Friday, September 16, 2011
Becker perception
"Each of us is subject to the limitations of time and place." meaning no matter how hard you try you will look at things with your current perspective on marrying many women or men, female circumcision or having one man with all the power. We do not mean to put ourselves in history and condemn those practices at first, we should understand the context of a situation and then put in into perspective from our own culture and understanding. Historians must attempt to put aside our emotional connection with the present and focus on the facts at hand before passing judgment on another culture on their actions over our own. The ideals of what an historian should do has not changed, what they do must change in order to pass on a more complete knowledge in context of the given situation. Such as, girls in communities where they perform female circumcision may in fact want it to happen, it means they are a woman and it stands for something in their way of life. The historian would look upon this and judge it to be inhumane and immoral. It is not humane to judge how another culture lives or has survived these hundreds and thousands of years.
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Brian - I agree and I disagree! Yes we are certainly subject to limitations of our culture and our job is to try to understand the context of the historical actors we are investigating. But our job is not to pass judgement. It is to tell the stories of the past, to place them in context for the reader and to provide meaning. But not to judge. Historians shouldn't judge female circumcision but should present the multiple sides of this - the girls that resist, the older women who perform it to adhere to culture priorities or to safeguard the girls from being marginalized,the men who see it as a way to protect their power as well as those who see it as inhumane and immoral. Not to judge but to investigate the story.
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