Abstract
It is a truism that the ideology of the dominant groups shapes their observations of the subordinate elements in a society. It is also a truism that the dominant groups consciously or unconsciously act to shape the collective beliefs of the subordinate elements, so that the subordinate elements will observe the world as the dominant want them to observe it. In one form or another, both truisms appear in all kinds of claims by social historians that the sense of reality of past people — dominant and subordinate — was ‘socially constructed’ (or culturally constructed’). The truisms pose a serious problem for our attempts to recover the actual ways of life of subordinate people. It is the object of this chapter to spell out the problem and to assess some of the methods used by practitioners to solve it.
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Notes, References and Further Reading
The commentary on Foucault’s influential idea of the relationship between power and knowledge is considerable. Perhaps the best place to start is Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault; The Will to Truth, London, 1980. A devastating critique of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge is R. Nola, ‘Post-Modernism, A French Cultural Chernobyl: Foucault on Power/Knowledge’, Inquiry, 37, 1994, pp. 3–43. Also critical of Foucault, but from other angles, is Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Discourses of Michel Foucault’, in his The Killing of History.
P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, pp. 68ff.
Note that the term ‘deconstruction’, invented by Derrida, is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘discourse analysis’.
Scott, ‘A Statistical Representation of Work’, in her Gender and the Politics of History, p. 115.
In V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker, eds, Crime and the Law; The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, London, 1980.
Examples of radical social control theory are J. Ditton, Controlology; Beyond the New Criminology, London, 1979; E. Lemert, Human Deviance, Social Problems and Social Control, New Jersey, 1967. The nearest thing to its application to a historical situation is G. Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, London, 1983.
Gatrell, ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence’, pp. 276, 292.
Gatrell, ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence’, p. 291.
New York, 1985.
Michael W. Dois, Majnun, The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed., D.E. Immisch, Oxford, 1992.
Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 17, 73.
Showalter, The Female Malady, e.g. p. 204, Ch. 9.
Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 63, 72–3, 213.
Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 57, 161.
A weaknesses in her argument is that she does not explain how real mental disease entities are discovered. Nor does she explain how and why male mental disease entities are ‘constructed’.
Showalter, The Female Malady, pp. 72, 142, 144, 192–3.
Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 210.
Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 136.
Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 137.
Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 143.
New York, 1974.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan p. xvi.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, pp. 3–149. I think this is the weakest of the three arguments. Genovese provides little evidence that slaves had a sense of rights and does not suggest any criteria for the existence of ‘self-respect’.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, pp. 646, 645, 84, 675; also 86, 133.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, p. 675.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, p. 675.
There is overwhelming evidence that peoples’ memories of distant events in their own lives are unreliable. For example, P.M. Blau and O.D. Duncan, The American Occupational Structure, New York, 1967, compared the occupations that men gave in census manuscripts with those attributed to them by their sons and found a 30 per cent discrepancy. D. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psycho-history, New York, 1980, pp. 101ff cites many studies demonstrating the fallibility of parental memory in respect of the milestones in the lives of their children when they went through infancy. Also see T.S. Sarbin review in History and Theory, vol. 26, 1987, pp. 352–64.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, p. 675.
The Rosenthal effect is the term given to the famous experiments by the American psychologist, Robert Rosenthal, who found that the expectations of the researcher influence the responses of subjects, even under the strictest laboratory conditions. It has echoes, of course, of social-constructionist theories. A superb discussion of the effect and of how to deal with it is by M. Martin, ‘The Philosophical Importance of the Rosenthal Effect’, in Martin and McIntyre, eds, Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, Ch. 37. A third problem with oral history which I have not dealt with here is the typicality of the respondents. There is good evidence that slave narratives were quite atypical; see C. Vann Woodward, ‘History from Slave Sources’, American Historical Review, 79, pp. 470–81; and D.J. Spindel, ‘Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxvii, no.2, Autumn 1996, pp. 247–61. My strictures about oral history are not meant to suggest that oral history is a fundamentally and fatally flawed empirical technique which should never be applied. Instead I am suggesting that its practitioners are often far too casual in their use of their data and badly need to verify the observations in the data with devises similar to the techniques of textual criticism which conventional scholars apply to documentary sources.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, pp. 285–324.
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© 1999 Miles Fairburn
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Fairburn, M. (1999). The Problem of Socially Constructed Evidence. In: Social History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27517-5_8
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