Italian Microhistory and the Cultural Turn: Insights from Geertz and Davis

The Rise of Cultural History III: Italian Microhistory

Clifford Geertz on culture: [b]elieving, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Nathalie Nathalie Zemon Zemon Davis: Davis: What What can canhistorians historians learn learnfrom fromanthropology anthropology? ? Insights from ethnological field work and its close observation of living processes of daily social interaction adopt interesting ways of interpreting symbolic behaviour within groups and societies would make them think about new ways how the parts of a social system fit together makes historians use materials from cultures very different from those which historians are used to work in (no longer just written sources but material culture)

Nathalie Zemon Davis: What can historians learn from anthropology? ? New new awareness of the importance of informal or small-scale interactions New mechanisms of social interaction and exchange : the role and place of gifts and reciprocity in the social exchange (her book on the The Gift ) New insights into gender system: how men s and women s spheres of action, speech relate to each other. Magic, rituals, cults and witchcraft

So, what is this new cultural history (or socio-cultural history) about? ...questions the past by asking how people at the time perceived and interpreted themselves, what material, mental and social motivations respectively influenced their forms of perception and production of sense, and the effects such forms produced. (Ute Daniels, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2001), p. 19) The cultural turn asks not only How it really was? but rather how was it for him, or her or them? (Miri Rubin, What is cultural history now , in D. Cannadine (ed.), What is history now? (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 81

What united the Italian microhistorians? Disillusion with grand narratives of modernity (progress, economic growth, consumer culture etc.) dissatisfaction with large scale seriel analysis; Braudelian longue dur e ; quantitative analysis and reliance on structural approaches Interest in social and cultural anthropology rather than scientistic sociological models Lesser interest in a general history from below ; they were drawn to idiosyncratic figures and phenomena rather than to ordinary people and consistent patterns (therefore: distance to other histories of everyday life which developed at the time, such as the German Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life)

Overall Aim: to employ the microscale of analysis in order to test the validity of macro-scale explanatory paradigms Microhistory as a practice is essentially based on the reduction of the scale of observation, on a microscopic analysis and an intensive study of the documentary material Microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved ... phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations ... [Giovanni Levi, On Microhistory , pp. 101-2] It is on this reduced scale, and probably only on this scale, that we can understand, without deterministic reduction, the relationships between systems of beliefs, of values and representations on the one hand, and social affiliations on the other. (Roger Chartier)

Views on sources and evidence Focus on the exceptional normal : an event or practice that, viewed in the context of modern scientific enquiry, seems exotic, remarkable or marginal, but that, when properly investigated, that is, placed or coded in its proper context, reveals its own logic and order. (E. Grendi) anomalies Historians work like detectives: clues, traces, hints a close reading of a small number of texts, related to a possible circumscribed belief, can be more rewarding than the massive accumulation of repetitive evidence. (Ginzburg)

How to deal with evidence and sources? Making clear distortion partiality and process of research Highlighting the gaps of knowledge: The obstacles interfering with the research were constituent elements of the documentation and thus had to become part of the account; the same for the hesitations and silences of the protagonist in the face of his persecutors questions or mine. Thus the hypotheses, the doubts, the uncertainties became part of the narration; the search for truth became part of the exposition of the (necessarily incomplete) truth attained. (Ginzburg) Conversation with reader about gaps, showing possibilities of interpretation by the historian (Davis does this too in Return of Martin Guerre) Read against the grain: Use institutional sources to reconstruct the vision and experiences of those who were its subjects

Microhistory and the big question of historical reality: Aim of microhistory: the search for a more realistic description of human behaviour ....the true problem for historians is to succeed in expressing the complexity of reality (Levi) Isn t this at first sight anomalous with microhistorians categorical assertion of an anti-positivist, constructivist view of the production of history? .....based on the definite awareness that all phases through which research unfolds are constructed and not given: the identification of the object and its importance; the elaboration of the categories through which it is analysed; the criteria of proof; the stylistic and narrative forms by which the results are transmitted to the reader . (Ginzburg)

Their views were shaped by the movement of Italian Neo-Realism (John Brewer, Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life , Cultural and Social History, 7:1, 87- 109) Italian historians, realism and positivism or empiricism are not the same thing. For they take their views first and foremost from the Italian neo-realist movement of the immediate post-Second World War era, and more generally from twentieth-century notions of realism derived from literature and film. Neo-realism is best known outside Italy through the films: Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti Paisa (1946), Roma: citta aperta (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948) and La terra trema (1948) Origin: Neo-realism began as an attack on the unreal, spectacular and imperial designs of Italian fascism, and as a way of recuperating the harsh experiences of the Second World War. But its values and approach later underpinned criticism of what were seen to be the new delusions of post-war capitalism. What sort of world did the neo-realists depict? They depicted a world that was fragmentary, sometimes capricious and arbitrary, full of conflict, skewed by partial knowledge and different levels of consciousness, marked by different temporalities that were circular, repetitive and subjective, discontinuous as well as linear. It was a world inhabited by every sort of person, speaking in every sort of voice.

Criticisms: (too?) compelling stories Case studies that illuminate wider concerns or simply nice stories or? relationship of margins to centre? relationship of micro to macro? causes of historical change? Problem of reality And what can this approach contribute nowadays, when globalization and global are the dominant keywords in the humanities and the social sciences keywords that we hardly associate with anything micro?

Ginzburg on microhistory http://serious-science.org/microhistory-2893