Writing the Practices

Bibliographic Data

ID8940155
AuthorsRoger Chartier (0000-0002-6008-9241, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume21
Issue2
Pages255-255
Publication date1998-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/286629
OpenAlexW2318077533
LanguageEN
Citations received5

First of all, I would like to thank very warmly Bonnie G. Smith,Jonathan Dewald, and William H. Sewell Jr. for attention they paid to my book On Edge of Cliff and for their astute comments and criticisms, which oblige me to clarify some of my historiographical positions or propositions. 1. I agree with Smith's ironic and critical comment about contradiction between claim for a universal knowledge made by historians and specificity and particularity of each practitioner's own social place or professional locus. I do not think that historians can avoid risk of mythical reconstructions of past. Identitarian mythological and fanciful histories are not linked with specific (and often dominated) identities. Like others, professional historians are capable of projecting desires and needs of present onto past, possibly writing a history of their discipline according to a heroic and idealistic narrative that ignores exclusions that have sustained process of professionalization itself. It seems to me, nonetheless, that we have to distinguish firmly between social description of inequalities that have inhabited and still inhabit historical discipline and epistemological characterization of operations and controls that govern production of a scientific discourse -especially if term scientific is understood, following Michel de Certeau, as the possibility of conceiving an ensemble of rules allowing control of operations adapted to pro

Political science · Computer Science · History · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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