19 - 21 AUGUST, 1999
BUFFALO, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Turning Points in Historical Thinking
'In recent years,' Georg Iggers, an internationally recognized authority on the study of historiography, remarked in his keynote speech at the conference on 'Turning Points in Historical Thinking: A Comparative Perspective', 'there have been increasing attempts at comparative history and hardly any at comparative historiography.' But a sound approach to comparative history, Iggers stated, required 'a reorientation in the ways in which historians approached history.' His comments were agreed with by most participants at the conference, held in August 1999 at State University of New York at Buffalo, where Iggers served over twenty years as both professor and distinguished professor of history.
By Q. EDWARD WANG
The theme of the conference, as stated by its organizers, 'is to identify turning points in historical thinking in world cultures, with a focus on Chinese and Euro/American historical traditions.' As a working concept, the so-called 'turning point' is defined as 'a fundamental change in one's perception of the past that occurs in a historical time and has a far-reaching influence in the later period.' Such 'turning points' should lead to the rise of new schools in historical writing and new philosophies of history, hence contributing to a new form of historical thinking that (re)shapes one's vision of the past, the present, and the future. This new historical thinking can exert its influence within its own culture, or without, having an international, cross-cultural impact.Centring on its theme, the conference was designed to tackle three tasks: 1) describing turning points in historical events in different cultures; 2) comparing and contrasting the occurrences of the turning points in various cultures from a global perspective; and 3) identifying cross-cultural influences in making changes of historiography and historical thinking. In Chinese historical culture, for example, there were three readily identifiable 'turning points' that occurred during the Qin-Han period (3rd century BCE 3rd century CE), the Song Dynasty (10th and 13th centuries), and the 19th and the 20th centuries, respectively. These 'turning points' divided Chinese history, at least in regard to its cultural development, into three major periods, comparable to the well-known tripartite scheme (ancient, medieval, and modern) in European history. It is also possible to draw a similar conclusion by looking at other cultures, in which 'turning points' of the similar magnitude could also be identified in the course of historical movement. But prior to the worldwide expansion of capitalism, these 'turning points' were generated for different reasons, and the differences make comparative study a worthwhile endeavour. In modern times, by contrast, ideologies such as nationalism, Marxism, and liberalism have often had a cross-cultural impact, resulting in a more complicated and hence a more colourful outcome of the change of historical thinking.
As the conference was aimed at addressing major changes in historical writing and thinking from a cross-cultural perspective, experts on both Chinese and Western historiographical traditions attended. To enrich the mixture even more, the organizers also invited scholars specializing on historiographies of other cultures to join the discussion. This cross-cultural intention, was also manifested in its programme which was divided into six panels according to chronology and each panel mixed historians from different fields, enabling them to exchange ideas among themselves and with the chair and the commentator, who, coming from yet another field, could add spice to the variety of the panel.
Such international co-operation was demonstrated on all the panels. When Benjamin Elman (UCLA), for instance, posited a 'fourth turning point' in the development of Chinese historical thinking that occured during the 17th and the 18th centuries, Achim Mittag, a German China scholar and a former IIAS fellow, modified Elman's thesis by offering a broader, hence a global view of the change. In commenting on their papers, Jörn Rüsen, a noted historical theorist of Kulturwissenschaftes Institut of Essen, Germany, shared his thoughts on 'multiple modernities,' using East Asia as a prime example.
International exchange, of course, does not mean that everyone shares the same view. In discussing the post-modern challenge to history, Keith Windschuttle, an Australian author of the well-circulated book The Killing of History, attacked, as was only to be expected, the theoretical underpinning of post-modernism. His criticism was shared by Zhilian Zhang of Peking University, who basically viewed the post-modern phenomena as products of an 'unhealthy' development of Western capitalism. But Richard Vann, a long-time editor of the Histor y and Theory and Arif Dirlik (Duke University) defended the opposite point of view. As Vann cited many examples from recent developments in Euro-American historical writings to support his sympathetic view, Dirlik, an expert on modern China, discussed possible alternatives to approaching the relationship between post-modernism and history.
While it generated more questions than answers, the conference offered an 'excellent opportunity,' as one participant put it for scholars of different cultural and intellectual backgrounds to exchange and discuss ideas concerning the issues of historical study. This kind of exchange, as summarized by Ying-shih Yu, an acclaimed Chinese intellectual historian from Princeton University, would help the work of the scholars in the Chinese study field most directly. Echoing Iggers' observation in his keynote speech, Yu, who gave the concluding remarks at the end of the conference, stated that there was an urgent need to overcome a 'self-imposed Orientalism' that pitted China against the West in a dichotomy, failing to acknowledge the specificities of both traditions, let alone adopting a broad, cross-cultural approach to comparative historiography. Realizing the need for changing the ways historians study history, therefore, may well be one of most important outcomes the conference has reached.
Funded mainly through the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taiwan, the conference was co-sponsored by the International Project on Chinese and Comparative Historiography based at City University of New York (cf. IIAS Newsletter No. 16, p. 30) the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (of which Iggers is president), and the East Asian Studies Program at SUNY Buffalo. *
The papers given at the conference are now being revised for publication. Anyone interested should contact:
Q. Edward Wang
wangq@rowan.edu,
Georg Iggers
iggers@acsu.buffalo.edu, or
Thomas Lee
thomashcl@hotmail.com
for more information.
Q. Edward Wang. The author is one of the organizers of the conference and chair of the History Department at Rowan University, New Jersey, United States. He would like to thank Dr Thomas Burkman, the director of East Asian Studies Program at SUNY Buffalo, for helping organize the conference.