{"id":940,"date":"2018-04-04T16:02:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T16:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=940"},"modified":"2018-04-04T20:04:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T20:04:22","slug":"the-historian-and-the-ant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2018\/04\/04\/the-historian-and-the-ant\/","title":{"rendered":"The Historian and the ANT: a cautionary tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018The move of African workers from a British colony to a German colony,\u2019 Ulrike Lindner argues, \u2018entailed a clash of different colonial cultures, which can thus be analysed in a new light.\u2019[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

This is not an unusual statement. It is a statement that could be found in newspapers, anthropological reports, or works of history. It is not, however, a statement that an adherent of Actor-Network Theory finds himself able to make. It is a presentation of a flattened narrative, ascribing agency to cultures, and making them discrete actors in their own right, as a shorthand by which to describe the multitudinous relationships between individual actors. Later in the article, Lindner provides a more specific example, citing an instance in which an individual \u2013a German Mr H\u00e4nert\u2014 found that his hiring of a German housemaid caused domestic tensions. \u2018In this case,\u2019 Lindner observes, \u2018conceptions of class and race quite obviously clashed.\u2019[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

This may appear a slight alteration, but the shift in tone is crucial. The first statement sets the cultures<\/em> at the heart of the theoretical historicisation as briefly sketched: it is a prescriptive <\/em>statement, a frame according to which the historian expects conflict between pre-defined groups, and expects the individual to follow a certain pattern generally observed. The second is a descriptive<\/em> statement, working from a particular instance and describing its actors, and thence its events, within their particular contexts. They are placed within the flow of ideas, people and goods occurring in the selected slice of the past\u2019s space and time.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is unfair to pluck two such statements from out of a work and analyse them in such a way; Lindner, I imagine, would not differentiate significantly between the two in ideological intent. As a pair of examples, however, they serve as a useful springboard.<\/p>\n

The question is ultimately one of scale, a problem not unusual in history and still less so in the transnational subset. The \u2018micro-macro debate\u2019 arises constantly. What should the historian include in his history? How should something \u2018of relevance\u2019 to a chosen study be differentiated from that which appears not to be? What, fundamentally, ought the historian do if he is to produce \u2018worthwhile\u2019 historicisation? Is it a necessity that the micro be connected to the macro, and is it possible? Reviewing the last question, J-P.A. Ghobrial suggests not: microhistory-turned-macro, he argues, produces \u2018a set of caricatures, a chain of global lives\u2019 assembled teleologically by the historian.[3]<\/a> Bruno Latour, the most prominent proponent of Actor-Network Theory and indeed the scholar responsible for its name, re-presents the micro-macro debate as the \u2018actor\/system quandary\u2019, summarising it as the question of whether \u2018the actor is \u201cin\u201d a system or the system is made up \u201cof\u201d interacting actors.\u2019[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Ideally,\u2019 Latour observes at an earlier point in Reassembling The Social<\/em>, his seminal work, the theorist would \u2018abstain from frameworks altogether\u2019, and instead \u2018just describe the state of affairs at hand.\u2019[5]<\/a> This is an incontrovertible statement. Conceptual frameworks \u2013be they Marxist, postmodernist, social, etc.\u2014 exist, after all, out of attempts to best \u2018just describe the state of affairs at hand\u2019; they are efforts to most accurately represent the past \u2018wie es eigentlich gewesen\u2019, the spirit behind Ranke\u2019s declaration remaining unavoidable even if his methods and views are no longer embraced.<\/p>\n

Latour\u2019s understanding of \u2018the state of affairs at hand\u2019 is predicated on the notion that \u2018actors themselves make everything, including their own [conceptual] frames, their own contexts, their own metaphysics, even their own ontologies\u2019, such that an actor is \u2018not<\/em> substitutable. It\u2019s a unique event, totally irreducible to any other.\u2019[6]<\/a> This is a vision of anthropocentric studies (of which history is a subset) which places the actor at its very centre. It resolves the actor\/system quandary by declaring that the system is made up of actors, and that the actors\u2019 choices are shaped by their systems\u2014 in other words, in a quite common-sense manner which retains that paramountcy of actors while accepting that constructs, or the patterns of reinforced behaviour for which they are a shorthand, are also of significance.<\/p>\n

But what do you do <\/em>with that? Eric Hobsbawm declared that the nation, and indeed all history, \u2018cannot be understood unless analysed from below\u2019.[7]<\/a> To look at just <\/em>the myriad of actors as actors that comprise the nation, or any other structure, however, is to find oneself struggling to discuss all of importance to the systems and the ways in which actors must shape their lives in response to them (I nearly wrote \u2018and the ways in which they shape actors\u2019 lives\u2019!). To examine only the constructs (as a more hard-line Marxist or economic historian might), however, is to forget, with consequences deeply damaging to the work\u2019s accuracy, the contingency of such constructs upon their comprising actors.<\/p>\n

The historian attempting to work in accordance with Actor-Network Theory must, therefore, do both<\/em>, as Latour suggests\u2014 hopping mentally from the immediate locality to the global view of interconnected and continuous localities. This is the only way in which to resolve the micro-macro debate. To do this appears to me, however, to be as impossible as it is desirable. The theory envisages the world contiguous expanse of continuous locality within which practically every locality is connected to practically every other: this is conceptually accurate, but defies any attempt to break the whole up into discrete units, or to compartmentalise according to either time or space. The web of relationships between actors and the entities that they form stretches, unavoidably, into the without, as well as the before and the after, of the cross-sectional slice of the past chosen for historicisation by any historian. Actor-Network Theory, applied to history, yields something akin to chaos theory and leaning towards postmodernism and poststructuralism. The extrapolations from it, trending as they do towards a vision of a universally inter-related history and of a consequent impossibility of accurate representation, yield the conclusion that the historian can never properly historicise: the truth of the subject matter, \u2018the state of affairs at hand\u2019, is vast and grows vaster the more one looks at it.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Ulrike Lindner, \u201cTransnational movements between colonial empires: migrant workers from the British Cape Colony in the German diamond town of L\u00fcderitzbucht\u201d, European Review of History<\/em> (Vol. 16, 2009), pp. 679-695, p. 680<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid., p. 689<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> J-P.A. Ghobrial, \u201cThe Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory\u201d, Past & Present<\/em>, Vol. 222, Issue 1, (Feb. 2014), p. 58<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory<\/em>, (Oxford: OUP, 2005), pp. 169-170<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., p. 144<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid., p. 147; p. 153<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780<\/em>, (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), p. 10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018The move of African workers from a British colony to a German colony,\u2019 Ulrike Lindner argues, \u2018entailed a clash of different colonial cultures, which can thus be analysed in a new light.\u2019[1] This is not an unusual statement. It is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[129,163,162,161,134,164,90],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-africa","tag-ant","tag-ghobrial","tag-latour","tag-lindner","tag-micro-macro","tag-networks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-fa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":941,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions\/941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}