Miriam Burstein offers some interesting thoughts on "X Studies" (where X might be women, African-American, Jewish, American ...) that follows on from a women's studies discussion on Alas, A Blog.
The question really is, should you study your own group?
Thinking about this issue brought me all the way to Minnesota. I decided that if I was ever going to do New Zealand history it would be better to do my professional training out of the country. But I selected between universities in [predominantly] English-speaking countries that were either similar receiving countries in the 19th century migration out of Europe (U.S., Canada, Australia), or Britain itself. This is not exactly expanding ones horizons as far as they could go, and when American-born historians of America say how non-parochial I am for studying America (this really has happened several times), I think "we're both pretty parochial ..."
I've never understood the critique that "women" or "ethnic" or "Jewish" studies are too narrow either; after all it's perfectly acceptable -- it used to be the height of good learning, in fact -- to specialize in the study of elite Greek and Roman society 2000 years past. Non-national groupings are just as valid as nationalities as the basis for studying the human experience.
Where the "studies" approach goes awry is when the number of people studied becomes so trivial, and the merits of a broader grouping for study get lost. Rather than inadvertently offend my predominantly American readership by selecting some American ethnic or religious group I'll say that studying the Jewish or African experience in New Zealand would be an example of a study too narrow.
Large numbers are important! Groups with big populations are important historically. ("Big," of course, is relative). Large groups should get studied more.
Of course, the amount of artefactual information left for historians by different groups is quite different. Near universal literacy is established enough in the West that "we" tend to forget that one hundred years ago, many people didn't really get the chance to randomly contribute to the historical record. It's been said that social history is the study of laundry lists, but if you can't even write a laundry list we're not going to be reading your novel or diary or newspaper column.
I think this alone accounts for some of the differences between the ways in which historians approach the study of groups, and the way in which contemporary "studies" departments set themselves up. Historians are trained to ask and answer the question of how their evidence came to survive to the present. In other words, methodology is important, and I share the concern that "studies" approaches can short change students' learning of methods and approaches. (At the college level, this is not as much of a worry as at graduate school).
But should you study yourself? I don't think that being of a group gives you privileged knowledge about that group's history. Americans born in the 20th century don't come fully equipped with knowledge of their history -- they have to learn it by reading just like the rest of us from far away.
But on the other hand, studying a group that you can be a part of cannot just be dismissed as parochial. If the past really is another country, it's all the study of somewhere else.
Posted by robe0419 at April 8, 2005 1:52 PM