Author(s) | Steege, Paul; Bergerson, Andrew; Healy, Maureen; Swett, Pamela |
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Abstract | Both elites and outsiders benefit from disguising the nature of everyday life, as if ordinary people had no role in shaping it. Their deceptions of self and society serve as the preconditions for both hegemony and resistance to it; and yet we must think around these myths if we are to understand the everyday. If we were to reduce our investigation of the problem of social relations solely to the study of aggregate groups and institutions – that is, to macrohistory – we would fail to understand that critical moment of enactment: when ideas become deeds, whether one hurts her, helps him, ignores her, and so on. The historian of everyday life undermines comfortable dichotomies of power and resistance by considering the ways in which ordinary people participate in crafting new forms of hegemony. For instance, rather than imagining the cold war as a global conflict by means of which hegemonic superpowers imposed their control over a city like Berlin, consider how the very ability to assert that power depends on everyday behaviors that escape not only the control but even the notice of the presumptive hegemons. The 1949 western “victory” produced by an Anglo American airlift that overcame a total Soviet blockade of West Berlin depended on unruly Berliners continuing to practice the black marketeering and deal making that had enabled them to survive since the last months of the Second World War. True to the myths of everyday life, these same unruly Berliners retrospectively tended to explain their survival only in terms of the airlift, arguably to preserve their autonomy in a polarized international system that so circumscribed their lives. It is in the interaction between both kinds of deal making that we find the productive power of an everyday life history approach. Our hope for future research in the field of everyday life is that it will move further in these directions. Reconstructing the sometimes revolutionary contributions to world politics by ordinary people requires some patience and a dose of creativity. It requires of its practitioners that they strive to stake out analytically the connections between micro and macrohistories. Yet it also offers a way to avoid retribution for our hubris: by stubbornly abiding by the particularities of that everyday. By constructing historical narratives in which real people made use of the chance to shape their present, we draw out the human consequences of those actions. The most formidable task confronting the historian of everyday life remains, then, to find the means to tell that integrated story.nThe texts we use to reconstruct the everyday are often found, or created, in serial form: a series of court records that all pertain to cases of a certain kind, a collection of letters of denunciation, a series of oral interviews, a series of petitions all written to the same body. These will contain all manner of detail about people, incidents, conflicts, practices. The systematicity of data collection, and the degree to which we compare one kind of source intertextually to all other available sources on the same phenomena, gives this research process a veneer of science. Yet these data points are all fragments in themselves, with more gaps in between them than coherence. They become a story with causal connections only through the speculative judgment of the historian. As historians facing our notes, computers, distractions, and deadlines, we select the stories (or “cases”) that elucidate something we find significant. We choose a particular fragment to be interpreted, which entails not choosing some other. |
IssueNo | 2 |
Pages | 358-378 |
Article | Access to Article |
Source | The Journal of Modern History |
VolumeNo | 80 |
PubDate | 2008 |
ISBN_ISSN | 0022-2801 |
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