subject of ethics in anthropology: It is no longer necessarily nor exclusively the ethnographer who does the writing. The contested claims to ethnographic authority, access, and representation are closely related to the importance of the production and circulation of texts. The will to be loyal to one's consultants does not in all projects appear as the most ethical manner to pursue fieldwork. The power relations that anthropologists engage mirror the fluidity and flexibility of power relations among their research subjects that appear exacerbated in study-up projects. As anthropology's focus has become increasingly urban, cosmopolitan, and Western, conventional understandings of ethnographic authority, access, and power relations are contested and problematized in new, more complex ways.     

A Country Once Great? Asylum Seekers,Historical Imagination,and the Moral Privilege of Whiteness

ABSTRACT

The current public debate on asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat is profoundly emotional and divisive. Its emotional nature must not only be considered in the present context but also understood from a historical perspective. This article argues that often the asylum seeker debate has been structured as an emotional dispute about the morality of the Australian nation; and that one of the main functions of such a dispute is to reinstate the moral privilege of whiteness. This has weakened the ability of human rights activists to advocate for the ending of current policies, and has instead reinforced an insular, exclusionary and rhetorical understanding of Australian history. On both sides of the debate, historical amnesia and the rhetorical celebration of the past have at times worked hand in hand with allegedly pragmatic approaches to the “boat people” crisis. Yet it is only in addressing the repressed and haunting memories of the past that Australians might find critical and creative antidotes to the merciless dictates of pragmatic politics.     

“De-skilling” the 1891 Censuses in New South Wales and Tasmania

The 1891 censuses taken in New South Wales and Tasmania abandoned the long-established practice of grouping working-class occupations into “skilled” and “unskilled” categories. Instead, they were grouped into “Industrial” categories that did not differentiate between grades or degrees of skill. In this paper the sudden disruption to the preceding practice is explained as an effect of the intersection of two histories: the changing meaning of skill, and the history of scientific method. The paper traces the transformations in meanings of skill from an “artisanal” to an “industrial” form and examines how the two central figures in the construction of the 1891 census — the statisticians T.A Coghlan and R.M Johnston — were enmeshed in that history. Coghlan is usually given the more prominent role in accounts of late nineteenth-century statistics, but in this case Johnston's expertise in using scientific method was instrumental in the “deskilling” of the census.     

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.     

The Japanese Movement to Protest Wartime Sexual Violence: A Survey of Japanese and International Literature

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes a genealogical perspective to the social sciences study of robots in Japan, proposing a widely applicable research on “robot cultures.” The author discusses the corporate and governmental strategies and mechanisms that are shaping a national robot culture through establishing robot “lineages” and a national robot history which can have significant implications for both humans and robots. The paper contributes discussions on monozukuri (manufacturing) and Nihonjinron (theories on “Japaneseness”) to the existing anthropological consideration of robots, by examining links between monozukuri and robots, robot genealogy, popular culture and robots, and different social rituals and sites that help the enculturation of robots. The paper draws attention to the power relations and hegemonies of robot culture which also imply the existence of plurality and diversity that will require further scholarly attention as the robot phenomenon unfolds.     

Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia

Abstract

This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australia's past.     

Pearson’s Mission: Revisiting Noel Pearson’s Revisionist History of Hope Vale

In 2000, Noel Pearson drew on his experiences of growing up on the Hope Vale, the Guugu Yimidhirr–speaking community that emerged from the Cape Bedford mission in the south east of Cape York, to write a revisionist history of the region. Indigenous communities were “strong, if bruised” in the wake of colonisation, he argued, but had descended into chaos since the 1970s because alcohol and welfare benefits had undermined the formerly resilient Aboriginal norms of “responsibility”. This paper offers a critical review of this politically potent account of the past, drawing on alternative oral histories, ethnographies and ethnohistories of Hope Vale, including Pearson’s own honours thesis (1986). Without challenging this sketch of his own experience, nor the sincerity of his nostalgia for the mission of his youth, I argue that Pearson’s more recent retellings are selective. In particular, his revisionist history overlooks evidence of drug abuse in the early colonial period and overstates both Guugu Yimidhirr agency in the process of missionisation and the uniformity and representativeness of the community that developed at Cape Bedford. Finally, I offer some possible personal, philosophical and political explanations for Pearson’s shifting approach to the past.     

Is Russia a militocracy? Conceptual issues and extant findings regarding elite militarization

The dominant paradigm for understanding contemporary Russia holds that Vladimir Putin's tenure in office has been accompanied by a massive influx of former KGB and military personnel – so-called “siloviki” – into positions of power and authority throughout the polity and economy. Claims of extensive elite militarization, however, are largely based on the analyses of only one research program and, moreover, the validity of the estimates produced by that research program is open to question on numerous grounds. In this article, we review existing research on elite militarization in Russia; discuss a series of conceptual and empirical issues that need to be resolved if valid and meaningful estimation of military–security representation is to be achieved; introduce new findings; and evaluate the totality of existing evidence regarding whether the Russian state under Putin deserves to be labeled a militocracy. We find that the most straightforward reading of existing data indicates that the percentage of siloviki in the political elite during Putin's first two terms as president was approximately half of that which has been widely reported in both scholarship and the media, and also declined during the Medvedev presidency. In addition, our analysis of a broader cross section of the elite estimates military–security representation during the Putin presidency to have been lower still. Overall, existing data paint a less alarming picture of the depths to which siloviki have penetrated the corridors of power since 2000 than has been commonly portrayed and thereby cast doubt on Russia's status as an “FSB state.” On the other hand, past trends also provide some basis for expecting that the numbers of siloviki will once again rise during Putin's current presidential term.