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Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Anderson, Greg S. |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | Our discipline's grand historicist project, its commitment to producing a kind of cumulative biography of our species, imposes strict limits on the kinds of stories we can tell about the past. Most immediately, our histories must locate all of humanity's diverse lifeworlds within the bounds of a single, universal "real world" of time, space, and experience. To do this, they must render experiences in all those past lifeworlds duly commensurable and mutually intelligible. And to do this, our histories must use certain commonly accepted models and categories, techniques and methods. The fundamental problem here is that all of these tools of our practice presuppose a knowledge of experience that is far from universal, as postcolonial theorists and historians like Dipesh Chakrabarty have so well observed. In effect, these devices require us to "translate" the experiences of all past lifeworlds into the experiences of just one lifeworld, namely those of a post-Enlightenment "Europe," the world of our own secular, capitalist modernity. In so doing, they actively limit our ability to represent the past's many non-secular, non-capitalist, non-modern "ways of being human." To be sure, historicism's cultural turn of the last thirty or more years has helped sensitize us to the alterities of non-modern experiences. No doubt, our |
| Starting Page | 787 |
| Ending Page | 810 |
| Page Count | 24 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1093/ahr/120.3.787 |
| Volume Number | 120 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://polisci.osu.edu/sites/polisci.osu.edu/files/F_Anderson_RLW.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr%2F120.3.787 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
