RETHINKING HISTORY : JENKINS

Rethinking History

What Keith  Jenkins does in his book titled " Rethinking History" initially look into What is history by looking into theory and then examining it in practice  and finally put theory and practice into a definition - methodologically informed definition.

Jenkins makes two points at the level of theory that is History is one of a series of discourses about the world. These discourses does not create the world (physical realm that we live) but they do appropriate it and gave it all the meaning it has.  History as a discourse is thus in a different category to that which it discourse about, that is, the past and history are different things.

He points out that History and Past are not stitched into each other, rather history and past float free of each other, they are ages and miles apart.  Such a discursive practices in different subjects interprets different interpretation over time and spaces.

historians construct analytical and methodological tools to make out of thier ways of readings and talking about it: discoursing. In that sense we read the world as a text, and logically such readings are infinite.

He points out that different sociologist and historians interpret the same phenomenon differently through discourses that are always on the move that are always recomposed and decomposed which need constant self examination as discourses by those who use them.

For Jenkins, History is a claim to knowledge that makes the discourse it is.  There are three problematic theoretical areas: areas of epistemology, Methodology, and ideology each of which must be discussed if we are to see what history is.

One important question he raises is that how specific histories came to be constructed into one shape rather than another, not only epistemologically, but methodologically and ideologically too.

There is an epistemological fragility , as  if it were possible to know once and for all, now and forever, then there would be no need for any more history to be written, for what should be the point of countless historians saying it all over again in the same way?

Epistemological fragility, then allows for historians' readings to be multifarious (one past many histories).


Why Epistemologically fragile? 

No historians can cover and these recover the totality of past events because their content is virtually limitless.

Second, No account van recover the past as it was because the past was not an account but events, situations etc. As the past has gone, no account can ever be checked against it but only checked to other accounts.

there is fundamentally no correct 'texts' of which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all are there. No matter how verifiable, how widely acceptable, history remains inevitably a personal construct, manifestation of the historians's perspective as a narrator.



Jenkins Points out that, by translating the past into modern term and in using knowledge perhaps previously unavailabl, the historian discover both what has been forgotten about the past and pieces together before.

what Jenkins argues is that history is a shifting discourse constructed by historians and that from the existence of the past no reading is entailed:  change the gaze, shift the perspective and new readings appear.  Yet although historians know all this, most seems to studiously ignore it and strive for objectivity and truth nevertheless. and this striving for truth cuts through  ideological / methodological positions.