Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

[M]an is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.... The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. Karl Marx (1)

I

Eric Hobsbawm was in ebullient mood in 1970. "It is a good moment to be a social historian," he concluded his influential essay, "From Social History to the History of Society." For reasons he'd understand but because of developments in the writing of the history of the senses that he probably didn't anticipate, Hobsbawm might well sound a similar note of optimism were he to write the essay today. (2)

I'd like to suggest why Hobsbawm's understanding of social history seems to have been important to relatively recent work on the history of the senses--most of which is on the history of aurality--even if that influence is not always acknowledged explicitly by some of the authors concerned. Part of the difficulty in determining the influence of social history, especially as opposed to cultural history, is that for many historians generally, including several of those whose work is examined here, there has been a merging of the terms of "cultural" and "social" history so that the two have become virtually synonymous. While there are some methodological differences in the writing of cultural and social history, I see the two as, in fact, having fused, not least because what is commonly identified as cultural history is pretty much within the definition of social history offered by Hobsbawm. I do not mean to suggest that all recent work on the history of the senses has been shaped exclusively by social history methodology and concerns, nor do I wish to suggest that these works are of one piece. Plainly, some of the techniques of cultural history--especially the emphasis on linguistic analysis--have been important to writing on the history of the senses. Moreover, some intellectual historians and scholars of the history of medicine have offered penetrating observations on the history of the senses, observations that should prove helpful to future work on sensory history. (3) What I do argue is that the history of the senses--possibly one of the most significant advances in the writing of history in recent years--owes something to the contributions of social history, particularly as Hobsbawm defined it.

For Hobsbawm, social history's principal promise and strength resided in its expressed desire to examine and reveal the interplay among economics, politics, and culture, a desire reflected in a methodology and a style of historical investigation characterized by a resolute eclecticism, a refusal to be hedged by artificial boundaries, and a drive to contextualize what those working on, say, purely economic, intellectual, or political history tended to isolate. With that main strength in mind, Hobsbawm ventured that the most interesting and relevant work by social historians would flourish in the fields of urban history, the historical examination of classes, social groups, mentalities and cultures, and in work on the rise of modernity, industrialization, and nationalism. (4)

A good deal of work on the history of the senses--much of it very recent--has been informed by the main epistemologies, ontologies, and habits of thinking about the past inspired by social history. (5) Social history's impetus toward a braided analysis, one in part influenced by the Annales school, has a way of alerting historians to the role that senses beside vision--the preponderant way historians still tend to "view" the past--have played in human affairs. Certainly, as George H. Roeder, Jr. has shown, U.S. history textbooks, thanks principally to the influence of social history, are "more likely than those written before 1970 to address seriously the historical role of sensory experience." It is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of historians still work from the assumption that the past is best seen rather than, say, heard or smelled. Indeed, even the examples of the inclusion of the senses in textbooks and some monographs offered by Roeder tend to remain incidental to the main narrative, their presence and function to flesh and excite the writing rather than explore explicitly the roles of all the senses in any systematic way. (6)

The social historians' tendency to consider the breadth, depth, and interlaced aspects of the human experience has helped create a frame of mind and nurse an investigative temper and way of understanding that has prompted some of them to go beyond an unwittingly visualist representation of the past. Thanks in part to this habit, some social historians no longer simply assess past experience through the eyes of historical actors but now also consider hearing, smell, touch, and taste in informing matters concerning urban, religious, political, and economic history and specific questions concerning technology, national identity, and modernity. (7)

Of course, it could be argued that recent work that treats explicitly seeing, visuality, and ocularity is itself refreshing because it unpackages and explains the way that visuality become so dominant in the West by detailing the rise of print culture, the advent of scientific and technological instruments that empowered the eye, and Enlightenment quests for visualist perspective and balance. Judging by Martin Jay's pioneering work--Jay is an intellectual historian who is careful to distance himself from the exaggerated claims for the primacy of the eye made by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong and who understands that the hegemony of vision didn't mean that there was just one way of seeing--the effect of scholarship on seeing tends, nevertheless, to cast sight as the predominant sense in the modern world. While such work has been helpful in explicitly identifying seeing as one sense among many, it has also tended to stress the hegemony of the eye and, by implication (though hardly by design) has privileged sight to the exclusion of other, related, ways of understanding the past. (8)