Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Introduction: the Third Path
- PART I FORMATIVE DISCOURSES
- PART II PRACTICES OF INQUIRY
- 6 Discursive hybrids of practice: an introductory schema
- 7 Generalizing practices of inquiry
- 8 Particularizing practices of inquiry
- 9 The prospects for inquiry
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Particularizing practices of inquiry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Introduction: the Third Path
- PART I FORMATIVE DISCOURSES
- PART II PRACTICES OF INQUIRY
- 6 Discursive hybrids of practice: an introductory schema
- 7 Generalizing practices of inquiry
- 8 Particularizing practices of inquiry
- 9 The prospects for inquiry
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The specialists most concerned with particularity, historians, have long been resistant to the incursion of formalized methods into their provinces. Training in many departments remains largely a matter of historiography and apprenticeship. The institutional stakes of such training tend to promote ever more detailed analysis of particular times, places, and events. Historians thus sometimes reject comparison because it sacrifices detailed knowledge for greater breadth of analysis, and their impulse is to suspect theory of sacrificing empirical reality for systematic conceptual coherence. Yet there have been important countertendencies. Although Marc Bloch considered history more a craft than a science, he devoted considerable attention to detailing the techniques of that craft, and he regarded comparison as a central craft technique.
Moreover, historians do not have a monopoly on their craft. Recently, any neatly bounded autonomy of history has been eroded, first, by deconstructive criticism, second, as a consequence of intense efforts to thematize the relationships between history and other disciplines, third, because social science researchers have increasingly engaged in comprehensive single-case analyses, and, fourth, because a number of historians themselves have shifted practices to incorporate both the so-called linguistic turn and more theoretically informed analytic practices. However the boundaries of history may be construed, they are not historically immutable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cultures of InquiryFrom Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research, pp. 204 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999