Method and Theory

In his enumeration of feminist, Annaliste, neo-Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist “methods,” Jenkins reveals a basic inability to distinguish between method and theory. Theory is essentially an explanatory tool that is applied to sets of data in order to make them comprehensible. Often, theories are generated from circumstances, situations, and contexts that are independent of the data-sets to which they are applied. The explanatory function of theory inevitably endows it with a “presentist” quality - meaning that the theories historians select tend to echo contemporary concerns (e. g. feminism; postcolonialism; queer theory) while theories employed by earlier generations can fairly swiftly appear to become outmoded (e. g. classical Marxism). The type of theory selected will inevitably influence the form of interpretation and mode of argumentation employed but it will also determine which facts are considered relevant for the current purpose of the study. Thus a Marxist history will obviously focus more on issues of class and class conflict while a structuralist history will concern itself more with myths, rituals, and mentalities. To the extent that different theories pursue different interests by means of different interpretive strategies, there are no epistemological grounds for choosing between them. However, any theory that felt itself entirely unconstrained by such historical facts as have survived would rightly be condemned as either insufficient or misrepresentative. For example, a feminist history that ignored facts unrelated to women, not because they were irrelevant to the case but precisely because they contradicted it, would be far inferior to one that sought to take account of the awkward counterexamples. In these cases, it is not the theory that has been violated, but the “rules of evidence,” the “critical standard” - in short, the historical method.

Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with a musical example. A mute manuscript is given audible musical form by a pianist in the course of a recital. The pianist decides what to play - be it Mozart, Rachmaninov, or Gershwin - and the talented pianist will give his or her own interpretive expression to the musical notation on the page in order to communicate with his or her audience. At the end of the day, though, there is a correct way to play the piano (striking the keys sequentially) and an incorrect way (e. g. taking a chainsaw to it). No doubt the latter makes for an interesting artistic expression, but only the senselessly wealthy or acutely tone-deaf would pay money night after night and still pretend they were listening to a pianist. By the same token, any literary critic who espouses a particular postmodernist theory but refuses to believe in, let alone practice, historical method cannot seriously expect to be regarded as a historian.

Jenkins is right to say that there is no single definitive method but this is not - or should not be - a function of which theory a historian decides to employ but rather of the nature of the surviving historical evidence. Tchaikovsky’s music can be played on any number of instruments, but a violin is not played in the same way as a piano, a flute, or a glockenspiel. Carr noted that he was sometimes tempted to envy the competence of his colleagues who wrote ancient or medieval history, but then consoled himself with the thought “that they are so competent mainly because they are so ignorant of their subject” (1987: 14). The remark was obviously not intended as a compliment but it nevertheless underscores the important point that the study of modern or contemporary history, which enjoins its practitioners to scour new or insufficiently known archival materials, requires an entirely different method from that needed to study ancient history, where the written documentation is scant (and consequently familiar to a larger number of scholars) and where there is generally greater recourse to non-written, material evidence. And this is especially true of the Archaic period of Greek history, where such written testimony as exists is largely the product of later periods.

This book is concerned primarily with the practice of history, and especially with method. It assumes that there is a past which we can access, however incompletely, from historical traces and it accepts that the writing of history is a literary pursuit that requires a certain amount of imagination, though all interpretation - however imaginative - is to some degree constrained, or at least framed, by the available historical evidence. The fundamental question that I wish to ask is not so much “what happened?” in the Archaic period of Greek history but rather “how do we know what (we think) happened?” Ideally, of course, one would wish for answers to both questions, but it has long been recognized that the evidence we have at our disposal for Archaic Greece is insufficient to support the sort of political-military or event-driven narratives that can be written about later periods where the documentation is fuller.

On the other hand, the evidence is more amenable to the treatment of longer-term social, economic, and cultural processes. One conclusion to emerge from the chapters that follow is that an attachment to place was a more significant basis of cohesion in the earliest protohistorical communities than has previously been recognized and that this was probably a longer-term legacy of Late Bronze Age administrative organization that survived in spite of - or perhaps precisely because of - the unsettled conditions of the intervening Dark Age. Conversely, the communities that emerged from the Dark Age were relatively underdeveloped in terms of social complexity and seem not to have possessed the level of organization that is attributed to them by those later literary accounts that tell of colonial ventures in the eighth century. Instead, it is not until well into the seventh century that contemporary poetry and the earliest inscribed laws attest to the transition from a “ranked” society, in which local communities coalesced around charismatic chieftains, to a stratified society in which a true aristocratic ruling class emerged. A direct consequence of this was a more politicized consciousness among non-elite members of the community, though it is only towards the end of the Archaic period that this political consciousness was translated into action - and then only in certain cities such as Athens.

Throughout much of the Archaic period, a relatively small elite class, whose membership was recruited according to landholding and descent (the primary mechanism for the transmission of property), enacted the most important decisions within a political community which was predominantly composed of peasant landholders; beneath these were dependent laborers, serfs, and chattel slaves. Economic opportunities overseas offered new sources of wealth and, although these were initially exploited largely by aristocrats, by the sixth century there had emerged a new class of non-agricultural producers who demanded a social and political status concomitant with their wealth. Long-distance trade becomes more visible, while an examination of settlement patterns and land use suggests an intensification of agricultural practices aimed at producing a surplus for market exchange. These developments fostered, and were facilitated by, the invention of coinage, which also allowed city-states to make public expenditures on a greater scale than ever before and to invest more in monumentalizing urban centers. It is these more processual developments, rather than individual events, that the combined testimony of contemporary but fragmentary literature, inscriptions, and archaeology is best able to illuminate.

Needless to say, the historian hopes to understand the past better. It would obviously be satisfying if we could establish once and for all whether, when, and how the Lelantine War was fought, but what I hope to demonstrate in the pages that follow is that actually “doing” history, regardless of the results obtained, is also a worthwhile pursuit in itself. The practice of history is often compared with the act of translation. The fact that one is able to translate at all would suggest that the past is not entirely incommensurable or incomprehensible to the present; the fact that one needs to translate, however, underpins the fundamental differences between past and present. The historian’s task is not simply to uncover the past in its own terms (even if this were possible). Instead, the historian must make sense of the past in terms that carry meaning in the present. In the act of translation there are often words, phrases, and concepts which are not directly translatable into another language and which reveal both the expressive nuances and the limitations of the respective languages. So, too, the practice of history, aside from yielding valuable information about the past, can impel us to become more self-aware about the assumptions, priorities, and values that our own society holds to be self-evident.