historian's craft - early modern europe, darnton, burke, historical anthropology and mentalities

7/31/2019 Historian's Craft - Early Modern Europe, Darnton, Burke, Historical Anthropology and Mentalities

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Q: Robert Darnton and Peter Burke have both emphasized the distance of the modern

historian from the early modem period. How do you think 'a history of mentalities' and

'historical anthropology' become important historiographical tools for studying that period in

European history?

While crafting historical prose the historian must always keep in mind that common law or

common knowledge is never an absolute quantity and varies from society to society in

different time periods. Therefore there are always two contexts that come into play while

attempting the study of history; the historians own context, and the context of the subject

matter being written upon.

As Robert Darnton in his book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural

Historyputs it they do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand their way of

thinking, we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness. Darnton goes on to argue

that there is a false sense of familiarity with the past which has to be dispensed with. As an

example, he cites an eighteenth century proverb which reads He who is snotty, let him blow

his nose. According to Darnton, when we cannot follow a joke, proverb, ritual and so on set in

a different context, there is scope to unravel an alien system of meaning.

Darnton refers to a context which is not ones own as a foreign mental world which he

believes a historian able to negotiate through. In an essay titled Workers Revolt: the Great Cat

Massacre of Rue Saint Severin, Darnton demonstrates this very concept. A small sketch of the

life of a worker in a printing house in 18th

century France shows them highly dissatisfied with

general working conditions as well as the poor standards of food old cat food, which were

mostly old rotten bits of meat which they could not stomach. As a prank one of the workers

(Leveille) who has an extraordinary talent in mimicking, took to howling and meowing up onthe masters roof so that the bourgeoisie and his wife did not sleep one bit. As a result, the

master commands the workers to kill all the cats in the house (it so happened that the wife

adored them).

The men proceed to kill and then dump sack loads of half dead cats in the courtyard. When

the mistress of the house views this episode she is horrified. To the men however, it seems

ridiculously funny and the entire episode is narrated several times over by Leville provoking

great amounts of hilarity among the working class in the printing houses. From this episode,

Darnton writes:

Yet it strikes the modern reader as unfunny, if not downright repulsive. Where is the humour in

a group of grown men bleating like goats and banging with their tools while an adolescent

reenacts the ritual slaughter of a defenseless animal? Or own inability to get the joke is an

indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe.


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He goes onto add that we must therefore use anthropological techniques as they can

penetrate and alien culture...where it seems to be most opaque.

Peter Burke points out that the consciousness of the distance of a historian from an event

occurring in an earlier time and space existed even during the 18th

Century. Burke picks up theexample of Thomas Warton whose methods as per Burke are relevant even today (Burke,

2008). Warton, while commenting on the rise of romantic fiction in Europe wrote:

In reading the works of an author, who lived in a remote age, it is necessary thatwe should

place ourselves in his situation and circumstances; that we may be better enabled to judge and

discern how his turn of thinking and manner of composing were biased, influenced and as it

were tinctured by very familiar and reigning appearances, which were utterly different from

those which we are at present surrounded. (Quoted from Burke, 2008)

Hence it becomes obvious that we must rely on alternate tools of history to capture this

otherness. Both history of mentalities and historical anthropology are tools which can help

the historian place himself in the context of the contemporary. The history of mentalities or

mentalite as the French have enigmatically termed it is not an easy subject to define. Carlo

Ginzburg and Richard Cobb are seen as the leading practitioners of this approach, despite their

own denial of doing the same.

Peter Burke defines the history of mentalities using three distinctive features. Firstly there is a

stress on collective attitudes as opposed to individual ones. Secondly the emphasis is not so

much on conscious theories but on unspoken or unconscious assumptions. Lastly there is the

assertion that the difference in mentalities between two groups will make a far stronger

statement than difference in attitudes.

The approach however did not appear suddenly but was cultivated through historical

development of historiography as well as the interaction of disciplines. From Emile Durkheim

onwards, sociologists and social anthropologists have been concerned with collective

representations, modes of thought and cognitive systems of various cultures. Durkheims

follower Levy Bruhl put the term mentality into circulation arguing that primitive people

thought in a pre - logical manner.

A systematic approach began with the Annales School and its founders Lucien Febvre and Marc

Bloch who were very much concerned with what was called historical psychology, collectivementalities and conceptual apparatus. What they were doing however was not exclusive to

France as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga whos Waning of the middle Ages looked at

collective attitudes alongside the history of feelings and importantly what the author termed

forms of thought.


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The first point that needs to be made about the history of mentalities as per Burke is that

something needed to occupy the conceptual space between the history of ideas and social

history. For instance, the social history of ideas practiced by Enlightenment historian Darnton

who takes very seriously ideas that emerged in the everyday social life was very much akin to a

history of mentalities.

Burke puts forward two critical problems of cultural history that seemingly require the

approach of mentalities to resolve. Firstly he asks why individuals from different cultures often

find communication difficult. Secondly he questions why what one group finds absurd is fairly

normal to a second group of persons. Therefore he goes on to further this premise in asking

why it is possible to translate word to word a text from one script to another and yet not

decipher exact meanings. Burkes answer, which can be adopted for both the present and the

past is that there is a difference in mentalities between two or more cultures and thus this

aspect must indeed be examined in order to make full sense of the past.

In various fields such as economic history, history of sciences etc scholars have found it

impossible to solve such a problematic without invoking the concept of mentality as opposed

to a rationality that is devoid of both time and space and instead defined ethnocentrically. For

instance in the case of the economy, the Polish historian Witold Kula in account of the working

of the feudal system in 17th

and 18th

century Poland has demonstrated that it cannot be fully

explained without taking into account the attitudes, values or modes of thought of the

magnates who gained fully from it. Even EP Thompsons famous Moral Economy of the English

crowd suggested that food riots cannot be seen as a simplistic response to hunger but an

expression of collective moral assumptions of the working class.

A third example to show how history of mentalities has further the study of early modernEurope can be found in Cardinal Berulles somewhat puzzling statement the state of childhood

is the most vile and abject state of human nature, after that of death. Is the oddness in the

statement itself or is it revealing of a mentality where childishness has become acceptable to

adults far more in the modern age as opposed to the 17th

Century.

A fourth example can be drawn from Huizingas conclusion that several statements made in the

early modern age should not be taken literally or metaphorically but has its logical status

somewhere in between. A rebel band from Brittany, France expressed their demands in a

document as follows it is forbidden to give refuge to the gabelle (salt tax) and her childrenon

the contrary everyone is ordered to fire on her as one would on a mad dog. It becomes criticalin this context to study the mentality of this particular rebel group in order to understand the

exact personification ofgabelle or salt tax which is being treated as a live entity.

Faced with examples of trying to understand the other, historians need a concept like

mentality in order to avoid twin dangers. The first danger is dismissing the above discussed

examples as unworthy, or faulty historical evidence unworthy of consideration. If a particular


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early modern attitude strikes us as being odd, we must remember that it was part of an entirely

differently belief system. The second danger is what can be termed premature empathy. Levy

Bruhl had diagnosed this illness in historians which is a tendency to place oneself in the arena

of the subjects being studied and making them think as we do if we were in their place.

Therefore it is not sufficient to imagine oneself in the subjects shoes, but also necessary toimagine their definition of the situation itself.

There are however at least four serious objections to the mentalities approach to intellectual

history; the first serious objection is that of homogenization. The broad differences that lie in

mentalities encourage historians to treat certain attitudes they find alien as if they were

homogenous. For instance, if were to say talk of the legal mentality in 17th

Century England,

we cannot assume that all lawyers, courts and other such structures possessed the same

attitudes.

Secondly there also exists the problem of change or variation over time. In the words of Roger

Chartier the problem on which all histories of mentalities stumbles, that of the reasons for the

modalities of the passage from one system to another. The idea here is that there would be a

system of thought in which if each part supports another would make the system impervious

to any outside intrusion in theory. A pertinent example is Marc Blochs study about the belief

that rulers in France and England could cure skin disease by touching the sufferer. Bloch points

out that if a sufferer returned to the king after having the ritual performed, indicating that it

had not worked, but it having not worked had not affected the belief of the patient in the

ritual.

The third objection is that the history of mentalities treats belief systems as autonomous. In

other words, it concerns itself overly with the relationship of one belief to another that ismisses out the overarching relationship of a belief to society. However, neither Marc Blochs

Royal Touch nor Febvres Problem of Unbelieftreated belief systems as independent of society

and thus this criticism has been answered. A fourth criticism is that the mentalities approach is

built on Levy-Bruhls contrast between pre logical and logical thought, the foundations of

which have been undermined by later research.

The second task before us is to analyse historical anthropology as a tool to better understand

early modern Europe. Firstly however we must understand what exactly we mean by the term

historical anthropology. Is historical anthropology anything more than a fashionable term for

social history? According to Peter Burke we can delineate five specific features of historicalanthropology which describe a distinctive approach to history.

Firstly, social history has attempted to describe trends on the basis of qualitative evidence;

historical anthropology on the other hand is deliberately qualitative in nature, focusing on

causation. Secondly works of social history focus on the lives of millions of people or the mass.


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On the other hand historical anthropology deals with microscopic history i.e. of either

individuals or small communities, to achieve greater depth.

Thirdly social historians tend to offer causal explanations of various trends over time, trends

which they are often unaware off. Historical anthropologists offer what, following CliffordGeertz (1973) is often called thick description or the interpretation of social interaction in a

given society in terms of that societys own norms and categories.

Fourth, we can point to the place of symbolism which in everyday life has been neglected by

both cultural historians (who are primarily concerned with works of art) and social historians

(who are concerned with social reality). Historical anthropologists buck this trend and make it

one of their central concerns to show how apparently trivial rituals and routines have an

important role in maintaining and enforcing a certain world view. Hence they pay attention to

the clothes that people wear, the food they eat, the ways in which they address each other and

the manner in which they hold themselves, gesture or walk.

Finally, as far as theoretical influences are concerned, social history tends to be informed by

the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Historical anthropology on the other hand while

acknowledging theory, serves its own great tradition with the works of Durkheim and Geertz

taking precedence.

From the 1960s to the 90s, the distinctive historiographical feature of cultural history has

been the turn to anthropology. The anthropologist who perhaps inspired the most in terms of

numbers and effect from a previous generation is Clifford Geertz, whose interpretive theory of

culture is often juxtaposed with Levi Strausss theory of structuralism. Geertz criticizes

Edward Taylors definition of culture - knowledge, art, morals, law and custom on thegrounds that it obscured a great deal more than it revealed. Geertz stresses on the importance

of what he calls thick description labeling culture as a historically transmitted pattern of

meanings embodied in symbols.

His study of the Bali culture and in particular the Balinese cockfight where he treats the sport

as a philosophical drama is according to him key in understanding the Balinese culture. Geertz

believed that there was a story the Balinese people tell through this game. Thus it was through

Geertz that historians, in a systemic manner began to enter the mental world of a society via

the study of symbols, texts and representations, which while they may not be implied directly

are left to be deciphered.

The impact of Geertzs work on cultural historians may be best illustrated through revisiting

Robert Darntons book, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays (1984). Darnton in this text

emphasizes that one can read a ritual or a city just as one reads a folk tale or a philosophical

text. Darnton places the incident of the cat massacre (which has already been discussed above)

in a series of contexts, from labour relations to popular rituals and from attitudes of cats to


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views of violence. In this way he not only helps the reader appreciate why the apprentices did

what they did but also makes the incident a point of entry into an alien world.

A growing interest in the subject of rituals saw the emergence of the drama analogy

originating in Erving Goffmans work The presentation of the self in everyday life. The traditionof studying official rituals dates back to the 1920s, but in the 1960s and 70s historians like

Natalie Davis and EP Thompson discovered various popular rituals such as charivaris among

others. Rhys Isaac even suggested that every culture has a distinctive dramaturgical kit or

repertoire.

Anthropology as an alternative mode of linking culture to society in an age where there was

growing interest in popular culture saw anthropology become even more relevant to

historians. Therefore symbolism of everyday life began playing a greater role in the works of

historians. As LP Hartley put it, cultural history achieves most coherence and makes the most

sense when views as retrospective ethnography as the past is a foreign country where things

are done differently.

In the 1970s another trend emerging from the fusion with anthropology was that of micro

history. Anthropologists offered an alternative model that of an extended case study in which

there was space for culture and freedom from economic or social determinism and for

individual faces in the crowd. The microscope seemingly offered an attractive alternative to the

telescope, allowing concrete individuals or local experience to re-enter history. The two major

works of this kind are Le Roy Laduries Montaillou which analyzes a small village for a period of

thirty years and Carlo Ginzburgs Cheese and Worms (1976).

historian's craft - early modern europe, darnton, burke, historical anthropology and mentalities

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