Behind the Glim — Introduction
Why do we need the past ? What is the category of the past offering us ? How is the past helping us to better grasp or conceptualise present and future ? If the present is understood as self-evident reality, is the past, similarly, an objective category ? …
Tag: Historiography
Behind the Glim — Part 1
The dual concept of pre-modernity and modernity is a curious object of historiography. Not just original, it becomes double-edged, as soon as one realises its repercussions. Sufficiently unquestioned in our days, it can support an array of divisive, reductive and ideologically oriented positions…
Behind the Glim — Part 2
Centuries from now, when the monopoly of post-Enlightenment western values, imaginations and institutions will have shied away before what will have become, hopefully, multi-centered global cultures, we will probably remember the Enlightenment project as a serpent that ended up biting its own tail…
Behind the Glim — Overture
At this stage, we need, perhaps, to insist that not all conceptualisations of historical phases lead to grave reductions. Without them, no historical discourse would be possible…
Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Introduction
History and lie. Fifth century B.C. Herodotus is equally known as the ‘Father of History’ and the ‘Father of Lies’. His chronological and causal accounts of the Persian Wars may have marked the beginning of history as a discipline, but it was ignored by none, from his contemporaries to his most postmodern commentators, that Herodotus also included in his records some factually questionable episodes…
Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Section 2.2.2
One needs to scratch the outer skin of Herodotus’ historical account of Egypt to start noticing the more ideological, if not political, perspectives of his discourse. We could first notice how Herodotus, quite regularly, describes at length ethnographic observations or stories containing sexually explicit, if not trash material.
Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Section 2.2.3
Finding the first Orientalist is a matter of importance. It is aiming at discovering the roots of what became later a major part of world history, one that determined world dynamics in the recent centuries and, according to Saïd, still does today as an after-effect of colonialism and in the surviving forms of Orientalism…
Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Conclusion
Questioning the responsibility of Herodotus in the Orientalist project is asking the question of alternatives. Saïd himself seems to praise the curiosity and adventurous mind of Herodotus. Herodotus’ very presence in the debate is also liable to his enterprise of not only travelling to foreign places, but also of maintaining records of them…
In the mid-19th c., when Karl Marx announced, in the Communist Manifesto and later in his Capital, the emergence of strong movements of revolt by the working class in industrialised England, France and Germany, he certainly did not imagine that the first cases of such uprisings would actually take place far away from Western Europe…