A Historian's Draft

Why research an individual in history? An elementary question I often pose myself, the congealed essence of my doubts about its worth: the worth of spending time, energy, and money. And the unrestrained feeling of having not enough of any of these things to fulfill my desire can not always be repressed. Perhaps I was motivated to find the most extreme method to not write the structuralist, the social history that seemed so beaten to death with a stick by endless analyses of documentations of inheritance conflicts, of succession, of appointments to office, transformed, at worst, into the abstraction of numbers and tables. On first glance, what is the thing that opposes the amorphous leviathan “Society” which remains at the heart, albeit obscured, by these symbols the most? Perhaps it is it the atomistic unit that forms the monstrum’s cells: the individual. At least, to me, that seemed, and still seems, to be the most intuitive answer. (But is it the best answer?) Decades ago, I mig...

So, I was at a pub today (which is not the most unusual thing to happen). They opted to play the classic rock best-of playlist or something from Spotify at first (I remember the Stones, Kansas, etc.), but eventually the music changed. And I noticed the first, maybe second, song which followed a new pattern: AAA. In some sense, it cannot be called a song: the most basic idea of song form is what we would describe as ABA. A song, you might say, is based on the idea of a difference , a contradiction , within itself (ah, good old dialectics!). But there was no difference in this song: it was four chords. A single pattern, repeated ad nauseum. (In music theory we would say that the harmonic rhythm of the music never changes.) This song, you could say, describes , but it does not narrate . It does not tell a story . It just stays in a place; it doesn’t take us anywhere. And it certainly doesn’t take us anywhere and then back . This may be the incarnation of what some YouTube personaliti...

 Pierre Bourdieu’s short essay „The Biographical Illusion” (1987) is one of the most well-known critiques of biography as a method of research. To Bourdieu, a sociologist famous for his contributions to social theory (his typology of capital and his concept of social fields are wildly influential), the immediate point of view on biography is on that as a method of social-scientific research, and of ethnography (e.g., interviews). Nevertheless, the short essay does provide some insights, some points worthy of reflection. Amusingly, at least to me, not as much to the method of biography, but to sociological views on anthroponomastics, the study of human names. What follows is a reflection on what piqued my interest, an interpretive, not a hermeneutic reading.  I. When we speak of human life, it is never devoid of its own historicity. Human beings are situated in time: they experience, and they reflect on their experiences. And, most relevantly, they narrate these lives to ...

Oh, what is history? As someone who aspires to write history, this happens to be a question of rather particular relevance. Indeed, it is also something I do even enjoy musing about, but I also do not possess the sufficient leisure of time to pursue to the extent I would like to. Which is unfortunate: after all, would it not be much more reassuring to confidently know what one does before one does it? But then, can there even be a definite answer to this initial question? When asking, “What is history?”, one can expect numerous answers. Some might reply, “History is what happened in the past.” This, perhaps, overly common view does betray a certain naivety, since, in a sense, this equates history with the past. It also devaluates the historian’s craft to that of the task of mere description, expressing an idea of history as being a faithful reconstruction of the past: history as the  mimetic representation of a long-gone reality. (As if that even were possible!) Some might ...

Bokura no nanoka-kan sensō Frankly, I have no idea how to write a review of a movie, of all things. But let us try. Having watched the anime Bokura no nanoka-kan sensō (official English: Seven Days War ) this evening made me realize that I do quite enjoy these kinds of coming-of-age stories. It makes me nostalgic, in a sense, evoking a cathartic state of melancholia. Content The movie itself is easily described: a wholesome, slightly bittersweet coming-of-age drama that hardly polarizes. The primary, thematic dichotomy that the plot revolves around is one between two states of being: the world of the adults (interestingly, pretty much all of them are men) who are expected to “suck it up” to society, or at least to the immediate representants of power and status within society, and the prerogatives of the young in their liminal state of adolescence, who are still permitted to stay true to themselves—although their inability, their struggle of coming to terms with themselves is ...

  Introduction I am not a fan of introductions. Indeed, now that I am sitting here and feeling like writing something, I experience this awkward situation of hearing an inner voice telling me, “You need to introduce yourself first!” It is a new blog, after all. (I wonder about its lifetime expectancy already.) But what might be a worthwhile introduction, or a worthwhile first blog post? Perhaps I can try the biographical approach. I read multiple times that for historians—and at least partly I still do consider myself one (hence the punny blog title: who gets the reference?)—the art of autobiographical writing is an enlightening exercise. And biography, theory of biography, that is one of the things I developed an interest into. (Expect me to write about this in the future. Also, puns are an interesting thing: they are supposed to be funny, but we all know they are not.) What is interesting about biography in this day and age is that it is perceived as so anachronistic: o...