Means Of Discipline Research Articles

Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation

AbstractThe polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French post‐structuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.

Braving Homelessness on the Ethnographic Street with Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman

Epistemological concerns about the construction and theorization of `the homeless' in relation to `the street' form the basis of this extended review of Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman's Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. Glasser and Bridgman promote their brand of anthropology as an effective means of generating insights into, and policy on, homelessness. Their interventions echo the contradictions of a liberal capitalist discourse that advocates the minimization of state intervention and maximization of individual autonomy for affluent citizens while extending a multiplicity of disciplinary means of state intervention into the lives of the impoverished. Glasser and Bridgman locate their `holistic', `ecological' approach within a dominant tradition of ethnography of poverty on one's doorstep from Tally's Corner onwards. I argue that Glasser and Bridgman's work is in keeping with a tradition that serves to exoticize the poor with the authority of empirical science. They reproduce a temporally and culturally distanced version of `the homeless' as highly modern yet primitivized objects of study that serves to flatter the anthropologist. The review takes seriously the idea that discourse is constitutive and has material effects for the self and `the Other' and so is particularly critical of Glasser and Bridgman's foundationalist approach to research as a means to depict and explain a given `reality' that reconstructs an untenable one-to-one relationship between reality and representation.

“Reading” “ Methods” “Texts”: ” How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science

This article reports on an interpretive content analysis of fourteen research methods texts. We read them as a genre—exploring their structural and rhetorical features—to address two questions: To what extent do research methods texts reflect the breadth of methods used in political science and its fields? To what extent do they reflect contemporary ferment concerning questions of social reality and its “knowability?” These questions are intertwined with each other—epistemological positions on what counts as “science” affect the methods presented—and with the misleading distinction between “quantitative” and “qualitative” methods. Although these texts vary considerably in the degree to which they engage epistemologcal issues. all fourteen texts explicitly endorsed or implicitly assumed positivist definitions of science, which can be seen in their treatments of “qualitative” methods issues. Interpretive methods of data access and analysis are almost entirely “disappeared,” and positivist qualitative methods of data access receive treatment that ranges from poor to excellent. This textual consensus on positivism as the mode of scientific research in political science has implications for professional practice in four areas: the possibility of field-neutral methods texts, student research agendas, disciplinary meanings associated with “method” and “methodology,” and researchers' professional identity as political scientists.

Life Has Its Ups and Downs

Lower levels of support and high levels of need make journal cancellations to counter rice inflation as much a problem in ihe humanities as in other areas. Targeting more expensi;e titles for cancellation assumes a stability in relative price levels over time that may not exist. Prices of core journals in the humanities were sampled at five-year intervals from 1977 to 1997, and relatively expensive and inexpensive titles identified by deviation from disciplinary means. Titles found relatively high or low at one point rarely remained so over time. The long-term effect of cutting journals by targeting more expensive titles may be no more effective in reducing the budget than more user-oriented approaches. Changes in subscription figures did not appear to affect prices. Core humanities journals were found more expensive than other titles in their disciplines, but subject to lower rates of inflation.