Embodiment Of History Research Articles

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

True life, real lives: Revisiting the boundaries between ethnography and fiction

ABSTRACTEthnography and fiction have long been in dialogue in their common endeavor to understand human life and through their shared foundation on writing. Recently, anthropologists and sociologists have expressed concern that the worlds they study might be depicted more compellingly, accurately, and profoundly by novelists or filmmakers than by social scientists. Discussing my work on the embodiment of history in South Africa and on urban policing in France in light of, respectively, J. M. Coetzee's novel The Life & Times of Michael K and David Simon's television series The Wire, I analyze their commonalities and singularities. Using Marcel Proust's meditation on life and suggesting the heuristic value of distinguishing true life from real lives, I propose, first, to differentiate horizontal and vertical approaches to lives and, second, to complicate the dichotomy associating ethnography with the former and fiction with the latter. This reflection, which borrows from Georges Perec's rumination on the puzzle‐maker, can be read as a defense of ethnography against a certain prevailing pessimism.

In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History

In the last few decades the nature of history making, especially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sensibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite history and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking, history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become dominant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes have placed the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the

Oppression and freedom in therapeutic space

The asylum seeker is a particular dialectical embodiment of history. (S)he is a person with a specific individual history of lived experience, within a political history and mythology. To engage with one or more asylum seekers, a therapist must enter that political history and mythology. But the therapist too is a person with a history of lived experience, who inhabits and embodies a political history and mythology. The therapist also has a theory or discourse which addresses these experiences and experiential contexts more or less adequately. Thus, the therapy becomes pulled in the direction of a process of one person healing (or attempting to heal) another and conversely in the direction of a struggle of persons to discover themselves through the integration of their lived experience within its historical and mythological context. The former is constrained by the historical political context, while the latter requires a recognition and a critique of that context.

Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick (review)

Reviewed by: Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick Mark D. Larabee Eyal Peretz. Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 176 pp. As a study of the privileged role literature plays in the transmission of cultural trauma, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power extends well beyond the realm of Melville scholarship. In an elegantly conceptualized argument, Peretz contends that only in and through literature as a performative act can disaster "be fully heard, witnessed, and uttered in a way which will do justice to it." His reading sheers away from current trends of historicizing in favor of an engagement that casts itself forward, employing Moby-Dick's timeless "scene of utterance" and the "wounding strangeness" of American literature as a testimonial to the destruction of European identity. By seeing Melville's narrative as a paradigmatic textual prefiguration of twentieth-century disaster, Peretz launches his subject into contemporary discussions of trauma, the embodiment of history, and—most propitiously—the worth of literature at a time when some see it as an "orphaned" adjunct to nonliterary discourses. Peretz begins, with a nod to Antonin Artaud, by drawing resonant parallels between Ishmael's encounter with the whale and Freud's [End Page 795] encounter with art, detailing the act of witnessing the traumatic, epistemologically fraught occurrence that Peretz calls a "white event." In such an encounter, the overwhelming event manifests as a riddle invoking the collapse of knowledge, the resort to a "vocabulary of power," and an imperative to transmit the event to the future. While his analysis of power revisits the terms of previous scholarship, Peretz transcends traditional accounts of the political struggle between Ahab and Ishmael (provided here by the Cold War critics via Donald Pease) by questioning what demands the use of the vocabulary of power in the first place. Answering this question involves addressing a complex relationship encompassing testimonial language, fabulous language, and the nature of linguistic address, authority, and meaning. Peretz convincingly elucidates these associations at multiple levels. The exposure of Ahab's vulnerable body and its reorientation consequent to physical wounding permit the introduction of "a dimension of meaning or sense"; this irruption in turn calls for the vocabulary of power when that of knowledge proves epistemologically inadequate. The substituted language, one of excess, then becomes the vehicle for enigma. The enigmatic white event questions and implicates Ishmael as well, Peretz argues, and Ishmael's breathless 468-word account of Moby-Dick's whiteness relates an encounter as wounding to him as physical mutilation is to Ahab. According to Peretz, a disastrous encounter such as that with the whale precipitates a crisis of authority and comprehension not only for Ahab and Ishmael, but also for the novel's readers. "The wound, the cry, and whiteness have to be thought together," Peretz writes, in an assertion characteristic of both the study as a whole and its attendant strength: a conceptual alignment of trauma, witnessing, and address placing Moby-Dick and its strategies at the heart of any cultural self-understanding we might glean from the story of catastrophe that is the long twentieth century. Peretz's recasting of intertextuality as "a category of witnessing" productively qualifies the Bloomian anxiety of influence. It also leads to curious, haunting conclusions: "white events" like the disastrous sinking of the whaling ship Essex survive only as literary events, and this contextless narrative, "[testifying] avant-la-lettre to the horrors . . . of the twentieth century," discloses the meaning of its future historical context as incomprehensibility itself. His point—that the patterns, if not the particulars, of Moby-Dick reverberate into our time—merits elaboration. Yet Peretz relegates the single extended example of a modern literary-historical relationship to his copious endnotes, which raises a pair of related difficulties. [End Page 796] First, more such explorations (implicitly promised in the introduction) would have gratifyingly extended what is, in this respect, a tantalizingly brief book. Second, and more unsettling: his conclusion that Moby-Dick testifies equally to literary and historical disasters, and that "[b]oth kinds of events actually address us in a similar manner," could be misconstrued as a...

Embodied history. Uniqueness and exemplarity of South African AIDS

The exceptionality of AIDS in South Africa, both for its epidemiological features and public controversies, seems to have its correspondence in the exceptionalism of South African history, with its unprecedented regime of apartheid and its unexpected turn to democracy. The article shows that AIDS in this country can simultaneously be seen as unique (because of the historical context in which it is inscribed) and exemplar (of social determinants observed in other countries characterised by similar past or present of domination). As an alternative to cultural and behavioural models of the epidemic which have been widely spread on the African continent, the concept of embodiment of history is proposed in order to account for both the structural facts underlying the epidemic (inequality, violence, migration) and the construction of collective as well as individual narratives of the disease (including victimisation and accusation).

"We Do Nothing but Enact History": Thomas Carlyle Stages the Past

While recent scholarly interest in the "theatricality" of Victorian culture has focused principally on novels, this essay widens that focus to include early-Victorian historical writing. Like his novelistic counterparts, Thomas Carlyle integrated pictorial and theatrical modes of representation into his historical essays despite harboring customary antitheatrical prejudices. In Past and Present, most particularly, Carlyle relied upon theatricality (as distinct from dramatization) as the surest means of providing his readers with the vibrant, animated, and enacted history that he promised them. This implicitly theatrical restoration of the past did not occur through a self-conscious mise-en-scène but through such basic elements of performance as bodily presence, pictorialism, and the organization of theatrical space. For Carlyle, no less than for his theatrical contemporaries, any purely narrative history was dead, linear, and typographic, while any enacted history-alive, solid, and corporeal-was inevitably theatrical. Through a close reading of passages from Past and Present, this essay illuminates correspondences between Carlyle's rhetorical embodiment of history and the staging of history in the Victorian theater.

Kinship and the embodiment of history

(1998). Kinship and the embodiment of history. History and Anthropology: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 263-298.

The Cyclopean Walls at Tarragona

If the description of the 6th century Massalian Periplus, preserved in the Ora Maritima of Rufus Festus Avienus,l does not refer to Tarragona, as almost all scholars agree with Professor Bosch Gimpera2 in believing, then one can only say that to no other city of the Spanish coast can that account of its walls be applied with greater appropriateness.Seldom does it happen, as at Tarragona, that the ancient walls retain intact throughout the ages the embodiment of history amid the modern life of the city, and nowhere else with such charm and grandeur as that of Cesse with its true Iberian atmosphere. Usually the huge blocks of the primitive cyclopean wall are overlaid with reconstructions and refacings of the Roman, Visigothic and Medieval periods and of the modern Spanish fortifications.