Historical Truth, Postmodern Theory and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History
History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side's virtues and victories but of its mistakes and disasters. Thucydides also distanced himself from his own culture and religion.
The ability to stand outside your own political system and your own culture, to criticise your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breath. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist.
For most of the last two thousand years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to discover the truth. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated, and often completely wrong, but until comparatively recently their critics felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different to what had actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was within their grasp.
Let me summarise the prevailing assumptions:
1. Truth is not an absolute concept but a relative one. Different cultures and even different political positions each have their own truths.
2. History cannot give us any knowledge in an absolute sense. Different ages reinterpret the past for their own purposes.
3. We do not have access to any such thing as a real world. What we think of as reality is a construct of our own minds, our language and our culture.
4. The meaning of any text is in the eye of the interpreter. People of different ethnic, sexual and cultural backgrounds will read historical evidence their own way, and that way will be different to people from other perspectives.
5. History is thus not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction. When historians look at past cultures they cannot be objective, nor can they escape from the cocoon of their own politics or culture. What historians see in the past are their own values and interests reflected back at them. One of the original gurus of the postmodernist movement, the American historical theorist, Hayden White, author of Metahistory , tells us we should "recognise historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found".
The ability to stand outside your own political system and your own culture, to criticise your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breath. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist.
For most of the last two thousand years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to discover the truth. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated, and often completely wrong, but until comparatively recently their critics felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different to what had actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was within their grasp.
Let me summarise the prevailing assumptions:
1. Truth is not an absolute concept but a relative one. Different cultures and even different political positions each have their own truths.
2. History cannot give us any knowledge in an absolute sense. Different ages reinterpret the past for their own purposes.
3. We do not have access to any such thing as a real world. What we think of as reality is a construct of our own minds, our language and our culture.
4. The meaning of any text is in the eye of the interpreter. People of different ethnic, sexual and cultural backgrounds will read historical evidence their own way, and that way will be different to people from other perspectives.
5. History is thus not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction. When historians look at past cultures they cannot be objective, nor can they escape from the cocoon of their own politics or culture. What historians see in the past are their own values and interests reflected back at them. One of the original gurus of the postmodernist movement, the American historical theorist, Hayden White, author of Metahistory , tells us we should "recognise historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found".
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