Explaining the Past While Studying the Present: History as Born and Performed

• In Event: 481 - Theory Section Paper Session. Theory, Method, Data, and Representation

Abstract

While ethnographers call for including temporal contexts in their studies, they tend to treat the past as historical facts, collected by experts, and largely isolated from the understandings of research subjects. This study analyzes how citizens being interviewed about their city invoked the past in ways much different from those of history texts. As opposed to a past born from historical sources, the past of interviewees was performed through interactions that strategically critiqued or wistfully enhanced the present. While grounded in personal experience, this past reflected community values such as childhood, natural space, and urban development. These two pasts show how citizens have little knowledge of the history of their city. Yet, their performance of the past preserved values of the community and identity, and their intimate, populist histories defied elite, professional explanations, revealing power struggles between how researcher and researched define the world. Ethnographers should further research how their subjects construct the past, as well as be sensitive to their own construction of history and the authority underlying it.

Author

• Pepper Glass, Weber State University