I saw your response to Arch after I posted this, but honestly, that doesn't seem like a substantive reason to dismiss the book, which is a journalistic attempt to synthesize and popularize ideas from a lot of different fields, not really an attempt to do what historians have already been doing for years. I guess it's partly a matter of popularizing already existent ideas for an audience which isn't already familiar with them.
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it's anecdotal. YOu know a historian who is familiar with archaeology. The guy who wrote 1491 spoke at UC last year and his work was apparently a revelation to historians and archaeologists alike (at least as I remember it being described, I didn't go). One of the most interesting parts of the book had to do with the turf wars in archaeology, with so much fighting going on for so long to determine who gets to say what and be believed. It seems to me to be such a huge field that a historian involved with her own work would have a hard time acquiring more than a passing acquaintance with the field. And, as you say, if a person's work doesn't tend to coincide with the archaeological record, how likely is it that they'll stay abreast of it all or any part of it? That's what I meant by historians not dealing with archaeology. Considering that archaeologists can't even seem to agree on what the archaeological record means, it seems that historians would be getting the information at second remove (if not further).
Which, going back to the issue of P. Wrede, shows that it's no surprise that she's promulgating a use history and science that is about as sophisticated as a fourth grader's diorama of cave men. Should she have done more research and been smarter? Absolutely. If I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she did some (because isn't that what alt-history is all about?), then she rejected the complexity to tell a story stupidly. If she didn't do the research, bad too. Either way, she deserves all the shit that gets thrown at her over this one. Because, as you point out, the complexity of history cannot be ignored. If anything, 1491 does a reasonable layman's job of making that case and showing that the complexity is greater than is popularly known.
Also, I think Wrede's a Carleton alum. Oh, the shame.
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Date: 2009-05-13 04:08 am (UTC)The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it's anecdotal. YOu know a historian who is familiar with archaeology. The guy who wrote 1491 spoke at UC last year and his work was apparently a revelation to historians and archaeologists alike (at least as I remember it being described, I didn't go). One of the most interesting parts of the book had to do with the turf wars in archaeology, with so much fighting going on for so long to determine who gets to say what and be believed. It seems to me to be such a huge field that a historian involved with her own work would have a hard time acquiring more than a passing acquaintance with the field. And, as you say, if a person's work doesn't tend to coincide with the archaeological record, how likely is it that they'll stay abreast of it all or any part of it? That's what I meant by historians not dealing with archaeology. Considering that archaeologists can't even seem to agree on what the archaeological record means, it seems that historians would be getting the information at second remove (if not further).
Which, going back to the issue of P. Wrede, shows that it's no surprise that she's promulgating a use history and science that is about as sophisticated as a fourth grader's diorama of cave men. Should she have done more research and been smarter? Absolutely. If I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she did some (because isn't that what alt-history is all about?), then she rejected the complexity to tell a story stupidly. If she didn't do the research, bad too. Either way, she deserves all the shit that gets thrown at her over this one. Because, as you point out, the complexity of history cannot be ignored. If anything, 1491 does a reasonable layman's job of making that case and showing that the complexity is greater than is popularly known.
Also, I think Wrede's a Carleton alum. Oh, the shame.