Comments on: CCR691 – VTB’s Spiritual Literacy – Ch. 1 for Comment

By: Anna

Anna — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:42:08 +0000

Your second question about the ethics of representation in historical work speaks to a lot of the thoughts I’ve been having as I’ve been reading this week. This particular chapter of VTB’s book, along with her article on material rhetoric, reminded me of a comment LA made in the research colloquium last week when she said that she tries to go into her work assuming that every person she’s writing about was trying to do their best. This strikes me as an important kind of ethical stance towards representation in historical work–assuming a kind of generosity or “affectionate interpretation” even as critique things that are problematic.
I read VTB as assuming a similar stance, while also emphasizing that doing so doesn’t mean overlooking the less pleasant parts of people’s lives (Wesley’s patriarchal position, for example).

When we were talking about research ethics with regard to person-based research last week, it seems like we were really connecting questions of ethics with questions about our research might affect people in the here and now. It seems like thinking about ethics with regard to historical research requires thinking about ethics in a slightly different light. I’m not entirely sure that I know how to articulate what that approach to ethics is supposed to look like, except to say that it might serve us well to think about ethics beyond the site of individual bodies or particular communities.

By: Luce

Luce — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:43:03 +0000

Eileen has hit on a number of interesting points in your questions, so I want to take a bit of a different tack.

The “lower ranks of folks” recalls fondly my reading of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Not sure if you’ve read it (most folks know heteroglossia), but in his work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin talks about writing meant to be mimetic of carnivalesque. One of the key features of carnival culture is a celebration of the “lower stratum” or low and bawdy humor. This is kind of like our version of toilet humor but with an authority figure in the mix.

Anyway, all of this to say that there seems to be a backlash (nod at Faludi here) toward high theory and history proper in movements like feminism and queer studies, which at their heart call into question what counts as acceptable materials to mine rhetorical and subjective experience. We often critique postmodernism for desubjugating experience, but history proper has in many ways done just that by providing a naturalized version of history that authorizes only certain types of materials that count as history.

Like Bakhtin, I wonder if our penchant for lower humor isn’t a metaphor for our own resistance to forms of history proper. Burton just gives that resistance a method and justification from a feminist standpoint, but that resistance is there in the ways we choose to laugh as well.

By: eileen E Schell

eileen E Schell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:37:07 +0000

I like your questions, and I was particularly stimulated by question #1–how can we study community literacy through historiography? And also by your question about how “we look for materials” to “examine the ‘lower ranks’ of folks in the past.”
This is really an interesting set of questions because of the challenge of social history. Archives do tend to preserve the lives of those who may have the money or power in a society (what Bob Connors called “kings and battles” approach to history or what Nietzsche calls monumental history).

It’s more possible to find material by and about John Wesley in archives than about the working people attending the field preaching at 5:00 a.m. But there are ways to find that information and cobble together accounts–whether from diaries, records, demographic information, court house records, pamphlets, working men’s/women’s associations, etc. But it means a more piece meai kind of archival research and detective work that might go above and beyond the detective work that already takes place around archival research….

Recreation vs. representation is an interesting comment, too. Isn’t the writing of history a re-creation, in many ways, that involves complex choices about representation?