Studies of the history of knowledge should not be imagined as so many productions of a scholarly consensus. There are of course many areas of agreement, but there are also areas of conflict. An obvious example, discussed in Chapter 2, is the question of ‘orientalism’, raised by Edward Said and taken up by both supporters and critics of his central argument. As in the case of history in general, it is impossible to study the history of knowledge without encountering problems; old problems such as internal versus external approaches, change versus continuity, anachronism and relativism, and newer ones such as triumphalism and constructivism. The purpose of this chapter is not to offer simple solutions to complex problems, but to encourage awareness of the decisions, often implicit, that underlie different studies in this field.
A problem that has already surfaced more than once in this book is the problem of the relation between knowledge and society, a problem posed by Marx and Mannheim and debated ever since. One form that it takes is that of choice between two approaches to the history of knowledge. On one side, we find the ‘internal’ approach that explains change in an order of knowledge in terms of growth or decline from within; on the other side, the ‘external’ approach that links change within a knowledge order to change in the world outside it. In the case of the history of knowledge, one approach would explain the fragmentation of knowledge by the accumulation of information, while the other would view it as part of the increasing division of labour. ‘Internalists’ find the external approach insensitive, while ‘externalists’ consider that the internal approach is too narrow.
In this case the problem might be resolved by suggesting that both approaches are necessary, that it is possible, indeed necessary to reconcile them, difficult as this reconciliation may be in practice. On the other hand, other forms of the knowledge and society problem cannot be dismissed so easily. The big question is whether the shape of a given society determines or simply influences the knowledges to be found in it. This question raises a number of others in its turn. What counts as a ‘society’? For example, is Britain in the early twenty-first century one society or many? Does ‘society’ mean the social structure, the division into genders, classes and occupations, or does it include the economic and political systems as well? In the wake of the second wave of the sociology of knowledge, we also need to ask whether it is ‘culture’ (including fundamental values) rather than society that shapes knowledge in a particular place and time. There is no simple answer to any of these questions, but it would be unwise, to say the least, to embark upon a history of knowledge without bearing them in mind.
As in history in general, the relative importance of change and continuity in the history of knowledge continues to provoke debate. It is easy to say that the truth lies between the two extremes, but more difficult to be specific and to differentiate between places, periods and domains. A classic discussion of the problem in the history of science is Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).1 Writing against what he called ‘the concept of development-by-accumulation’ underlying most earlier histories of science, Thomas Kuhn argued instead for the importance of recurrent revolutions. Each revolution, so he argued, goes through a series of stages. The first stage is the awareness of ‘anomaly’, in other words the recognition that some information is inconsistent with currently accepted interpretations of the natural world, interpretations that Kuhn described as the ‘paradigms’ or models of ‘normal science’ in a given place and time. The second stage is that of the ‘crisis’ of the paradigm, as anomalies accumulate. The third stage is the ‘revolution’, in other words the breakthrough to a new paradigm, which when accepted becomes a new form of normal science, to be challenged in its turn by further anomalies.
In France, a critique of the assumption of continuity had been launched a generation earlier than Kuhn by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard, together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor as director of an institute for the history of science in Paris, opposed the idea of the gradual, continuous, cumulative evolution of science, replacing it with the idea of breaks or ‘ruptures’. A break was a break-through, the removal of what Bachelard called an ‘epistemological obstacle’, such as the assumption that things were animate.2
Following (paradoxically enough) the tradition established by Bachelard and Canguilhem, Michel Foucault also criticized the emphasis on continuity in histories of knowledge. In its place he advocated what he called an ‘archaeology of knowledge’, penetrating below the surface, excavating intellectual strata and emphasizing the sharp breaks in different periods between what he called ‘discourses’ or more generally the ‘episteme’.3 Like Kuhn, Foucault thought in terms of revolution rather than evolution (hence his use of the metaphor of ‘birth’, as in the case of his book The Birth of the Clinic).
In this debate over the relative importance of evolution and revolution, which party has won? There is of course no reason to believe that all change in orders of knowledge or in academic disciplines is of the same type. All the same, it is worth adding that when they are examined in more and more concrete detail, some intellectual revolutions have come to appear less and less revolutionary, notably the famous scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The American historian Steven Shapin began his book on the subject with the sentence ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it’, going on to question the existence of ‘a coherent, cataclysmic and climactic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world and how they secured proper knowledge of that world’, replacing it with the idea of a plurality of events spread over generations.4
A similar point might be made about the nineteenth-century ‘revolution’ in historical thought associated with Leopold von Ranke. Some historians, following Thomas Kuhn, have written about Ranke's establishment of a new historical ‘paradigm’.5 Ranke was indeed a great historian and one who made a great impact on what was becoming a profession, first in Germany and then elsewhere. His critique of earlier historians, for overemphasizing literary sources such as chronicles and paying insufficient attention to the documents to be found in national and other archives, scored some palpable hits. All the same, Ranke was far from the first historian to work in archives and, ironically enough, the archival sources he is best known for exploiting, the reports of Venetian ambassadors, originally addressed to the Senate of the Republic, were not ‘pure’ documents but literary productions following rhetorical conventions. Once again, what looks from a distance like a sudden revolution appears in close-up to be part of a more gradual process.
If the close examination of revolutions in knowledge reveals continuities, the reverse is also the case, as a number of studies of tradition, some of them already discussed in Chapter 2, suggest. Although the Latin word traditio literally means what is handed down, it would be a mistake, as many scholars have pointed out, to imagine that what is passed from one generation to another remains unchanged. Since the world is always on the move, it can even be argued that if a tradition remained the same it would be different, because its context had altered. For this reason, the Dutch Indologist Jan Heesterman wrote about what he called ‘the inner conflict of traditions’. Hence the need to reconstruct them, or even to invent new ones, as well as the attempt to disguise change by claiming that a given institution was, as the Catholic Church asserted at the time of the Reformation, semper eadem (‘always the same’).6
One consequence of disguising change within tradition is to encourage anachronistic interpretations of the past. Among historians, anachronism is generally considered a mortal sin, perhaps the mortal sin par excellence, since it signifies unawareness of change, the historian's speciality.
All the same, some distinguished historians deliberately employ anachronistic phrases. Their point, whether explicit or implicit, is that historians are translators from the culture of the past into that of the present, and that like translators between languages they face the difficult choice between fidelity to the culture they are translating from and intelligibility to the culture they are translating into. If they place the emphasis on fidelity, translators adopt the strategy of ‘foreignization’, leaving technical terms in the original language, writing about seventeenth-century ‘natural philosophy’ rather than ‘science’, Chinese shen-shi rather than ‘scholar-gentry’, Ottoman medreses or Arab madrasas rather than ‘mosque schools’, German Bildung rather than ‘general education’ and so on.7
On the other hand, if they place the emphasis on intelligibility, translators choose the strategy of ‘domestication’, using familiar modern Western terms such as ‘university’, ‘science’ and so on to refer to institutions or practices in places or periods in which these concepts did not exist, although knowledge was transmitted and nature was investigated. Domestication brings the reader closer to the past, at the price of possible confusions between past and present, while foreignization preserves the uniqueness of past cultures at the price of making them seem remote.
As a case-study of the problem we might take the concept of the ‘intellectual’. As we saw in Chapter 2, the term came into use in France at the end of the nineteenth century in the context of the notorious ‘Dreyfus Affair’. This moment, in which some writers, scientists and scholars participated in a public debate, has been described as the moment of ‘the birth of the intellectual’. The term intellectuel was indeed coined in French at this time and soon spread to other languages such as Italian, Spanish and English.8 Strictly speaking, then, it is anachronistic to use the term ‘intellectual’ to refer to knowledgeable people living in a period before it was coined, although it is difficult not to think of Voltaire in this way, since he was not only what his contemporaries called a ‘man of letters’ but also an individual as deeply involved in public, political controversies as (say) Zola in the nineteenth century or Sartre in the twentieth.
Some leading historians would go further in this direction. In a characteristically bold essay, published early in his long career, the great French medievalist Jacques Le Goff presented the scholastic philosophers of the twelfth and thirteen centuries, known at the time as philosophi or magistri, as ‘intellectuals’. A more recent study of this intellectual world by Jacques Verger, although respectful to Le Goff, prefers what the author calls the more ‘neutral’ modern phrase, gens de savoir (‘knowledgeable people’). On the other hand, some contributors to a recent collection of essays on early medieval ‘lay intellectuals’ defend their use of the term on the grounds that their concern is with scholars who – like Zola or Sartre – were involved in public debates.9
It is certainly convenient to have a general term that facilitates comparisons between the Chinese shen-shi, the ‘ulema of the Muslim world (above, Chapter 1), Indian pandits, the Russian intelligentsia and so on. The problem is that the use of a general term irons out differences between the social role of knowledgeable people in these different cultures. The practice of alternation between the general term and the specific ones offers a pragmatic solution, but the problem of what is lost in translation remains. Behind it looms a still greater problem, that of the ‘commensurability’ or ‘incommensurability’ of concepts.10 This in turn raises the spectre of relativism.
It is impossible to go very far in the study of knowledge, whether in space, time or indeed within a given society, without encountering a variety of traditions. Confronted with this variety, historians face a difficult choice, whether to assert (or at least to assume) the superiority of a single tradition, usually the Western scientific tradition, thus incurring the charge of ethnocentrism, or to treat all claims to knowledge as equal, incurring the charge of relativism or even nihilism. Since a number of scholars studying what they call knowledges in the plural have recently opted for the second strategy, this section focuses on the problems raised by that choice.
Karl Mannheim's famous discussion of situated knowledge, discussed earlier, implied a kind of relativism, although Mannheim himself distinguished what he called ‘relationism’, emphasizing the way in which beliefs are ‘bound’ to a particular place, time and social group, from what he called ‘a philosophical relativism’ that denies the validity of any distinction between truth and falsehood. This distinction has incurred some criticism.11
On the other side, Mannheim has been criticized, notably by the sociologist of science David Bloor, for a failure of nerve in exempting the natural sciences from his account of situated knowledge. Ludwik Fleck, whose work was discussed in Chapter 2, had already made the same criticism of Durkheim, another believer in what has been called the ‘sociological immunity’ of science. Thomas Kuhn responded to the challenge by arguing that different scientific theories are the product of what he called ‘incommensurable ways of seeing the world’, while Bloor himself put forward what he called a ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of science, arguing that for sociologists knowledge is whatever is taken to be knowledge in a given milieu or culture.12
Anthropologists too usually take this position, linked to the idea of the incommensurablity not of theories but of whole cultures. As Fredrik Barth puts it, ‘We want to be able to … exercise the relativism whereby all of the traditions, bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing practiced by people are recognized for our comparative and analytic purposes as coeval and sustainable, each on its own premises.’13 As we have seen, some anthropologists, putting the denial of ‘sociological immunity’ into practice, have carried out ‘fieldwork’ in laboratories, for instance, in order to observe modern Western scientific knowledge in the making.14 In complementary fashion, other anthropologists place Western science and ethno-science (otherwise known as ‘indigenous knowledge’) on the same footing in order to view what they call ‘a more naked science’, emphasizing similarities rather than differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.15
At this point it may be useful to distinguish the philosopher's problem of relativism from that of the historian. Philosophers continue to disagree about the way to solve the problem of relativism, or better, relativisms in the plural – moral, cognitive, subjective and so on. For historians, on the other hand, the pressing problem is a pragmatic one. To understand past knowledge systems it is not necessary to assert that they are equally effective in understanding the world. On the other hand, we do need to treat them on equal terms. Attitudes that appear to us to be naive or credulous – the belief in the efficacy of witchcraft, for instance – should not be judged by our standards but related to the culture of which they formed a part, the local norms, including the standards of verification current in a given place and time. Documents that appear to be inaccurate, like the Inuit maps discussed in Chapter 3, may simply reveal a different understanding of space from our own. The essential point is to take seriously the knowledges and the intellectual categories of other cultures, rather than viewing them from a position of superiority as so many errors or ‘superstitions’.
The history of knowledge is often written as the history of success, of ever-increasing information, knowledge and understanding. There have certainly been many triumphs, most obviously the discoveries and theories associated with Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and other scientists, or in the humanities the more gradual development of textual criticism, comparative linguistics, the decoding of dead languages and so on. More generally, it has been argued that the history of humanity is the history of ‘collective learning’ in which knowledge has accumulated and has been shared more and more widely as different groups and cultures have encountered one another.16
On the other hand, we should remember that knowledge can be lost as well as gained, if knowledgeable people die without passing on what they have learned or if archives and libraries go up in flames. The burning of the library of Alexandria, the greatest library of classical antiquity, offers a notorious example of this process, like the ‘burning of books and burial of scholars’ in 213 BCE by order of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.
In some places and at some moments, such as the decline of the Roman Empire at the time of the invasions of the so-called ‘barbarians’, a great deal of what had been known in the ancient world was lost as a result of the devaluation of ‘pagan’ knowledge in the Christian world as well as the decline or destruction of its former centres. Among the losses was the knowledge of Greek, and with it other kinds of knowledge, including medical knowledge.17
Although knowledge, or even learning, is not confined to books, the small numbers of texts in circulation in early medieval Europe are likely to shock modern readers. We need to imagine a world in which a relatively large library contained only four hundred books or even fewer. In the eighth century, the historian Bede, who worked in a monastery in Northumbria, was privileged, since he had access to more than three hundred books. In the ninth century, the library of the monastery of Reichenau contained 415 books, and that of St Gall, 395. In his famous study of the Middle Ages, Richard Southern tells the story of the correspondence between Raginbold of Cologne and Radolf of Liège, c.1025, in which they discussed the ideas of the late classical scholar Boethius but were unable to understand what he meant by the ‘interior angles’ of a triangle, ‘a forcible reminder’, as Southern says, ‘of the vast scientific ignorance with which the age was faced’.18
Collectively, we now know much more than Raginbold and Radolf, indeed more than Boethius and Aristotle. However, this increase comes at a price. Some scholars speak of ‘information overload’, in other words the accumulation of ‘raw’ data faster than it can be processed and turned into knowledge. Overload was already the subject of complaint in the sixteenth century, soon after the spread of printed books.19 The problem has become increasingly acute in our time, with the ‘explosion’ of information discussed earlier.
In any case, even if humanity as a whole knows more today than at any time in the past, we cannot say the same about individual humans. Our memories have not improved and we do not study for longer hours than our predecessors, so that if we know some things that they did not, the reverse is also the case. Consequently, histories of knowledge need to include ignorance, obstacles to knowledge and conflicts between knowledges, sometimes ending in the collective rejection of what had been believed to be knowledge, as in the cases of alchemy, phrenology and so on.20
Historians, like scientists, long viewed knowledge of the world as ‘an assemblage of accurate representations’.21 As in the case of the gradual accumulation of knowledge, discussed above, this view was opposed by Bachelard, Kuhn and Foucault. Bachelard, for instance, claimed that ‘Nothing is given. Everything is constructed.’ This position has come to be described as ‘constructivist epistemology’, with the construction sometimes qualified as either social or cultural. It is part of the trend that the French historian Roger Chartier has described as the shift ‘from the social history of culture to the cultural history of society’.22
As has often been the case in histories of knowledge, it is the scholars working on the history of the natural sciences who first exemplified this shift from what Jan Golinski has called a view of scientific knowledge as ‘the revelation of a pre-given order of nature’ to a view of it as ‘a human product made with locally situated cultural and material resources’. Golinski focuses on the problem of moving from experiments conducted by particular people in particular places, ‘the local culture of physics laboratories’ for instance, to scientific laws of supposedly general validity. The paradox of universal knowledge being produced in specific environments has inspired recent studies in the geography of knowledge, examining regions, networks, botanical gardens and so on.23
In the social sciences, Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the way in which the social position of sociologists affects their perception of the societies that they study.24 In the humanities too the ‘constructivists’, as it is convenient to call them, have drawn attention to the active role of discoverers (whether they are conscious of this or not) in the creation of the phenomena that they believe they have discovered. They impose categories on what they observe and on occasion at least, especially when the discoverers are in a position of power, these categories come to seem natural, even among the people observed.
Again, scholars often find what they expect or want to find or view the social world through the tinted spectacles of intellectual paradigms, not to mention less sophisticated stereotypes such as (for Westerners) the passive or lazy ‘oriental’. Western historians, for example, familiar with the idea of the feudal system, ‘discovered’ feudalism in India and Japan, impressed as they were by specific similarities and passing over the important differences between these regimes.
Constructivism was encouraged, indeed it was put on the intellectual map, by two ethnographies of scientists at work, Laboratory Life (1979) by Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar, subtitled ‘the construction of scientific facts’, and The Manufacture of Knowledge (1981) by Karin Knorr-Cetina. For a time, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘invention’ became a favourite term in the titles of books, as in the case of studies of the invention of Africa, Spain, Scotland and, most memorable for historians, The Invention of Tradition.25
The reaction against simplistic assumptions of ‘discovery’ and ‘objectivity’ was a salutary one, but – as is often the case in the history of scholarship – the pendulum swung from one extreme to another. Today, it seems to have settled somewhere in the middle. This middle position has much to be said for it. Invention out of nothing is as implausible as a simple uncovering of what was always there. Taking the term ‘construction’ somewhat more literally than many of its users have done, we might pay attention to the raw materials used in the building. We might also speak and think in terms of ‘reconstruction’.
Returning to the example of the British in India, discussed in Chapter 2, they neither discovered nor invented the caste system, but they reconstructed it. As Nicholas Dirks suggests, ‘caste, as we know it today, is not some unchanged survival of ancient India’, but ‘the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule’.26 The British may have misinterpreted the Indian social system, but they had the power to make their misinterpretation become the new reality. Something similar may have occurred in England after 1066, when the Norman conquerors, uninterested in the more complex social distinctions to be found in Anglo-Saxon society, imposed a simple division between free peasants and serfs.
In historical writing as in sociology and anthropology there has been a long debate over the relative importance of social structures or systems and that of individual agents, or actors. The history of knowledge is no exception here.
On one side, Fredrik Barth's anthropology of knowledge emphasizes agency, ‘the knowers’ and ‘the acts of the knowers’ – the people who hold, learn, produce and apply knowledge in their various activities and lives. On the other, Bourdieu's Homo academicus, discussed in an earlier chapter, sustained with his usual brilliance an argument for the primacy of what we referred to in Chapter 2 as ‘orders of knowledge’, or as Bourdieu preferred to say, of positions in the academic ‘field’ and the inheritance of cultural capital.27
All the same, it might be argued that the career of Bourdieu himself, the son of a rural postman in the Southwest who became a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, suggests the possibility of exceptions to his rules. As in the case of other dichotomies discussed in this chapter, a position somewhere in the middle is to be recommended, as a vantage point from which to view both the insights and the limitations of the two opposites.
From a social point of view, a system of knowledge includes the roles available for individuals to perform, the criteria for a good performance, and the way in which different kinds of knowledge are transmitted. It may be imagined as a network of opportunities and constraints, opportunities and constraints that are not always visible to the agents. Although this proposition would not be easy to test, it might be argued that successful agents in a given culture of knowledge are the ones whose abilities best fit the system. On the other hand, different systems offer more or less space for individual agents to do things their own way, just as they offer more or less space for innovation.
Take the case, or more exactly the different cases (since the regime in Poland, for instance, was less rigid than that of East Germany), of the academic systems in the Communist states of East-Central and Eastern Europe in the age of the Cold War. The constraints of the ‘party line’ were obvious enough to both insiders and outsiders. All the same, some creative individual academics were able not only to survive in the system, in spite of the obstacles to the careers of nonconformists, but also to produce work that won them respect in other countries, not only in the natural sciences, where there was less political interference with research, but in the humanities as well. In the USSR, for instance, the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the folklorist Vladimir Propp, the semiologist Yuri Lotman and the historian Aron Gurevich were all able to publish work of lasting value, recognized both unofficially at home and in public abroad. Even systems of knowledge that appear to outsiders to offer agents no room to manoeuvre have such spaces, just as systems that appear to offer great freedom may include constraints.
It may seem odd to be discussing gender here, since the relative roles of men and women in the history of knowledge might be better regarded as a topic than as a problem. However, the topic certainly raises problems, beginning with the fact that little attention was paid to the place of women in the story until quite recently. This inattention may be explained by the dominance of men in the historical profession as well as by the relative ‘invisibility’ of women in the past.
The history of gendered knowledges illustrates some of the themes discussed in the preceding section on system and agency, since for a long time the dominant order of knowledge had little room for females. Women were generally excluded from formal institutions of knowledge such as universities or learned societies until the late nineteenth century. Obstacles to their progress remained, but careers of individuals such as the physicist Marie Skłodowska-Curie, psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein, and classicists such as Jane Harrison became possible.
Before 1800, women were active in roles such as ‘midwife’ and ‘wise woman’, but oral transmission imposed ‘a strict limit to pass on the knowledge that any woman or group of women might accumulate over a lifetime of practice’. From an academic point of view, female expertise did not count as knowledge, and it was increasingly challenged by males. In the case of midwives this challenge was already visible as early as the fifteenth century, when physicians such as Michele Savonarola began to treat infertility, to supervise pregnancy and childbirth and to give advice about the health of small children.28 Following the model of Virginia Woolf's famous essay on ‘Shakespeare's sister’, one might imagine the career – or non-career – of Newton's sister, as intelligent and curious as he was but lacking his opportunities.
However, women did have a certain room for manoeuvre, especially behind the scenes. Before 1800, exceptional European women travelled the world and searched for knowledge, like the German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian in eighteenth-century Surinam, who took more interest than her male colleagues in plants that assisted contraception and abortion, obtaining the information about them from female slaves.29 However, it was only in the later twentieth century that such activity behind the scenes began to be taken seriously by social historians.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the new wave of feminism in the 1970s made an impact on the sociology of knowledge. Situated knowledge, viewed earlier mainly in terms of social class, was discussed by Donna Haraway and others in terms of gender.30 More recently, a series of studies, mainly by female scholars, has drawn attention to contributions to knowledge made by women in a number of different domains, places and periods. Some studies focus on the obstacles in the way of women who wanted to become scholars, in the manner of Germaine Greer's study of female painters, The Obstacle Race (1979), while others emphasize the positive contributions that certain women were able to make.
Both these points are vividly illustrated in Ann Shteir's study of women as botanists in nineteenth-century England. The collection of plants, especially flowers, was considered a ladylike pursuit. So was painting them and writing about them, especially writing for children. As long as botany formed part of a general natural history, the participation of female amateurs posed no problem. After 1830, however, as botanical culture became more professional and more scientific, in other words an academic discipline, the subject was ‘defeminized’. Even women who contributed to the new science were marginalized. Agnes Ibbetson, for instance, published articles on plant physiology and was not afraid to criticize the work of fellow-botanists, but she received only a ‘poor response’ from male colleagues.31
The writing of history itself has been examined from these points of view, notably by Bonnie Smith, proposing that ‘the development of modern scientific methodology, epistemology, professional practice and writing has been closely tied to evolving definitions of masculinity and femininity’.32 Smith distinguishes three main groups of female historians: first the amateurs, such as the sisters Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland, joint authors of lives of the queens of England, or Julia Cartwright, the biographer of the ‘Renaissance woman’ Isabella d' Este; secondly, the assistants, carrying out research for more famous male historians, as Lucie Varga did for Lucien Febvre, or writing books jointly with them but receiving less of the credit, as in the case of Mary Beard's contribution to The Rise of American Civilization (1927), written with her husband Charles; and in the third place, the professionals, often paid less or waiting longer for promotion than their male colleagues, but including scholars of the distinction of the medievalist Eileen Power, one of the first women to become a professor at the London School of Economics (in 1931). Power was the author of Medieval People (1924) and Medieval Women (1975: it is surely significant that this book had to wait so long to be published, thirty-five years after the death of its author).
From the perspective of ‘women's ways of knowing’, discussed in Chapter 1, it may also be significant that the contribution of female historians has been especially important in economic history and the history of everyday life; witness not only Power's books but also Alice Clark's pioneering Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) and the work of Lucy Salmon, professor at Vassar College in the USA from 1889 to 1927, who, as Smith says, ‘taught the uses of a virtually unlimited, even low kind of source material. Railroad schedules, laundry lists, trash piles, kitchen appliances, the position of trees and the condition of buildings in urban spaces conveyed critical historical information’.33
Turning now to the ‘foreseeable future’ – in other words the near future, whether foreseeable or not – I believe that we shall see increasing emphasis on the place of knowledge in other kinds of history. A move in this direction has certainly been made by economic historians such as David Landes, who wrote an economic history of the rise of the West that explained this rise essentially as a result of ‘the gains from the application of knowledge and science to technology’. Again and again in his narrative, Landes stressed what he called ‘the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow’ and the importance of learning from competitors, as the nineteenth-century Japanese did while the French did not.34
Again, in the case of military history, Peter Paret has discussed what he calls the ‘cognitive challenge’ of warfare, noting how Carl von Clausewitz developed his theory of war in response to Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806.35 On the other hand, historians of political thought have so far said relatively little about the political knowledge that supported both the generalizations and the recommendations of the writers that they study, even though some political thinkers, such as Aristotle or Jean Bodin, took care to gather large quantities of information about a variety of political regimes, while others, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, drew on the experience of a life in politics.
Within the history of knowledges themselves, I believe that three approaches will become increasingly important in the coming decades: a global approach, a social approach and a concern with the very long run.
In the first place, as in the case of history in general, we can already see a global turn, going beyond studies of particular parts of the world such as India or China and organized not around the diffusion of Western knowledge or even around colonialism, much studied recently, but around encounters, clashes, translations and hybridizations. Some recent studies have concentrated on ‘knowledge on the move’, often over long distances.36 As has so often happened in the history of knowledge, historians of the natural sciences have led the way, though scholars working on the history of historical thought and writing have been moving in the same direction.37 Comparisons between cultures distant from one another, such as ancient Greece and ancient China, are making their contribution to this trend.
In the second place, we can see a social turn, including a history of knowledge from below, examining, for instance, the employment of information not only by governments but also by the governed, whether to vote in a particular way, to organize protests or even to make revolutions. Another aspect of the social approach, once again an extension of a tendency already visible in the present, is an increasing interest in everyday knowledges, including the tacit, bodily knowledges discussed in Chapter 2, not only in crafts such as metal-working but also in fields as diverse as diplomacy, trade, connoisseurship, management and sport. In the last case, exemplary studies of boxing and capoeira, written by anthropologists whose fieldwork included training in these arts, deserve to inspire historians.38 The role of the coach in making tacit knowledge explicit might make an illuminating topic for future investigation.
In the third place, in the near future we are likely to see more emphasis on collective learning on the part of humanity over the very long term, attempting to answer the big question posed by one of the protagonists of Big History, ‘How did this pooling and sharing of knowledge generate the long-term changes that distinguish the history of humans from that of closely related species?’39 The challenge is to fill in the outline offered by David Christian, who has noted, for instance, that increasing dense settlement ‘encouraged more exchanges of ideas’ as agriculture developed.40 The response to this challenge might be described as ‘cognitive history’. Cognitive history may appear to be the history of collective mentalities under another name, but it is concerned with a period much longer than the longue durée of the French Annales School, with millennia rather than centuries. To go further in this direction, historians will need the help of archaeologists, in other words an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ in the literal rather than the Foucauldian sense. Archaeologists have long been interested in the reconstruction of knowledge in ‘prehistoric’ times, in other words before the invention of writing systems, using the evidence of material remains. They concern themselves with the turning-points when humans began to use language, to make paintings and carvings, or to bury their dead in elaborate graves. In their attempts to reconstruct prehistoric worlds of knowledge and ways of thought, archaeologists began by a kind of intellectual subtraction, ‘draining off’ later knowledges.41
As we saw in Chapter 1, later archaeologists turned towards anthropology, since many anthropologists have studied small-scale societies with simple technologies, while some of them have turned to cognitive science to help them study what they call ‘embodied cognition’. In similar fashion, archaeologists have made use of the findings of cognitive science in the search for the ‘ancient mind’, practising a ‘cognitive archaeology’ of the kind advocated by Colin Renfrew and others.42 Studies of later periods are fewer, although an attempt has recently been made to draw on cognitive studies for a history of remembering in early modern England, focused on religion and education.43
Whether future historians of knowledge will draw on cognitive science or neuroscience is a more difficult question. For ‘Big’ or ‘Deep’ historians, concerned with a hundred thousand years or more, the idea of ‘cognitive evolution’ makes obvious sense. ‘Evolution’ in the Darwinian sense of the term, in other words the enlargement of brains and the growth of cognitive abilities by natural selection, is the red thread in the long and complex story running from the apes to Homo habilis (already using tools 2.7 million years ago), Homo erectus (standing upright) and finally to Homo sapiens.44
More problematic is the relevance of cognitive studies to the study of the history of the last five thousand years or so, on which most historians concentrate their attention. Even here, though, a fruitful intellectual exchange may be possible. In the case of the history of knowledge, the recent convergence between the conclusions of cognitive psychologists and oral historians who study memory is worth noting. After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, for instance, a psychologist conducted an experiment, twice asking the same group of people what they remembered about the incident, on the first occasion on the day after the accident and a second time three years later. He looked for discrepancies between the two accounts in order to show the unreliability of memory.45
Oral historians have also interviewed the same witnesses more than once and learned both how and how much their memories changed over time. Each group of researchers might learn something from the other. The psychologists are better at explaining why our memories change over time, while the historians are better at explaining how they change, emphasizing what might be called the ‘mythologization’ of memory, the contamination of memories of personal experiences by the stories current in a given culture. For example, the memories of Australian soldiers who fought in the First World War were influenced by their memories of films or television serials representing the same events.46
Historians like to point out that if anything is certain about the future, it is that it will differ from all the predictions made about it. All the same, whatever the new trends in the history of knowledge will be in the coming decades, it is likely that interest in the subject by members of our ‘knowledge society’ will continue to grow.