History and literature, etc.

Question 1

Monaghan and Just - use of ethnography

Answer 1

Spending months with a group of people can help greatly in understanding them

Dou Donggo of Indonesia - example of crime and appropriate punishment according to laws (woman attacked by a man)

Invisible to historian as they keep no written records

Even ethnographic historian using oral histories would have difficulty accessing the case, as it is accepted tribal practice never to discuss a dispute once it is settled

Question 2

Anth - Keith Thomas protestation

Answer 2

1963 - protested against historical specialisation by subject matter, contrasted it with how anthropologists studied small-scale societies in their totality

Saw overlaps between matters studied by anthropologists in preliterate societies and some phenomena studied by historians of preliterate European society

Question 3

Anth - reconceptualising ‘survivals’

Answer 3

By asking what thoughts hitherto conceptualised as survivals meant to those who thought them, and what people’s ritual did for them, it could be possible to see how those phenomena fitted into people’s lives and conceptions of the world

Bloch’s idea - rather than ‘superstition’ or ‘faith’, the phrase ‘system of belief’ relativized and historicised both, and was implicitly comparative

Question 4

Anth, Thomas - use of studies of mentalities

Answer 4

Anthropological studies of primitive mentality could provide valuable reinforcements to historians confronted by a paucity of evidence for the mental life of the lower reaches of the distant society they are studying

E.g. knowledge gained from anthropologists concerning the importance of dancing as a bond of community lives

Tells us something about the possible implications of the Puritan attack on maypoles and Sabbath Sports

Question 5

Arch definition

Answer 5

The study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived

Question 6

Limits of archaeology - Great Mother Goddess fable

Answer 6

For Jacquetta Hawkes, that goddess was so omnipresent/omnipotent in Bronze Age Crete that she labelled it as a ‘predominantly feminine force’

Shattered by Peter Ucko’s book on figurines showing only 28 of 103 recovered could be identified as female, only two from any house and none from a shrine

Large breasts and buttocks (power) observed by Hawkes was entirely subjective

Question 7

Arch, Finley - contribution of archaeology to history

Answer 7

Would presume roughly inversely proportionate to the quantity and quality of available written sources

However, for the earlier periods, huge complications are introduced by oral tradition and historical legends

In this case, archaeology is used to assess whether the literature has any worth at all

Question 8

Arch, Finley - difficulty of comparison

Answer 8

Akragas in Sicily famed for wealth due to 10 temples being built in the 5th Century

But what is a fair standard for temple construction in this period?

Question 9

Mat, Grassby - analysis of objects

Answer 9

Should have etic and emic analysis (study of objective attributes and their significance to those who used them)

Question 10

Mat, Grassby - objects in their time

Answer 10

Gave material form to the rules and belief patterns of those who traded, purchased or used them

Ones that share attributes can be grouped into a certain period

Question 11

Mat, Schlebecker - practical use of objects or models

Answer 11

Verbal descriptions often fail to give a good idea

He who swings a cradle will understand why cradlers earned more per day than ordinary reapers

Question 12

Mat, Grassby - limits to artefacts

Answer 12

Ambiguous - not always a clear message or adequate picture

Survival dependent on many random facts e.g. material they are made from

No foolproof way of distinguishing the literal from the emblematic in any past work of art

Question 13

Myth - interdependent nature

Answer 13

Myth and history used like they are contradictory

Both stories of concrete events, said to have taken place at a certain time and involving certain people

Myth varies from history in terms of vagueness to time and space

Question 14

Myth - condensing of history

Answer 14

Historians have to condense res gestae into historia rerum gestarum - cannot convey everything, are also telling a story

Question 15

Myth - history to myth and vice versa

Answer 15

Creation of world written by Hebrew writer, since then historians have tried to recount the facts surrounding it

Alternatively, Richard III includes biographical facts being moulded to the point of utter distortion until a villain emerged

Question 16

Lit, Trevelyan - shared objective

Answer 16

Make the dead live, to record the manifold adventures of the spirit of man

Literature must be taught with historical background to truly understand it

History of any literate age must therefore include study of its literature to understand it fully

Question 17

Lit - PL example

Answer 17

John Milton’s works are of great interest to a Stuart historian

Gives examples of how a literate man felt about the doctrines - Calvinist tendencies in reform of the Church, but lacked self-examination in manner of St Paul

Paradise Lost is Arminian as man himself is responsible for the fall, not a predetermining god, and salvation is offered to all of mankind