Some theoretical approaches to intercultural comparative historiography

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 5-21

  Rüsen, Jörn ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0007974493     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505441     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. Christian Meier, "Die Entstehung der Historie," in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung (Poetik und Hermeneutik V), ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich, 1973), 256. (It seems to be time to install an elaborated comparative view of the different forms, within which the different cultures and societies correlate historical questions, world-views, and interests with certain ways of activity, of change, of expectation, and with certain structural peculiarities of society.)
2. A recent example is Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Fundamenta Historica, Bd. 3) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1991).
3. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago, 1983);
4. Georg G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein überblick im internationalen Zusammenhang (Göttingen, 1993).
5. Iggers's "international relationship" is exclusively European-American. The older International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory, ed. Georg Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westport, Conn., 1979) includes most of the non-Western countries.
6. For example, Historians of China and Japan, ed. William G. Beasley and Edward G. Pulleyblank (London, 1961);
7. Yu-shan Han, Elements of Chinese Historiography (Hollywood, 1955);
8. Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography [1938] (Cambridge, Mass., 1961);
9. The Translation of Things Past: Chinese History and Historiography, ed. George Kao (Hong Kong, 1982);
10. Rolf Trauzettel, "Die chinesische Geschichtsschreibung," in Ostasiatische Literaturen, ed. Günther Debon (Wiesbaden, 1984), 77-90;
11. Extrême-Orient/Extrême-Occident, IX: La réfé rence à l'histoire (Paris, 1986).
12. For example, Problems of Indian Historiography, ed. D. Devahuti (Delhi, 1979);
13. B. Kölver, Ritual und historischer Raum: Zum indischen Geschichtsverständnis (Munich, 1993);
14. Pratima Asthana, The Indian View of History (Agra, India, 1992);
15. Michael Gottlob, "Writing the History of Modern Indian Historiography," in Storia della Storiografia 27 (1995), 123-144.
16. For example, Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness (Tuscon, 1988).
17. A recent approach to bringing non-Western cultures into view in dealing with the history of Western historiography is the series Geschichtsdiskurs, ed. Wolfgang Küttler, Jörn Rüsen, and Ernst Schulin (vol. 1: Grundlagen und Methoden der Historiographiegeschichte [Frankfurt/Main, 1993];
18. vol. 2: Anfänge modernen historischen Denkens [Frankfurt/Main, 1994];
19. vol. 3: Die Epoche der Historisierung [Frankfurt/Main, 1996]).
20. Cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, "Sozialgeschichte im Zivilisationsvergleich: Zu künftigen Möglichkeiten komparativer Geschichtswissenschaft," in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), 143-164;
21. Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt/Main, 1996).
22. A typical example is Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature.
23. Franz Rosenthal reflected upon the problem when dealing with the subject matter of "Muslim historiography": he identifies it as "those works which Muslims, at a given moment of their literary history, considered historical works and which, at the same time, contain a reasonable amount of material which can be classified as historical according to our definition of history . . ." (A History of Muslim Historiography. 2d rev. ed. [Leiden, 1968], 17).
24. For example, Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, 4th ed. (Leipzig, 1896), I, viii.
25. Cf. Andreas Pigulla, China in der deutschen Weltgeschichtsschreibung vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1996).
26. I have tried a first approach to such a theorization for the sake of an intercultural comparison (concerning the history of human rights) in Jörn Rüsen, "Die Individualisierung des Allgemeinen: Theorieprobleme einer vergleichenden Universalgeschichte der Menschenrechte," in Jörn Rüsen, Historische Orientierung: über die Arbeit des Geschichtsbewußtseins, sich in der Zeit zurechtzufinden (Cologne, 1994), 168-187.
27. For the following cf. Rüsen, "Was ist Geschichtsbewuß tsein? Theoretische Überlegungen und heuristische Hinweise," in Historische Orientierung, 3-24.
28. Hao Chang, Chinese Search for Order and Meaning 1890-1911 (Berkeley, 1987), 7.
29. Johan Galtung, "Die 'Sinne' der Geschichte," in Historische Sinnbildung: Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien, ed. Klaus E. Müller and Jörn Rüsen (forthcoming, Reinbek, 1997);
30. Johan Galtung, "Six Cosmologies: An Impressionistic Presentation," in Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means (London, 1996), 211-222.
31. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
32. Kung-yang chuan, Ai-kung 14th year.
33. Cf. Mencius III B, 8.
34. Untersuchende, erzählende, didaktische und diskussive Darstellung: Droysen, Johann Gustav Historik, historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1977), I, 217-283, 445-450.
35. Cf. Jörn Rüsen, "Bemerkungen zu Droysens Typologie der Geschichtsschreibung," in Jörn Rüsen, Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur (Frankfurt, 1993), 267-275.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, in Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden (Munich, 1988), Bd. 1, 243-334, esp. 258-270.
37. (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, transl. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge, Eng., 1983], 83-100).
38. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 1-42.
39. Jörn Rüsen, "Die vier Typen des historischen Erzählens," in Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt, 1990), 153-230;
40. cf. Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory (Pretoria, 1993), 3-14.
41. Cf. Jörn Rüsen, "Historische Methode und religiöser Sinn: Vorüberlegungen zu einer Dialektik der Rationalisierung des historischen Denkens in der Moderne," in Geschichtsdiskurs, Bd. 2: Anfänge modernen historischen Denkens, ed. Wolfgang Küttler, Jörn Rüsen, and Ernst Schulin (Frankfurt/Main 1994), 344-377.
42. Meier, Die Entstehung der Historie, 251-306. Meier speaks of a "politically determined process of an entire rapture, a deep shift of measures" (254).
43. Jörn Rüsen et al., "Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbewußtsein von Abiturienten im Ruhrgebiet," in Geschichtsbewußtsein empirisch, ed. Bodo von Borries, Hans-Jürgen Pandel, and Jörn Rüsen (Pfaffenweiler, 1991), 286.
44. Cf. Chun-chieh Huang, "Historical Thinking in Classical Confucianism: Historical Argumentation from the Three Dynasties," in Time and Space in Chinese Culture, ed. Chun-chieh Huang and Erich Zürcher (Leiden, 1995), 76: "Chien originally meant 'mirror,' and mirror is that by which we examine ourselves, how we look to people, the representative of our 'conscience.' The character, chien, then turned later to mean 'lesson, norm, pattern,' without totally shedding the original meaning of normative mirroring."
45. This topos seems to be universal in all advanced civilizations. It is, for example, the basis for Ibn Khaldûn's (1332-1406) Book of Examples and Collection of Origins as well as for Ssu-ma Kuang's (1019-1086) Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government.
46. Jörn Rüsen, et al., "Geschichtsbewußtsein von Schülern und Studenten im internationalen und interkulturellen Vergleich," in Geschichtsbewußtsein im interkulturellen Vergleich: Zwei empirische Pilotstudien, ed. Bodo von Borries and Jörn Rüsen (Pfaffenweiler, 1994), 79-206.
47. Albert D'Haenens (Louvain la Neuve) once in a debate used the slogan "oralité, scribalité, electronalité" which I pick up here.
48. I have tried to conceptualize such a process in respect to the question of the universality of human rights and general issues of humankind, selfness, and otherness in Jörn Rüsen, "Die Individualisierung des Allgemeinen" and Jörn Rüsen, "Human Rights from the Perspective of a Universal History," in Human Rights and Cultural Diversity: Europe - Arabic-Islamic World - Africa - China, ed. Wolfgang Schmale (Frankfurt, 1993), 28-46;
49. Jörn Rüsen, "Vom Umgang mit den Anderen: Zum Stand der Menschenrechte heute," Internationale Schulbuchforschung 15 (1993), 167-178.
50. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
51. Concerning the fall of Nanking (1867), an already established literary pattern of suppressed memory was applied which articulated a weariness of looking back: "And I fear to look back, to read too carefully Yü Hsin's fu" (Stephen Owen, "Place: Meditation on the Past at Chin-ling," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 [1990], 417-457.)