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Anthing Goes: Mexico's "New" Cultural History

Author(s): Stephen Haber


Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 2, Special Issue: Mexico's New
Cultural History: Una Lucha Libre (May, 1999), pp. 307+309-330
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2518376
Accessed: 18-01-2018 00:18 UTC

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Anything goes?

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Anything Goes:

Mexico's "New" Cultural History

Stephen Haber

This essay analyzes what has come to be called the "new cultural history" of Mex-
ico, a body of literature that, as Eric Van Young and Mary Kay Vaughan point
out, is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back perhaps no further than i990.
It is also, as Vaughan notes, a movement predominantly based in the United
States. Indeed, it has had little impact in Latin America itself, where historians
have hewed to more materialist approaches than those favored by the new cul-
tural history. Finally, its primary focus is the study of the mental and symbolic
processes that may or may not be primarily shaped by class experience but that
play an important role in the creation of social, political, and economic power
relations in society. Because it concentrates on the mental processes by which
common folk come to perceive, resist, and accommodate themselves to dominant
classes and groups, the new cultural history is largely, although not exclusively,
concerned with the "subaltern." In short, it represents a subset of social, cultural,
and political history- existing at the nexus of the three fields, but not necessarily
being wholly a part of any one of them. Indeed, there is a good deal of Mexican
cultural history that is written outside the orbit of the new cultural history.
This history constitutes both a major shift in the questions that historians
are asking and the methods that they employ to answer them. Indeed, because
it borrows methods from literary and cultural studies, along with the post-
modern ambivalence of those fields about the possibilities for an objective
epistemology, the broadest implications of the new cultural history are to be
found in its impact on historical methods and epistemology. For this reason,
this essay concentrates on the epistemology of the new cultural history. It does
so by examining the three essays prepared for this symposium and the canoni-
cal texts that they cite.

The author would like to thank Herbert S. Klein, Noel Maurer, and Armando Razo for
their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Hispanic Ame7rican Historical Review 79:2


Copyright i999 by Duke University Press

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31O HAHR / May / Haber

The fundamental points I raise for the field to consider are two. First, the
new cultural history is both ontologically and epistemically subjective. Many
of its practitioners are ambivalent about the notions that there are objective
facts (i.e., that facts exist independently of the subjective beliefs of the observer)
and that arguments should be organized according to the canons of logical
reasoning. This severely limits the ability of new cultural historians to advance
knowledge. Instead, it only enables them to advance their openly stated politi-
cal goals. Indeed, many of these historians embrace the notion that all scholar-
ship is political.
Second, the epistemology of new cultural historians has serious conse-
quences for their ability to sustain arguments. Their categories of analysis and
systems of classification are vague, imprecise, and inconsistent. At the same
time, the body of documentary evidence that sustains their empirical claims is,
by the admission of the new cultural historians themselves, thin and speaks to
the issues at hand only in an oblique manner. The net result is a body of schol-
arshipi in which evidentiary gaps and logical inconsistencies are filled by argu-
ment based on recourse to authority, moral statements, and ruminative inter-
pretive artifice.
Because I concentrate on the epistemological issues presented by the new
cultural history, I organize this essay as follows. Section i presents a brief dis-
cussion of the rules of evidence and argumentation in the two established his-
torical epistemologies: social science history and traditional history. Section 2
explains how the new cultural history constitutes a major departure from both
these epistemologies. Section 3 details the practical problems for the writing
of coherent historical narratives that is entailed by the new cultural history's
postmodern epistemology. Section 4 concludes.

Epistemological Foundations of Social

Science and Traditional History

There are two dominant paradigms in the writing of history. The first, social
science history, is rooted in the natural sciences and thus has a Popperian
falsificationist epistemology. It stresses logical consistency and formalized
thought, tests theories and frames hypotheses in a direct and explicit manner,
and embraces the quantitative analysis of systematically gathered data. The
second, traditional history, is rooted in legalistic notions of proof. It therefore
stresses the accounts of contemporaries (eyewitness evidence, in the legal
sense), the presence of similar accounts from multiple independent sources
(corroborating evidence), reasoning by analogy, and the construction of an

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Anything Goes 3 " I

authoritative narrative that draws on the author's historical imagination and


that expresses his or her moral voice.1
Because of these basic differences in epistemology, there are considerable
differences in how social science historians and traditional historians con-
struct narratives and present evidence. For example, the legalistic standards
of proof in traditional history mean that debates tend to be settled on the
basis of the provenance and density of documentary evidence. Quantitative
analysis receives slight attention; in the legal sense it is circumstantial evi-
dence. Social science historians, on the other hand, not only view the statistical
analysis of quantitative data as a strong form of proof, but, even more funda-
mentally, view the notion of hypothesis testing that underlies it as the most
compelling form of argumentation. Indeed, one of the fundamental differ-
ences in the epistemologies of the two approaches is that social science histori-
ans are explicitly engaged in the testing of models while traditional historians
do so in an implicit (and therefore incomplete) manner.2 Legalistic notions of
pro6f also encourage traditional historians to stress the aesthetic qualities of
scholarly prose: rhetorical brilliance is as important in the construction of a
powerful historical narrative as it is in a court of law. Social science historians,
on the other hand, emphasize systematic exposition and the specification of
hierarchically ordered hypotheses. Rarely are they accused of being great liter-
ary stylists.
Social science historians and traditional historians tend to think about
the goals and purposes of historical inquiry in fundamentally different ways.
The goal of social scientific history is to test theories that make general state-
ments about human behavior. Social science historians therefore tend to view
historical case studies as scientific observations, much in the same rigorous
sense that clinical psychologists or medical researchers employ the term.3
Traditional historians, on the other hand, tend to see the enterprise of history
as the refraction of documentary evidence through an aesthetic form in order
to recreate the past. This is not to say that traditional historians do not seek
to produce generalizable results. It is to say, however, that their generaliza-
tions do not emerge from the classical logic of hypothesis testing. Rather,

i. Robert William Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, i983), 54.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Alexander L. George, "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of
Structured, Focused Comparison," in Diplomacy: New Approaches in Histoiy, Thewy, and
Policy, ed. Paul Gordon Lauren (New York: Free Press, I979), 50-5I.

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31 2 HAHR / May / Haber

their generalizations emerge as practical wisdom that the reader extracts from
the narrative.4
The epistemologies of traditional and social science history may be dif-
ferent in fundamental ways, but they both share a commitment to advancing
knowledge based on reason and evidence. Both have ways of answering the
fundamental question of all serious fields of scholarly inquiry: How would you
know if you are wrong?

Epistemological Foundations of the New Cultural History

The new cultural history is not simply a new set of questions that historians are
asking; it constitutes a strongly subjectivist epistemology that is fundamentally
flawed in its ability to advance knowledge. This subjectivism is rooted in three
interrelated issues. The first is a postmodern ambivalence about the existence
of objective facts. The second is a postmodern ambivalence about the notion
that arguments must be based on logical reasoning. The third is the political
goals of the new cultural history. Let us take up each of these issues in detail.
First, new cultural historians manifest a postmodern ambivalence about
the existence of objective facts. Essentially they accept the legalistic notions of
evidence and proof charac eristic of traditional history while dispensing with
the single most important feature of traditional historical epistemology: the
notion that there are objective facts that can be established regardless of the
subjective beliefs of the observer. It is not so much that they reject the notions
of facts and events, but that they seem to stress that the determination of the
facts should not be the priority of historical research. In fact, many new cul-
tural historians believe that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate out
what actually happened in the past from their own present subjectivities and
identities.
Perhaps the clearest articulation of this view can be found in the introduc-
tion to Florencia Mallon's widely cited Peasant and Nation: "As the one con-
structing the narrative, I have power over its form and over the images of the
actors it contains. In a way I am tearing down official stories only to build up a
new one. Yet my efforts will bear fruit only if I am willing to listen, to open my

4. Perhaps the best example of the emergence of practical wisdom in a historical


narrative is that found in Bernard B. Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien
Phu (Philadelphia: Lippincott, i967). Though never explicitly stated, the central and
inescapable insight of this military history about a battle that took place in I954 was that
the United States could not win the war in Vietnam.

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Anything Goes 3 1 3

narrative to contending voices and interpretations, to struggle to avoid the


role of the omniscient or positivistic narrator."5 She goes on to say: "This pro-
cess of tracing connections-between myself and local intellectuals, between
submerged and unsubmerged discourses, between what happened then and
what happens now and in the future-places me squarely inside the struggles
over power and meaning. I cannot stand outside or above them, and in any
case I would not want to.'6
Eric Van Young echoes this view in his contribution to this symposium. As
he puts it:

[T]he cultural history literature often betrays certain autobiographical


undertones. Partly this is due to the increasing convergence of cultural
history with anthropology, whence we have bleeding into our discipline
recent examples of crypto-confessional from eminent practitioners such
as Ruth Behar and Paul Friedrich. But partly it just makes sense given
the nature of the approach and its own coordinates in cultural studies.
Whereas we once arrayed ourselves as observer and object, we now have
two subjectivities warily circling each other, or even three if the maker
of the source-text is distinct from the actors being described. If the
observers are in the picture, in other words, perhaps their assumptions
and the mode of their gaze warrant some attention.7

Many of the defenders of the subjectivist epistemology of the new cultural


history argue that approaches such as this are valid because all history is biased.
As Mary Kay Vaughan in her contribution to this symposium puts it:

The methods and concepts of cultural historians have been subjected to


critique by social science historians, such as Stephen Haber, who argue
that their sources and methods (and not those of cultural historians) can
produce objective, scientifically verifiable history-as if statistics were
not contingent upon the biases of those who construct categories of
analysis, upon the diligence and preferences of those who collect them,
and upon the mathematical models of those who manipulate them.8

5. Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Per-u
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, I995), 20.
6. Ibid.
7. Eric Van Young, "The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico,' in this issue.
8. Mary Kay Vaughan, "Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican
Revolution," in this issue.

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314 HAHR / May / Haber

This view is fatally flawed on two counts: Vaughan misunderstands social sci-
ence history as a discipline; and she seems unaware of the difference that ana-
lytic philosophers draw between ontological and epistemic subjectivity.
In regard to the first point, social science historians are quite aware that
the choice of a particular functional form or specification of a statistical tech-
nique can have an impact on their results. They are also aware that data sets
may be biased in any number of ways. It is for this reason that social science
history as a discipline has created a set of well-defined standards of evidence,
methods, and argumentation designed precisely to minimize these potential
sources of bias. These include various types of sensitivity analysis (designed to
determine whether the choice of functional form or specification drives the
qualitative results), tests for normality and heteroskedasticity (designed to
determine the representativeness of samples), tests for collinearity (that deter-
mine the independence of variables), and tests for autocorrelation (that
determine the independence across time of a given variable).9 Finally, social sci-
ence history has well-established rules of exposition that require that alternative
hypotheses be systematically evaluated. In short, the epistemology adhered to
by social science historians contains mechanisms that systematically constrain
subjective beliefs from determining substantive conclusions.
Second, Vaughan's view belies a serious misunderstanding of the differ-
ence between ontological and epistemic subjectivity.10 Vaughan is correct that
many of the observations of historians, both traditional and social scientific,
are theory laden. Their categories of analysis are often informed by sets of
unstated and unexamined values and biases, and these categories in turn order
the data under analysis. While this observation is true, it is also trivial in the
sense that it is true for virtually all bodies of knowledge. It is what analytic
philosophers mean by ontological subjectivity. The questions we ask, and the
categories and methods we create to answer them, are informed by subjective
values that do not emanate from brute facts of nature. A society that valued
material well-being, for example, would ask questions about the rise and fall of
living standards, and would therefore create categories and develop methods

9. For a discussion of social science methods, see Thomas G. Rawski et al., Economics
and the Historian (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, i996); and Roderick Floud, An
Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, I973).
iO. Ontology refers to the philosophical process by which human beings give value to
certain aspects of reality while denying it to others. Epistemology refers to the way human
beings organize knowledge; it is the philosophical system by which we determine how we
know what we know.

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Anything Goes 3 1 5

(such as GNP accounting) to measure their movement. A society that did not
value the material living standards of its population would neither think to
inquire about the standard of living nor would it develop techniques to mea-
sure per capita income.11
Knowledge can be advanced even if a discipline is ontologically subjective
(informed by shared sets of values) as long as it is epistemically objective
(informed by clearly defined rules of evidence and reason that do not privilege
individual experiences or beliefs that cannot be replicated). Ontological sub-
jectivity does not mean that there is no objective world, that observation can-
not be disentangled from the subjective beliefs of the observer, and that we
cannot establish systematic methods to study human behavior that produce
useful and replicable results. Behavior can, in fact, be objectively studied even
if it is based on an intersubjective shared understanding. To provide an exam-
ple, we use green pieces of paper to exchange goods and time in the United
States because everyone shares the view that these pieces of paper are valuable.
This shared subjective understanding of money does not, however, preclude
an observer from noting that these pieces of paper really are valued and that
this valuation affects the behavior of human beings in empirically verifiable
ways.12 Thus the ontological subjectivity of money as a cultural construct does
not prevent historians from establishing objective facts about human behavior.
The second manifestation of the subjectivist epistemology of the new cul-
tural history is its ambivalence about the canons of logical reasoning. Indeed,
the new cultural history has elevated the lack of analytic clarity to a virtue.
One of the supposed advantages of its postmodern epistemology is that it
avoids "static, reifying" exercises because its conceptual categories are "pro-
cessual," not analytic.13 This essentially means that clearly defined analytic cat-
egories are replaced by a fog of words whose meaning is indeterminate.
Much of the new cultural history is strongly influenced by the postmod-
ern notion that the world is constituted by language -that reality is a cultural
construct, a "text" whose meaning is defined solely by infinite associations
with other "texts." Analytic categories are therefore pernicious fictions whose
purpose is to prevent counterdiscourses from challenging the authority and

i i. John R. Searle, The Construlction, of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, I995).
I2. Ibid.
I3. See, for example, Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, "Popular Culture and
State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico," in Eveiyday Formts of State Fomnation: Revolution
aiid the Negotiations of Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, I994), I .

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31 6 HAHR / May / Haber

hegemony of science, reason, and the relentless logic that underpins modern
society. 14
Perhaps the boldest articulation of this view can be found in Derek Sayer's
concluding essay to Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent's widely cited Everyday
Forms of State Formation: "I do not want to get into the issue of modernity, post-
modernity, and so on here. But I would suggest-and people have been saying
this for a long time before the postmodernists, going back to Max Weber and
beyond-that there is a certain parallel between the exigencies of scientific dis-
course (coherence, predictability, control, one thing following from another
and being logically related to the other) and the technologies of domination
themselves.'"15 The implication is that if you believe in the explanatory power of
logical thought you are also in favor of the creation of presumably malevolent
(but undefined and unspecified) "technologies of domination."
In his contribution to this symposium, William French echoes this
ambivalence about the utility of logical reasoning. As he puts it, "Rethinking
both culture and the state (often together), forms part of a larger questioning
of holistic approaches or paradigms . . . that see history as having overall
coherence, direction, and meaning that can be captured within some metanar-
rative."116 Although he is more muted than Sayer, the implication of French's
view is clear: events are not interconnected and cannot be understood as part
of a coherent system of causal relationships.
The third manifestation of the subjectivist epistemology of the new cul-
tural history is its explicitly political goals. Contemporary political issues
informed much of the work of previous generations of historians, and in this

I4. Readers may wonder why any reasonable person would come to hold such a
position. Steven Pinker provides, in my view, the key insight: "Many of us have been
puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments by the doctrines of postmodernism,
poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible,
meaning is self-contradictory, and reality is socially constructed. The motives become
clearer when we consider statements like 'Human beings have constructed and used
gender-human beings can deconstruct and stop using gender,' and 'The heterosexual/
homosexual binary is not in nature, but is socially constructed, and therefore
deconstructable.' Reality is denied to categories, knowledge, and the world itself so that
reality can be denied to stereotypes of gender, race, and sexual orientation. The doctrine is
basically a convoluted way of getting to the conclusion that oppression of women, gays, and
minorities is bad." Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, I997), 57.
I5. Derek Sayer, "Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on
'Hegemony,"' in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday FormVts of State For-Mation, 3 72-73.
i6. William E. French, "Imagining and the Cultural History of Nineteenth-Century
Mexico," in this issue.

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Anything Goes 3 I 7

sense the emphasis on articulating a moral or ideological voice is nothing


new.17 What is different, however, is that the political ends of the narrative are
elevated to a virtue that in and of itself is deemed capable of sustaining an
author's substantive claims. The problem here is twofold. First, that truth is
subjective: it is contingent on the ideological prejudices of the reader. Second,
debate about substantive claims are discouraged. Scholars who disagree with
an interpretation or argument are open to ad hominem attack. If you disagree
with someone on methodological or evidentiary grounds, then by implication
you have an antiprogressive (and likely right-wing) political agenda.
Florencia Mallon's American Historical Review article on subaltern studies
in Latin America is perhaps the most obvious example of this genre of histori-
cal writing:

This is not an easy time for scholars who work on Latin America. Over the
past five years or so, many of our most important and inspirational
historical narratives have come undone; the Cuban Revolution is dying a
slow death after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dragged down by the
morass of global capitalism, the internal erosion of social gains, and a
leadership grown old in the holding of centralized power. The
Sandinistas lost control of the state in i990 and face the future internally
divided, needing to make broad coalitions if they are to regain a place in
the executive branch (Where is their stunning political majority of I979-
198i?). In Chile, the post-Pinochet Christian Democrats have hailed
the dictatorship's radical privatization and free market reforms as
"modernization," tarnishing the memory of Chilean aspirations for social
justice under Salvador Allende and the Chilean statist model of economic
development that emerged from the first "popular unity" government of
the late I930S. In Peru, Sendero Luminoso has confused and confounded
those of us accustomed to supporting peoples struggles, first by killing an
astounding number of the people they were supposedly struggling for,
then because their "maximum leader" reached an agreement with an
authoritarian, free market-oriented president after only a few weeks in
captivity. One could go on and on. But the main question, simply put,
is, what is a progressive scholar to do? If we continue to commit to
emancipatory, bottom-up analysis and yet can no longer simply ride one of

I 7. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dr-eam: The "Objectivity Question" and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, i988); and Stephen H. Haber,
David M. Kennedy, and Stephen D. Krasner, "Brothers under the Skin: Diplomatic
History and International Relations," Inte-national Security 22, no. I (I997).

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3 8 HAHR / May / Haber

our various Marxist or


tives? Are there other

She then goes on to say:

Does not subaltern studies offer us the perfect compromise? Formulated


by a group of intellectuals based in the "Third World," anticolonial and
politically radical yet conversant with the latest in textual analysis and
postmodern methods: what more could a cautious, progressive scholar
hope for?19

The political aims-anticapitalist, prosocialist, prorevolutionary-of the


new cultural history are echoed by Patricia Seed and her coauthors of the found-
ing statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, published in a
boundary 2 collection entitled The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America:

The present dismantling of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the


end of communism and the consequent displacement of revolutionary
projects, the process of redemocratization, and the new dynamics
created by the effects of the mass media and transnational economic
arrangements: these are all developments that call for new ways of
thinking and acting politically.20

In their introduction to Everyday Forms of State Formation, Gilbert Joseph


and Daniel Nugent also explicitly reveal their ideological goal:

WVhat is needed is a truly postrevisionist critique of Mexico's revolution-


ary past, one that is prepared to ride its long waves and is not deaf to its
multiple voices and dialects-such as those that presently emanate from
the highlands and jungles of Chiapas. It is this kind of critique, generated
through experience and imaginative response to forms of oppression,
control, and rule, that the present volume seeks to encourage.21

i8. Florencia E. Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies:


Perspectives from Latin American History," American Historical Review 99 (I994): I49I-92.
i9. Ibid., I493.

20. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement," in The


Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, eds. John Beverly, Michael Aronna, and Jos6 Oviedo
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, I995).
2 I. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, preface, in Joseph and Nugent, Evelyday
For-mns of State Formation, xvi; emphasis in original.

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Anything Goes 3 1r9

Mark Thurner, in his preface to From Two Republics to One Divided, follows
a similar rhetorical strategy, the purpose of which is to give moral authority to
the subsequent historical narrative:

As the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in Europe, the wall of an


ultraorthodox Maoism was going up in Peru. At the same time, the
Peruvian Left was falling into disarray, and the scholar-hero of the Left
had just died, at a tragically young age, of brain cancer. As the coffin of
Alberto Flores Galindo was carried out of the Casona of San Marcos
University and enveloped in the flurry of red flags (of PUM, the United
Mariateguist Party) and masked diablada dancers, the Peruvian Left
seemed to go with him. The world seemed upside down, out of joint.22

At times, the articulation of a political and moral vision reaches extreme


levels. Consider, for example, the use of images from both pop psychology (the
recovery of repressed memories) and utopian socialism in the following pas-
sage from Peasant and Nation. Also note the shift in verb tenses within the para-
graph. A statement about what happened in the nineteenth century becomes
transformed into a statement about what we, the readers, might imagine for
Mexicans in the future:

I must still insist that the popular democratic discourses constructed


during the mid-nineteenth century, partially or completely repressed as
they were in the following years, today still form a part of embedded
memory and practice within popular political cultures. Recovering
these discourses involves digging them out from under the dominant
discourses that suppressed them, whether through the neo-colonial
"divide and rule" as in Peru or the successful construction of a
hegemonic state as in Mexico. In both cases this recovery allows us to
imagine more clearly how subaltern peoples might, after conquering the
space to do so, create their own alternative polities.23

22. Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial
Nationmaking in Andean Pern (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), iX. What connection
these events have to the subsequent analysis of the nineteenth century is never made clear.
2 3. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, i9.

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320 HAHR / May / Haber

Practical Implications of the

New Cultural History's Epistemology

The subjectivist epistemology embraced by new cultural historians leaves them


with two practical problems. The first is that it is difficult, if not impossible,
for them to give empirical answers to the questions they pose. The second is
that their ambivalence about the power of logical thought means that their
categories of analysis are so incompletely and vaguely defined as to be mean-
ingless. As a result their arguments are internally inconsistent.
In regard to the first issue, the new cultural history is about people who
did not leave firsthand, written accounts of their own lives. Practitioners of
this history strive to understand how power and meaning were expressed in
everyday forms; how hegemony was constructed, contested, and reconstructed
through ritual and discourse; how subaltern groups expressed an alternative
vision of the nation; and other questions about how common people perceived,
accommodated, and resisted capitalism and the formation of the nation-state.
Many of these are interesting questions. It is not clear, however, that new
cultural historians can marshal the objective facts necessary to answer them.
In part this difficulty stems from the ambivalence of these historians about
the possibilities of establishing objective facts as a philosophical principle. In
part this difficulty arises because the available documentary evidence only
obliquely speaks to these issues. What body of documents, for example, might
plausibly provide direct evidence about the central question posed by Wil-
liam French for historians of nineteenth-century Mexico, in" 'imagining' . . .
how the nation has been imagined, how subjectivity has been imagined and,
in some of their most provocative work, how the imaginings and thus con-
struction of nation and subjectivity have been (and are) implicated in each
other.'24 Practitioners of the new cultural history, as Vaughan and Van Young
point out, must therefore read traditional bodies of evidence "against the
grain" in order to tease out what they argue are subtle and nuanced mean-
ings, which are then decoded in light of methods adapted from literary or
cultural studies. The problem, of course, is that the interpretation of evi-
dence "read against the grain" is not unambiguous. Indeed, in this practice
the presence of ambiguity and the virtuosity of the interpretive act are at a
premium.
Eric Van Young is perhaps clearest about this problem when he states that
"cultural historians are mostly asking anthropologists' questions without access

24. French, "Imagining."

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Anything Goes 32I

to anthropologists' tools."25 As he quite correctly points out, ethnographers


can reinterview their informants in order to clean up ambiguities, fill in factual
details, or discuss at length their understanding of the symbolic meaning of
rituals or discourses. Historians, of course, do not have this option. They must
rely solely upon what they can retrieve in the fragmented documentary record,
and that record is overwhelmingly concerned with institutional, not mental or
symbolic, issues.26
As a practical matter in the writing of the new cultural history, this prob-
lem is perhaps most clearly displayed in Florencia Mallon's Peasant and Nation.
On the one hand, she argues that "the category of gender is crucial to the
story?'27 Yet at the same time, she concedes that "gaining access to what women
did, thought, or argued was a feat of historical imagination.'28 Thus, at a num-
ber of junctures throughout the text, she is forced, quite literally, to "imagine"
what her historical actors thought, felt, or said.29
In a recent article, Gilbert Joseph provides perhaps the bluntest assess-
ment of the ability of researchers to understand the mental constructs of long-
dead informants:

Making sense of the consciousness of participants in rather fleeting


moments of collective rural action-episodes that rarely leave a cultural
trace -is no easy task.... Indeed, many students of social movements
wonder whether we can ever determine individual motivations with any
degree of accuracy. The task is made even more daunting when we
must work retrospectively, with incomplete data. Particularly in the
tumultuous context of riots and rebellions, the insurgents themselves
may not even be conscious, at the moment they join a band, of what
motivates them. One Yucatecan peon, Marcos Chan, tersely remarked at
his trial: "They asked me if I wanted to join them and I said yes." How

25. Van Young, "New Cultural History."


26. As Van Young puts it: "What most often shows up in the documents, as we all
know, are the institutional aspects of colonial life-traces of formal structures such as
property systems, judicial and administrative structures, or kinship relations; or if we are
lucky, freeze-dried versions of rituals, episodes of collective action, conflict situations, and
so forth." Ibid.
27. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, xix.
28. Ibid.
29. One of the most glaring examples of this can be found in ibid., IS, where Mallon
imagines what the "counterdiscourses" of widows sounded like. The strategy is repeated
again on p. i65, where she imagines what the people of Tepoztlin perceived and felt about
the Liberal faction.

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322 HAHR / May / Haber

can we begin to know what went through his mind? How can we know if
he would have acted differently a day or a week later if presented with
the same choice?30

Nevertheless, two pages later Joseph dispenses with this problem with a wave
of the hand. "But ultimately," he states, "in grappling with these episodes of
resistance and rebellion, I feel compelled to attempt a general explanation of
why they took place and why villagers and peons decided to join them-to
offer at least a proximate cause, to pass through the eye of the needle, as it
were."31
I should point out that difficulty in establishing the empirical facts is not
peculiar to history: it is present as well in the social and natural sciences. The
response to data limitations in those fields has been to assess truth claims
through tests of logical consistency. Indeed, in a number of fields in the social
sciences, formal models (strings of logically connected, if-then statements)
play a key role in theory construction. At the very least, logical models play an
important role in structuring empirically-driven arguments, particularly when
the empirical data is from studies with small numbers of observations or
cases.32
New cultural historians could follow the lead of social and natural scientists
and apply formalized thought to assess the plausibility of arguments that are dif-
ficult to evaluate on purely empirical grounds. As we have already seen, however,
the former historians are highly ambivalent about the epistemological utility of
logical reasoning. They therefore reject the notion that categories of analysis
and systems of classification must be clearly and unambiguously specified.
A few definitional statements by new cultural historians serve to convey
an idea of how a fog of words has come to replace clearly defined categories of
analysis. Consider, for example, the definition of popular culture offered by
Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent in Everyday Forms of State Formation:

Designating popular culture as the symbols and meanings embedded in


the quotidian practices of subaltern groups is not intended as a rigid
formulation that might enable us to specify exactly what the contents of
those symbols and meanings are-a static, reifying exercise at best.

30. Gilbert M. Joseph, "Rethinking Mexican Revolutionary Mobilization," in Joseph


and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 148.

31 . Ibid., 150-51I
32. James D. Fearon, "Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,"
World Politics 43 (199 ).

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Anything Goes 323

Rather, our definition underlines their processual nature, and insists that
such popular knowledge is constantly being refashioned and "read"
within (and upon) the subordinate imagination.33

A similar treatment of the category of culture can be found in William


French's essay in this issue of the HAHR, in which he states that

the conceptualization of culture as a relatively coherent system of norms


and values that guide all kinds of conduct in society has been rejected.
In its place we now see an emphasis on more discrete and conflicted
cultures. This is apparent in Mallon's emphasis on communities riven
with divisions and on all relationships as being subject to negotiation
(although, perhaps, her term "communal hegemony" brings back in the
former definition of culture), and in Stern's characterization of culture as
argument. Likewise, a reified notion of the state is giving way to the
idea of the state as itself imagined, as a process of cultural revolution that
works from within us.34

To French's credit, he realizes the consequences of rejecting clear definitions


of culture and the state, although as we noted earlier, he is celebratory (rather
than concerned) about the implications of this for history as a discipline.
The lack of analytic clarity extends to just about every major concept
employed in the new cultural history. Take, for example, "subaltern." As Van
Young, French, and Vaughan all note, the subaltern is one of the central cate-
gories of the field. Indeed, "subaltern studies" has become unto itself a special-
ized subfield of the new cultural history. Consistent with the antiepistemolog-
ical foundation of the new cultural history, the concept is never operationalized
nor defined in a meaningful way. Indeed, the "Founding Statement" of the
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group does not even provide a working
definition of this term, except to say that "the subaltern is not one thing. It is
... a mutating, migrating subject.'35 In Florencia Mallon's widely cited "The

3 3. Joseph and Nugent, "Popular Culture and State Formation," in Joseph and
Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 17.
34. French, "Imagining."
35. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement," 146. Members
of this group do agree with a general concept of the subaltern as the masses of the laboring
population, but they also acknowledge that the term is flexible enough to include even
those dominating agents that have oppressed the masses. That is, depending on the
circumstances, anyone is capable of being characterized as subaltern.

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324 HAHR / May / Haber

Promise and Dilemma


broadly as anyone who is subordinated in terms of class, caste, age, gender
and office, or in any other way."36 Who then is not subaltern? Clearly, all the
young, all the nonrich, all women, all nonheterosexuals, and all nonelites, are
subaltern. In fact, the final phrase of Mallon's definition, "or in any other way,"
admits virtually anyone into the category. In short, the subaltern seems not to
be an idea, but a word that pretends to stand for an idea.
Indeed, in the new cultural history imprecision even surrounds categories
of analysis that have clear and well-defined meanings in common speech. The
concept of "space," for example, appears to have multiple and indeterminate
meanings even within the same text. At times, space appears to refer to a geo-
graphic locale, an actual physical site, a locus of cultural or social interaction,
or, more imprecisely but still intuitively understandable, an opportunity to
articulate a position or argument (as in "discursive space").37 At other times, its
meaning is a complete mystery. Consider, for example, the following from
Peasantsand Nation: "these irregular forces formed a sociopolitical space connect-
ing local communal hegemonic practices to broader state apparatuses, espe-
cially the regular army. And it was in this intermediate space, composed of dis-
course, structure, and action, that rural subalterns in all three areas constructed
alternative national-democratic projects.'38
Occasionally, the very notion of "space" makes no sense at all in the con-
text in which it is used. Consider the following from a recent article by Mary
Kay Vaughan: "New spaces and behaviors were more easily tolerated in women
who left than in those who stayed behind."39 This reader, at least, is puzzled
about what it means for a person to have a space, about how one could know
whether that space was new or old, and about what it means, exactly, to "toler-
ate" a space.
Indeed, in the new cultural history the concept of "space" is nothing more
than a conceptual catchall-a word to be used whenever nothing else readily
comes to mind. Consider, for example, the variety of meanings that can be
imputed to the term in the following passage from Womlen of the Mexican
Countryside: "[The various authors'] essays demonstrate how women's income-

36. Mallon, "Promise and Dilemma," 1494.


37. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 71.
38. Ibid., i8.
39. Mary Kay Vaughan, "Rural Women's Literacy and Education during the Mexican
Revolution: Subverting a Patriarchal Event?" in Women of the Mexican Countlyside,
1 850-i990: Creating Spaces, Shaping Transitions, eds. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary
Kay Vaughan (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1994), 120.

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Anything Goes 3 25

earning capacities combine with their invasion of new cultural and institu-
tional spaces (factories, markets, schools, travel, recreation, store ownership,
and politics) to produce an often tortuous renegotiation of gendered power,
spaces, and roles."40 To this reader it is not clear that politics, itself a highly
abstract category, can be construed as "a cultural or institutional space." It is
equally unclear how politics, store ownership, and travel can be considered
similar, all fitting into a single conceptual basket. The concept of space is again
used as a conceptual catchall in the "Founding Statement of the Latin Ameri-
can Subaltern Studies Group," although here we are informed that the space-
whateveri it is-is blank. As Patricia Seed and her coauthors explain, their proj-
ect is "to represent subalternity in Latin America, in whatever form it takes,
wherever it appears-nation, hacienda, workplace, home, informal sector,
black market-to find the blank space where it speaks as sociopolitical subject
requires us to explore the margins of the state.''41
Readers looking for further examples of incoherently defined categories
of analysis need look no further than the contributions to this symposium.
Consider, for example, how Mary Kay Vaughan defines the key concept of
"identity":

Identity, as defined here, cannot be reduced to notions of economic


interest or positioning in relations of production. It is also deeper, and
more intimate and specific, than generic notions of the moral economy
built around the subsistence ethic. It is historically embedded in local
experience and constructed through memory and practice. While forged
in local experience, identity is not formed in isolation, but in relation to
broader social formations, information systems, events, and interaction
with the state. It is relational and grounded in differences between the
self and others. It reflects and constitutes power and unequal power
relations. For instance, identity is gendered, establishing different
behaviors, expectations, and power relations for men and women.
Individuals and groups have multiple identities that shift according to
time and context. Identities may be social, cultural, or political. Here I
am concerned with political identity as it draws upon and relates to
social and cultural identity. To detect these in the historical record, the
historian must rely to a large extent on peasant discourses, i. e., the

40. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, "Introduction," in Fowler-


Salamini and Vaughan, Women of the Mexican Countyside, xx.
41. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement," I44.

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326 HAHR / May / Haber

languages that order re


and influence social practice.42

Given this definition, how would we know whether the particular iden-
tity we impute to someone accurately portrays that person's authentic self at a
particular point in time? Even if we could get around the problem of obtain-
ing sources that speak directly to the identification of individuals' authentic
selves (itself no small feat, because the extant documentation, as Van Young
points out, speaks to this subject in only the most oblique of ways), we would
still be confronted by the impossibility of actually operationalizing the notion
of identity contained in Vaughan's definition. To borrow subcategories from
Vaughan's essay, how would we determine when someone had a "peasant iden-
tity" or a "political identity," or was developing a new identity? How could we
be certain that identities were, or were not, "shifting"? In fact, because "indi-
viduals and groups have multiple identities that shift according to time and
context'" one can assert just about anything one pleases. Propositions about
identities are thus unfalsifiable through either empirical verification or logical
inference.
Conceivably, our resolution of this problem might be made easier if we
understood what a discourse is, since an identity can be "detected" by analyz-
ing "discourses.'43 Unfortunately, however, "discourse" is as poorly defined a
category as "identity." According to French, it is "defined as systems of knowl-
edge that codify techniques and practices for the exercise of social control."44
Apparently, from what I can gather, occasionally discourse refers to a particu-
lar type of language; but other forms of representation are also considered dis-
courses, particularly if they can be related to hegemony. Thus, rituals contain
discourses, as do works of art and drama, or, for that matter, even the way peo-
ple dress. In short, one can assert that any kind of discourse exists and there
seems to be no way to falsify the proposition. In fact, discourses are multiple
and relational, which is to say that you cannot argue that one particular dis-
course did not exist in a particular text simply because you have identified
another one in that same text. Indeed, the rules of argumentation are such that
one can claim the presence of certain types of discourses whether a particular
set of terms appear in someone's language or not (recall here that a ritual or
work of art may also contain a discourse). Thus, for example, I do not have to

42. Vaughan, "Cultural Approaches."


43. Ibid.
44. French, "Imagining."

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Anything Goes 327

use masculinized terminology in this essay (allusions to sports metaphors, or


words such as seminal) to risk standing accused by a new cultural historian of
using gendered discourse that expresses hegemonic power relations. The fact
that I argue that the strongest forms of argument are those rooted in logic and
the dispassionate and unbiased analysis of the evidence may be grounds
enough for conviction.
The lack of clearly defined categories of analysis means that even if they
wished to, new cultural historians would be hard pressed to sustain arguments
that are internally consistent. Consider, for example, William French's state-
ment that in the late nineteenth century, "the state [attempted] to inculcate
new forms of subjectivities and identities."45 By French's own definition, the
state is not an objective entity but is itself "imagined," as part of an internal sub-
jective process.46 Since both "identities" and "subjectivities" are "imagined,"
along with the "state," are we to understand that something that is imagined
and is "discursively articulated" can inculcate something else that is "imag-
ined" and "discursively articulated"?
Or consider, for example, French's discussion of the notions of gender and
power in the works of Steve Stern and Ana Maria Alonso. French notes that
Alonso "conceptualizes the relationship between power and gender in a funda-
mentally different way."47 One might think that this observation would be fol-
lowed by a discussion of which of the two approaches is analytically more
powerful, that is to say more useful in understanding a broader range of
observed phenomena in the historical record. Given the antiepistemological
tendencies of new cultural historians, however, such distinctions need not be
drawn. We can simply say, as French does, that the "result is provocative" and
be done with it.
Finally, consider Florencia Mallon's notion of hegemony, one of the cen-
tral conceptual categories of her work and that of her fellow new cultural his-
torians. "First," she begins, "hegemony is a set of nested, continuous processes
through which power and meaning are contested, legitimated, and redefined
at all levels of society. According to this definition, hegemony is a hegemonic
process: it can and does exist everywhere at all times. Second, hegemony is an
actual end point, the result of hegemonic processes.'48 By this definition, of
course, nonhegemony does not exist as a theoretical or empirical possibility.

45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 6

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328 HAHR / May / Haber

The result is a concept that is ahistorical (because there are in fact times when
hegemony does not exist-revolutions being an obvious example), that is
tautological (hegemony is hegemonic), and that is theoretically incomplete
because it does not allow for the possibility that some states have achieved
higher degrees of hegemony than others. Given the definition of hegemony in
Peasant and Nation, what are readers to make of the notion, later introduced
(but not defined) by Mallon, of "counterhegemony"?49 Presumably, if hege-
mony "can and does exist everywhere at all times" then counterhegemony log-
ically must never exist anywhere at any time. With this kind of indeterminacy
in the basic.categories of analysis, how can we operationalize the other, more
complex categories that Mallon creates, such as "communal hegemony," "com-
munal hegemonic processes," "hegemonic nationalist discourses," "counter-
hegemonic Liberalism" "communal hegemonic discourses," and "popular Lib-
eral counterdiscourse"?50
How then does the new cultural history sustain truth claims if its substan-
tive arguments are difficult to empirically verify and if it cannot be held to
standards of logical reasoning? One way it meets these objections, as already
noted, is by framing its arguments around explicitly ideological statements
that infuse the subsequent narrative with moral or political authority. A prob-
lem with this approach is that truth becomes contingent on the ideological
prejudices of the reader. Another way is through a direct appeal to authority:
statements are true because someone else agrees with your assertion. But with
this approach two other problems become manifest. First, truth becomes con-
tingent on the readers' acceptance of the notion that some particular individu-
als have privileged knowledge, the inner logic of which we cannot divine. Sec-
ond, truth becomes contingent on the relevant authority not changing his or
her mind at some point in the future. Recall here Florencia Mallon's reasons
for embracing subaltern studies. She doesn't argue that this approach has
greater analytic power than other approaches but, rather, that it should be
embraced as a research method because it is "formulated by a group of intel-
lectuals based in the 'Third World,' anticolonial and politically radical yet
conversant with the latest in textual analysis and postmodern methods.'51

49. Ibid., 12.


50. Ibid., 12, 15, 6i, 96, 117. I should point out that there is, in fact, no agreement in
the literature as to what the concept of hegemony actually means. See, for example, the
comments by Sayer, "Some Dissident Remarks," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of
State Formation, 367.

5i. Mallon, "Promise and Dilemma," 1493.

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Anything Goes 329

Permit me to provide an example of what this kind of argumentation


looks like when put forward in an historical narrative. In Gilbert Joseph's
analysis of the phenomenon of "pressing," he asserts that although reluctant
Yucatecans were coerced or pressured into joining a rebellion, this does not
imply that they were forced. The evidence upon which he bases the claim that
an exclusive focus on coercion "ignores pressing's unifying function," is simply
to quote a similar unproved (and likely unprovable) assertion from Indian his-
torian Ranajit Guha.52 Guha's claim, and it is nothing more than that, that
pressing "is primarily an instrument of . .. unification and not of punishment,"
is taken as proof in and of itself.53 Indeed, the strategy of argument by recourse
to authority is so common in the new cultural history that it has become almost
standard to note the "prominence" of authorities, or to note that ones own
views are "in accord with" those of some other well-known historian.

Concluding Remarks

The new cultural history poses an interesting set of questions about the cul-
tural foundations of political and economic power. The evidence and methods
employed by new cultural historians in answering these questions fail, how-
ever, to satisfy the epistemological standards set by established schools of his-
tory. In short, the new cultural history has not yet succeeded in creating a
serious research program. It cannot convince scholars who are not already
predisposed to believe its claims that its substantive findings are accurate.
What should the field do? Should cultural historians colonize other fields,
as Eric Van Young suggests? Or is the problem one of the imbalance in the
level of binational research, as Vaughan suggests? While I would agree with
much of Van Young's diagnosis about the ills of the new cultural history, I
would disagree with his suggested cure. If the new cultural history were to col-
onize other fields the result would simply be the colonization of those fields
with the same epistemological problems that have plagued the new cultural
history. Similarly, more research by Mexican scholars will not make these
problems disappear. There would simply be a higher volume of research whose
substantive claims could not be verified or replicated.
Should historians then abandon the study of culture because it presents
questions that are difficult to answer? I think not. The study of culture and

52. Joseph, "Rethinking Mexican Revolutionary Mobilization," 154.


53. Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, vol. 4 (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985),
197-98, cited in Joseph, "Rethinking Mexican Revolutionary Mobilization," 154.

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330 HAHR / May / Haber

its interaction with politics and economics is simply too important to leave
unstudied.
What it does mean, however, is that new cultural historians are going to
have to think long and hard about how they define their analytical categories,
build causal models, and sustain arguments in the face of limited and indirect
evidence. It also means that they are going to have to come to grips with the
difference between ontological and epistemic subjectivity, and that they will
have to develop methods designed to systematically constrain subjective beliefs
from influencing substantive conclusions. Ironically, it may well mean that
these historians will have to embrace standards of proof rooted in the applica-
tion of formal logic. If the evidentiary base is thin for the kinds of questions
that Mexican historians are now asking, then one way to sustain truth claims is
to be certain that they are based in logic, reason, and clear specification. Such
a strategy may not, however, be consistent with the political and performative
goals of the new cultural history.

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