Potential

This chapter focuses on the potential within certain methodological approaches in history-writing to use the personal experience of the author. The tools and concepts of anthropology, psychoanalysis and ‘postmodernism’ have all influenced academic history in vital and profound ways throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The extent and consequences of these influences differ across the three cases – but are also powerful in each one. The three intellectual approaches (broadly conceived) are also shown to contain within them extended and sophisticated discussions of the subjectivity of the author. These discussions rarely make it into the histories, but they have nevertheless been influenced by the ‘participant observer’ discussions in anthropology, the acknowledgement of deep and obscure personal motivations in psychoanalysis and the demand for ‘reflexivity’ in postmodern and literary theory. This potential might well be used to legitimate ‘the personal’ in history-writing, but it can do more: it can show that historians might analyse their work and their own selves from within the conceptual architecture they already inhabit.