e + i = history

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a pretty interesting conference put on jointly by PARC and the Institute for Middle East Studies at GW. The topic was "Palestine: What We Know", and more than anything the panelists and speakers were trying to get at the problem of accessing information about a place that isn't a state. It was about the difficulties historians (and historically-minded anthropologists) encounter when they go in search of archives -- official or otherwise -- that, at worst, have been destroyed or, at best, haven't been subjected to the same kinds of official cataloguing, etc. that an official state might undertake.

The keynote speaker was Rashid Khalidi -- whom you may recall from his days as one of Obama's "subversive" pals in Chicago, but more importantly a Middle East historian of the finest order, and a pretty good speaker too. He was opinionated without ever getting too preachy, sharply shooting down a student's rather silly question about what "Obama is really thinking" by asking why, if he actually knew, he would broadcast it in front of this particular audience today.

He was hitting the major themes of the conference too, speaking to the challenges of "Palestinian Studies" as a discipline, but with a strong focus on history. He came back several times to the importance of "dealing with sources". He even took a swipe at Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, sort of a sacred cow when it comes to great histories of the 20th century, for Braudel's inability to read Turkish and Turkish sources when writing about a time when Turkish-speakers dominated much of the very region he was studying.

Though I'm sure Braudel -- always one for expanding the historian's toolset to include new disciplines and skills -- would agree with the criticism, for me Khalidi was highlighting something deeper about the nature of history. As one of my current professors puts it, it's the "application of imagination to evidence", and I like that definition a lot. Any good history is based on the collection and analysis of evidence, but that collection never comprises a full picture. We're always trying to dig up more artifacts and uncover more previously-unknown sources, but that full documentation will never be reached. So what do you do? You take what you do have and you imagine it as wholistically as possible, trying to distance yourself from biases (or not, depending...) and relate the pieces of evidence to each other. But every historian has limitations to his/her toolset, posing yet another problem to the evidence-gathering process.

When I write this -- or share it with someone, typically my wife, God bless her -- it can come across as somewhat obvious. It sounds, on paper, a lot like what a good journalist does or even a lawyer, and not too distant from the work of a scientist either. I'd agree with that, too, but I think unlike some of those things, there are aspects (and ideas) of history that have become so deeply ingrained in the way we think about ourselves -- as individuals, as a nation, as members of a religion, a race, a gender, a community -- that we cease to anymore understand them as the result of this process: evidence + imagination. These "truths we hold to be self-evident"? Those too.