The Limits of a Metaphor: Beyond History as a “Craft”

This paper seeks to destabilize the all-too-familiar metaphor of history writing as a “craft.” Produced and reproduced in all levels of college history education and repeated as a mantra in disciplinary reflections by historians of various stripes, the metaphorics of artisanship, while revelatory of historians’ self-understanding, works to obscure alternative possibilities of historical thinking and historiographical theory. The historian as “craftsperson,” their method/theory as “framework,” the creation of historical narrative as “weaving”—all these participate in a semantic web that hides and redeems as artistic creation the expropriative relation of the historian to their materials. The historian’s necessary engagement with fragments of past is indelibly a transgressive act, marshalling the dead in the service of a political future. We summon the past, giving it a “voice.” Humanistic historiography thus assumes a value system in which memory is good, and the past is there to be uncovered, indeed that to uncover the past is to do right by those to whom a voice is being given. I argue that, if we put this fundamental historiographical value into question, what may emerge is an understanding of history writing, not as craft, but as necromancy. Such an alternative historiographical metaphorics allows for an understanding of the obsession, and the danger, inherent in any production of history, of the burden placed upon the past by the historian’s intervention. It also enables a reconfiguration of the inescapable question of the importance of forgetting for historical knowledge. This question is prescient in an age in which each of us produces an immense digital archive that gives disturbingly deep insight into our interiority. The necessity of forgetfulness for historians, and even the virtue of it, must be recaptured by moving beyond anodyne descriptions of historiography as artisanship, in order to appreciate it as obsession and transgression.