Historicity (Historizität)

Definition

Historicity is the thesis that historical knowledge is itself historically situated — that the historian's categories, and the "social sciences" generally, must be understood as products of a particular society and culture. In Lüdtke's introduction it grounds a call for "the historical self-enlightenment of the seemingly ahistorical social sciences, insight into their historicity" (p. 9). The volume's doubts about "rationalization" rest on this: "Are [the 'shaping power of supraindividual forces'] not themselves the product of a society and culture that are decidedly 'bourgeois' in character—a society in which a ruling elite … sought, through its explorers and entrepreneurs, to measure the rest of the world by its imperial yardstick?" (p. 8). Historicity is also the theme Medick finds anthropologists discovering in their own objects: "anthropologists are in the process of discovering history not just as a necessary analytical mode … but as historicity, historical experience, the construction and practice of history and memory in the societies they themselves investigate" (Medick, p. 59).

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the call for the "historical self-enlightenment" of the social sciences.
• Hans Medick — historicity as the anthropologists' discovery; the critique of "peoples devoid of history" (Eric Wolf).
• Michel Foucault — "effective history" as the wiki's adjacent concept of a history without origins.
• Martin Heidegger — the historicity of Dasein, a different but related tradition.
• Eric Wolf, Johannes Fabian — the critique of the ahistorical construction of "the primitive."

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography built on the historicity of knowledge.
• Historical Experience — what historicity restores to the objects of study.
• Historical Anthropology — the discipline discovering historicity in its subjects.
• Effective History — the Foucauldian formulation.
• Modernity — the epoch whose "achievements" historicity relativizes.
• Historicism — the tradition the concept both shares and criticizes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's Introduction on decentering and the historicity of the social sciences (pp. 8–9); Medick on the discovery of historicity by anthropologists and the critique of "timeless primitives" (pp. 59–61).

Open Questions

• Does historicizing the observer's categories leave any ground for a truth-claim, or does it collapse into universal relativism? The volume gestures at "verifiability" without resolving the question.
• How does historicity differ from the historicism the volume criticizes? Lüdtke distances himself from "a historicist individualistic bias" while retaining a historicizing programme.