Beyond comparison: Histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity

History and Theory

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 30-50

  Werner, Michael ^a   Zimmermann, Bénédicte ^a  

^a ÉCOLE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547426851     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00347.x     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. For a presentation of the problematic in a German research field, see Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte: Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwö rter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).
2. The literature in this area is flourishing. For a recent overview, refer to the dossier "Une histoire à l'échelle globale" in Annales HSS 56:1 (2001), 3-123.
3. For an example of a case study, see Daniel Dubuisson, L'Occident et la religion: Mythes, science et idéologie (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1998).
4. On this type of usage, see in particular Michael Werner, "Le prisme franco-allemand: à propos d'une histoire croisée des disciplines littéraires," in Entre Locarno et Vichy: Les relations culturelles franco-allemandes dans les années 1930, ed. Hans Manfred Bock, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, and Michel Trebitsch (Paris: CNRS-Editions, 1993), I, 303-316;
5. Le travail et la nation: Histoire croisée de la France et de l'Allemagne, ed. Bénédicte Zimmermann, Claude Didry, and Peter Wagner (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1999).
6. For a more complete presentation of the concept of histoire croisée applied to problems of transnational history, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, "Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002), 607-636.
7. Our interest in histoire croisée first arose through our own practice of comparative methods and transfer studies. The limits that this practice came up against for certain objects of study were the starting point for this reflection. That is why we prefer to discuss histoire croisée in relation to comparative history and transfer studies, while considering "connected," "shared," and "entangled" histories more as alternatives to these first two approaches, in the same manner as histoire croisée, even if each of them has particularities. On Connected History, see The Making of the Modern World: Connected Histories, Divergent Paths (1500 to the Present), ed. Robert W. Strayer (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989);
8. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies 31:3 (1997), 735-762;
9. Serge Gruzinski, "Les mondes mêlés de la Monarchie catholique et autres 'connected histories'," Annales HSS 56:1 (2001), 85-117.
10. The expression "shared history" was originally used to designate the shared history of different ethnic groups and was then extended to the history of gender, before being used in the discussion of "post-colonial studies." See Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
11. as well as Stewart Hall, "When was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit," in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996).
12. For the concept of Entangled History, see Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2002)
13. as well as Shalini Randeria, "Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India," in Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, ed. Yehuda Elkana et al. (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2002), 284-311.
14. See, in particular, Michel Espagne, "Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle," Genèses 17 (1994), 112-121;
15. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996);
16. Christophe Charle, "L'histoire comparée des intellectuels en Europe: Quelques points de méthode et propositions de recherche," in Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels, ed. Michel Trebitsch and Marie-Christine Granjon (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1998), 39-59;
17. Johannes Paulmann, "Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansàtze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts," Historische Zeitschrift 3 (1998), 649-685;
18. Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999);
19. Matthias Middell, "Kulturtransfer und historische Komparatistik, Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis," Comparativ 10 (2000), 7-41;
20. Michael Werner, "Comparaison et raison," Cahiers d'études germaniques 41 (2001), 9-18;
21. Gabriele Lingelbach, "Erträge und Grenzen zweier Ansätze: Kulturtransfer und Vergleich am Beispiel der französischen und amerikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft während des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 333-359.
22. Histoire croisée is part of a long-standing debate on the relationship between history and social sciences. The debate was initiated at the start of the last century in France by Simiand in "Méthode historique et science sociale," Revue de synthèse historique (1903), 1-22 and 129-157.
23. For more recent steps in the debate, see the dossier "Histoire et sciences sociales," Annales ESC 38:6 (1983)
24. and the special edition devoted to the "critical turn" (Annales ESC 44:6 [1989]);
25. Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique: L'espace non-poppérien du raisonnement naturel (Paris: Nathan, 1991);
26. and L'historicité de l'action publique, ed. Pascale Laborier and Danny Trom (Paris, PUF [Collection Curapp], 2003).
27. On recent French discussions concerning comparison, see in particular Stratégies de la comparaison internationale, ed. Michel Lallement and Jan Spurk (Paris: CNRS-Editions, 2003);
28. Marcel Detienne, Comparer l'incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000);
29. Qui veut prendre la parole, ed. Marcel Detienne (Le genre humain) (Paris: Seuil, 2003);
30. the dossier in Annales introduced by Lucette Valensi, "L'exercice de la comparaison au plus proche, à distance: le cas des sociétés plurielles," Annales HSS 57:1 (2002), 27-30;
31. the collective Franco-American work on repertoires of evaluation coordinated by Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot, Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States, ed. Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
32. as well as Patrick Hassenteufel, "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle: Remarques à propos d'expériences de comparaisons européennes," in Curapp, Les méthodes au concret: Démarches, formes de l'expérience et terrains d'investigation en science politique (Paris, PUF [Collection Curapp], 2000), 105-124.
33. On comparison of civilizations, see Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich, 79-92
34. as well as Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). Analogous observations may of course be made with respect to the national and regional levels.
35. For example, on distortions about the notion "Privatdozent" in the history of higher education systems, see Frank Schultheiss, "Un inconscient universitaire fait homme: le Privatdozent," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 135 (2000), 58-62.
36. It should be pointed out that Marc Bloch, in his programmatic lecture at the Oslo Congress, had already underscored the necessity of historicizing the categories of analysis. The differences arising in research on feudalism due to the use of the French term tenancier and the German term Höriger, in his view, offer the comparativist an enlightening area of study. Marc Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes," Revue de synthèse historique 4 (1928)
37. reprinted in Marc Bloch, Mélanges historiques I (Paris: Editions de l'EHESS, 1963), 16-40, especially 38ff.
38. In his introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Bergen and Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969), 9-38, Fredrik Barth had already underscored the necessity of taking into account the interaction at the borders from which spread the distinctive traits of the entities under study - here "ethnic groups." But while assigning to them a determinative role, Barth limits the transformational effects of interactions to the processes of definition and the characteristics of the groups, without calling into question the cohesion of the group or the dichotomizing function of the borders. Although Barth defines ethnicity at the borders, he still conceives of it as structured by the principles of sameness and difference.
39. Jean-Claude Passeron has addressed them as difficulties of the "sociological reasoning" caught between the two extremes of experimentation and historicization. See Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique, esp. 57-88.
40. For a presentation of the transfer approach, see Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, "La construction d'une référence culturelle allemande en France, genèse et histoire," Annales ESC 42:4 (1987), 969-992.
41. For additional work contributed through the study of Germano-British transfers, see Aneignung und Abwehr: Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann, and Willibald Steinmetz (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998);
42. for the relationships between America and Europe, see Transferts culturels et métissages: Amérique / Europe (XVIe-XXe siècles)/Cultural Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years of Interculturation, ed. Laurier Turgeon, Denys Delâge, and Réal Ouellet (Sainte-Foy: Les presses de l'université Laval, 1996).
43. For these various examples, see in the order listed Jean-Yves Grenier and Bernard Lepetit, "L'expérience historique: A propos de C.-E. Labrousse," Annales ESC 44:6 (1989), 1337-1360;
44. "Le paysage en France et en Allemagne autour de 1800," ed. Élisabeth Décultot and Christian Helmreich, Revue germanique internationale 7 (1997);
45. the special section compiled by Frédéric Barbier, "Le commerce culturel entre les nations," Revue de synthèse 1:2 (1988)
46. as well as Helga Jeanblanc, Des Allemands dans l'industrie et le commerce du livre à Paris (1811-1870) (Paris: CNRS-Editions), 1994;
47. and Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).
48. See Philologiques IV: Transferts culturels triangulaires France - Allemagne - Russie, ed. Katia Dimitriéva and Michel Espagne (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1996).
49. It is only by extension that the term takes on the meaning "to meet in passing, esp. from opposite directions." Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield MA: Merriam-Webster, 1983), p. 309.
50. On the philosophical foundations of a discussion on transformations brought about by coming into contact with the Other, see in particular Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber [1965] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
51. On intermixing, see Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999), especially 33-57.
52. See, for instance, the research by Sebastian Conrad on the making of Japanese history through the confluence between local tradition and importation of European national historiography. Sebastian Conrad, "La constitution de l'histoire japonaise: Histoire comparée, transferts, interactions transnationales," in Werner and Zimmermann, ed., De la comparaison à l'histoire croisée, 53-72.
53. "National" historiographies generated during the period of colonialism may likewise be analyzed in terms of intercrossing. See, for example, Romila Thapar, "La quête d'une tradition historique: l'Inde ancienne," Annales HSS 53:2 (1998), 347-359.
54. This is true of the study carried out by Kapil Raj on the effects of the intercrossing between Indian and English methods in the birth of British cartography at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which thus no longer appears as an authentically "English" creation, but as the result of an interaction between two distinct traditions that mutually nourished one another. Kapil Raj, "Connexions, croisements, circulations: Le détour de la cartographie britannique par l'Inde, xvme- xIxe siècles," in Werner and Zimmermann, ed., De la comparaison à l'histoire croisée, 73-98.
55. The expression "point of view" is used here not in a subjective sense, but in the literal meaning of point of observation that determines an angle of view. Max Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 81ff.
56. Pierre Bourdieu placed great emphasis on this point in his work as a whole. See in particular Choses dites (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), 155ff.
57. In the sense used by Anthony Giddens, in New Rules of Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1974).
58. This question has been treated in particular by Jocelyne Dakhlia, '"La culture nébuleuse' ou l'Islam à l'épreuve de la comparaison," Annales HSS 56 :6 (2001), 1177-1199, here 1186ff.
59. This problem is particularly acute in the social sciences where inquiries are subject to an ongoing tension between procedures designed to be objective and descriptive, on the one hand, and a normative and prescriptive dimension, on the other, resulting from the fact that the researcher is also a social being. However, many studies have shown that this problem also exists in the hard sciences. See, in particular, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage, 1979);
60. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996);
61. Dominique Pestre, "Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences: Nouvelles définitions, nouveaux objets, nouvelles pratiques," Annales HSS 3 (1995), 487-522, with a description of the state of research and numerous bibliographical references.
62. For the positioning of the multiscopique approach in relation to microstoria, see, in particular, Paul-André Rosental, "Construire le macro par le micro: Fredrik Barth et la microstoria," in Jeux d'échelles: La micro-analyse à l'expérience, dir. Jacques Revel (Paris, Editions de l'EHESS/ Gallimard/Seuil, 1996), 141-159.
63. See, in particular, Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, "La micro-histoire," Le débat, no. 17 (1989), 133-136;
64. Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: La carrière d'un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle [1985] (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
65. Maurizio Gribaudi, "Échelle, pertinence, configuration," in Jeux d'échelles, 113-139.
66. Jacques Revel, "Micro-analyse et construction du social," in Jeux d'échelles, 15-36, here 26.
67. Histoire du quotidien, ed. Alf Lütdke [1989] (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1994);
68. Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie, ed. Winfried Schulze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994);
69. Mikrogeschichte Makrogeschichte: komplementar oder inkommensurabel?, ed. Jürgen Schlumbohm (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999).
70. Bénédicte Zimmermann, La constitution du chömage en Allemagne: Entre professions et territoires (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2001).
71. Martina Löw underlines in her sociology of space this relational and labile dimension of spaces composed of objects and individuals that move beyond the systems of geographical, institutional, political, economic and social coordinates that aim to stabilize spaces by establishing boundaries. Martina Low, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).
72. For additional developments on the relationships between histoire croisée and the transnational dimension, see Werner and Zimmermann, "Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung," 628ff.
73. For an example of such work on categories, see, in particular, L'enquête sur les categories: De Durkheim à Sacks, ed. Bernard Fradin, Louis Quéré, and Jean Widmer (Raisons pratiques, 5) (Paris: Editions de l'EHESS, 1994);
74. see also the special section "Hommage à Bernard Lepetit: L'usage des catégories," Annales 52:5 (1997), 963-1038.
75. See Danny Trom, "La production politique du paysage: Éléments pour une interprétation des pratiques ordinaires de patrimonialisation de la nature en Allemagne et en France" (Doctoral thesis, Institut d'études politiques, Paris, 1996).
76. Alain Desrosières accounts for these generalization procedures in the case of statistic categorization. Alain Desrosières, La politique des grands nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).
77. For a case study, see also Danny Trom and Bénédicte Zimmermann, "Cadres et institution des problèmes publics: les cas du chömage et du paysage," in Les formes de l'action collective: Mobilisation dans des arènes publiques, ed. Daniel Cefaï and Danny Trom (Raisons pratiques, 12) (Paris: Editions de l'EHESS, 2001), 281-315.
78. See Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);
79. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (1992), 81-128;
80. for the cultural sciences, see Michael Lackner and Michael Werner, Der Cultural Turn in den Humamvissenschafteu: Area Studies im Auf oder Abwind des Kulturalismus? (Bad Homburg, Werner Reimers Stiftung, 1999).
81. See Alban Bensa, "De la micro-histoire vers une anthropologie critique," in Revel, ed., Jeux d'échelles, 37-70;
82. Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text: Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation, ed. Eberhard Berg and Martin Fuchs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993);
83. Danny Trom, "Situationnisme méthodologique et histoire: une approche par induction triangulaire," in Laborier and Trom, ed., L'historicité de l'action publique.
84. For a recent discussion of the question, see Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), passim.
85. Nicolas Mariot and Jay Rowell, "Une comparaison asymétrique: Visites de souveraineté et construction nationale en France et en Allemagne à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale," in Werner and Zimmermann, ed., De la comparaison à l'histoire croisée, 181-211.
86. Passeron (Le raisonnement sociologique, esp. 85-88 and 368-370) has gone furthest in the analysis of the challenge posed by the construction of the context, in particular with respect to the comparative method, without, however, advancing concrete methodological proposals. Histoire croisée, for its part, proposes to link two levels of construction of context, that of the analytical operations carried out by the researcher and that of the situations of action analyzed.
87. Under a procedure closed to the combinative ethnography founded by Isabelle Baszanger and Nicolas Dodier on the establishment of an "ethnographic jurisprudence." Isabelle Baszanger and Nicolas Dodier, "Totalisation et altérité dans l'enquête ethnographique," Revue française de sociologie 38 (1997), 37-66.
88. For an attempt at a transposition into history, see Zimmermann, La constitution du chômage. On the relation between case study and generalization, see Penser par cas, ed. Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (Paris: EHESS, 2005)
89. See Concerts et publics: Mutations de la vie musicale 1789-1914: France, Allemagne, Grande-Bretagne, ed. Hans-Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2002).
90. See, in particular, on this point, Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Eng: Polity Press, 1984).
91. For a reinterpretation of the notion of structure in terms of schemas and resources, and thoughts on its integration into a theory of action and a problematic of change, see William H. Sewell, "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98:1 (1992), 1-29.
92. For an illustration of this dual grounding, see Paul-André Rosental, L'intelligence démographique: Sciences et politiques des populations en France (1930-1960) (Paris, Odile Jacob, 2003).
93. For the nineteenth century, the main reference remains Droysen's Historik, as well as Dilthey's project for a critique of historical reason. For more recent debates on reflexivity in the social sciences and its relationship to theories of modernity, see, in particular, Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990);
94. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization (Oxford, Polity Press, 1994).
95. On the epistemological implications of this question, see Alexandre Eseudier, "Epistémologies croisées? L'impossible lecture des théoriciens allemands de l'histoire en France autour de 1900," in Werner and Zimmermann, De la comparaison à l'histoire croisée, ed., 139-177.
96. For a presentation of the problem in the context of a German discussion, see Otto Gerhard Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996).
97. On the problem of historical relativism, see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982);
98. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,1988), 349ff.
99. Finally, on the history of the idea of historical relativity, see Reinhart Koselleck, "Geschichte," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972-1997), vol. 2 (1979), 647-717, here 695-701
100. and Koselleck, L'expérience de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997), 75-81.
101. The grounding in the dynamic of social activities makes it possible to place histoire croisée within the debate over constructionism. On the one hand, all of the objects of histoire croisée, as well as the categories capable of describing them and the problematics to which they relate, are assumed to be socially constructed. But, on the other hand, this does not mean that they are all placed on the same level and that their respective positions are irrelevant. Quite to the contrary, we advance the hypothesis that the configuration of the intercrossing and the intellectual operation corresponding thereto lead to a logic that produces meaning on the basis of semantic interactions between situated positions. Viewed from this perspective, intercrossing appears as a social construction that produces specific forms of knowledge. See Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially 36-59.