Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The difference between history and historiography, or mah nishtanah ha inyan hazeh mi col ha aherim?

How does history differ from historiography,or how did this subject make itself different from all others?

The answer to that is simple and not simple. 

historiography is the writing of the stories of history that have been accepted as "history."  those stories might not, in fact, be "history" but may be "propaganda," "wishful thinking," or "delusion."

History is the record of what happened, whether or not that conforms to what subsequent generations want to believe happened.

How does this differ from other fields?

To take dance (as an example of a "discipline" that also is creative--keeping in mind that "creative," when used in a field like history, is not a compliment):  dancers have to take class to learn, to develop, to continue to grow.

No dance class that I know of requires any dancer to be able to explain what Balanchine was attempting to do, and how and why American dancers (and audiences) had no context in which to understand him (and still don't.)

In contrast, as a grad student in history, I was required to take a class in which one of the prerequisites was sufficient proficiency in Aramaic to know when and where a major scholar had so thoroughly lacked competence in that language that most of his "translation" of a major historical work is little more than his fantasy of what the actual text says.

Therein lies the difference between "history" and "historiography."