'Rethinking History' - Keith Jenkins - Review
This
is a short, challenging book about the theory of history. When it was first
published it infuriated many in the history business, but also fascinated
others.
The Introduction starts with “This book is addressed primarily to students who are embarking upon a study of the question, “what is history?”. Thus, it is a little academic. The word “discourse” is a prominent word throughout and “metanarrative” occurs often in the last chapter.
The book has an Introduction and three chapters: (1) What history is; (2) On some questions and some answers; and (3) Doing history in the post-modern world. These chapters are followed by a Notes section, containing mostly references to other books or articles. In one of these notes (Note 9 to the Introduction) Keith Jenkins describes his chapters as “introductory, polemical, basic and ‘teacherly’”.
The basis of the approach is post-modernism. Literature and philosophy, but less so history, have their own well-developed theories. He says that the word history covers several things. The word means the past, which has gone and can never be experienced. The word also means historiography, the work of historians writing about the past from the written and other evidence available. There are plenty of methodologies available to historians but all are self-referencing, but which one to choose? Histories are always relative and never absolute. They always have a point of view. The most dishonest are those histories which state they have no point of view. All histories are relative. “History is less than the past” and “History is never for itself. It is always for someone”.
The descent into post-modernism may be too much for some readers, that everything is relative, that there is no centre, that nothing can really be known. Side-stepping this academically-constructed nihilism, this book is a useful correction to lazy acceptance of the way history is often presented. There may be truth there somewhere, but history is more a series of histories narrating something that can never be fully grasped or understood. This post-modernist exaggeration is a useful critique of conventional history.
The Introduction starts with “This book is addressed primarily to students who are embarking upon a study of the question, “what is history?”. Thus, it is a little academic. The word “discourse” is a prominent word throughout and “metanarrative” occurs often in the last chapter.
The book has an Introduction and three chapters: (1) What history is; (2) On some questions and some answers; and (3) Doing history in the post-modern world. These chapters are followed by a Notes section, containing mostly references to other books or articles. In one of these notes (Note 9 to the Introduction) Keith Jenkins describes his chapters as “introductory, polemical, basic and ‘teacherly’”.
The basis of the approach is post-modernism. Literature and philosophy, but less so history, have their own well-developed theories. He says that the word history covers several things. The word means the past, which has gone and can never be experienced. The word also means historiography, the work of historians writing about the past from the written and other evidence available. There are plenty of methodologies available to historians but all are self-referencing, but which one to choose? Histories are always relative and never absolute. They always have a point of view. The most dishonest are those histories which state they have no point of view. All histories are relative. “History is less than the past” and “History is never for itself. It is always for someone”.
The descent into post-modernism may be too much for some readers, that everything is relative, that there is no centre, that nothing can really be known. Side-stepping this academically-constructed nihilism, this book is a useful correction to lazy acceptance of the way history is often presented. There may be truth there somewhere, but history is more a series of histories narrating something that can never be fully grasped or understood. This post-modernist exaggeration is a useful critique of conventional history.
It
gets 4/5
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