HISTORIOGRAPHY S ince very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography... more
HISTORIOGRAPHY S ince very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography in the narrower sense of " intentional attempts to recover knowledge of and represent in writing true descriptions or narratives of past events " has had a rather briefer career throughout the world, though one more complex and variegated than most accounts allow. It is not possible in the space of a brief essay such as this to convey the entire richness of the human effort to recapture the past, but an effort must be made to summarize the historio-graphical traditions of many different regions. At least three major (in terms of their international scope, longevity, and influence) and a variety of minor independent traditions of historical thought and writing can be identified. The major ones are the Western (descended jointly from the classical Greek and Roman and, via the Old Testament, from the Hebraic), the Islamic (originating in the seventh century C.E.), and the Chi-nese. Minor ones include the various indigenous traditions of thinking about the past (not all of which involved writing), including ancient Indian, precolonial Latin American, African, and those arising in certain parts of east and Southeast Asia. The Western form (which would include modern Marxist Chinese writing) has predominated for a century or more in most of the world, but it would be a mistake to see that as either inevitable or as based on an innate intellectual superiority of method. Its hegemony springs much more from the great influence of Western colonial powers in various parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and perhaps even more from the profound effect in the last hundred years of Western, and especially North American, cultural, linguistic, and economic influences. A consequence of the global dominance of Western academic historical practices is that not just history, but historiography, has been " written by the victors. " None of the major histories of historical writing produced in the last century addresses other historiographical traditions, undoubtedly in part owing to linguistic difficulties. This has produced a thoroughly decontextual-ized and celebratory grand narrative of the rise of modern method that has only been challenged in recent years. It is thus critical that any new survey of historical writing not only pay serious attention to non-Western types of historical writing (and indeed to nonliterary ways in which the past was recorded and transmitted), but that it also steer clear of assuming that these were simply inferior forms awaiting the enlightenment of modern European-American methodology.
