Annäherung (Coming Nearer)

Definition

Annäherung — "coming nearer to, approximating" — is, in the source's glossary, "a central hermeneutical term in the methodological stance of alltagsgeschichte's methodology and practice of representation focused on personal and quotidian historical contexts, entailing the effort to demarcate and reconstruct distance in understanding and representing the Otherness of popular culture and the experiences of social actors from an 'inner perspective'" (Glossary, p. 312). Its paradox is that the closer the historian tries to come, the more the distance between past and present must be made explicit. Lüdtke rejects both "rapturous emotive comprehension" and indiscriminate understanding: "it is crucial to recognize that the distance between 'us' and the 'others' is not something self-evident and given, but problematical; it may be possible to bridge the gulf, but it cannot be eliminated" (Lüdtke, p. 8). Annäherung is therefore paired with Verfremdung (making strange) and opposed to Gadamerian fusion of horizons.

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the concept's elaborator: "Any attempt at 'coming nearer' to the realities always remains a kind of reconstruction" (p. 25).
• Hans Medick — the ethnological critique of hermeneutic identification and the "challenge from the other" (no author page yet — see log).
• Hans-Georg Gadamer — the "fusion of meaning horizons" (Horizontverschmelzung) that Annäherung declines.
• Carlo Ginzburg — "the fundamental instrument is that of alienation, making strange, the ability to make the familiar alien."

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the field for which Annäherung is a methodological norm.
• Otherness — the gulf Annäherung bridges without eliminating.
• Thick Description — the descriptive method that respects the distance.
• Historical Experience — the object of the attempted approach.
• Verstehen — the hermeneutic concept Annäherung both invokes and revises.
• Betroffenheit and Anteilnahme — the affective side of the encounter with the past.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's Introduction on decentering and Otherness (pp. 8, 24–25) and the glossary entry (p. 312); Medick's discussion of Gadamerian hermeneutics and Ginzburg's "alienation" (pp. 48–50).

Open Questions

• Is Annäherung a knowledge-claim or an ethical stance? Lüdtke keeps both in play, which may be the concept's strength and its vulnerability.
• Can "coming nearer" coexist with the volume's commitment to Verfremdung, or are the two in tension?