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How is Historical Knowledge Recognized?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba
Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba*
Affiliation:
University of Dar es Salaam
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Extract

Historical knowledge exists in all human societies. It is the cognitive appropriation of socially-determined material transformations necessary for life process. We must begin with this fact. It is a form of social consciousness, a socially-determined interpretation of the movement of those transformations. But where do we find it and how do we recognize it? Where is the place of historical knowledge? Where and how does it exist? On the printed page, in books, of course, and prior to printing and writing, in oral traditions (all those forms of a human community's collective memory--some names of people or places; songs, stories, poems, legends, tales, cosmogonic myths; drawings, carvings, cave inscriptions, tablets, bone/bamboo inscriptions; languages; old roads; etc.). Historical knowledge exists nowadays as well on tapes, cassettes, computer memory, films, pictures, etc.

Historical knowledge exists in different degrees of elaboration, of truth character, of accuracy, as well as of scope. All human societies have undergone, and continue to undergo, social transformations. Some have experienced or experience more slow processes of movement than rapid ones and thus their social awareness of those processes of transformations has been or is less sharp. That is why the conscious control and social mastering of the social process of transformation has been or is less developed. Other societies at a certain level of world social process experienced or experience more rapid processes of transformations leading to sharper forms of social consciousness of those processes and specific needs of developing ways and tools for handling those processes.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 13 , 1986 , pp. 331 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1986

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References

Notes

1. Engels, Friedrich and Marx, Karl, Collected Works (Moscow, 1976), 5: 41–42.Google Scholar

2. Perlman, Fredy, Against Hisstory. (Detroit, 1983).Google Scholar The main thesis of this book is that history started with states.

3. Slater, Henry, “Notes on the Production of Historical Knowledge,” Utafiti, 6 (1984), 159–66.Google Scholar

4. I am referring to Skillen, Anthony, Ruling Illusions (Hassocks, 1977), 21, 23Google Scholar, where it is shown that political “theorists write as if the state is that-which-keeps-order-in-the-world” that is, “a statist demand is posed as a requirement of logic.”

5. Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar

6. Pomian, Krzysztof, “Le passé: de la foi à la connaissance,” Débat, no. 24 (March 1983).Google Scholar I refer particularly to the discussion of marks of historicity in this article.

7. Bloch, Marc, The Historian's Craft (New York, 1953), 79.Google Scholar

8. Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1971)Google Scholar; idem., For Marx (London, 1969); idem. and Balibar, E., Reading Capital (London, 1970).Google Scholar

9. Robert, Serge, Les révolutions du savoir: théorie générale des ruptures épistemologiques (Longuevile, Quebec, 1978)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

10. In his Problems in class analysis (Boston, 1983), 71Google Scholar, G. Carchedi has proposed another classification of the sciences into the ‘natural’ and the ‘social.’ “Neither the social nor the natural scientist is free from social conditioning in the very act of producing knowledge. The difference resides in the nature of the phenomena studied. Natural science is socially determined analysis of natural (i.e. non-socially determined) phenomena; social science is socially determined analysis of social (i.e., socially determined) phenomena. A further difference follows, i.e. that the social sciences become, the moment they become social phenomena, part of the real concrete which they study. Both social and natural sciences are social phenomena, … but only the former becomes part of the real concrete which it studies, through its action upon other social phenomena.”

11. Ibid.

12. For further discussion of this important issue see Fisk, Milton, “Dialectic and Ontology” in Mepham, J. and Ruben, D.H., eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy (Hassocks, 1979), 1: 117–43.Google Scholar

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15. Heller, Agnes, A Theory of History (London, 1982).Google Scholar The first part examines the six stages of historical consciousness characterizing humanity.

16. Slater, Henry, Lecture Notes (Dar es Salaam, 1983).Google Scholar