Clues, margins, and monads:the micro-macro link in historical research

History and Theory

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 347-359

  Peltonen, Matti ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0038706006     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00172     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative," in his The Past and the Present Revisited (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 74-96. First published in Past &Present 85 (1979)
2. As paradigmatic examples of modernization theory in the field of historical studies, see Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
3. and W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960)
4. See, for instance, the reactions of Bernard Bailyn, Dominick LaCapra, or Charles Tilly. Bernard Bailyn, "The Challenge of Modern Historiography," American Historical Review 87 (1982), 1-24
5. Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
6. and Charles Tilly, "The Old New Social History and the New Old Social History," Review 7 (1984), 363-406
7. Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge. Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 93-113
8. Giovanni Levi, "Comportements, ressources, procès: avant la 'révolution' de la consommation," in Jeux d'échelles: La micro-analyse a ̀l'experience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 187-207
9. Giovanni Levi, "The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective," in Mikrogeschichte, Makrogeschichte: komplementär oder inkommensurabel?, ed. Jürgen Schlumbohm (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), 53-82
10. Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It," Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), 10-35
11. Edward Muir, "Observing Trifles," Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), vii-xxviii
12. Jacques Revel, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), 493-501
13. Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes," in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 81-118
14. Levi, "On Microhistory," 97-98.
15. For a more thorough treatment of this proposition, see Matti Peltonen, "Carlo Ginzburg and the New Microhistory," Suomen Antropologi 20 (1995), 2-12
16. Roger Chartier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History?," in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals &New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 32
17. LaCapra, History & Criticism, 45-69.
18. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley [1975] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
19. The characterizations of persons being excluded from the study of witch-crazes comes from H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1984), 102
20. and Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London: Paladin, 1976), 237.
21. Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Cambridge, Eng. : Polity Press. 1995), 79
22. Michel de Certeau, "Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer's Speech," in The Writing of History, 244-268
23. Roger Chartier, "Michel de Certeau: History, or Knowledge of the Other," in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 46
24. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press. 1991), 185-351
25. Paul Veyne, Writing History. Essay on Epistemology, transl. Mina Moore-Renvolucri [1971] (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984)
26. de Certeau, The Writing of History, 11.
27. Ahearne, Michel de Certeau, 35-36.
28. Fernand Braudel, On History, transl. Sarah Matthews [1969] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 203
29. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324, transl. Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1980), 354
30. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 [1981] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991)
31. English translation: The Arcades Project, transl. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999)
32. The exception is Hans Medick, who has mentioned "Walter Benjamins, Ernst Blochs und Theodor Adornos einphatische und philosophish-spekulativ überhöhte Herausgebung des Einzelnen, Besonderen und Konkreten in der Geschichte." Hans Medick, "Mikro-Histoire," in Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Histoire, ed. Schulze, 49
33. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989), 55
34. On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1988), 340
35. Jean Selz, "Benjamin in Ibiza," in ibid. , 356
36. Pierre Missac; Walter Benjamin's Passages, transl. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,), 44
37. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456.
38. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 48
39. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460, 461, and 476.
40. In the text, however, I use an older and more precise translation of this part of Benjamin's manuscript: Walter Benjamin, "N [Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progressl," transl. Leigh Hafray and Richard Sieburth, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 47,67,and 48
41. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-453.
42. Eric Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 547
43. There is, accordingly, a reluctance to elaborate the micro-macro link in this interesting work. In reference to Greenblatt's earlier work this element in his thinking has been recently criticized by Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 47-62
44. The other fatal assumption Solow refers to is the assumption of perfect competition, which is still common even in models trying to imitate the conditions of imperfect competition. Robert Solow, Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10
45. Charles Lemert, Sociology: After the Crisis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 163.
46. Nicos Mouzelis, Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies (London:Routledge, 1995), 155.
47. Levi, "On Microhistory"; Ginzburg, "Microhistory."
48. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 388-392,462-475.
49. John H. Elliott, National and Comparative History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). It is interesting to observe that even such a dedicated opponent of microhistory as Elliott proposes a microhistorical research strategy that comes close to Braudel's and de Certeau's idea of marginal areas or events as epistemologically critical
50. See Elliott, National and Comparative History, 27, where he says that "But in so far as colonies do tend to express and preserve metropolitan customs and values in a distilled and often rarefied form, a comparative study of colonial societies offers another, and potentially promising, way of approaching the question of distinctive collective identities and identity formations. "
51. Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). "When I began, in the 1980s, researching the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, it was because I was attracted by the immense amount of source material this major disaster generated, which revealed the structures and dynamics of everyday life, social inequality, politics and administration, mentalities and behavior, in a major European city. These are precisely the fine details which remain concealed from the historian's view in more normal times." For Evans's criticism of microhistory
52. see his In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), 144
53. Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, N. H.: Montgomery Endowment, Dartmouth College, 1994), 31
54. Birgitta Odén, Leda vid livet: Fyra mikrohistoriska essäer om självmordets historia (Lund: Historiska Media, 1998), 7.